EDIS Calls for Papers and Announcements

SPECIAL ISSUE: “Networking Dickinson”

Until recently, Dickinson’s writings have more often been considered uniquely detached from, rather than indicative or exemplary of, broader cultural currents. For the Spring 2014 issue of the Emily Dickinson Journal, we seek essays that explore her work’s relation to local, national, and global networks of circulation and exchange in the nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which they comment upon and register the traces of these networks: traffic in goods and ideas, travel and transportation systems, financial transactions, legal battles, political movements, and the circulation of news via telegraph, print, and word of mouth in the small town of Amherst. Essays might also address the networks that conveyed Dickinson’s work from the turn of the century to the present, as well as the twenty-first-century networks—digital, print, scholarly, fan-based—through which her work currently circulates and takes on new meanings and functions. This issue seeks to showcase work that situates Dickinson inside the broader social, cultural, political, economic, and informational networks on which so much of her writing depends. Please use formatting appropriate for the Emily Dickinson Journal. Submissions due (by email) by July 1, 2013 to Eliza Richards (ecr@email.unc.edu) or Alexandra Socarides (socaridesa@missouri.edu).

Emily Dickinson International Society at MLA

The Emily Dickinson International Society will sponsor two sessions at the 2014 Modern Language Association Annual Conference. The 2014 MLA Conference will be held in Chicago, January 9–12, 2014. For the session, “‘A Vision on the Retina’: Emily Dickinson and Visuality,” papers will address Dickinson’s engagements with vision in any of its senses; nineteenth-century visual cultures, technologies, arts, performances, and spectacles; optics and theories of the visual and the verbal; blindness, hallucination, observation; ekphrasis, metaphor, word, and image.

Emily Dickinson International Society at ALA

The American Literature Association will hold its twenty-fourth annual meeting in Boston, May 23–26, 2013. EDIS will sponsor two panels. The first, “Dickinson and Queer Theory,” will be chaired by Cristin Ellis, University of Mississippi. The panel will include presentations by H. Jordan Landry, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (“Transgender Tricksterism: Border Crossings as Anodyne to Mourning in Emily Dickinson”), Sandra Runzo, Denison University (“The ‘Woman’”), and Páraic Finnerty, University of Portsmouth (“Sedgwick’s Dickinson”). The second, “Dickinson’s Haunted Language,” will be chaired by Páraic Finnerty. The panel will include presentations by Maryanne M. Garbowsky, County College of Morris (“Fear and its Haunting in the Creative Mind of Emily Dickinson”), Cristin Ellis (“Dickinson’s Posthumanism”), and Ken Takata, Hamline University (“Resolving Phrase Structure Ambiguity in Dickinson’s Poetry”).

EDIS 2013 International Conference:

“Emily Dickinson, World Citizen”
University of Maryland and American University
College Park, MD and Washington, D.C.

On August 8–11, 2013, the University of Maryland and American University will co-sponsor an Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) international conference in the Washington, D.C. area. To celebrate twenty-five years of EDIS fostering intellectual and artistic exchange, “Emily Dickinson, World Citizen” will explore Dickinson’s various forms of belonging and ways in which multiple constituencies “belong” to her, her world. The poet herself may have seen “New Englandly,” but as a cosmopolitan reader, she crafted and cultivated numerous affiliations beyond the local. This conference explores her politics, her understanding of citizenship, her engagements with international cultures and influences, as well as those cultures’ diverse engagements with her writings. The focus of the conference’s critical and artistic inquiries is the global reach of her mind and verse from the nineteenth century to the present.

“Emily Dickinson, World Citizen” will take extensive advantage of the many historical and cultural resources in the D.C. area. Anticipated highlights include high tea at the Willard Hotel, where Emily Dickinson stayed when she visited her Representative father and where Julia Ward Howe wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; a lecture and/or exhibition, followed by a reception, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts; a dinner and reception at American University; a poetry reading by some who consider the DC/Maryland area home; and what Emily Dickinson would surely demand...