You’ll need to log in to MLA Commons to share your materials. If you don’t already have a Commons account, register using the email address associated with your MLA membership (and we recommend using your MLA.org username if it’s available). You can join the 2022 convention group once you’ve registered.

Deposit in the CORE repository

If you want to share your conference paper, presentation, or other materials publicly, the CORE repository is the recommended way to do it.

If you upload your conference materials in the CORE repository, the item will get a DOI and structured metadata, which will help people find it. Materials shared in CORE are publicly accessible, so you can share the DOI with anyone (no log-in required). When you upload your materials, you will also have the option to share it with up to five relevant groups, if you wish, like the convention group or related forums. It will also appear on your Commons profile.

This post from last year has some more relevant information.

Create a Doc

If you prefer not to share your materials in CORE, you can share them as a Doc. You have the option to share a Doc with up to one relevant group. You can also set access settings to make the doc publicly visible or limited to logged-in users.

More ideas for using the Commons during the convention

Update your profile and share the URL

Your Commons profile can serve as a landing page for your scholarly online presence. If you need a link that you can easily share with people and include in your convention slides, the profile is an easy way to set up such a page with sections for your academic interests, a brief bio, projects, and more—as well as automatically populated links to work you’ve shared in CORE. Learn more about profiles.

Participate in the 2022 MLA Convention group

The convention group has a discussion forum and tabs for CORE deposits and Docs shared with the group. Join, subscribe to get notifications, if you wish, and share information with other attendees.

Check out the MLA Commons News Feed

If you want to see activity across the network during the convention, visit the News Feed to see others members’ CORE deposits, discussions in groups, updated profiles, and more.

With hundreds of downloads of her CORE deposits, Mattza has contributed widely to the Spanish and literature communities on the Commons. Her deposits are shared with a variety of MLA Commons groups including the LSL second language teaching and learning group and the CLCS Classical and Modern group. Mattza takes her commitment to the humanities even further through her blog Medieval and Early Modern Studies where she announces and invites people to join talks, workshops, and other events concerning literature and the humanities in general.

Not only is she passionate about medieval and early modern literature, but she also values sharing her work as a collaborative tool and using her platform to engage with the broader humanities community. To Mattza, open access and open educational resources are beneficial to everyone, allowing all parties to be “agents of knowledge,” as she puts it, constantly learning and growing. 

I reached out to Mattza to learn more about what got her involved in Spanish literature and what has motivated her to share so much of her work. What inspires me about her work is her ability to make it personal and connect to her own heritage. As a Spanish major, I have learned about and read some of the works Mattza studies, and I always enjoy exploring literary works from different perspectives. Her passion for her work allows others to be moved by what moves her. 

What sparked your interest in medieval and early modern Spanish literature?

The more I read about the period and its most emblematic works, the more I realized the thematic complexity and the cultural diversity embodying the literary texts I was encountering. However, I think I fell in love with this area because it allowed me (and still does) to connect with a literary and linguistic past that works as the background I need to discover and rediscover, build and rebuild but also to deconstruct, my own cultural heritage and my understanding of many of our contemporary affairs.  

What is your favorite thing about your area of research?

It is almost impossible to study it without an interdisciplinary approach. You need to know about art, fine arts, history, literature (and science too!) to understand and contextualize well the texts. Indeed, I am always learning new things (or digital programs!) and I simply love that realization that it is not over, that I need to know more about X, Y, or Z, etc.

What are some projects you are currently working on or are looking forward to?

I am currently focused on Cervantes’s texts. I am writing an essay on Don Quixote’s adaptations to the theater stage. I am also finishing an anthology of early modern texts that connects Chinese and European literatures. I recently completed a bibliographical note about a letter sent by queen Isabel de Valois (1545-1568) to her mother queen Catherine de Medici (1519-1589) that until recently was attributed to Isabel de Borbon (1602-1644). This epistolary correspondence between these two queens provides us with the opportunity to study from a different perspective on how gendered relationships and writing during the early modern period help to shape female agency and political power.  

