"Just as President Obama has taken advantage of Twitter as a medium to create connections between followers and a cause," he said, "teachers can use Twitter to create connections between students and a subject."

Also during that session, brothers Dr. Dominic Delli Carpini, an associate professor of English at York College of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, suggested students of rhetoric would find much to analyze in Obama's "Organizing for America" website. Students, for example, could question the website's arguments through fact checking.

In an earlier session called "Poetry and Hip-Hop in the Age of Obama," Dr. David Caplan, an English professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, examined how poets and hip-hop artists, with varying degrees of success, documented Obama's ascendance. Though Obama's inauguration "seemed a poetic occasion," Caplan argued that the nation's most admired poets, many of whom teach creative writing, were plagued by challenges as they tried to write, on deadline, works about Obama. Many poets, Caplan said, seemed overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment. On the other hand, Caplan said hip-hop songs inspired by Obama, especially "My President" by Young Jeezy, "seemed effortless."

"Reading Race in the Obama Era" and "Changing Black Literary History after Obama" were among the additional sessions related to the president. The convention also delved into diversity-related topics ranging from "Travel Literature, Race, and Ethnicity" to "Religion and Religiosity in the Hispanic World" to "Placing Korean American Literature in American Literary History."

Outside of scheduled sessions, much of the conversation among convention attendees focused on the grim state of jobs in the language and literature fields. Just last month, the MLA's annual jobs report projected a 37 percent drop in faculty opportunities in English and foreign languages and literature this academic year, the steepest decline in more than three decades. Last year, the positions advertised in the MLA's Job Information List - an authoritative collection of faculty positions in languages and literature at the nation's colleges and universities - plummeted 26 percent, the second biggest backslide since its launch in the 1975-76 academic year.