Taught by Literature at the MLA in Philadelphia

 By Matt Villanueva, MA '24

Over winter break, I had the privilege to attend the 139^th annual MLA conference in downtown Philadelphia. Throughout the four-day conference I was able to attend many panels and special sessions on various topics and presented on a special session “Recentering Black Women Intellectuals: A Philadelphia School District Collaboration” to discuss our research project with other scholars and educators and to debut the Taught by Literature website (taughtbyliterature.org).

The conference days were, admittedly, tiring and overwhelming at times. Every block time had multiple sessions that I wished to attend and for three days, I bopped around the center city Marriot and Loews hotel conference rooms to hear fellow grad students adjacent to established scholars share their work. The two days I attended a myriad of sessions for the whole day ranging from topics of representation in digital humanities, the storytelling power of music, postcolonialism, and Filipino studies (to name a few). After a shaky and nerve-wracking attempt to talk to a scholar after the first session I attended, I was lucky to make some great connections with other scholars and graduate students.

The Presidential theme of the conference was a celebration of joy and sorrow. Throughout the weekend of listening and conversing with all these scholars, I was affirmed about how important the humanities still is and that there are so many people pushing boundaries of what that entails. I was amazed by how open all of these scholars were to sharing their work. For the first time ever, I met other Filipino literary scholars and each of them were more than happy to share their research and connect me with other people in the field to assist me in my future endeavors. These sessions also gave me a framework of how to present at future conferences such as the NeMLA (Northeast MLA) conference that I will be presenting at in March in Boston.

On Saturday, alongside Dr. Bridgette Fielder (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Denise Burgher (University of Delaware), Shaquita Smith (Social Studies Curriculum Specialist, Philadelphia School District), Ismael Jimenez (Director of Social Studies Curriculum, Philadelphia School District), and our undergraduate research assistant Jenine Hazelwood (Villanova ’26), we presented on a special session on Taught by Literature about what we do as a project and why it is so important to work alongside the school district to direct this change. It had been the first time that we had a majority of our project members present and it was incredible to see this project that we’ve spent so much time finally make a debut in such a fitting way of placing Black educators in the forefront. Being able to listen to Shaquita and Ismael give their remarks on the project, validate the work that we have done, and talk about how they have used the project and its resources was incredibly affirming to the importance of the panel.

As I wandered around the sessions before Saturday, I changed my presentation pretty drastically. I initially went in thinking about just saying about all the nitty gritty things I do for the project and it was frankly fairly boring. But as the sessions went on and the topic of joy and collaboration kept coming up, I changed my remarks to discuss why the work is important and the joy that comes out of the collaboration that we’ve worked on. I attached my remarks below and there will be a video released on our website of them forthcoming.

I admittedly was too tired to walk over to the convention center on Sunday and sat it out, but my first experience in a large-scale conference was incredibly thought-provoking, assuring, and hectic. When I was talking to some Filipino scholars, we talked about how the humanities are slowly becoming more inclusive and a place that we start feeling a sense of belonging. And being able to hear that from scholars who look like me, has inspired me to keep pushing within this field and my forthcoming thesis on Filipino literature this spring.

Remarks for Panel:

I feel like throughout these past few days, after listening to so many great educators and scholars talk about what they have been working on, I’ve shifted and changed what to say here. I’ve been hearing a lot about joy within the past few days. And I think we all know this is a field where joy is necessary. This work is painstakingly perfectionist, cumbersome, and difficult at times. But it’s made me think about the difference between passion and joy. It’s partially my thought of necessity of this project to make early Black women’s writing more accessible that fuels my passion for it, but it’s also the inherent joy that literature provides that fuels it.

Coming from a predominantly white institution at St. Bonaventure where I had zero professors of color — I actually haven’t had any sort of teacher of color until my first year of grad school— being able to work and collaborate in the rare academic group sans any straight, white men, is helping me reimagine what belonging can mean in terms of academic accessibility.

Two years ago, when I was writing my personal statements to get into my MA program, I was about to graduate with my BSed in Adolescent Education and English with the goal to go straight to the classroom after I was done with my masters in pursuit of doing meaningful social justice work. My purpose for pursuing the MA was “to further my career as an English educator and learning while influencing my new cohort of students by promoting independent learning, kindness, love, and humanity through the nuances and experiences of the English language and literature.” But as I came to Villanova, I soon discovered that I am able to impact my community more directly and more broadly within the realm of academia. I want to challenge the traditional notions of scholarship and academia by making theory more accessible, and amplifying the subaltern’s voice, or at least try to find their voice through the faux noise of academic jargon.

In bell hook’s “Theory as a Liberatory Practice,” she writes of the inaccessibility of theory to larger audiences and the de-legitimized work of scholars from oppressed groups due to the unapproachable nature of academic scholarship outside of the field. I think through this project, we have been able to start fulfilling this goal of a kinder and more just world.

Within the project, I have worked on worked on transcribing handwritten and typed transcripts, collect and sort images, and film videos to help create this digital archive. Within the video project, I’ve had the privilege to work with so many inspiring Black women that I can only including some of the incredible women on this panel right now along with our other undergraduate assistant Trinity Rogers who could not be with us today. We wouldn’t be able to do half of what we do without their commitment.

I think this panel itself is a testament to the power of this project. I initially got my degree in education because I wanted to be an agent of accessibility within literature. I had these broad goals of challenging the canonical curriculum and bring writers of color to the forefront, mainly because I always had to go a few extra miles to read works by authors that looked like me. Through this project and this panel, in this predominantly Black city that I call my home, we have been able to share and discuss literature that is representational of the students here. This digital archive we’re creating is helping to show students that they belong.

The other day I heard that archives are created as a group, not just by a researcher. I’ve had the pleasure of working with this incredible group of people to create and share an archive that is becoming more accessible to students of all ages. Literature by Black women should be read and shared beyond just Toni Morrison — albeit how great she is. In the video project, I had the pleasure of interviewing current MacArthur Fellow Gabrielle Foreman after she read an excerpt of Harriet Jacob’s Incidents and life of a Slave Girl, and I’d love to share her final remarks to close.

Free people, and human people tell their stories. And so, to believe that people haven’t written, which is what we believed for so many years about Black women narrators of enslavement, is to suggest in fact that they’re not human. So, if we go and look for the writing, we will find it. If we go look for the infrastructure that Black women created, we will find it. If we go and look for the poetry, we will find it. The question is not “where do we look?” The question is not, “do we look in collaboration?” The question is, “do we look long enough to honor what they left us and the legacies that we’ve inherited from them?”

Left to right: Shaquita Smith, Jean Lutes, Jenine Hazlewood, Ismael Jimenez, Matt Villanueva, Brigitte Fielder, and Denise Burgher