What inspires you to share OA and OER material to the CORE repository?

The desire to collaborate with a society that provides a fair education and equal opportunity to all. In my opinion, one of the most important benefits of open educational resources (OER) or educational resources in Open Access (OA) is the opportunity it provides students to become agents of knowledge. On a professional level, it allows me to share in a more direct and faster way with colleagues nationwide and or globally my recent discoveries, thoughts, and sometimes even teaching strategies with the hope to receive feedback that allows me to improve and keep collaborating with others.

What benefits do you see in using communities like MLA Commons?

It allows us to get in touch and discuss in a virtual and more formal setting the outreach of our discoveries. The MLA Commons is not a for-profit platform, which is of immense help to guarantee objectivity and equal access to information. Allowing the discussion of different perspectives in our field of expertise helps our learned societies, such as the MLA, to expand and continue their scientific contribution to society and the educational system in our country and abroad.

Do you have any advice on how people can best utilize MLA Commons?

Some of my colleagues have been very generous with their sharing of materials in the MLA Commons. I hope more would consider uploading their own material too. I foresee the MLA Commons as one of the best perks of being a member of the MLA if we all collaborate in it. The best way to utilize the MLA Commons is by sharing and let others know of it! 

This post will feature a few of the deposits received during the event and pose a few questions to the instructors who created and deposited the material. I chose to highlight these deposits because they showcase the realities of students and professors adapting to new methods of teaching and learning; the support and comradery that has come from this transition; and a sense of hope towards the future. Thank you to Sujata Iyengar, Nicky Didicher, and Scott Challener for their contributions! 

Hear more about their deposits, below:

• Sujata Iyengar, “Cherishing ‘alle that is made’: Student Voices from the COVID-19 Pandemic Pivot at the University of Georgia, USA”
• Nicky Didicher, “ROCK Your Semester”
• Scott Challener, “The New Border (Spring 2021)”

“Cherishing ‘alle that is made’: Student Voices from the COVID-19 Pandemic Pivot at the University of Georgia, USA” by Sujata Iyengar 

Sujata Iyengar deposited a preprint of her contribution to “Journal of a Plague Year: Six Voices from American Universities: Part I.” A professor of English, Iyengar discusses the connections her students have made between literature and their own lives during the pandemic. 

What was your initial reaction to moving your class online at the beginning of the pandemic?

I was relieved that UGA had made the switch to remote learning in light of the pandemic, which I had been following since December 2019. I had already (in February 2020, before we “pivoted”) started offering hand sanitizer to students when we did group activities and wiping down our shared markers, book-binding tools, and so on!

I also felt thankful that I had taken up opportunities to develop online remote teaching and learning experience before the pandemic hit. I had co-developed a fully online, asynchronous class in 2015, then developed one of my own in 2016 as an Online Learning Fellow, and (later in 2016) unofficially piloted a hybrid course. Since 2018, I had been running remote team meetings across different states (using Zoom) for the Shakespeare journal I co-founded and co-edit, and from 2016-19, with the help of a series of wonderful PhD students and some keen undergraduates, I coordinated a series of remote and in-person meetings between researchers and students in the South of France and researchers and students here in Georgia, as part of a multi-year international grant I won. So I was already familiar with the idea and execution of remote, hybrid, fully online, asynchronous and non-asynchronous learning technologies—and actually kind of looking forward to seeing how it would all work, and especially to reassuring other teachers that it could not only work, but also work WELL.

How has the experience of teaching during the pandemic changed your approach to teaching?

You could group my changes under three headings, I suppose: 1. Modular or “flipped” approach to class discussion 2. Thoughtful, historicized “presentism” 3. Foregrounding social-emotional learning.

