The Modern Language Association (MLA) is obsessive over Steven Salaita’s firing at the University of Illinois, demonstrated by a panel session entitled, “Salaita, Academic Freedom, and the Question of Palestine: Where Do We Go from…
Search Result
Too Few Feminists in Video Games, says Professor
#GamerGate and feminism in gaming were the subjects of a paper at a recent Modern Language Association (MLA) panel at their annual convention, held this year in Austin, Texas. Anastasia Salter, an assistant professor of…
Rape Narrative Over Due Process
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…
Prostitution’s Victims Ignored by Amnesty International
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…
Sexual Violence in the Military
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…
Bootstrapping Broads: Talking Feminism
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…
Ecologically Correct: It’s Academic!
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…
Academic Animal Studies/Farm
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…
Rock, Paper, Scissors
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…
Pros and Cons of Tenure
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…