Search results for "MLA"

The Modern Language Association’s (MLA) new punching bag is due process, as one session in their annual convention demonstrated (The convention was held in Austin, Texas this year.) In the session, entitled, “Narrating College Sexual Assault,” Donna Potts, a creative writing professor at Washington State, shared her own experience as a young college freshman who […]

Occasionally the Modern Language Association (MLA) actually does look at language, and makes a valuable contribution to the sum of human knowledge. At the MLA conference this year, Kate Day, a law professor emeritus at Suffolk University, pulled no punches on the issue of prostitution and sex trafficking. She was critical of Amnesty International’s definition […]

In a presentation to a Modern Language Association (MLA) panel on sexual violence, Ariana Vigil, a women’s studies professor at North Carolina-Chapel Hill, linked a military deserter and his perspective on the military to the homosexual agenda. Author Jose Zuniga, a former member of the U.S. armed forces who refused to deploy to Iraq in […]

Harriet Beecher Stowe, European gardens and gender bias were discussed in a recent Modern Language Association (MLA) panel at their annual convention held this year in Austin, Texas. The panel, entitled, “Bootstrapping Broads: On the Work of Writing Labor.” Gretchen Murphy, a professor of English at the University of Texas-Austin, spoke at length about Harriet […]

It’s interesting that although liberals are the ones who most like to talk about protecting the environment, conservatives are the ones most likely to do yard work. “There is a conflict between the politics of freedom and environmental activism,” Jana Maria Giles said at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Austin, Texas last week. […]

George Orwell might have been amused. Academia is well on its way to quite literally becoming Animal Farm. Indeed, the very first day of the latest Modern Language Association (MLA) convention featured a panel on “New Animals: Critical Theory After Posthumanism.” “The animality of the dog is very different from the animality of the whale,” […]

It’s interesting that some of the same people who go ballistic at the suggestion that corporations are people are quite willing to ascribe human attributes to inhuman things.  “I’m out to prove that rocks are alive and humans are not,” Simon Porzak, a writing instructor at Columbia said at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention […]

At year’s end, we thought, looking over copy for 2015, that we could get a snapshot of how tenure works in academe. Ultimately, we came up with 14 arguments for tenure and thirteen against but that ratio is deceptive. The 14 pro-tenure arguments consist of individuals and the anti-tenure arguments include three associations (including the […]

Every year we hit the road to find out what English Departments are up to at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention and always come back depressed. A look at some of the panels we have to look forward to at the next MLA meeting may give you some idea of why their annual confabs […]

In what is yet more evidence that universities have become, at least where campus free speech is concerned, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” as Chester E. Finn Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Education has described them, the Wesleyan University community has been undergoing collective apoplexy over an opinion submission in the […]

Pretty hilarious, but if they think that’s an overwhelmingly white panel, maybe they should go to the Modern Language Association (MLA) panels in their annual conference: About 140 geography professors have added their name to a “manifesto” calling on the Association of American Geographers to diversify its conference panels, decrying them as too white and […]

Campus Reform reported the following: “Rolling Stone has confirmed through court documents that Emily Renda, a White House sexual assault adviser and university employee, introduced “Jackie,” the focal point of Rolling Stone’s gang rape exposé, to reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.” “The court filings were submitted last week in response to a $7.5 million libel lawsuit filed […]