Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 294

April 4, 2016: Remembering Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Bureau

[This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennialsover the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act.]On a major and telling reason why the Bureau failed, and two lasting legacies nonetheless.The March 3, 1865 legislationwhich established the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) includes a stunning detail that reflects just how ill prepared the nation was for the realities of Reconstruction: the Bureau was initially intended to exist for only one year. As a result, when the Congressional Republicans supporting Reconstruction passed a bill to renew the Bureau’s charter one year later, in February 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill (one more example in the long list of “What if Lincoln had lived?” hypotheticals), and over the subsequent few years the Bureau became increasingly under-funded, -staffed, and –supported. By 1869 the Bureau was operating only a skeleton staff; by 1872 the Bureau’s director, former Union General Oliver Howard, had been transferred to the West to handle Native American policy, and the Bureau ceased operations entirely. Yet in truth, this seemingly essential Reconstruction program only experienced one year of full support, a telling representation of how significantly hamstrung Reconstruction efforts were from their very outset.Despite those significant limitations, however, and despite the intense opposition it faced during and after 1865-66 from discriminatory Black Codes, the terrors of the Ku Klux Klan, and so many other aspects of postbellum Southern society, the Bureau achieved a number of impressive, lasting results. The most prominent such effects were those related to education, and they took hold very quickly and potently: by the end of 1865, nearly 100,000 former slaves were enrolled in public schools run by or in conjunction with the Bureau, and despite all the obstacles confronting those students attendance rates apparently remained steady around 80%. When the post-1866 cuts in funding and staffing made it nearly impossible to run all these schools (church groups and other communities fortunately stepped in to keep many running), the Bureau shifted its focus to creating institutions of higher education: nearly 25 such colleges were created between 1865 and 1872, and many of them (such as Howard University, Fisk University, and Tougaloo College) remain in service today as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In and of themselves those colleges and universities represent a potent legacy of the Bureau’s educational efforts.Far more intimate and thus more difficult to quantify, but at least as significant, were the Bureau’s efforts to assist freed people’s families, including working to reunite separate family members and performing marriages. Marriages during slavery were neither legal nor binding, and that reality both made family reunification that much more difficult and presented a host of other legal and social problems in the postbellum world. By not only performing but legalizing marriages between former slaves, then, the Bureau was able to fundamentally alter the legal and social as well as familial realities for these freed men and women, and for their families, descendents, and communities. Charles Chesnutt’s stunning short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1898) highlights how complicated but also how crucial were ideas of marriage and family for those who had experienced the fragility and absence of those core human experiences under slavery. In helping counter those horrific past realities and offer freed men and women a much different set of marital and family possibilities, the Bureau performed both a human and historical service whose legacies cannot be overstated.Next Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 2-3, 2016: March 2016 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]February 29: Montreal Memories: The McCord Museum: A series on how Montreal remembers kicks off with a great, complicatedly located cultural history exhibit.March 1: Montreal Memories: Pointe-à-Callière: The series continues with the limitations and possibilities of archaeological history.March 2: Montreal Memories: The Museum of Fine Arts: The artistic and historical pavilion that complements my prior two museums, as the series rolls on.March 3: Montreal Memories: Vieux Montréal: Three telling spots that capture the complex past and present of Old Montreal.March 4: Montreal Memories: Anglais and French: The series concludes with two ways Montreal’s bilingualism can serve as a model for America.March 5-6: Canadian Colleagues: Wrapping up a Canadian series by highlighting some of the many great Canadian colleagues I’ve worked with!March 7: Puerto Rican Posts: West Side Story: A Boricua series starts with the musical’s surprising history and its limits and strengths as a cultural text.March 8: Puerto Rican Posts: Martín Espada: The series continues with a few complementary ways the Puerto Rican poet portrays his heritage.March 9: Puerto Rican Posts: Raúl Julía: AmericanStudying three iconic performances from the talented birthday boy, as the series rolls on. March 10: Puerto Rican Posts: J. Lo and Marc Anthony: The linked but divergent paths of two of the most famous Puerto Rican American musicians.March 11: Puerto Rican Posts: Sotomayor’s Story: The series concludes with what’s profoundly cultural about the Supreme Court Justice’s autobiography, and what’s not.March 12-13: Puerto Rican Posts: The Statehood Debate: A weekend special on five historical moments that have brought the