In July 2021 I took over as editor of Modern Language Quarterly from Marshall Brown, who retired after thirty years on the job. As it happens, the first essay I ever prepared for publication I sent to MLQ, to Marshall. I was a graduate student just starting work on my dissertation. My adviser had recently attended the journal-sponsored conference “Feminism in Time” and was preparing his contribution to the special issue that would soon appear under that title. He recommended that I submit to MLQ in part because his work had been so warmly received by the journal’s longtime editor, and in part because my essay—a rangy piece on nineteenth-century book collecting, Walter Benjamin, and a lyric oddity from the French Renaissance—seemed to fit MLQ’s distinctive literary-history mission: its broad embrace of literature’s temporal entanglements.
Marshall rejected my essay immediately. I received what I later heard others more...
