« Hervé Guibert : du patient à l'agent », NeMLA, Niagara Falls, 23-26 marzo 2023 (original) (raw)

Dear NeMLA Members and Colleagues, On behalf of the University at Buffalo, NeMLA's administrative host institution since 2013, I would like to welcome each of you to the 54 th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association. More locally, the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and the entire Western New York area, know something about this year's conference theme. According to Merriam-Webster, "resilience" refers to "an ability to recover from or adjust…to misfortune or change." From the enduring legacy of the region's economic downturn fueled by the decline of U.S.-based manufacturing, to the past three years of pandemic isolation and loss, Buffalo has done much to adjust to misfortune and change. The year 2022 has been particularly difficult. On 14 May 2022, ten proud African-American Buffalonians were murdered in the East Side Tops Friendly Market. On December 22, 2022, a bomb cyclone winter storm devastated our city and took the lives of more than thirty people. The events of 2022 rocked the region and its institutions of higher education. In the face of these tragedies, educators, intellectuals, and members of diverse publics struggled to adjust and change, to recover from the "compressive stress," as Merriam-Webster calls it, of natural disasters and human hate and violence. Our resilience shows in our ability to respond to the demands of the current crises, whether natural or man-made, and to restore hope in the future of the planet and human institutions. The College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo is proud to serve as NeMLA's sponsor and administrative home. UB and NeMLA share the same deep commitment to transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary work, the same investment in public engagement, and the same belief in the importance of a liberal arts education for the 21 st century. In the face of current cultural and societal crises, faith in liberal arts education must be resilient if it is to survive. Like NeMLA, the largest regional MLA conference that has preserved a close-knit, intimate character, UB's College of Arts and Sciences combines the strength of a large college with the values and relationships emblematic of smaller liberal arts communities. We share your passionate determination to care for the arts and the humanities, and together, we can show how new initiatives and ideas in the liberal arts spring from creating partnerships across organizations and disciplinary boundaries. Such partnerships are crucial to shaping a global agenda for the role and scope of the humanities in the contemporary world. The UB-NeMLA collaboration is a key example of such a partnership. It has created dialogues, inspired students, and energized faculty to produce knowledge for the betterment of society. We are proud to be part of this effort toward increasing the impact and reach of your contributions.