[This past week,
after many
years of planning and many
posts in this space, I helped host the 2016 Northeast MLA
convention in Hartford. It was an amazing four days, and I could write much
more than a week of recap posts—so here I’ll focus specifically on the new
initiatives I brought to the convention. If you were part of NeMLA 2016 in any
way, please share your own recaps and responses in comments!]
On three
standout moments from Friday’s deeply inspiring series of President-sponsored
sessions at the Mark Twain House
on public humanities.
1)
The opening sesson on digital humanities and the
public included wonderful presentations from Ivy Schweitzer,
the NEH’s Jennifer Serventi, and AmericanStudier
pére. But I knew the least about the work being done by Trinity’s
Jack Dougherty and a group of student collaborators on their open-sourced,
digital book project On the Line, and I found it
both fascinating and exciting. The project is about as interdisciplinary and as
public humanities as it’s possible for work to be, but it’s also and just as
importantly making vital use of technology on every level, from content
(featuring interactive maps and video/audio clips in the chapters, for example)
to delivery (allowing readers to download PDF or e-reader versions or order
hard copies from a publisher along with reading on the website, for another).
Can’t wait to learn more about it!
2)
The next few sessions featured so many wonderful
moments, from Carolyn
Karcher discussing her brand-new
book on Albion Tourgée to Capital Community College’s Jeff Partridge, the
Twain House’s James Golden, and the Stowe Center’s Emily Waniewski sharing the
phenomenal Hartford Heritage Project
(among many other great presentations). But I have to focus here on the day’s
final president-sponsored session, which featured John Jay’s Jonathan Gray,
UT-Austin’s Juliet
Hooker, and educator and activist Zellie
Imani (a fourth presenter, Wesleyan student and #BlackLivesMatter’s Sadasia
McCutchen, was unfortunately unable to make it) on the topic of “Scholarship
after Ferguson.” I can’t possibly do justice to their challenging and
compelling, provocative and powerful, and entirely vital talks here, so I’ll
just say that this session (which followed up a roundtable in last
summer’s issue of Modern Language Studies)
was one of my very favorite moments from any conference ever.
3)
Which is fitting, because it was followed with
my very favorite conference moment, and one of my life favorites to date: introducing
our keynote speaker, Jelani
Cobb. Dr. Cobb’s address itself was, to be clear, even better than I could
have imagined, as engaging and funny as it was nuanced and analytical, as righteously
depressing and angry as it was vital and ultimately (I believe) critically
optimistic. But nonetheless, the chance to introduce a talk by Dr. Cobb, as
part of a conference I had helped organize, at the end of a day I had been
imagining for more than three years, with my parents and fiancé and many
friends in the audience (on all of whom more in Friday’s post)—yup, all-time
favorite moment.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this post? Other NeMLA follow ups you’d share? I’d really love to hear them
(and feel free to email them to me
if you prefer)!
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