Robert Train, Modern Languages Professor, appointed to PMLA

Robert Train (Spanish/Modern Languages & Literatures) has been appointed by the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA) to serve on the Advisory Committee to MLA’s flagship journal, PMLA, for a three-year term, from July 2020 through June 2023. Since 1884 PMLA has published MLA members’ essays of interest to scholars and teachers of language and literature. Members of the Advisory Committee are well-known scholars chosen to represent particular fields of study, advise the PMLA Editorial Board and the editor by evaluating articles submitted for publication in PMLA that are within their fields. Dr. Train will represent the field of applied linguistics and foreign language teaching.

For more than a century, Modern Language Association members have worked to strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature. Founded in 1883, the MLA provides opportunities for its over 25,000 current members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in higher education. As the current MLA President, Judith Butler, states: “The MLA has always served a crucial role in the humanities, both in the United States and in several other countries where we have members and where our resources have proven important for scholarship, employment, and public engagement” (https://www.mla.org/About-Us/About-the-MLA/Welcome-Letter-from-the-President). The MLA hosts an annual convention and other meetings, works with related organizations, and sustains one of the finest publishing programs in the humanities. Dr. Train has been an MLA member for the last 22 years and is a regular attendee of the annual convention, where he has presented 11 different papers, most recently “Language Experience as Social Justice and Resistance in the War on College, Immigrants and Latin@s” (with Glenn Martínez) at a session on Language Teaching and Learning in the Trump Era at MLA 2019 in Chicago. He has served as an MLA conference proposal reviewer and on the MLA Delegate Assembly (Applied Linguistics Division) for an elected 3-year term (2010-2013).

As the only CSU professor currently serving on the PMLA Advisory Committee and one of the few not affiliated with elite public and private universities, Dr. Train hopes to bring to the journal’s readership voices that speak to the diversity of experience lived by persons, communities and institutions under-represented in scholarship in the humanities. Dr. Train offers the following advice to his junior faculty colleagues:

“At Sonoma State, we face challenges to our staying engaged in research, such as chronic underfunding, limited sabbaticals, heavy teaching load and multiple service commitments. But don’t give up and remember that cultivating your profesional, intellectual and scholarly communities both within and beyond Sonoma State is mutually enhancing as you bring your perspective from the front lines of undergraduate education to the wider conversations in higher education. Remain active in those organizations that nourish and support your research and teaching practice.”