EDIS Calls for Papers, Announcements and Awards

EDIS Undergraduate Essay Prize

The Emily Dickinson International Society is seeking essays for a prize devoted to undergraduate research on Emily Dickinson. We seek critical essays by undergraduates from institutions of all kinds, focusing on Dickinson’s poems or letters. Students at all levels are eligible to submit. Papers should be 15 pages maximum. The winning essay will be published on the EDIS website and the author will receive an award of $100. To submit an essay for the prize, send copies of articles as anonymous word attachments, plus a cover letter with contact information to the following address by May 25, 2016: epetrino@fairfield.edu. The essays will be distributed electronically to a panel of nationally recognized scholars for judging. All submissions will be acknowledged and receive a response within a month.

EDIS Graduate Student Fellowship for 2016 Awarded

The Emily Dickinson International Society has announced that its fellowship award of $1,000 in support of graduate student scholarship on Emily Dickinson has been made to Justin Tackett, a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University who is researching sound technology and poetry from 1850 to 1930 in Britain and America. He reports that his dissertation comprises chapters on stethoscopy, phonography, microphony, radiophony, and telegraphy, the last of these focusing on Emily Dickinson. In that chapter, telegraphy represents immediacy and compression of language, elements that also figure prominently in Dickinson’s poetry. He plans to use his EDIS fellowship to travel to Amherst for the first time to visit the Homestead, Evergreens, and Dickinson archive, as well as to research the impact of the telegraph (and telephone, initially called the “speaking telegraph”) on the town and Dickinson family. Most recently, he has published articles on Victorian periodicals and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with an article on Inklings member Charles Williams forthcoming this summer.

EDIS Dickinson Scholar Award Winner Announced

The Emily Dickinson International Society has announced that their 2016 Scholar Award of $2,000 has been given to Gillian Osborne, a postdoctoral fellow in English at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. Professor Osborne reports that her research and writing interests include American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental history. She holds degrees from Columbia University (in comparative literature) and the University of California at Berkeley (in creative writing and English) and has taught at UC-Berkeley, Bard College, and San Quentin Correctional Facility. Her work on Dickinson has appeared in The Emily Dickinson Journal and The Boston Review, and she has published poems in such journals as The Threepenny Review and Volt. She says of her own work: “My current book project investigates how nineteenth-century American writers, desiring a closer communion with the natural world, could long for both an end to literature and the intensification of literary faculties. I consider authors and naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic, while focusing my investigation through Dickinson and Thoreau. Despite their differences, these authors focalize a common sensibility of the period—a faith in fundamental literary practices of thought, reading, writing, and figuration as a means of connecting humans to the earth.”