debate over Puerto Rican statehood up to the present.March 14: Political Thrillers: Tom Clancy: A thrilling series kicks off with the guilty pleasures of my childhood favorite novelist.March 15: Political Thrillers: Ripley and Bourne: The series continues with two complex, thrilling, and very American characters.March 16: Political Thrillers: The Pelican Brief: What’s not particularly political about the John Grisham thriller and what is, as the series rolls on.March 17: Political Thrillers: Enemy of the State: The underrated political thriller that’s as prescient as it is paranoid.March 18: Political Thrillers: Manchurian Candidates: The series concludes with political thrillers on page and screen, and how reality might trump both of them.March 19-20: Crowd-sourced Thrillers: Really interesting responses and arguments from one fellow ThrillerStudier—please add your own in comments!March 21: NeMLA Recaps: Public School Visits: A series recapping the 2016 Northeast MLA convention in Hartford starts with Thursday’s first steps toward connecting NeMLA to public schools.March 22: NeMLA Recaps: The Public Humanities: The series continues with highlights from Friday’s presidential sessions on public humanities, leading up to Jelani Cobb’s keynote address!March 23: NeMLA Recaps: Creative Readings: Takeaways from three impressive creative writers featured at the conference, as the series rolls on.March 24: NeMLA Recaps: The State of the Academy: Three distinct but interconnected issues that came up in Saturday’s presidential sessions on higher ed.March 25: NeMLA Recaps: Many Thanks: The series concludes with a few of the many thanks I have to express to all those who made the conference so successful.March 26-27: What’s Next for NeMLA: Three ways you can get involved in next year’s NeMLA Convention in Baltimore and with the great organization as we move forward.March 28: 19th Century Humor: Irving’s Knickerbocker: An April Fool’s series starts with Washington Irving’s ahead-of-its-time satire.March 29: 19th Century Humor: Fanny Fern: The series continues with the very serious side to one of our most talented humorists.March 30: 19th Century Humor: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: The New England regional writer and story that are funny, wise, and anything but narrow, as the series continues.March 31: 19th Century Humor: Melville’s Chimney: The deeply strange story that proves that ambiguity and allegory can be funny.April 1: 19th Century Humor: Ah Sin: The series concludes with Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s play and the fine line between satire and stereotypes.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 1, 2016: 19th Century Humor: Ah Sin

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19thcentury humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. I’m serious!]On the fine line between satire and stereotypes.First and foremost, it’d be foolish of me not to link to this piece by my dad Stephen Railton, part of his award-winning website Mark Twain in His Times , on Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s play Ah Sin, a Play in Four Acts (1877). Dad has far more in-depth knowledge of the play than I, and a great deal to say in that piece about the play’s complex relationship to the era’s anti-Chinese prejudices (on which I focused a good bit of my third book), as well as both the two authors’ public roles and reputations as prominent humorists and the often razor-sharp line between the satirical and the stereotypical (or, to quote one of the funniest works of all time, between clever and stupid) when it comes to humorous engagements with social issues.That line is a seemingly eternal element within humor, and one not limited to ethnic or racial comedy. Take Amy Schumer’s sketches about gender, sexuality, and rape—is she satirizing our culture’s problems with those issues, or using stereotypes to gain laughs and ratings (or, as always, some combination of the two, one dependent in no small measure on the knowledge and perspective an audience member brings with her or him)? But at the same time, ethnic and racial humorists seem particularly prone to walking the fine line between satire and stereotype, and to prompting passionate debate about where on that spectrum they fall. From Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy to Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, and up to contemporary works like Key & Peele and Blackish, African American humorists have been at the center of many of those debates in the late 20th and early 21stcenturies. But the same questions apply to any and all cultures and identities, and Asian American comics and performers such as Margaret Cho and Ken Jeong have faced the same responses and critiques.Of course, Ah Sin represents another side to the issue—a satirical yet stereotypical work about Asian American identities created by two white artists, if ones who (as my Dad’s piece notes) were already on the record in support of Chinese Americans (especially relative to their very xenophobic moment). Yet while there’s no doubt that outsiders to a culture or community have to tread the line even more carefully if they choose to create humorous works about that group (and have to recognize that they’re opening themselves up to justified critiques in the process, regardless of their specific choices and work), I would argue not only that they have the right to do so, but that doing so represents an important part of humor’s role in a society and culture. Indeed, no other artistic genre can highlight in the same ways the absurdities and myths that surround us—and humorous works can do so whether they satirize those elements, deploy them as stereotypes, or, as is so often the case and was for Twain and Harte’s play, do both at the same time.March Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 31, 2016: 19th Century Humor: Melville’s Chimney

