American literature scholars Gary Totten and Linda Helstern, both associate professors in the English department, presented at the Modern Language Association’s 127th Annual Convention in Seattle Jan. 5-8.

As president of the Edith Wharton Society, Totten also chaired the session “Wharton at 150,” sponsored by the society, a Modern Language Association allied organization. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edith Wharton, a major voice in early 20th century American fiction.

Helstern presented a paper titled “Back to Ground Zero: Performing the Fiction of Race in Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57” in the first session sponsored jointly by the Modern Language Association’s Divisions on American Indian Literatures and Asian American Literature, “Native Asian Encounters.” The session focused on the representation of Native people in Asian American writing and Asian Americans in Native-authored texts.

Helstern’s paper addressed the ways that the White Earth Anishinaabe novelist Gerald Vizenor works in the most experimental of all his novels to counter the model minority stereotype attached to Asian Americans through a range of performative strategies, including kabuki, protest demonstration, striptease, sexual performance and the re-enactment of Native history.

Totten also participated in a pre-convention workshop, “Getting Started in Digital Humanities,” which included break-out sessions on coding and programming, project management, grant funding opportunities and cross-disciplinary collaboration to support research, archival work and pedagogy within humanities disciplines.

With roughly 140 divisions and discussion groups and more than 120 allied organizations, the Modern Language Association is the world’s largest scholarly organization devoted to language and literature.