Dear Colleagues and Friends,
I have been nominated by the MLA Elections Committee to run for a seat in the Delegate Assembly representing New England and Eastern Canada. If you are a MLA member, would you vote for me? Please see my campaign statement below and a forwarded email from MLA that contains the link to the voting page. Even if you are not in the New England region, you can still vote. But you can only vote for one regional delegate. So if you vote for me, then you can’t vote for a delegate in your own region and vice versa.
Here is my statement:
I am honored to be nominated to represent the region of New England and Eastern Canada in the MLA Delegate Assembly. I support the MLA’s public advocacy for the humanities. I am also excited to see that one of the MLA’s Strategic Priorities is to continue the internationalization initiative. This is the right thing to do. Such effort to expand the MLA’s global reach, however, should not be directed merely by practical benefits alone, but should be informed by a deeper understanding about the humanities’ place in the world. I firmly believe that humanists who are sensitively and skillfully attuned to multi-lingualism and regional/local differences have a particularly significant role to play in shaping the future of the world. Let us not be discouraged to think otherwise. If elected, I will advocate for a concrete and reflective assessment about the opportunities as well as challenges brought by globalization to the humanities. I will also support the endeavor to develop innovative methods to engage the public to diverse perspectives, cultures, and languages drawing upon rich materials of world humanities. To this important job I bring my teaching experience and my scholarship in Chinese fiction and film, my broad research interests in world literature and cinema, my administrative experience as the Chair of a Modern Languages and Literatures department, as well as my active involvement in MLA as a panelist, a roundtable organizer, a forum committee member, and a PMLA Advisory Committee member.
Thank you so much for your support!
Jiwei Xiao<jiweixiao@gmail.com>