Modern Language Studies

Members of NeMLA are encouraged to submit essays and reviews to Modern Language Studies. We welcome submissions of primary documents of literary historical interest; translations of creative writing by writers in literatures of the modern languages; and essays on pedagogy, the politics of higher education, graduate and faculty working conditions, and related topics. 

Members are also encouraged to have their publishers send their books to NeMLA to have them reviewed in Modern Language Studies. All new books by NeMLA members will be announced on the NeMLA website.

Twice a year you receive Modern Language Studies in your mailbox. Maybe you flip through the pages, checking to see if any of the articles interest you. Maybe you take a quick glance at the poem or comic appearing in that issue’s “Front Matter” section, or you check the contributor notes to see who’s in the issue and what their accomplishments look like. Perhaps you just toss it on one of those large piles of papers and books encircling your desk’s slowly diminishing workspace. These are the everyday ways that MLS materializes in your life, and by extension how NeMLA maintains a presence there too.

But MLS is more than just another pretty object in your bookcase (we did, after all, win an award for our design). It’s also what enables us speak to each other as a community of scholars, writers, teachers, and graduate students. Like the PMLA, MLS is a forum for both emerging and established scholars, and for all the theoretical and critical perspectives that make our organization a richly diverse one. Unlike the PMLA we also provide a stage for the creative work of our members, for interviews with writers, and for the unpublished letters and works of artists and intellectuals. MLS is one of the few humanities journals that still operates as an omnibus publication serving a wide range of intellectual and aesthetic tastes; one of the few still being published in hard copy, though with an online presence too; and one of the few still committed to remaining economically and editorially independent from today's corporate journal aggregators/publishers. We are, proudly, the voice of NeMLA’s membership.

In return for your membership fee—and, for those of you who live outside the U.S., an international mailing fee—you receive the latest and best work of your fellow members. You also receive another implicit invitation to send your work and to join the discussions that continue between conventions and among the entire membership. Whether it’s an article, a profession and pedagogy essay, a work of fiction or poetry, a review, or a position statement for “NeMLA Notes,” we have space here for you. That’s our job.

—Laurence Roth, Editor