[A couple weekends back I was in Niagara Falls for the 54th annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention. Longtime readers will know well how much I love NeMLA, the organization and the convention alike, and this year was no exception. So as usual, here are a handful of reflections on a great NeMLA convention!]
One of the
best parts of the last year has been working with my newest Fitchburg State English
Studies colleague, Jennie
Snow (whom I helped hire last year, and yes I am patting myself on the back
for that excellent choice). I’ve thus heard Jennie talk about her work in many
contexts, but hadn’t had the chance to hear a scholarly paper/talk of hers—until
NeMLA, that is, where she chaired the panel that featured Toshiaki Komura’s
paper (about which I wrote yesterday) but on which she also presented her own
work. And a phenomenal presentation it was, linking Eric Nguyen’s novel Things
We Lost to the Water (2021) to the evolving mission of the Department
of Homeland Security and the many fraught layers to how we define “homelands”
(and to the concept of resilience, on which the whole NeMLA conference was
focused). Jennie’s presentation made me put Nguyen’s novel on one of my Fall
semester syllabi (as the Literature concentration reading in my English
Studies Capstone course), and if that isn’t high praise for an academic
talk, I don’t know what is!
Next
reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you
were at NeMLA, I’d love to hear your reflections too!
No comments:
Post a Comment