MLA 2021 .... complete!

Well, there it is -- my first MLA completed. Despite the unfortunateness of an online-only conference, I'm glad I participated .... although, granted, MLA doesn't have much to offer a scholar of SF and fantasy, as there was virtually nothing worthwhile about those topics there. (The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts will always be better!) All in all, I attended two panels on Fredric Jameson,* and all the CEJL (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) panels about academic publishing. My own panel, "Publishing While Precarious," was a CEJL panel, in fact.

So, since I'm unlikely to ever publish an article out of this presentation, here's my conference paper that I presented at MLA 2021:

“Treating Contingent Labor with Compassion: Strategies in Journal Publishing for Reducing Wait Times”.

At least a few people really liked it ... and one respondent, too, really appreciated the point made between wait times and academic "Quit Lit."

One other fun thing to note -- these were some damn well attended panels. The first Fredric Jameson panel had over 300 attendees! My own panel was more modest with somewhere around 50, but it's a far cry from most conferences panels (excluding Tolkien panels, of course) that I've attended.

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** I'll wait for their recordings to be made available -- I just can't listen to theory papers over Zoom, but with recordings I can at least pause and take notes and look up stuff, if need be.

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