Editorial Note

It’s a pleasure to note the new directions in Dickinson studies mapped by the number of books that have recently been published on this poet and that will be forthcoming within the year. Stay tuned for more reviews in the coming issues!

Below is a note from Alexandra Socarides about a new website, titled “New Directions in Dickinson Studies.” This provides yet another venue for opening the doors to scholarly discussion of Dickinson’s work and life. The Journal looks forward to fruitful collaboration with this website in bringing readers the most challenging, instructive, and interesting writing in the wide range of Dickinson studies.

New Directions in Dickinson Studies (see: http://newdirectionsindickinsonstudies.org/home/) is a website devoted to showcasing new, different, speculative, imaginative, provocative, and unfinished thinking about the work of Emily Dickinson. Intended to foster collaboration and dialogue, the site employs the simplest of formats: a single 2,500–5,000 word piece and a “comments” box. Because the pieces that go up are works-in-progress (albeit well-articulated works-in- progress), we urge visitors to employ the commenting function heavily. A piece (and the discussion that it provokes) will stay on the main page of the site for two months, at which point it will be archived and the next piece will go up.

The idea to start this website came out of a meeting of both emerging and established scholars at the 2011 Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts. There, people expressed significant interest in exploring (but not establishing) some of the “new directions” in which we might take Dickinson studies, or in which it is being taken. To this end, the website is open to scholars, artists, historians, biographers, and teachers from different points in their careers, all of whom want to think about what “new” would mean in a field that has been approached from so many angles and perspectives already. In its very existence, this website seeks to ask: what constitutes a “new direction”? what kind of inquiry does it engage in? what does it look and sound like?

While the website is open to all visitors to read, you need a password to post a comment. In order to get a password, please email Alex Socarides at socaridesa@missouri.edu. Also, if you have a piece that you think would be good for the site, please email her to discuss and/or submit it.