Paul Lauter Receives ADE March Award

At this year’s MLA conference, the ADE Executive Committee awarded Paul Lauter, Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of English, Emeritus at Trinity College (Connecticut), the Francis Andrew March Award, which honors exceptional service to the profession of English. The award is named for Francis March (1823–1911), professor of English at Lafayette College and the first professor of English in America.  Lauter served as president of the American Studies Association and is the founding general editor of the influential Heath Anthology of American Literature.  He is also the author or editor of several books, including From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies and, most recently, A History of American Working-Class Literature.  He was one of the founding editors of the Feminist Press and of the journal Radical Teacher.  Lauter has been an active member of the WCSA and co-wrote its constitution with Sherry Linkon.

Call for abstracts

Special Session for the MLA Convention in Philadelphia, Jan. 5-8, 2017

Tracking in the Professoriate (A Roundtable)

Although most scholars realize that possessing a PhD from a top-ranked university is advantageous, David Colander recently quantified the startling degree to which institutional pedigree determines where a PhD holder in English will garner a tenure-track position. This roundtable seeks to further the conversation about tracking in the professoriate. Topics may include the hidden or unacknowledged effects of such tracking; placement patterns in administration or in the faculty labor pools outside the tenure stream; theorizations of tracking as governance or projects of civility; practices of tracking in relation to political economy; and intersections between institutional pedigree and gender, race, class, or sexuality in professorial placements. Other possibilities are welcome.

If interested, please send an abstract (150-250 words) and c.v. to Lynn Arner at larner@brocku.ca by March 17, 2016.  For more information about the conference and about the call for papers, see https://apps.mla.org/callsforpapers.