Wendy Tronrud

Candidate statement

I first presented aspects of my work on Emily Dickinson at the 2016 Dickinson International conference in Paris. As I began to work on my dissertation, which developed through an exploration of the relationship between African American spirituals and Dickinson’s Civil War-era poems, participation in this conference not only offered engaging conversations with many Dickinson scholars important to my project, it offered an irreplaceably supportive intellectual community. This community has continued to inspire my own thinking about Dickinson and her poetry and it also has provided a model on how to facilitate academic conversations and relationships that mentor, encourage, and include new voices and ideas. I would like to become an EDIS Member-at-large to more directly participate in this community of scholars and artists. As I neared completion of my dissertation in the English department at the CUNY Graduate Center, I presented at the 2019 Dickinson conference in Monterrey on a Dickinson and music panel. Our panel was invited to develop our respective papers into articles for a Women’s Studies issue focusing on new directions in Dickinson and music (March 2021). Currently, I am working on an essay that deals with Dickinson’s volcano poems in relation to its symbolic import to American slavery writ-large, and I will begin developing my dissertation, “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk, into a book manuscript for publication. As an educator, Dickinson’s poetry continues to play an important role across the classes I am fortunate to teach. In 2019, I took a full-time faculty position with the Bard Prison Initiative and, since 2017, I also mentor and teach in Bard College’s Masters in Teaching program. When I was a NYC high school teacher, I included Dickinson’s poetry in my literature classes with great aplomb as her poetry has a unique ability to both interest students and encourage them to experiment and creatively engage as thinkers and writers. While teaching at Queens College, I taught an Emily Dickinson course for English majors, and for BPI students, I am developing a second-semester FYSEM, or first-year seminar course, on thinking historically with Dickinson’s poetry. Becoming directly involved as a member-at-large with the Emily Dickinson International Society would be a tremendous opportunity. In this role, I will work with fellow EDIS members to introduce new readers and scholars to Dickinson’s poetry and Dickinson studies as well as to support and learn from the dynamic scholarship that continues to emerge from Dickinson’s poetry.