Oh, I thought you meant NHV!

Dude, have you ever been to this station during the week? Every Amtrak on the east coast stops here. Metro North goes to GCT several times an hour. It’s an extremely busy station—many trains an hour.

I challenge my fellow members to come up with the most expansive, connective panels you can conceive of, to discuss as well as to mirror our “family resemblances”: panels that include not only different kinds of institutions but also of many different nations and fields. 10/10

a place of community and advocacy and a space for sharing our reading, writing, and teaching. With this presidential theme, I urge you to join me in considering our scholarly and professional familial and quasi-familial connections and in making the MLA into your intellectual home too. 9/10

concerns early modern Chinese sources and especially a kind of drama that originated in the area around Suzhou. Nonetheless, despite my niche corpora—and the fact that I have given my share of papers at the convention to an audience of less than a dozen —I’ve come to regard the MLA as one of my 8/10

but perhaps it can also spur us to reimagine the acts of comparison and relational thinking that are one core of our shared work.
I am honored to be the first Asian American and Asianist to serve as president of the MLA. As a scholar I contain even more minority identities: my work mostly 7/10

outsized impact in many fields, but perhaps especially literary studies, where it has turned out to be remarkably generative when it comes to considering genre, identity, and literary histories. This year’s theme invites conversations within traditions and about literal forms of kinship, 6/10

Nonetheless, it does not take a Wittgenstein to see all our family resemblances or the way in which our present moment places all of us not in precisely the same situation but in a complicated network of connecting challenges and opportunities.
This short passage by Wittgenstein has had an 5/10

build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way” (Philosophical Investigations, Macmillan, 1958, pp. 31, 32).
It would be similarly almost impossible to come up with unifying characteristics of the MLA’s membership and our collective work. 4/10

of detail.” Wittgenstein moves away from the definition—whose essence is to exclude—to the inclusive metaphor of the family: “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: 3/10

Wittgenstein writes about how difficult it is to come up with categorical definitions of what constitutes a game. Even a quick glance reveals so much diversity: “we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities 2/10

Omg I’m so excited!