Can you believe how long it’s been since I posted to this blog? Yeah, me too.
Happy New Year!
I’m happy to have traveled and returned since December 2018, and I’ll be happy to continue this journey throughout 2019. I’ve got good news, bird news, and MLA news! At the end of this post, I’m embedding a Twitter Moment (click here to skip to it) that captures my livetweets from panels I attended at the conference. This is especially helpful, because I intend to cite some of the discussions at these panels and roundtables where my colleagues in English, Performance Studies, African American/Black Studies, and related fields shared some excellent ideas. More importantly, I made some bumpin’ black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day.
Good news!
I’ve been elected to the Executive Committee of the MLA Forum on Media Studies/Sound for a five-year (?!) term. This means I get to help come up with the topics for sponsored panels and to select participants based on submissions. I’m about to be more current in Sound Studies than I thought I might be, otherwise, and I’m so glad to receive this education and share it with my peers.
My article “Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’s Black Panther” was in the Top 10 most-read articles in Duke journals from 2018. Wow!
And furthermore, “Queer About Comics,” the special issue of American Literature edited by Ramzi Fawaz and Darieck Scott in which my article Desiring Blackness appears, was awarded Best Special Issue by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals! Darieck and Ramzi are the business!
And! and! After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century, edited by Tyler Bradway and E.L. McCallum, is about to drop! A preview version was on display at the MLA conference… oh, I went to the MLA conference in Chicago. It was great. Here are some more photos and details…
There were other great events, including the Cash Bar sponsored by the African American Literature & Culture forum where I got to catch up with my people and a 25th anniversary commemoration and award ceremony for the GL/Q Caucus. At the latter, after serving as chair of the prize committee for the Crompton-Noll Award for best essay in LGBT/Q studies, I got to congratulate the winners in person! At this conference, there were two eligibility periods under consideration, because the caucus elected not to engage in some of its official MLA business during the previous award cycle. So, this time, we recognized winners from two periods:
- 2016: Mary Zaborskis, at the University of Pittsburgh, for “Sexual Orphanings,” in GLQ, vol. 22, no. 4, 2016.
- 2017: Margaret Galvan, at the University of Florida, for “‘The Lesbian Norman Rockwell’: Alison Bechdel and Queer Grassroots Networks,” in American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2.
I want to give all the authors who submitted their work for consideration in this award competition a special shoutout here, because it was my job to receive and read all the articles submitted for the prize, along with two of my esteemed colleagues, and the experience was truly edifying. I can honestly say I’m more up to date on scholarship in queer studies right now than I have been in a couple years. And what’s more, the authors were absolutely right that their work represented the best of what’s going on in LGBT/Q studies in academic journals and books right now. All of this unpaid labor pays off in other ways; I’m really glad to be in a position to pay it forward.
And now, the aforementioned Twitter Moment. Here’s a recap of some of the panels I livetweeted, and some of the ensuing online conversation that extended the reach of the event.