Thank you so much for a *positive* portrait, for once, of the lives of literature professors! Despite all the caricatures circulating out there, the vast majority of us work hard at what we do, and are devoted to teaching and learning in all its forms (research is a form of teaching, after all: we're trying to present something new to the 15 or 50 or 500 people who care about that little niche as passionately as we do). And I wouldn't be a proper MLA geek if I didn't point out that while you're correct in noting that "transnationalism" is one of the buzzwords of the day, it wouldn't come up in an analysis of an 18th-century novel because nationalism as we know it doesn't become pervasive and world-shaping until the nineteenth.