NeMLA’s 50th Anniversary Convention, Washington, DC, March 21-24, 2019.
Abstracts may submitted by September 30, 2018 in English or French via the links provided. Please disseminate this invitation and send any questions to the organizers (erin.a.myers@gmail.com and bastink@eckerd.edu). Thank you for your consideration! Kate Bastin & Erin Myers
Motherhood remains a sensitive subject for women in academia of all ranks. Recent books such as Staging Women’s Lives in Academia: Gendered Life Stages in Language and Literature Workplaces (2017), Mama PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (2008), Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family (2012), and articles on The Chronicle of Higher Education have raised this issue in seeking to establish new footing for women in academia. The time is ripe for discussion about how changing the culture of the academy can help it grow to accommodate women as mothers and creators of culture, present and future. While it often seems that male academics are lauded for having children, the opposite rings true for women. Female academics encounter warnings in their graduate student days of avoiding children if they seek success, or face judgment that having more than one child relegates a female scholar to the “Mommy Track.” How can we overcome these stereotypes so deeply rooted in the academy, for the sake of our students as well as our own? How do we end the “cycle of unequal academic motherhood,” as Amy Kittelstrom called it in the “The Academic-Mother Handicap” (The Chronicle, Feb. 12, 2010)? This roundtable seeks to draw upon the collective wisdom of women who are experiencing, or have experienced, motherhood in the professoriate at all career stages, and from diverse orientations. We invite participants to join us in discussing the curious and fraught relationship between parenting and professing as we move towards a positive reframing of motherhood and the academy.