Mystery at the MLA by Cynthia Kuhn

LUCY BURDETTE: Having been a student for a large part of my life (and still continuing to be, as you saw yesterday), I love reading about the inside scoop in academics. In fact, I have a book set in a psychology department that I hope to resuscitate and finish one day. So it's with great pleasure that I introduce Cynthia Kuhn--you can tell she's the real deal! Welcome Cynthia!

CYNTHIA KUHN: Ever since the Lila Maclean Academic Mystery series has emerged, I’ve found myself having conversations that go a little something like this.

Person: What do you write?

Me: Academic mysteries.

Person: Oh! That’s nice. (long pause) And what is that?

I usually just say, “It’s a mystery set at a school.” But that’s not always the case.

One of my favorite academic mysteries takes place at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, which is the governing body for literature and language studies. Murder at the MLA was published under the pseudonym “D.J.H. Jones”—presumably to protect the author as they satirized the experience of attending the conference, as well as the experience of being in academia. (Through the magic of the internet, you can readily find their identity, but I’m not going to reveal it.) And every time I revisit the book, I re-live what it’s like to attend MLA.

MLA is sort of like Comic Con for academics. There’s not so much Pop Culture Celebrities, but there are Very Important Scholars as far as the eye can see. No cosplay, but there’s tweed. Now, I don’t tend to encounter much tweed on campus, but the last time I went to MLA, it was as though all of the remaining tweed in the world had been drawn together into a fabric sea that steadily engulfed the conference hotel. True story.

Then there’s the Nametag Check. Attendees are constantly scanning each other’s conference badges for name and school

information—it’s practically involuntary. And it’s completely understandable that people feel the need to cut to the chase and know who they’re dealing with. It may be someone on your panel. It may be the editor of the journal where you hope to place an article. It may be the person who might hire you. It may be the Famous Scholar whose work changed the way you see the world. (Speaking of Famous Scholars, you must be on guard against blurting out, as I once did upon meeting one, “I just quoted you in my paper.” Because they might say, as my listener did, “What part, exactly?” Word to the wise.)

While conference-goers are attending panels and parties, and the academic societies are meeting to celebrate their research crushes, something else is taking place: all around the conference hotel, hopeful candidates in search of tenure-track positions are facing hiring panels. This is, without question, a nerve-wracking experience. Murder at the MLA describes certain interview techniques as follows:

“. . . what they’ll do is, they’ll wait until you’re sitting down, probably on the sofa, some place that’s not an easy place to get up from. Then one of them will smile and ask you if you’d like to help yourself to coffee or tea.

Even if you don’t really want any, . . . there’s something about the way it’s offered that is an order, really. . . . They know you’re nervous. They want to see how you handle that nervousness, physically.

It’s all about details . . . Can you pour your coffee without spilling any? Will you have the nerve to take sugar and cream? Did your spoon make a scraping sound? And see, there’s no table here at the sofa. They don’t want you to have a table. They want to see how you’re going to sit down with that cup and how you’re going to hold it.” (Jones 79-80)

Whether or not this is a truthful scenario (one hears rumors, after all), it is certainly not unimaginable. Which is some of the pleasure offered by academic mysteries in the first place.

The lovely thing about MLA is that whether you are applying for your dream job, giving a paper, or simply wanting to keep up with the disciplinary buzz, there are myriad opportunities to discuss highly specialized topics you care about with others who care as much as you do. That is pretty spectacular.

So: academic conferences, particularly MLA, can be fabulous. They can be terrifying. They can also be some blend of fabulous and terrifying. What a wonderful place for a mystery to be set! If you’ve already attended the conference—or if you’d like to experience it vicariously through fiction—then Murder at the MLA is for you.

And yes, I have plans to send Lila to an academic conference someday. How could I not?

Works Cited

Jones, D.J.H. Murder at the MLA. U of New Mexico P, 1993.

What kind of experiences have you had at conferences or other professional gatherings? What are your favorite aspects?

Cynthia Kuhn writes the Lila Maclean Academic Mystery series, which includes The Semester of Our Discontent and The Art of Vanishing. She teaches in Denver and serves as president of Sisters in Crime-Colorado. For more information, please visit cynthiakuhn.net.