Waïl Hassan, professor and head of the Department of Comparative & World Literature, has been elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association, the largest national scholarly organization in literary studies.

Hassan will serve in this role for the next year, automatically becoming vice president the following year, and then president of the MLA starting in January 2027.

What inspired you to pursue a leadership role at MLA?

I did not pursue it; it pursued me! In the spring of every year, a seven-member nominations committee comes up with a list of three nominees that it deems suitable for the position of Second Vice President of the association, in addition to a list of candidates for membership of its executive council, the 18-member body that governs the association. I have no idea how the nominating committee came up with my name as a potential candidate for the top of the ticket, and I will probably never know, since those deliberations are confidential. The candidates are then asked if they accept the nomination, and the elections are held in November. The winner of the three-way election for second vice president serves in that role for one year, starting in January, then automatically becomes vice president the following year, then president a year later.

What are you hoping to accomplish in this position?

This is a particularly challenging time for the humanities and social sciences as a whole, and especially for the language and literature fields. The MLA does a lot of public advocacy for the humanities, in addition to supporting scholars at all stages of their careers. I hope to strengthen all of those efforts.

What are you most excited about when it comes to this role?

I am excited about the opportunity to engage with others in charting the path forward for the association during this turbulent period. The MLA is such a large organization that, in some respects, it mirrors the polarized state of national politics. It will be important to focus our attention on the values most important to scholars, including academic freedom, open inquiry and debate, the myriad struggles for social justice and equity, and resistance to corporate and political pressures.

How does this tie into your work as a professor at the U of I? 

The MLA has been intimately tied to my work as a literary scholar ever since I was an MA student.

It’s the largest association for scholars and students in the various fields of modern languages, with over 20,000 members who live and work in more than 100 countries. The association publishes the MLA International Bibliography, an indispensable database to which most academic libraries subscribe. The MLA’s flagship journal, PMLA, is the most prestigious journal in the language and literature fields, and its annual journal, Profession, focuses on matters of broad concerns to scholars. The MLA also has an extensive book publication program for edited collections and textbooks used by scholars and teachers in numerous fields of literary and cultural studies. The MLA annual convention, which takes place in early January, is the largest professional conference in those fields, frequented by over 5,000 participants, from graduate students to eminent scholars, and over fifty academic publishers exhibit their publications there.

Over the past three decades, I have attended the annual convention many times to present my work, listen to leading scholars present theirs, interview for jobs (in the old days), network with colleagues, and meet press editors. I have also served on several MLA committees that organize panels for the annual conference, and I’ve been a judge for one of the book prizes awarded by the association. But I am not a special case. The MLA is intertwined with the scholarly activities of the vast majority of language and literature scholars such as myself.