Ages and Stages: Women in the Academy, Shared Conversation (NeMLA)
Philadelphia, PA
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association
Event: NeMLA
Although much has changed in the academy in recent decades, many struggles related to gender and the “traditional notions” of the roles women fulfill and the roles men fulfill in the academy have remained strikingly rigid, to the detriment of individuals as well as to the collective institution. Women still bear a service burden disproportionate to that of their male colleagues. Women in the academy still struggle with childbearing and child-rearing choices that men in the academy do not face in the same way. Women still face sexism and sexual harassment that their male counterparts escape. For women of color, the burdens are magnified. The roundtable “Ages and Stages: Women in the Academy, Shared Conversation” seeks to bring together women academics in a variety of stages and ages in their careers—from young women just beginning their careers and attempting to navigate their campus’s politics to women struggling to make decisions about beginning families and raising children while also honoring their scholarship and teaching agendas to mid-career women who find they have been too committed to university service to senior women faculty looking back at what should have or could have been or at how they managed to carve out a balance of satisfying professional and personal paths. The aim of the roundtable is to lend support to women at various stages of their careers and to provide participants in the session with tools to use in forging the paths of their own personal lives and careers. Ample discussion time will be provided, and roundtable speakers will be urged to speak rather than read their points.
Submit proposals via the NeMLA website: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP.
Terry Novak