Gerard Holmes
Election
Position
Name
Gerard Holmes
Candidate statement
The Emily Dickinson International Society has supported my scholarship, and provided a community for inquiry and collaboration, since I joined in 2015. I want to give back. To that end, my relevant superpower is managing, developing programs and partnerships for, and raising funds for small nonprofit organizations. I have done this for many years, and currently balance teaching with managing a small neuroscience-education foundation.
I am increasingly concerned with creating space for contingent and independent scholars to mutually support ongoing research and publishing. EDIS could lead efforts to support these scholars, modeling these efforts on existing programs for graduate students, and possibly partnering with other associations. Doing so could foster new modes of scholarly discourse, relatively unbound by academic institutions’ incentives and constraints, while bolstering the well-being of associations like EDIS by providing a rationale for those without the financial supports and flexible schedules tenure-line positions provide to attend conferences and publish in scholarly journals like The Emily Dickinson Journal.
My own scholarship has centered on Dickinson. Forthcoming are two book reviews in The EDIS Bulletin and Legacy. My essays on Dickinson have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, The Emily Dickinson Journal, and Reception. Samantha Landau and I co-edited a special themed issue, “New Directions in Dickinson and Music,” for Women’s Studies, to which I contributed an essay. My 2020 dissertation, “Discretion in the interval”: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances considered Dickinson’s writing in the context of improvisational aesthetics prevalent in musical and writing cultures during her lifetime, but now largely effaced from print reproductions.
Gradually, my research agenda is expanding beyond Dickinson. With Wendy Tronrud, I am now editing a special double-issue of ESQ on T.W. Higginson’s long career separate from Dickinson, to which I will contribute an essay on extemporaneous talks on spiritualism delivered by Higginson in 1858 and 1859. In addition, I am revising an essay for J19 on the importance for nineteenth-century American writers, especially Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman, of George Sand’s novels Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.
I have organized panels and presented on Dickinson and music, prosody, gossip, circus culture, play, manuscript variations, and improvisation, at conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and the Popular Culture Association, among others. In 2021 and 2022, I led virtual poetry discussion groups sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum.
I am increasingly concerned with creating space for contingent and independent scholars to mutually support ongoing research and publishing. EDIS could lead efforts to support these scholars, modeling these efforts on existing programs for graduate students, and possibly partnering with other associations. Doing so could foster new modes of scholarly discourse, relatively unbound by academic institutions’ incentives and constraints, while bolstering the well-being of associations like EDIS by providing a rationale for those without the financial supports and flexible schedules tenure-line positions provide to attend conferences and publish in scholarly journals like The Emily Dickinson Journal.
My own scholarship has centered on Dickinson. Forthcoming are two book reviews in The EDIS Bulletin and Legacy. My essays on Dickinson have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, The Emily Dickinson Journal, and Reception. Samantha Landau and I co-edited a special themed issue, “New Directions in Dickinson and Music,” for Women’s Studies, to which I contributed an essay. My 2020 dissertation, “Discretion in the interval”: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances considered Dickinson’s writing in the context of improvisational aesthetics prevalent in musical and writing cultures during her lifetime, but now largely effaced from print reproductions.
Gradually, my research agenda is expanding beyond Dickinson. With Wendy Tronrud, I am now editing a special double-issue of ESQ on T.W. Higginson’s long career separate from Dickinson, to which I will contribute an essay on extemporaneous talks on spiritualism delivered by Higginson in 1858 and 1859. In addition, I am revising an essay for J19 on the importance for nineteenth-century American writers, especially Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman, of George Sand’s novels Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.
I have organized panels and presented on Dickinson and music, prosody, gossip, circus culture, play, manuscript variations, and improvisation, at conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and the Popular Culture Association, among others. In 2021 and 2022, I led virtual poetry discussion groups sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum.