Originally published in the Spring 2020 MLA Newsletter

The crisis of the humanities is all around us, proclaimed by the popular press and suffered perhaps most acutely by our graduate students in their bones. […]

I.
“Where does it end?” asks Susie Monahan, a registered nurse, near the end of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Wit. She’s discussing the study of literature with Jason Posner, a clinical […]

T. S. Eliot once argued that a masterpiece of world literature “cannot be inherited” from the past. Rather, every new generation must obtain it “by great labour,” overcoming the historical distance that se […]

For decades now, video games have been a pervasive part of our culture. Recent data indicate that approximately half of all American adults and seventy percent of college students play video games “at l […]

Discussion has grown increasingly urgent among those involved in the humanities; threats to funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts are only the most highly […]

I’ve been in grad school for seven years, and while my friends from undergrad were out getting work experience, I was sitting in seminars and visiting archives. I have no work e […]

Originally published in the Fall 2017 MLA Newsletter

This year’s presidential theme, #States of Insecurity, pressed itself upon me late last year. It urges us to reflect on how our intellectual, artistic, and p […]

Let me say this up front: I like scholarly books more than scholarly articles. Good books, of course—bad books are terrible. But good books are better than good articles, for the same reason that good s […]

Speaking at the 2015 meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Jill Lepore argued that humanists are “needed at the scene of every crime. Not to look at the many, but at the one. Not n […]

Our first encounter with a graduate curriculum was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as part of a cohort of English PhD students at the University of Pennsylvania. Our experiences stay with us in curious […]

Since 2013 new graduate internship programs have been announced from Florida to California, and practice-based fellowships have also proliferated. Both are welcome responses to today’s spirited national c […]

The first shock came in December 1969, at the MLA convention in Denver, Colorado. From projections developed in the 1950s, an assumption had grown to become conventional wisdom among knowledgeable observers that a […]

It is time to reaffirm the value of teaching and to find new ways to think about connections between teaching and research. While preparing for a roundtable at the 2015 MLA convention, I was momentarily […]

Professors in the United States are socialized to view their jobs as some combination of teaching, research, and service. The tricolon is as familiar as the refrain of an old folk ballad: it feels as though it […]

At the 2015 MLA convention in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of presiding at the session on our common academic mantra: Teaching, Research, Service: A Close Reading. Academics invoke this triad often, in […]