1. I took the pandemic pivot as a chance completely to redesign my second-year survey, which – apart from adding or removing a few authors, and updating my own knowledge – I hadn’t really changed since I began teaching at this institution in 1998. I know many people detest the “modular” or outcomes-based approach that much online learning uses, but I found that I liked it and could use it to make my unstructured, open-ended discussions more effective – along the lines of the “flipped” classroom model. The online or hybrid model also let me provide additional “catch-up” materials for students from non-traditional high-school backgrounds so that if they felt they were missing essential background knowledge that their peers learned in high school, the resources were right there for them (I also scheduled additional workshops or optional class meetings on these topics for those who wanted them.)
2. I tried something I’d long wanted to do, which is to lay present-day texts alongside historical ones, and something that students have been asking me to do, and that seems harder to do because of the historical and geographical focus of the course on the peoples of the British Isles and because of the kinds of texts that have survived and been included in standard textbooks—to include more writing by racial, ethnic, and sexual minority authors and women authors (the first step is always for me to historicize ideas of race, sexuality, and gender, of course!). I have written about how that worked out in another paper on MLA Commons, “Decolonizing’ Spenser and Milton through Diasporic Responses”! I felt it important to let students find something that spoke to them in the literature, especially during this distracting, overwhelming time, and then to use that interest to engage them in the history, analysis, and writing that are the heart of the course.
3. Along those lines, I reduced the mandatory reading and writing load during the pandemic and experimented with a “labor-based grading” or “contract grading” approach. I felt it important to acknowledge that we are living through a hundred-year-event and that the pressures on all of us, especially on young people, have been overwhelming. I replaced traditional timed “ID” exams with a series of quizzes to make sure everyone had the facts and then reflection papers and journal entries, which they could revise more than once, to measure their growth as readers, writers, and learners.

What do you plan to keep the same in your classes this fall, and what are you planning to change?

This Fall I am just hoping to keep my head above water; I am very worried (since, at the time of writing, my institution is requiring neither vaccinations nor masks, nor even permitting instructors to require students to protect themselves in these ways) that we’ll have an outbreak of this Delta variant on campus that will make unvaccinated students quite ill. We have been told that we may not pivot online if students get ill, but we are supposed somehow to accommodate them—it’s not clear to me how. Although I am fully vaccinated, I am worried about the possibility of my being incapacitated by a breakthrough infection, because I am the only Shakespearean in my department right now and have a full load of courses, with students on the waitlist also trying to get in.

A big disappointment for me has been that, given our low vaccination rates in Georgia, and the fact that I am not currently allowed to require students to attend any event or activity that requires vaccination, I won’t be able to return to what was previously a core requirement for my Shakespeare courses, and one that students loved—live theatre. I am also disappointed that (again, given our low vaccination rates and absence of a mask mandate) I won’t be able to invite guest speakers to class, except remotely. So I suppose remote theatre and remote visitors will continue to be the same as during the early days of the pandemic, along with the online reading quizzes (much better than doing them in real time in class) and, I think, the regular online journaling. I still plan on doing a lot of group work using Google docs to set up our discussions, since I think Gen Z welcomes the greater structure and does well with it. The biggest differences will be that rather than watching the videos, etc. out of class time, students will have me there live to talk to them and they will be able to work on their Google docs while in the same classroom as each other!

What inspired you to create this resource?

I was so proud of my students’ reflections and how maturely and wisely they were dealing with the pandemic pivot that I wrote a reflection of my own and posted it on social media (Facebook), where during the semester I regularly post about my teaching days, good, bad, and indifferent. Then I was approached by a researcher in Germany who wanted to publish my social media post and to commission other, similar pieces from US scholar-teachers in the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, the oldest philological journal in Germany (founded in 1846). I told her that my students’ work was more important than mine as a testimonial to what they learned and that if my students were interested, I’d agree to edit and comment on my students’ responses and turn that into an essay. I also said that I needed to publish an open-access version so that my students’ parents and friends could read their work if they were interested, and she agreed (the open-access version is available on the English Department website and also, of course, on MLA Commons!) My students were gratified and granted us permission to publish their words (though several of them didn’t want their names to be used), and so the essay was published. I loved that the reflections then became what we call “authentic” learning assignments—students had written material that was edited and published for others to read in an international, peer-reviewed venue. Not bad for your first year of college.

