Ryan Heryford

Candidate statement

I am an associate professor in the department of English at California State University East Bay, one of the most diverse campuses in the United States, where I specialize in nineteenth-century American literature with a focus in the environmental humanities and early narrative and poetic iterations of environmental justice. My recent article in the Emily Dickinson Journal considers the role of compost and decay in Dickinson's poetics as contextualized within a mid-nineteenth-century American energy transition from lumber to coal, shale, and petroleum. This work on decomposition and nineteenth-century petroleum cultures aligns with my broader current manuscript project, titled The Snugness of Being: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Vitalism, which explores the influence of vitalism and, what I refer to as necro-genesis (or life whose preconditions are death and decay) on constructions of self and subjectivity within the works of Dickinson, Melville and Twain. I have presented work on these projects at C19, Dickinson International Conferences and the Annual Dickinson Meeting in Amherst. In 2018, I received the Dickinson Scholar Award to help support my research in Dickinson’s necro-genetic poetics. Most recently, I led a reading group on Dickinson and the environmental humanities for the Emily Dickinson Museum. My scholarly career is inherently entangled with service and activism. I’ve served as the vice-chair of my university’s academic senate and have chaired our sustainability committee for over six years. I remain actively engaged with a range of grassroots organizations throughout the Bay Area and beyond committed to working at the intersection of climate activism, environmental health and social justice. Within nineteenth-century literary studies, I am currently serving as an at-large member of the Mark Twain Circle and I work closely with colleagues in the Melville Society. While I am still a new scholar in Dickinson Studies, I feel that I could offer a dedicated and energized commitment to the Dickinson Society’s mission in reaching and sustaining a diverse field of students, academics and general readers, while further considering the relation between Dickinson’s writings and contemporary work in social and environmental justice.