Paula Krebs

Recent MLA webinars you can watch include topics such as The Great Untenuring, Diverse Career Pathways for Lang and Lit PhDs, What AI Means for Teaching, and so much more. PLEASE use our resources, including webinars, reports, and guidelines. They're for you! webinars.mla.org?_ga=2.123585...

Thanks, Andrea, for sharing

what was it?

We will continue to press the argument—in court, with Congress, and with the public—that the NEH remains a critical agency for American democracy, history, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, society, and culture.

MLA, @acls1919.bsky.social, & @historians.org are pleased by the injunction in the Author's Guild case, preventing reallocation of grant funds, but are disappointed in the ruling on our injunction. We remain steadfast in working to stop the unlawful dismantling of the NEH. www.mla.org/NEH-Lawsuit

More good reading on humanities workforce surpluses here. profession.mla.org/the-humaniti....

I'm participating in Bike MS: City to Shore Ride 2025! I’m participating in Bike MS: City to Shore Ride 2025 to raise funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Nearly one million people in the US are living with the challenges and uncertainty of...

If you want to support the fight against MS, you can donate here: events.nationalmssociety.org/participants...

The @modernlanguage.bsky.social editorial team is ON IT. Today's issue of The Source contains info on how to cite an Executive Order. act.mla.org/crm/?civiwp=...

My local grocer carries them, as does Wholefoods. Outshine is the brand

Lotsa grocery stores. My favorite brand is Outshine

I always keep coconut popsicles in the freezer. Year-round.

The summer I turned into a bookworm Podcast Episode · Explain It to Me · 07/20/2025 · 30m

Fun episode on summer reading, featuring MLA member (and my pal) Donna Harrington-Lueker, author of Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading. Highlight: the excerpt from Charles Lamb's "A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig." (!) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

And @danaawilliams.bsky.social is pretty fantastic herself. What great research for that book, and how beautifully told!

Reading Scenario Experiments. This series of prompts is designed to get you thinking about how the setting for reading affects concentration, comprehension, and even the existential experience of reading. Every week, one of the following prompts will appear on the syllabus. I encourage you to try all of them that you are able. How does a different reading setting affect your mood? Your receptiveness to the prose? Your pleasure or difficulty reading? What are the particular impacts of changing your lighting or surroundings? What do you notice about yourself and about the work you are reading during this experiment? 1. read by candlelight (use a small lamp in dorms where no candles are allowed!) 2. read for one hour without checking any devices, answering texts, etc. 3. walk out into nature (climb a tree, sit on a rock, grab a spot in a hammock) and read 4. host a reading night with friends & food (sit in companionable silence, reading without chatting) 5. read aloud a chapter to someone else 6. climb into bed at night and read by flashlight under the covers for at least 30 minutes, as if you’ve already been told “lights out” as a kid 7. reread a chapter and see what new things you notice the second time through 8. change your ambient-noise level: add music if you normally read in the quiet; or read without music if you are normally a music-listener 9. read with a sketchpad at hand and sketch scenes, characters, or other elements from the story 10. practice focused listening: have someone read to you 11. make yourself a special, fancy snack on a real plate to nibble while eating: pay attention to the cooking or arranging or choosing of ingredients to make it especially appetizing first 12. make tea (even if you’re not usually a tea drinker), and read and sip 13. invent a new reading scenario for yourself, or repeat the one you liked the best from this term [writing assignment using these prompts follows; text character limit prevents inclusion of it in full]

Here you go! I'll write some new ones for this semester too. They loved them. The "read without your phone or screens in the room" was a revelation, and many of them decided to keep doing it. They had NO IDEA (& were horrified) how often they interrupt themselves to look at a phone for no reason.

Yes. 25 years on, I teach differently: I read to them, we read silently together, we have weekly experiments week of setting different situations to read (with/out food, company, music; in/outdoors; varying light; &c) & discuss them. It's made ALL the difference to foreground reading as a process.

Sign on door reads “Longworth Cafe. Service Animals Only”

A very specialized eating establishment in this congressional office building

Indiana. West Virginia. Same thing. How ya gonna keep 'em down on the (metaphorical) farm? Limit their opportunities to learn other languages and cultures, learn to think critically, learn to ask why.

Take Action for the NEH!

Please take action to support funding the National Endowment for the Humanities. Contact your rep and senators via this @humanitiesall.bsky.social link: p2a.co/qyrPh2k

Woman at the next table in a coffee shop in dc: “I went to Europe last month. What a difference! Free speech! Functioning public sector! Trains!”

Re: Florida

Re: Florida

When the British, in late-19th-century South Africa, took the concept of the concentration camp from the US use of it in the Philippines, they insisted on calling them “refugee camps” despite the fact that they deported people from their homes to the camps and surrounded them with barbed wire.

When the British, in late-19th-century South Africa, took the concept of the concentration camp from the US use of it in the Philippines, they insisted on calling them “refugee camps” despite the fact that they deported people from their homes to the camps and surrounded them with barbed wire.

Does your grad student need a couple thousand bucks to travel to a collection or to pursue a professional development opportunity? www.mla.org/Resources/Ca...
Another reason to be an MLA member.

Indiana public colleges cut almost 20% of degrees Public Indiana colleges and universities have eliminated 19 percent of their degree programs to meet requirements added to the state’s budget, according to the Commission for Higher Education.

So, here it is. Thanks to a new state law that was NEVER DEBATED, Indiana University has committed itself to abolishing majors in African-American/African Diaspora Studies: American Studies; Art History; French; Italian; Religious Studies etc. DOZENS of majors. www.ipm.org/news-section...

I’d say, from the MLA side, that in the humanities the focus is more on moving forward a critical conversation than on that whole scientific answer-seeking thing . . .

Does your grad student need a couple thousand bucks to travel to a collection or to pursue a professional development opportunity? www.mla.org/Resources/Ca...
Another reason to be an MLA member.

Read this short thread on the humanities and the creation of knowledge.

Jumping on this to ask for support for our lawsuit against DOGE for the evisceration of the NEH. Please contribute to the fund we use to pay the lawyers, Paving the Way: www.mla.org/About-Us/Sup...

Do I happen to know anyone who will be at the Folger in the next week or two who might be willing take a photo of a single manuscript page for me?