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 explored 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 of 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 and to think alongside those who continue to deepen and extend access to new voices and ideas. I will participate in the upcoming Dickinson International Conference this summer 2022, both in the Critical Institute and in a panel, as I continue to develop my dissertation, “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson, Black Song and the Uses of Folk, into a book manuscript for publication. After presenting at the 2019 Dickinson conference in Monterey 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 in 2021; my essay is titled, "'Fossil Bird-Tracks': Emily Dickinson Performing Archaeologically." Currently, I am co-editing an issue of ESQ with Gerard Holmes on Thomas Wentworth Higginson and I am working on an essay that deals with Dickinson’s volcano poems in relation to their symbolic import to American slavery writ large (which I will present on at this year's conference). 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. This summer I am revising my MAT course for graduate literature students in tandem with a Library of Congress grant that asks pre-service teachers to consider how to use primary sources from this rich archive in their classrooms. Dickinson will be a focal point of the course as we explore the grant's question: How do we read the American landscape? In fall 2022, I will take an Assistant Professor of English Education position at Queens College, CUNY where I will continue my scholarship on nineteenth century America in tandem with my work on secondary youth education. 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.