What inspired you to share this resource with MLA Commons, and what inspires you to participate in communities such as MLA Commons?

I wanted everyone to read my awesome students’ work! Gen Z has had it hard—give them all the props! More seriously, several people commented on my social media posts and our Center for Teaching and Learning asked me informally to advise them about potential pitfalls of the remote pivot, since I have piloted different kinds of remote and online teaching tech. I realized that sharing this work might reassure faculty unfamiliar with remote learning and hybrid or online modalities that not only could they themselves comfortably learn to use such technologies but also their students could end up with appropriate outcomes: I hope the quotations from student work show that my students learnt to read deeply and analytically, to contextualize literature historically, and to identify the effective, creative, and expressive ways in which writers from all eras use language—as well as to see themselves as part of a world-wide community of readers and learners.

ROCK Your Semester by Nicky Didicher

Didicher’s deposit is an infographic giving advice to instructors for creating virtual courses. As a University Lecturer at Simon Fraser University, Didicher has used her position to advise and encourage others during the pandemic.

How has the experience of teaching during the pandemic changed your approach to teaching?

My Canvas shells are much more organized and user-friendly. I’m posting weekly checklists of things to read and things to do, plus announcing what’s new in Canvas. (I’m putting off doing so for next week by writing this.) I’ve learned to enable auto-transcription when recording synchronous Zoom discussions. I still sometimes forget to press “resume recording” after a breakout room session.

But those are tech details, not my approach. I’m trying to be more empathetic and compassionate. I’ll keep that, but give up being available to students evenings and weekends.

What do you plan to keep the same in your classes this fall, and what are you planning to change?

I want to go back to the way it was before, frankly, and I don’t feel sorry for saying so. I love in-person teaching, the rush and energy of a roomful of people all thinking hard about the same issues and questions, the ability to wander around the room and hear all the conversations instead of having to click from breakout room to breakout room. I’ll probably organize my Canvas shells better. I may keep the weekly checklist for first-year courses. My late penalties will be lower, and, in a course without TAs, I’ll waive them if the student brings a draft of the assignment to a meeting for feedback and support. I sincerely hope my students will not now expect me to record lectures, use Jamboard and Padlet and Kahoot, and so on.

What inspired you to create this resource?

I created the infographic as part of my responsibility as a Faculty Teaching Fellow for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Simon Fraser University (the Teaching Fellows help to organize events and programs to support instructors in the Faculty). I had been planning to put together a tips sheet for coping with the stresses remote teaching had placed on both instructors and students. And the mnemonic occurred to me during my masked once a week walk outside my apartment, to the local grocery.

What inspired you to share this resource with MLA Commons, and what inspires you to participate in communities such as MLA Commons?

When I got the email invitation to the deposit party, I thought to myself “can I take another online group figuring out how to do this thing, or am I totally sick of sifting through tips and ideas for remote teaching that I can pass on?” And then I thought about the grading and prep for Zoom classes I should have been doing and used the MLA group as constructive work avoidance.

The New Border (Spring 2021) by Scott Challener

Challener is an Assistant Professor of English and Foreign Languages at Hampton University. Challener taught this virtual course last spring at the College of William and Mary. This deposit is a syllabus for a course that explores literature from the US-Mexico border from the 1980s to present day. This syllabus stood out to me because as a Spanish major, courses on contemporary and modern Spanish literature, especially from women authors, were always my favorite.

What was your initial reaction to moving your class online at the beginning of the pandemic? 