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19thcentury humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. I’m serious!]On the deeply strange story that proves that ambiguity and allegory can be funny.Before doing the research for this post, I had only read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1855) once, some 20 years ago as a second-year college student. Yet Melville’s text had stuck with me across those decades, far more fully and deeply than have other texts I’ve read much more recently. It didn’t do so because of its quality, necessarily—like Pierre (1852), the novel with which Melville followed up his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851), “Chimney” is a text I would describe with words like “interesting” and “provocative” rather than “successful” or “good.” And indeed, perhaps the most interesting thing about “Chimney” is how much it refuses to give in to audience expectations—the story of an unreliable (possibly unhinged) narrator obsessed with his titular home furnishing, and of an evolving war between the narrator and his wife over that chimney and what seems to be a hidden room inside it, seems destined to head into the terrifying territory of Poe’s “The Black Cat”; but no such thrills or chills ever appear, and the story ends as ambiguously as it began.So if “I and My Chimney” isn’t a Gothic horror, what is it? In part, it seems to be an experiment in narration, an opportunity for Melville to create a first-person narrator far more consistently central to his story, yet at the same time far stranger and harder to sympathize with, than Moby-Dick’s Ishmael. That narrator, in turn, is involved in an extended experiment of his own: identifying himself with the oversized chimney that dominates his home and life (and marriage), and taking that personal analogy to depths of detail and philosophy that need to be read to be believed. So thorough is the analogy between man and chimney, in fact, that it seems fair to describe it as an allegory—only I admit to having very little idea, upon this second reading of the story (and I remember feeling the same back when I first read it), about what that allegory might mean or illustrate. There seems to be some theme of how we come to be linked to our homes or settings, but that point alone feels far too pedestrian to which to devote such an extended text.So I don’t think “Chimney” is a great story, and I don’t really know what (if anything) it means. But I do know this: it’s pretty darn funny. Take the story’s opening paragraph: “I and my chimney, two grey-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day.” Or these lines from a couple paragraphs in: “When in the rear room, set apart for that object, I stand to receive my guests (who by the way call more, I suspect, to see my chimney than me) I then stand, not so much before, as, strictly speaking, behind my chimney, which is, indeed, the true host. Not that I demur. In the presence of my betters, I hope I know my place.” Indeed, hardly a paragraph in “Chimney” goes by without producing at least one wry smile, and I laughed out loud a handful of times as well—no small feat for a 160 year old story written in the style and language of its time (and its notoriously challenging author). Whatever else Melville’s strikingly odd story is, it’s most definitely humorous—and as this week’s posts can help remind us, that’s a significant and meaningful thing to be.Last humorist tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 30, 2016: 19th Century Humor: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19thcentury humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. I’m serious!]On the writer and story that are funny, wise, and anything but narrow.For a long time, late 19th century local color writing—and specifically women’s local color writing—and even more specifically New England women’s local color writing—was dismissed by many scholars as narrow and parochial, historically and socially representative but not particularly significant in broader, lasting, literary terms. Over the last few decades, many scholars have pushed back on those ideas, seeking to redefine the writing as “regionalist” rather than local color and to recover and re-read many of the individual authors and works within that tradition. Yet outside of academia, I don’t know that such efforts have led to nearly enough public consciousness of these writers—and if I were to make the case for why they should, I might well start with the very talented New England regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930).Freeman’s prolific career and prodigious talents were certainly recognized in her own era, as she was awarded the 1925 William Dean Howells Medal for distinction in fiction and in the following year became part of the first group of women elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. While she began her career writing children’s stories, and published works in multiple genres, it was her local color short stories for adults, collected in volumes including A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), Silence and Other Stories (1898), and The Givers (1904), that most established her reputation and these culminating accomplishments. And yet in the half-century after her death those same stories came to many scholars to represent Freeman’s limited scope, interests, and talents, and thus to categorize her as precisely an example of a once hugely successful local color writer whose works now retain only