Joseph Gibaldi is an American scholar, editor, and the author of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, the citation and style standard used by college students, graduate students, and scholars across the humanities since the first edition appeared in 1977. He served for decades on the staff of the Modern Language Association of America and was the longtime author of record for the handbook through its first seven editions, shaping the modern MLA documentation style now taught in nearly every college composition course in the United States.
The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers and its more advanced companion, the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, together cover every stage of academic writing: selecting and narrowing a topic, conducting library and database research, evaluating sources, taking notes, outlining, drafting, documenting sources in MLA format, formatting manuscripts to scholarly standards, and navigating copyright and permissions. The handbook's introduction of an author-page parenthetical citation system in the 1980s, and the now-standard Works Cited list, replaced the older footnote-heavy approach and became the dominant humanities documentation style.
Gibaldi is also the editor of Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, a long-running anthology of essays on research approaches in literary and language studies, and the co-editor of the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, beginning with Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Approaches series has run to more than one hundred fifty volumes and has shaped college literature pedagogy for decades.