My initial reaction was a mix of confusion, anxiety, worry, and fear. I wasn’t especially worried about online teaching because I had already taught online in a variety of institutional settings. I was more concerned about the most vulnerable members of my broader family. In that category I include not only my partner and kids, my siblings, in-laws, and relatives, but also my students and their families, my colleagues and theirs, neighbors, staff, and so on. The pandemic revealed these extensive nets of relation, care, dependency, and vulnerability. We need and rely on each other. As our indebtedness to one another became more and more clear, the contradictions inherent in what faculty, staff, and students alike were being asked to do became more and more intense. Some students didn’t have stable internet access; others didn’t feel safe at the “homes” they were forced to return to; others went home only to become the primary caretakers in their families. As the crises compounded, these stressors pulled on all of these different lines of connection. I really felt that; and for these pressing social and material reasons, I wanted to make the transition to online classes as seamless, simple, and doable as possible. I kept asking myself: what matters now? What does—what can—teaching mean now?

How has the experience of teaching during the pandemic changed your approach to teaching?

Teaching during the pandemic changed the questions and objectives I start with and teach to. For example: before the pandemic, I used that important first day to do what you’d expect: establish collective norms and guiding principles; begin to get to know one another; introduce overarching frameworks for the course; review key parts of the syllabus. Now, we question the very idea of “norms” and “normalcy”; of coming together to study; of doing what we’re about to do. We ask what we ever wanted out of our ideas of the normal; we question how much we shared in those desires. We ask what’s necessary and what’s inevitable. The sense that what worked before will work again is gone. 

That’s not to say I don’t still call on a familiar pedagogical repertoire—I do, everyday. But I’m much more willing to question the prevailing assumptions entailed in that repertoire, and to forgo it or reimagine it altogether. And we still do all the community-building work we used to, but we start from a different intellectual and affective location. We spend a lot more time talking about the shared ground we stand on. We pursue Dr. Katherine McKittrick’s question—where do you know from?—and consider how the pandemic has changed our lives and our answers to that question. And we carry that question forward into all of our readings, asking where the authors we study know and write from, too. 

I’ve also made a lot of practical changes as a result of the pandemic. I assign fewer readings and work to ensure most required texts are available for free or at the lowest cost possible. I’ve streamlined my assignments and converted them into Google docs that students can comment on if they have a question; students can also copy the assignments and modify them for accessibility and usability. Everything, when possible, is hyperlinked (and checked for currency). To that end, I assign more “public-facing,” non-paywalled essays by scholars than I did before. I also began using GroupMe chats as a way to build virtual community, after a colleague, Alicia Andrzejewski, shared how she uses them in her courses. I digitized rubrics. I shifted to contract grading.

What do you plan to keep the same in your classes this fall, and what are you planning to change?

I intend to keep most of these changes the same. I anticipate negotiating more complex interactions between different kinds of experiences—in person and virtual, on-ground and online, print and digital. I hope this complexity will serve us (and not confuse us!) and deepen our understanding of the problems we live with. I hope more of our in-person discussions will filter in and out of blog posts and more formal assignments. That said, Zoom is exhausting, so I intend to use it as minimally as possible–and in very specific ways (for some office hours and group work, for example). I also hope to try out some new (or new-to-me) websites, like Google’s Jamboard. I like building different kinds of shared cognitive maps with students. New ways of representing and producing knowledge can help us reframe our questions and imagine alternatives. 

What inspired you to create this resource?

Sharing! Sharing isn’t just important to our lives. It is life. The pandemic revealed once again not only how much we share, but also how much we need to share. At the same time, we’re aware now more than ever how every dimension of sharing has been captured and corporatized.

What inspired you to share this resource with MLA Commons, and what inspires you to participate in communities such as MLA Commons?