historical or social interest.I could push back on those ideas and make the case for Freeman in any number of ways (as have many of the scholars I mentioned in my first paragraph), but I don’t know that there’s a better way to do so than to ask you to read my favorite Freeman story, “The Revolt of Mother” (1890). “Revolt” has all the hallmarks of New England local color, from its setting on a New England farm to its characters’ dialect voices; like most local fiction more broadly, the story’s tone is mostly light and witty, with surprising character and plot twists leading to an unexpected conclusion. None of those are bad things nor disqualify the work from literary significance, of course—in fact, they make it engaging for readers, a goal of just about any author in any genre. But Freeman’s story is at the same time deeply wise in its portrayals of every member of its focal family, individually, as a community, and in their histories and evolving present and future identities. It reveals a great deal about its particular historical and social setting, about gender and marriage, about parenting and generational change, and about human nature at its most flawed and its most hopeful. In short, it does just about everything great literature and art can do, and does it all well.Next humorist tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 29, 2016: 19th Century Humor: Fanny Fern

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19thcentury humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. I’m serious!]On the very serious side to one of our most talented humorists.
There are all sorts of reasons not to take Fanny Fern (1811-1872) seriously. First there’s that name—when Sara Willis (later and perhaps best known as Sara Willis Parton) decided in 1851 to publish her first newspaper columns and articles under a pen name (Willis was a widow with two young daughters to support, and while she had been writing on her own for many years she did not begin publishing until that year, at the age of 40), she opted for a name that parodied the alliterative pseudonym of one of the period’s most prominent authors and columnists, Grace Greenwood. Perhaps if Willis had known that she would within four years’ time be the highest-paid newspaper columnistin the country (as she became in 1855 when the New York Ledger paid her $100 a week), she would have chosen a name based more on her own identity and less on parodying that of another writer.
But even if we leave her name aside, much of Fern’s published work was, by its own admissions and in its explicit purposes and genres, relatively light. One of the catchphrases with which her columns were often described was “witty and irreverent,” and indeed the majority of them, including her first article “The Governess” (which appeared in the Boston newspaper Olive Branch), comprised humorous takes on various social and domestic situations; when those columns were collected and published in book form, it was usually under titles (such as Ginger-Snaps [1870] and Caper-Sauce [1872]) that seemed to emphasize their lightness. Many of her other writings were directed explicitly and solely at youthful audiences, such as all those pieces collected in Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends (1853), The Play-Day Book  (1857), and A New Story Book for Children (1864). Neither humorous columns nor children’s books are without their value—not only as cultural and historical documents, but also as works of literature in their own right—but compared to some of Fern’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries as extremely prominent women writers, especially Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller (but also for example Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a magazine-published phenomenon in the same year that Fern began publishing her columns), these works seem significantly less serious in theme and perhaps less meaningful as a result.
Well, maybe some of them are—and when you’re writing columns as frequently as Fern, it’s difficult to imagine that many of them wouldn’t be somewhat light or forgettable—but any extended engagement with Fern’s writings reveals not only a hugely prodigious talent but an unquestionable ability to connect her humor and style to some of the most serious topics of her own or any other era. Her autobiographical novel Ruth Hall (1854) certainly illustrates both talent and that ability, and illuminates quite effectively the particular situations and settings out of which she was working throughout these years. But we don’t have to leave her columns to find ample evidence of this rare combination of funny and serious, engaging and deep. To cite only two: “Male Criticism on Ladies’ Books” (1857) responds with vigor and passion to a New York Times book reviewer’s overtly sexist perspective on women’s writing, and manages both to skewer that critic as thoroughly as one can possibly imagine and to engage thoughtfully (all this in only a couple paragraphs!) with some of the most complex and important questions of gender, art, and audience; while “Blackwell’s Island” (which begins on page 29 in that linked book, and was part of a series begun in 1858) narrates a journey to the women’s prison located on that New York island and engages at length with a number of critical sociological and psychological factors and effects in the identities and lives of the women Fern encounters there. The two pieces feel quite distinct in many ways, but that of course is part of my point—her columns and writerly roles required her to give her talents quite free reign over a wide variety of topics and focal points, and the common denominator, quite simply, was those talents themselves.
