Mama, PhD at the MLA!
January 6th, 2009
Usually, graduate students and professors in the humanities tend to dread the annual Modern Language Association convention. After all, it meets right between Christmas and New Year’s, usually in a very cold city, and everybody’s fretting about giving a terrific paper or speaking brilliantly in an interview.
For me, however, now that I am an academic outsider, it was all pretty fun. I got to visit with old friends from graduate school, attend whatever panels I chose (mostly meta-panels on the state of the profession, but one excellent Russian film panel, too), and hang out at the Rutgers and Inside Higher Ed booths, too. In return for a press pass, I wrote a few articles about the proceedings for Inside Higher Ed. MLA Realities: Then and Now; The Quest for Balance and Support; and Caring for Children and Their Parents. Check them out and leave a comment if you like; I’m curious to know how other academic conferences handle child care, and what other fields are doing to make life easier for their grad student and faculty parents.
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