To that end, I was inspired to join MLA Commons and contribute to it because a mentor and friend, Andrew Goldstone, pointed me to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s excellent post “Academia, not edu.” I share in Fitzpatrick’s vision for MLA Commons as a not-for-profit alternative to academia.edu. Readers who are wondering why they shouldn’t keep posting their work there might also check out Jeffrey Pooley’s “Metrics Mania: The Case Against Academia.edu.” As Pooley writes: 

The university is already beset by market pressures and the imperative to demonstrate measurable impact. Scholars around the world experience the market’s impingement on their work lives through enrollment-driven budgets, customer-service teaching, contingent-labor contracts, and mandatory performance assessments. Less obvious, perhaps, is our own internalization of the audit culture’s values, one AuthorRank at a time.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

*Note: All responses are made by each professor in a personal capacity and not for the institutions that employ them.

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is a “peer reviewed, curated collection of reusable and remixable resources for teaching and research” edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew Gold, Katherine Harris, and Jentery Sayers and published open access by the MLA. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities uses a keyword approach. Curators of each keyword gathered artifacts to exemplify the concept; in total, the publication includes over 500 artifacts of digital pedagogy that can be used in a wide range of domains and by many audiences. To learn more about this project, check out an overview in the introduction by Davis, Gold, and Harris. 

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities presents a range of voices in the work of the keyword curators and the creators of the pedagogical artifacts, and also allows the broader community of readers to create their own collections of the artifacts. You can  browse by keyword and curator, explore tags and artifact types, or search for particular topics. As you find artifacts you want to revisit, you can create collections based on your own needs. The artifacts include a wide range of material, resources, and topics. The project has a broad potential audience, from students to researchers to curious readers looking to learn more.

The artifacts in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities are meant to be reused and remixed. The collections feature allows you to make connections among the artifacts and across disciplines. It is a straightforward and flexible system that is also shareable.

So how can you use this tool in your everyday practices? Below are two user stories to give you some ideas. Note that these are stories created to provide insight, and are not meant to generalize or define the entire community of users.

User #1: Jennifer, Student, 22

Jennifer is a graduate student at Modern Language Association University studying anthropology. Her studies require her to research various digital methodologies, so she uses the collections feature to gather resources for the part of her paper that will focus on pedagogy. Because her focus is on linguistic anthropology, she starts by looking at the keywords “Language Learning” and “Classroom.” She creates a collection and places the material she finds under each keyword in it, so that it is easy to refer to when she writes her final paper. Jennifer is able to write an excellent paper using all of the information she was able to gather from the Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities site. 

User #2: Thomas, Professor, 50

Thomas is a professor of African American Studies at Modern Language Association University, and COVID has moved his summer classes online. To get some inspiration and resources to help him plan for this course, he turns to the Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities site. He browses the keywords “Race”, “Diaspora”, and “Intersectionality” and creates a collection to place the resources he wants to revisit. He is able to find relevant and helpful assignments, projects, and curricula to inspire the creation of his own assignments for his asynchronous online course, and at the end of the term, he receives positive feedback from his students. He is also able to share his collection with other professors in his department, and they are able to gain inspiration for their courses as well.

Now that you have an idea about who can benefit from using the Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities site, watch the video below to see how to create your own collections!

Be sure to check out Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities for your teaching and research needs. You can also learn more info about the project in the “Guide to Online Teaching in the Humanities” blog post by Lee Skallerup Bessette on the Bringing Your Course Online site on MLA Commons. We think that this project and the collection-building tool can help to build our community, to share resources and support conversations within and across disciplines.

COVID forced educators to get creative with their methods of instruction. For those who wanted to maintain synchronous instruction, they had to consider the advantages and disadvantages of what that could look like virtually. For Elizabeth Tavares, the physical classroom and the theatre were the backdrops for her instruction prior to the pandemic. Unable to use either of those settings while teaching a course on Aphra Behn in Spring 2021, Tavares found podcasting to be a solution, allowing students to produce research-based work, create works relevant to the field of study, and maintain their own privacy. The assignment also allowed students to hone useful skills in the art and humanities: curating primary sources, telling a story, and reaching diverse audiences. Tavares reflected on this experience in “Making the Covert Public,” a blog post on the Humanities for All site; the CORE deposit preserves a copy of that post. 