There are specific and very contemporary and salient reasons to read each of those texts, and many others of Fern’s besides (such as her “A Law More Nice Than Just,” written in response to the story of a woman who had been fined for wearing men’s clothing in public, which engages with issues of gender, performance, appearance and identity more clearly and meaningfully than any dozen 1980s literary theorists). But I think the best reason is precisely Fern’s talent itself. In an era when far too many columnists seem unable to string together two coherent thoughts, much less to take our breath away with a phrase—and I’m not trying to sound like an old-timer pining for a Golden Age of writing; I think this is more about an emphasis on achieving partisan political aims and pleasing built-in constituencies and less about a waning of quality in and of itself—Fanny still packs a serious punch. Next humorist tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 28, 2016: 19th Century Humor: Irving’s Knickerbocker

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19thcentury humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. I’m serious!]On the humorous creation that was way, way ahead of its time.
An extensive and entirely straight-faced viral media campaign, an elaborate hoax which creates a fictional character (a curmudgeonly historian), passes him off as a real person, and notifies the public that he has gone missing and is being sought. A ramping-up of that campaign as the release of said historian’s most extended (but of course entirely fictionalized) work (a history of his native state of New York) approaches, including equally fictional newspaper “responses” by other (fabricated) locals who have known the historian and have information about his whereabouts. And the deeply meta-textual and multi-level satire that is the book itself, beginning with a straight-faced account by the (actual) author of finding said book “in the chamber” of the historian, and publishing it “in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind”; and continuing into no less than three different prefaces To The Public, including one by another fictional character (one of those who had published a newspaper notice) about his experiences with the fictional historian.
Sounds pretty post-modern, doesn’t it? Like a 21st-century literary equivalent to The Blair Witch Project (1999); like, in fact, one of the new century’s most inventive and post-modern novels, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves(2000). But the book I’m talking about was published over two centuries ago, in 1809, and was authored (along with the whole media hoax) by Washington Irving, a figure often associated instead with some of the Early Republic’s most genteel and Anglophile images and texts. Irving certainly deserves those associations in many ways, but a return to this striking first major book of his, A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker , can help us to see just how satirical and subversive our nation’s first professional author (a somewhat debated but not inaccurate title) could be and often was. And while the satire and subversion are most overt in the hoax and the book’s equally fictional prefatory materials, I would argue that the whole of the book comprises a more extended and in-depth, and certainly more thematically and methodologically significant, effort to satirize and subvert many of his period’s conventions of history-writing and understandings of the world. This effort begins with Book I’s Chapter I, “Containing Divers Ingenious Theories and Philosophic Speculations, Concerning the Creation and Population of the World, as Connected with the History of New York,” and doesn’t let up throughout the text’s seven Books and many centuries of world and local history.
Those satires and subversions can feel somewhat directly pointed at other historians and writers, and reading the whole of the History is thus, while fun (in an 1809 kind of way), not necessarily crucial for large numbers of 21st-century Americans. But Irving was not done with Knickerbocker in 1809, and one of the subsequent stories that he attributes to the character, “Rip Van Winkle” (first published in an 1819 collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon [another fictional character]), illustrates just how fully he could turn that satirical and subversive eye to more broadly and meaningfully American subjects. Much of “Rip” is just funny and silly, from its opening portrait of Rip’s extreme laziness and extremely hen-pecking wife to its folkloric, myth-making (literally, as it leads in the story to local myths about thunderstorms) central encounter with a dour Hendrick Hudson, his supernatural bowling buddies, and the sleep-inducing potent potable that Rip imbibes in their company. But Rip’s twenty-year nap coincides directly with the American Revolution, so that the story’s images of one village and its society become very overtly (if with no one clear point or argument) symbolic of American life before and after the Revolution’s shifts and transformations. I’ll leave it up to you—as I do with my students when I teach this story in my first-half survey—to decide what you make of the story’s closing pages and images of post-Revolution America; in any case, Irving’s story represents one of the earliest literary attempts to grapple seriously with both the Revolution’s effects and meanings and, most relevantly for our own (and every) era, the nation that we were and are becoming through and after them.
