A new assignment inspired at #MLA25 & aided by colleagues like @triproftri.bsky.social is the Commonplace Book—it essentially replaces my typical discussion prep & participation assignments—might as well be overly bookish in "Building a (Better) Book" right? s25bbb.ryancordell.org/pages/assign...

Commonplace Book

Inspired by this #mla25 session on commonplace books—& the incredible student examples they shared—I spent much of my trip home today reworking my spring undergrad course to replace my typical “discussion prep” assignment with a commonplace book assignment—so excited—will share when it’s ready

Commonplacing and Commonplace ...

A terrific convo and a few thoughts about our roundtable discussion on the (Im)Possibility of the #DH textbook that veered into field questions! #mla25 #dh

https://triproftri.wordpress.com/2025/01/12/dont-we-already-have-a-dh-textbook/

Thanks for joining us in New Orleans for #mla25! Visit mla25.org for on-demand sessions until March. And you can learn more about submitting or responding to a call for papers for the 2026 convention at the link below. See you in Toronto! https://www.mla.org/Events/Planning-a-Convention-Session

What are the chances someone at #mla25 wants to find a place to watch the Packers game after the last session ends at 3? I realize the MLA/NFL fan Venn Diagram may have the sliveriest sliver of an overlap

AI has been everywhere at #mla25 & it’s clear—if it wasn’t already—that the profession is collectively wrestling with the same anxieties & crises—I find myself increasingly unsatisfied about both poles of response—refusal & integration—& convinced what we will need to offer students are alternatives

It’s never been me, but I respect the hell out of those folks rolling into the publisher’s hall on the closing day of #mla25 with their spare suitcases, ready to fill them with free books 🫡

I don’t fly out until tomorrow morning so if you’re still at #mla25 & we haven’t had the chance to catch up, grab a coffee/drink, or share a meal let me know. My day is pretty flexible today.

Schedule time between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. for one last visit to the exhibit hall (Grand Ballroom, First Floor). Don't miss out on special deals and discounts from publishers and other companies that made exhibiting at #mla25 a priority. https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/meetingapp.cgi/ModuleExhibitorProgram/0

Join us at 5:15 p.m. for session 668, Campus Presidents Talk about How to Fight for Higher Education. Panelists will discuss their experiences with legislative encroachment, funding cuts, and other contexts for our work in humanities education. #mla25
https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Session/21248

Wondering which #mla25 session they’re headed to

In the next time slot at #mla25 is #s525, “The (In)Visibility of Editorship”—I will be talking about some new Viral Texts research—for the last chapter of our book—that revisits our project’s early network analyses with a more careful eye toward the fragmentation & missingness of our data

the argument in #mla25 #s501 correlating the rise of AP English & the decline of college English majors confirms something I’ve long suspected—“if you look at these two lines on a graph they essentially make an X”

Start your day at #mla25 with session 456, Collaborative Research: A Surefire Engagement Strategy for Language and Literature Students, at 8:30 a.m. Presenters discuss their projects and invite attendees to share their successes with undergrad research. https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Session/21355

In #mla25 #s422 "Old News"—celebrating the 20th anniversary of the NEH/LoC’s "Chronicling America" digitized newspaper archive Which means yes, we are now farther away in time from the founding of Chronicling America than the founding of Chronicling America was from the Challenger disaster

Eating beignets at what I hope is the Psychoanalytic Criticism Today session #MLA25

Ellen Lee McCallum at Freud's Ecology doing a paper on the "psychoanalysis of germ cells" in Freud's "On the Introduction of Narcissism" is fab. Great stuff implicitly on non-humaninist, precognitive element on our carrying out the survival of "quasi-immortal" germ cells #MLA25

Join us at noon for Poetry, Translation, and the Afro-Caribbean Cultural Legacy of New Orleans. Poets from New Orleans respond to the poems featured in the 2020 volume, Afro-Creole Poetry in French from Louisiana’s Radical Civil War–Era Newspapers. #mla25
https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Session/20167

Join us at 1:45 for session 331, Jazz and the Problem of Genre. Artists and scholars of New Orleans join specialists in music and sound studies, literature, and Black thought to discuss the problem of the category 'jazz'. #mla25
https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Session/19704

Happening at noon: join leaders of the nation’s foremost humanities grant-making bodies for session 300, The Humanities Grant-Making Landscape, as they discuss the state of federal and foundation support for language and literature research. #mla25 https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Session/21028