I reached out to Tavares to learn more about the assignment, her pedagogical approach, and her presence on the Commons.

Has the creation of this course changed your perspective on what it means to teach theatre and the arts? If so, how?

As I discuss in the piece, “Making the Covert Public,” commissioned by the NEH’s Humanities for All blog, not until having to teach in a pandemic did I realize the extent to which the basic technology of the shared classroom neutralized some problematic gulfs of privilege. Pivoting to a synchronous online environment meant that, in order to cultivate any sense of space or embodiment necessary in the teaching of theatre, inevitably in the cards would be a request of students to relinquish privacy. It was ultimately a request I was not willing to make. Rather than try to make the zoom room something it was not, I decided to lean into it by leveraging the growing vocabulary around Public Humanities, Digital Humanities, and Podcast pedagogy.

What is the future of the course and podcast?

The course was a unique offering specifically designed to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the first public performance of a work by Aphra Behn, as well as the publication of the first in the multi-volume, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn: Plays 1682–1696. The podcast was a limited series, hoping to amplify not only early modern women writers, but also the importance of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Theatre and Performance Department. The department was closed this year due to budget cuts at the museum despite housing some of the most important premodern archives in performance, especially by women. The elimination of access to these collections is being petitioned across the globe. The statement made by the Society for Theatre Research usefully summarizes the issue and provides resources.

What inspired you to share this document to the CORE repository?

I share all of my publications with the CORE repository in order to facilitate exchange in a not-for-profit platform with my peers, as well as to make potential future connections. I routinely find such platforms, in addition to Twitter, useful for not only connecting with experts, but also being commissioned for work.

How and why do you utilize communities and resources such as MLA Commons and CORE?

I was an early adopter of Academia.edu, eager to find work by colleagues when databases and other repositories either did not have what I needed, could not be sourced through inter-library loan services, or a paywall impeded access my previous institution, a small liberal arts college, could not afford. That platform became increasingly monetized, did not share its aggregated data, and withheld basic interface features unless a significant annual fee was incurred. I was made aware of MLA Commons by peers, as it provided all these same features as well as other kinds of community-building resources without a fee structure. The interface is also more sympathetic to the humanities, managing large amounts of content meaningfully and efficiently.

Tavares’s CORE deposit discusses how virtual instruction can provide opportunities for students in the arts and humanities to perform their crafts. Find other blog posts, syllabi, and course material in CORE, the open access repository available to Commons members to share materials across disciplines. Learn more about how to access and upload work in the introduction to CORE.

The work shared during the deposit party will give our community a chance to look back on lessons learned so far and to consider what practices will continue to be relevant going forward, even as vaccines may be more readily available and institutions may be changing their policies around remote instruction. Hear from other members about their experiences and future plans, and share your own.

During the week of the deposit party, discussions in the Teaching Remotely group will invite members to talk about their syllabi, share strategies for creating community within classes, and look to future plans for teaching. This weeklong event will consist of daily themes meant to spark conversation and inspire the sharing of resources and materials to the CORE repository. The goal of this event is not only to gather tools to help navigate the current moment but also to build this group as an ongoing resource for years to come.

To participate, MLA members can join the Teaching Remotely group on MLA Commons. (If you’re not already on the Commons, register using the e-mail address associated with your MLA membership.) 

For more information about CORE, including why you might want to use it and how to upload work, explore the support site’s introduction to CORE. When you upload work to CORE, share deposits with the Teaching Remotely group and any other related Commons groups.

We hope that you join us for the deposit party and continue to revisit the Teaching Remotely group for conversation and resources!

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Our deposit party was inspired by the Humanities Commons’ deposit party this spring, which you can read about on the HC Team blog, Platypus.  

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This post was also published on the Bringing Your Course Online site.