Irving was one of post-Revolutionary America’s first, and remains one of our most unique, literary voices, and was as the viral media hoax illustrates ahead of his time as a self-promoter and multi-layered meta-textual writer, and there’s a good deal to be said for reading him for those reasons alone. But underneath the fictional narrators and fictional commentators and humorous jabs at most everything and everybody lies, especially in these early works, a commitment to challenging and satirizing and reimagining some of our deepest beliefs and ideas—a profoundly American project for sure. Next humorist tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 26-27, 2016: What’s Next for NeMLA

[This past week, after many years of planning and many posts in this space, I helped host the 2016 Northeast MLA convention in Hartford. In this week’s series of recap posts I’ve focused specifically on the new initiatives I brought to the convention. I’d love to hear more follow ups of yours, but I wanted in this weekend post to share a bit of what’s to come—and how you can get involved!]I’m gonna keep this relatively short, for reasons directly related to item #1 below—and because I hope we can keep talking, here and elsewhere, about what’s next for NeMLA and how you can and should be part of it!1)      It’s important to start by highlighting the ongoing work of our new President, Hilda Chacón, who is moving us toward our March 2017 convention in Baltimore very smoothly. I can say with certainty, based on my own final year of conference planning, that Hilda will greatly appreciate any and all ways you can contribute to that planning and convention—whether you’re in Baltimore or the area, further afield but hoping to join us in 2017, or just someone with ideas to share for the convention and NeMLA. Please feel free to contact me (I remain on the Executive Board for one more year!), Hilda, or anyone who’s part of NeMLA to add your voice!2)      One specific way you can immediately get involved, for 2017 and beyond, is to run for one of the many Board positions that are up for election in 2016 (and would thus begin at the 2017 convention). The full list is here (a page that also highlights those positions that will be open in 2017, ahead of future president Maria DiFrancesco’s 2018 convention in Pittsburgh), and I encourage you to consider running for the Board and to let me know any questions or concerns you might have before doing so. 3)      Finally, and most personally, I very much hope that the specific initiatives I’ve discussed in this week’s posts—most especially the public school visits, but also the idea of president-sponsored sessions on key contemporary issues and conversations—can continue into the Baltimore convention and beyond. More broadly, I hope that we can keep talking about ways to help NeMLA connect to communities and our contemporary world—and I know that Hilda shares that hope as well. If you want to be involved in any of that continuing work, have other ideas or perspectives to share, or just want to be kept updated on where we go from here, please let me know! I can’t wait to see what’s next for NeMLA and hope you can be part of it.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other NeMLA follow ups you’d share? Ideas for NeMLA’s future? I’d still really love to hear them (and feel free to email them to me if you prefer)!

