Author Description

This issue of Profession contains Russell A. Berman’s introduction to his Presidential Forum, Language, Literature, Learning, held at the 2012 MLA convention, and the essays of the forum participants Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Christopher Freeburg, Jack Halberstam, B. Venkat Mani, and Imani Perry. To mark the journal’s thirty-fifth anniversary, the issue also features a retrospective sampling of articles that illustrate the evolution of the profession and of the professional issues the journal has addressed since its inception in 1977. The retrospective section includes articles by Leon Anderson; Wayne C. Booth; Heidi Byrnes; James A. Castañeda; Erik D. Curren; Reed Way Dasenbrock; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Gerald Graff; John Guillory; Carolyn G. Heilbrun; Mara Holt; Dorothy James; Claire J. Kramsch; George Levine; Philip Lewis; Alan Liu; Helene Moglen; Christopher Newfield; Mary Louise Pratt; Judith Ryan; Jack H. Schuster; and Domna C. Stanton.