University of California Davis Professor Will Be the Next President of the Modern Language Association

Margaret Ferguson, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California at Davis, has been elected as the 124th president of the Modern Language Association. The association was founded in 1883 and serves 30,000 members around the world. She will become president on January 1.

Professor Ferguson joined the faculty at the University of California at Davis in 1997 and served as chair of the English department from 2006 to 2009. Before joining the faculty at the University of California at Davis, she taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Professor Ferguson is a graduate of Cornell University. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University.