[This past
weekend, the Northeast MLA held
its annual spring
conference in Toronto. I was there in my official capacity as the
organization’s Vice President, as well as a presenter and audience member, and
wanted to follow up on a handful of the many interesting things that took
place. Leading up to a weekend post on how you can help me plan next year’s
conference in Hartford!]
Brief
introductions to the six colleagues I was excited to welcome to the NeMLA Board
at our 2015 Board meeting.
1)
John Casey:
Our new American Area Director, John has as much to say about veterans’
experiences and texts as academic labor issues, farming histories as disability
studies, and much, much more. I can’t wait to see how he develops connections
for our Hartford conference! (Addendum: John also wrote a great follow up blog post of his own.)
2)
Maria
Di Francesco: Our new Second Vice President, Maria will be in charge of our
2018 conference (which likely will be held in Pittsburgh), and I’m excited to
see what she does with it. But in the meantime, her interests in Spanish
literature and culture, gender and identity, and the digital humanities will
enhance all of our conferences and work as well.
3)
Angela Fulk:
Our new Member-at-Large for Pedagogy and Profession, Angela has what I consider
to be an especially significant role: helping me and NeMLA address issues of
adjunct and contingent labor at Hartford, one of my two central goals for the
conferene (on which more this weekend). But there’s plenty more to this area
than just those important issues, and Angela’s experiences and perspectives
should inform it all!
4)
Christina
Milletti: Christina will be our first Member-at-Large for Creative Writing,
Editing, and Publishing, a vital addition to our Board and to NeMLA’s work in
an official capacity (that is, we’ve been doing this work for years, but this
position and Christina will held amplify and extend those efforts). I can’t
wait to work with her to help select our opening night creative reader(s) for
Hartford!
5)
Lisa
Perdigao: Our new Cultural Studies and Media Studies Area Director, Lisa
reflects just how capacious and rigorous this 21st century category
is: that’s reflected by her two disparate and equally compelling contributions
to the 2015 conference, a paper on Seamus Heaney’s final poems and the chaired
panel on the future of TV about which I blogged yesterday, and by her many
other evolving interests in American literature, culture, and Studies.
6)
Richard Schumaker: Our
new Comparative Languages and Theory Area Director, Richard brings a career’s
work of impressive engagements with European and American literatures, cultures,
and intersections to this transnational topic and work. That he’s also a
pioneer in digital humanities and other uses of technology for scholarship and
pedagogy exemplifies, as do the details for each of these six figures, how much
each and all of them will bring to the Board, Hartford, and NeMLA. I’m lucky to
work with them!
Special 2016
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. Were you at
NeMLA 2015? I’d love to hear your follow ups as well—or your thoughts on this
post even if you weren’t there!
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