This post was written by Rex P. Nielson, BYU Humanities Center Director.
I’ve just returned from attending the MLA annual convention, held this year in a very chilly and rainy New Orleans. Following a lengthy more-than-ten-year stretch in which I deliberately avoided the MLA convention, a hiatus that I freely admit was prompted by my own insecurities, negative memories, and feelings of anxiety surrounding the academic job market, I returned to attending this Humanities mega-event two years ago and found myself converted. The MLA convention is no longer your [academic] parent’s convention. In a post-9/11, post-2008 crisis, post-Covid world, our profession has changed, and happily the MLA has changed too. The convention is vibrant, full of new ideas, disagreements, and committed, energetic scholars both young and old. I felt comforted and rejuvenated to reconnect with longtime friends and meet new colleagues, and I loved attending sessions organized around my own subspecialty of Luso-Brazilian studies. But perhaps the most unexpectedly enjoyable part of the convention this year (at least for me) was that I gave myself permission to wander.
The New Orleans French Quarter is a must-see, fascinating, and colorful place to visit. Or so I’ve been told. This past weekend was much too rainy and far too cold for me to venture out for a stroll. Friends suggested that I should do it anyway: “Go for a long walk, don’t have a plan, just wander.” Hopefully, I’ll have that chance in the future, though in the safely warm hallways of the convention center, I found myself ruminating anyway on the value of wandering, because the MLA is a great place to wander.
The convention exhibit hall is full of academic publishers from across the United States and abroad who are eager to share new academic publications and to hear about your latest projects. The maze of stalls never seems to end, and once I discovered the complementary herbal tea bar (!), I could have stayed for a long time. I felt thrilled and inspired to see so many books, the material evidence of so much scholarly time, thought, collaboration, and effort.
The countless concurrent sessions of the conference constitute a different kind of maze, and while I feel genuinely excited to spend time with colleagues from my own subfield, I believe there is also value in academic wandering, that is, in attending sessions that have little or nothing to do with my research and training. This year, in addition to some wonderful sessions related to my perennial interests in Brazilian literary studies, I also attended sessions with titles like “AI and World Languages,” “To Mine or Not to Mine: Questioning Extractivism,” “Futures of the Medical Humanities,” “The Cost of Reading,” and “Literature and the Brain,” to name only a few. (If any of these titles intrigue you, come talk to me about them!) Wandering into these sessions, I repeatedly felt surprised by the insights I gained, not just into these new-to-me areas of inquiry, but into my own research. The experience, frankly, was not unlike what so frequently happens in the weekly research colloquia of our own BYU Humanities Center. Such are the cross-pollinating benefits of stepping outside of our narrow disciplinary lives.
Other forms of academic wandering exist as well. I was once taken aback when I heard a bright undergraduate student refer to my class as her “LOL class” of the semester. When I timidly ventured to ask what she might mean by this, she innocently explained: “Oh, this is my Love-Of-Learning class for the semester. Each semester I always take one class that doesn’t count for anything, that’s just for the love of learning.” My initial wide-eyed dismay at being the butt of this student’s joke quickly turned to wide-eyed admiration for her idealized commitment to learning and expanding her own intellectual horizons. I wish the academic paths of all students included love-of-learning components.
We happily have numerous other examples of the value of wandering all around us. (To recommend just one, may I suggest revisiting Marc Olivier’s stimulating 2023 P.A. Christensen Lecture, “Unrest in All Things: An Insomniac’s Guide to the Humanities.”)
The many benefits of wandering may not always be immediately visible, and, in fact, wandering may sometimes lead us into uncomfortable places and situations. A willingness to step outside of what is comfortable, familiar, and safe no doubt is often a prerequisite to real growth and learning. Wandering, and the related motions of digression, nomadism, and detour can expand our perspective and deepen our sense of what it means to be in the world. As the Caribbean philosopher Eduard Glissant writes: “uprooting can work toward identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial, when these are experienced as a search for the Other.”
This coming semester, I hope that in the course of pursuing your many plans and projects, you also give yourself permission to wander a little, to read outside of your normal shelf of required reading, to attend a lecture on a topic unrelated to your most pressing academic work, and to meet and learn from those who occupy and work in spaces distinct from your own. By doing so, perhaps we might better understand Shakespeare’s Autolycus, the fool who says possibly the greatest truth in The Winter’s Tale: “And when I wander here and there, I then do most go right” (IV.iii.17–18).