March 25, 2016: NeMLA Recaps: Many Thanks

[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!]I can’t end a week of NeMLA recaps without thanking a few of the many people who made this conference so amazing and successful. The list goes way beyond these (including for example the entire wonderful NeMLA Board), but they are those for whom my personal gratitudes are most clear and in need of sharing.1)      First and foremost, this convention—like all our conventions, but even more than usual because of all that I asked of them—would never have happened at all, much less been so amazing, without the phenomenal NeMLA staff. That starts with Executive Director Carine Mardorossian, Associate Executive Director Brandi So, and Administrative Coordinator Renata Towne; but also includes so many others, from Graduate Assistant/Webmaster Jesse Miller and Marketing Coordinator Derek McGrath to Chair Coordinator Kristin LeVenessand CV Clinic Coordinator Indigo Eriksen. It’s no exaggeration to say that NeMLA is both the most effective and the most supportive academic community I’ve ever been around, and that starts with all these folks and all that they do. Thanks all!2)      When it comes to my most specific Presidential initiatives (ie, those about which I’ve written in this space all week), it’s safe to say that none of them would have gotten off the ground if so many of my friends and colleagues hadn’t responded positively to my invitations to take part in them. From my FSU colleagues and friends Joe Moser and Katy Covino joining the Thursday school visits to my dissertation mentor and friend Carolyn Karcher taking part in Friday’s public humanities conversations to my longtime New England ASA colleague and friend Siobhan Senier helping make our Sunday creative reading happen, among many other examples, these sessions became an inspiring reflection of how broad and deep my communities are, and how lucky I am to be part of them. Thanks all!3)      And then there’s love. It’s not just that my Dad, Stephen Railton, joined us on the first of those Friday President-sponsored sessions, helping get them off and running so perfectly with his digital humanities projects and perspective. It’s not just that my Mom, Ilene Railton, came along to take part in that day of sessions and connect with our presenters and site. And it’s not even just that my fiancé was able to join me for almost all of the conference, including attending panels I didn’t get to attend and adding her voice and ideas as a social studies teacher into those conversations. It’s most definitely all those individual things, of course—but through them, and through all the presences and contributions I’m highlighting in this post, it’s the overall sense that NeMLA 2016 connected to every part of my life and work, influenced and strengthened every side of my career, and was thus a culmination of all that I’ve done so far and an inspiring step toward what’s next. So once more, with feeling, thanks all!Special post on what’s next for NeMLA this weekend,BenPS. 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 meif you prefer)!

March 24, 2016: NeMLA Recaps: The State of the Academy

[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 distinct but interconnected issues that came up in Saturday’s series of President-sponsored sessions on current issues facing higher ed.1)      Adjunct faculty unionization: Many of the sessions focused specifically on adjunt and contingent faculty, thanks in large part to the efforts of both our CAITY Caucus President Emily Lauer and the amazing Charli Valdez of UNH. Those sessions covered a range of topics, but consistently came back to one focus, also the subject of the CAITY Caucus Special Event: the goals, challenges, and strategies for unionizing adjunct faculty. I was particularly interested to learn at the Special Event, from both Charli and from Stony Brook Community College’s Katelynn DeLuca, about two distinct kinds of such unions: those that include only contingent faculty (as is the case with Charli’s) and those that link them to tenure-track faculty (as does Katelynn’s). There seem to be pros and cons to both approaches, but I have to admit that as someone who believes we are all faculty, full stop, my instinct is to support the communal type. Please share your takes, though!2)      The defunding of public higher ed: Along with academic labor, the state of higher ed funding and support was another prominent topic, particularly in a roundtable featuring Emily, the University of Connecticut’s Chris Vials, and the amazing Marc Oullette. There’s no way I can do justice to the layers of the issue as that roundtable presented and engaged with it, but I will note that Chris did a particularly clear job highlighting one of the most frustrating factors linked to it: that as corporate profits have continued to rise, corporate (and upper-bracket income) taxes have gone way down, leaving most states in a serious financial hole (Connecticut has a more than $200 million budget shortfall) that makes it very difficult to fund (much less increasing funding for) public higher education. Only one factor, but one that’s far too often left out of the discussion, and I was really happy to hear Chris raise it so convincingly.3)      What we can do: All the sessions and presenters considered this topic, and of course the prior two points relate to it: both unionizing and other labor activism and analyzing, raising, and making public budget problems and priorities are vital steps we can and should take (as organizations like NeMLA as well as institutions and individuals). But on the session “Rethinking Humanities Pedagogy,” all three presenters—David Sloane, Kerry Driscoll, and most especially Jocelyn Chadwick—engaged even more fully with the question of what we can do in our classes, departments and programs, and educational institutions in response to these contemporary crises. Their presentations touched on many steps and solutions, from rethinking reading in David’s talk to bridging the gaps between higher ed, secondary schools, and the public in Kerry’s; but it was Jocelyn’s call for us to break down the silos of specialization, think in fully interdisciplinary ways, and make the case for what we do to all of our students and communities that I found especially inspiring. As we move forward in navigating all these and many related issues, her talk and ideas, like all those on this great day, can help light the way.Last recap tomorrow,BenPS. 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 meif you prefer)!