The theme of this year’s NEMLA Conference is resilience—encompassing the resilience of people, of the life of the mind, of the humanities, of trauma survivors, of the pursuit of peace with justice, of efforts to preserve the planet for human habitation, and, most recently, of the struggle to protect and defend democratic ideals, institutions, and practices. NEMLA is not only devoted to developing and reflecting seriously upon the measures needed to sustain a resiliency of spirit in all of these areas, it is determined to model such resiliency under the anti-intellectual pressures imposed upon and emanating from an increasingly corporatized university system.

No sector of an increasingly embattled academy faces greater challenges—material, political, occupational and ideological—than the humanities, of which the language arts, broadly construed, are both the engine and the vanguard. An organization like ours confronts these challenges to the profession of critical engagement by a stubbornly concerted effort, in conferences and publications, to mount for as a large a community as possible the highest caliber and the widest variety of cultural inquiry in our power. That is how we enact in our own intellectual habitus the resilience we discover, analyze and celebrate in other arenas.

But to accomplish this goal, finally, we must also challenge ourselves to overcome the pious assumptions and orthodox adherences that may give us a sense of unified purpose, but at the risk of what Friedrich Nietzsche called a herd morality. We cannot allow the powers currently arrayed against the critical enterprise of the humanities to provoke or persuade us to forfeit the iconoclasm that is indissociable from any properly critical endeavor.

We are therefore fortunate to have as our keynote speakers two decisively iconoclastic thinkers and writers in their respective fields, Anne Enright and Tim Dean. Enright, the Inaugural Laureate of Irish Fiction, is the author of ten works of narrative fiction. These include The Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year for 2007, The Forgotten Waltz, which won the Carnegie Medal for fiction, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, What You Like, which won the Encore Award, The Green Road, shortlisted for the Whitbread Awards, and last year the novel Actress.

Tim Dean is the James M. Benson Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of numerous influential theoretical and critical works, including Beyond Sexuality, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, and Hatred of Sex.

We look forward to seeing you and hearing your thoughts in Niagara Falls, where NEMLA will once again discharge its office as a bellwether of humanities research and analysis.