Here are a few examples highlighting what MLA members have been doing on the Commons:

• Caitlin Duffy, an MLA member and recent PhD in English at Stony Brook University who worked in a part-time role at the MLA, conducted the HC User Spotlight interviews and co-organized the Humanities Commons Twitter Conference and HC Summer Camps.
• Kendra Leonard has created a number of sites on the Commons, including one she used to conduct an open peer review of her book Spirit Films. Leonard reflected in an interview for the HC User Spotlight that the Commons “has helped me find work by colleagues and to make new connections that have led to important exchanges and helped shape my work.”
• Andrew Newman discussed his American Literature Anthology Project site in his HC User Spotlight. He said he thinks of his Commons profile as his “virtual intellectual home.” He also presented during the Humanities Commons Twitter conference.
• Kay Sohini presented on building an online academic presence with a Commons blog during Making Connections, the Humanities Commons Twitter conference.
• Lisa Tyler discussed her Virtual Hemingway project in an HC User Spotlight. Tyler participated in the HC Summer Camp and learned more about Commons features and functionality. She remarked on the ways the Commons facilitates connections between scholars: “I tend to do my research alone, and it’s really easy to feel isolated at times. With Humanities Commons I can see the potential for collaboration as people work on projects rather than having to wait until an article or book is finished and submitting it for review.”

We look forward to highlighting more the ways MLA members are using the Commons to connect with colleagues, develop their scholarship, and share the story of their work. If you have suggestions for what we might feature, please contact us! You can send an email to commons@mla.org.

Once you’ve uploaded your conference materials, the item will get a DOI and structured metadata, which will help people find it. Materials shared in CORE are publicly accessible, so you can share the DOI with anyone (no log-in required). It will also appear on your Commons profile.

You will need a Commons account, and you will need to be logged in.

If you’re not already a member of the 2021 MLA Convention group on MLA Commons, be sure to join it. That way, you can share your CORE deposit with the convention group.

Note: To deposit materials via MLA Commons and join the 2021 MLA Convention group, you will need active MLA membership. If you are not an MLA member, you can still upload work to CORE on Humanities Commons but you won’t be able to share your deposit with MLA Commons groups.

Once you’re ready to upload your convention materials, visit the CORE page and click on “Upload Your Work.”

You’ll be prompted to upload the file, give it a title, and select an item type. You should select “Conference paper,” “Conference poster,” or “Presentation.” When you select one of those item types, you’ll be prompted to add information about the conference.

Add additional information about the deposit, including any coauthors, subjects, tags, and language. You can also assign a creative commons license if you’d like others to be able to reuse your work. (If not, you can select “all rights reserved.”)

Under groups, share your deposit with the 2021 Convention group, and it will appear in the group’s collection of CORE deposits. You can also share it with other relevant groups. You need to be a member of a group to share CORE materials with it. Find groups to join in the MLA Commons and Humanities Commons group directories.

Learn more about CORE.

We would like to congratulate the following MLA members who received 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities awards.

Institutes for School Teachers

Lissette Szwydky-Davis, project director
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Remaking Monsters and Heroines: Adapting Classic Literature for Contemporary Audiences: A two-week institute for thirty-six schoolteachers on Frankenstein, “Cinderella,” and the adaptations of these classic texts.

Seminars for School Teachers

John Jordan, project director
University of California, Santa Cruz
Why Literature Matters: Voices from Nineteenth-Century American and British Literature: A four-week seminar for sixteen schoolteachers on nineteenth-century American and British literature.

Summer Stipends

Melissa Homestead
University of Nebraska, Board of Regents

Project Title: The Creative Partnership of American Novelist Willa Cather and Editor Edith Lewis

Aeron Hunt
Boston College

Project Title: Representations of Veterans in the Victorian Literature and Culture

Urmilla Seshagiri
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Project Title: A Scholarly Edition of Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”

Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Matthew Cohen, Project Director
University of Texas, Austin
Project Title: Walt Whitman’s Annotations