In an offering typical of the academic exotica on display at the Modern Language Association, and for that matter, in academia itself, a panel of profesors discussed what they called “queer (i.e. gay or homosexual)…
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“Hamilton” at the MLA
“Hamilton,” a popular Broadway hip-hop musical, has now made it into the Modern Language Association consciousness. At the 2017 convention held in Philadelphia, one professor dissected the significance of the musical for minorities in America….
MLA Vocabulary Contest
There is at least one way in which the Modern Language Association (MLA) that thousands of English professors belong to lives up to its name: they traverse in a vocabulary most of us working stiffs…
Workers of Berkeley Unite!
Now here’s a man-bites-dog story: Labor strife at Berkeley. Janitorial, custodial and cafeteria workers at Berkeley are fighting to maintain their raise from $9 to $17 an hour with benefits at a university that prides…
Hidden in Plain Sight: Genuine Scholarship at the MLA
In the days before Wayne Gretzky brought elegance to hockey, a running joke about the sport was, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” Something like this might be said of…
Black Lives Matter Street Theater at the MLA
At the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention in Philadelphia this year, we got to see some of the “Creative Responses to Black Lives Matter” They included: A filmed street theater presentation on “The Shooting…
From MLA to Women’s March: Remedial Revolutionaries
As we saw from interviews with students at last weekend’s protests, higher education, and lower, probably need to spend more time on self-improvement and less on self-esteem, just to further their own interests. For example,…
MLA-BDS Aftermath: A Star Is Born
Just as political careers are often launched from electoral defeats, so too do academic careers blossom when Left wing movements fail. Examples of the former abound, from Ronald Reagan’s rise in the wake of the…
‘Heteropatriarchy’ is a Phrase Used in Academia
One of the many ironies in academe is the degree to which academics invert reality. This tendency is usually on full display at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention at which thousands of English…
Why Martin Luther King, Jr. Still Matters
It is startling to realize how much the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. accomplished in a life span that did not even reach 40 years. At last year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, Adrienne Brown…