The MLA and Humanities for the Future

Our institutions evolved around a world that seems to be changing and perhaps vanishing around us. This talk examines the Modern Language Association’s current challenges as part of a larger reconfiguration of higher education. It revisits the purposes of humanities education in light of shifting institutional, economic and public conditions. Rather than imagining recovery as a return to the status quo, Tina Lu asks what new futures for the MLA and the humanities might look like if we accept that the present system may not endure. 

Light refreshments and drinks will be provided. Click here to stream on ASU Live.

About the speaker

Tina Lu is the president of Modern Language Associate and the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the head of Pauli Murray College at Yale University. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1998 to 2008. Lu received her PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University.

Her research focuses on the literature of the Chinese late imperial period, from around 1550 to around 1750, including novels, plays and belletristic writing. Lu is the author of "Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan" (2001) and "Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature" (2009). She is the coeditor of "Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone" (2012). Her work has appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Journal of Asian Studies, among many other publications.

Lu serves as associate editor of T’oung Pao. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Humanities Center.

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