Jacob Brogan: Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
NB: Well, if 'humanities' is defined restrictively to English language academia...DS
At 12:55 p.m. on a Thursday in early January, the double doors of Salon K at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Washington hung open like an unwanted hug. The space within had been optimistically set up for an audience of maybe three dozen: six rows of chairs in neat ranks with an aisle down the middle, facing a black-draped table with space for four participants.
The panel in progress “Lessing and the Intersectionality of Gender and Cultural Diversity” - had another 20 minutes to go, just enough time for questions. But no hands were raised, and no one was holding forth. In fact, the room was free of any sign of life. The seats were empty, the table uncluttered by notes or napkins. Even the hotel corridor outside, lined with rooms hosting other sessions, was silent. This was the first day of the Modern Language Association’s annual conference - arguably the most important, and most heavily trafficked, gathering for scholars of literature and culture. “If you pronounce the acronym ‘MLA’ to an American academic,” explains the British writer David Lodge in his 1984 campus novel “Small World,” “he will naturally assume that you are referring not to the Association as such, nor to its journal or its bibliography, but to its convention.”
For decades, the conference was the ground zero of professional life for literature scholars. Thousands descended on it to engage with the latest research and catch wind of the newest trends while listening to papers ranging from the abstruse (you’d be forgiven for not knowing who the 18th-century German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is, let alone what intersects in his work) to the intriguingly sexy (among this year’s listings: “Romantic Panic,” “Bibliomancy”). It was here, too, that rising scholars would meet with acquisition editors from the various university presses, pitching them on books that could make them into stars — or at least earn them tenure....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/03/14/modern-language-association-convention/
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