Christine Gerhardt
Election
Position
Name
Christine Gerhardt
Candidate statement
I am a Professor of American Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and have been working on Emily Dickinson since the early 2000s, with a particular focus on ecocritical perspectives. I have published A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World (2014) and essays on Dickinson’s poetry in relation to gardening, mobility, and the Anthropocene. Over the years, I have also taught various Dickinson seminars at the universities of Dortmund and Bamberg (Germany), the University of Graz (Austria), and Dartmouth College (USA), and have supervised both a doctoral dissertation and a postdoctoral project on her work. In many respects, Dickinson’s poetry has been a constant in my research and teaching. Indeed, the expectation within German American Studies to specialize across multiple periods and authors has further deepened my engagement with her work, since it can be compared so productively with, for instance, contemporary migration poetry.
EDIS, with its various platforms, publications, and conferences, and its vibrant intellectual community, has been crucial for me from the start, and I remain deeply grateful for the society’s openness to international scholars. For instance, I gave one of my first conference papers in the United States at the EDIS panel at the ASA in 2003, and my first essay on Dickinson was published in the Emily Dickinson Journal in 2006. More recently, one of my doctoral students benefited greatly from participating in two EDIS Critical Institutes. It has also been an honor to present my work at EDIS conferences in Amherst and Taipei. At the same time, it has given me great joy to conduct a virtual seminar for the Dickinson Museum together with Renée Bergland, to facilitate a Critical Institute session, and to now co-edit two EDJ special issues on Dickinson’s Ecologies with Li-hsin Hsu.
It would be a great honor to serve EDIS as a Member-at-Large. I would be glad to support the society by contributing to committee work, participating in ongoing conversations about the field, and fostering connections between EDIS and European academic networks. I would also be interested in helping to expand international participation—especially among early-career scholars—and in discussing initiatives that further highlight Dickinson’s relevance to contemporary concerns such as environmental humanities and global literary studies.
EDIS, with its various platforms, publications, and conferences, and its vibrant intellectual community, has been crucial for me from the start, and I remain deeply grateful for the society’s openness to international scholars. For instance, I gave one of my first conference papers in the United States at the EDIS panel at the ASA in 2003, and my first essay on Dickinson was published in the Emily Dickinson Journal in 2006. More recently, one of my doctoral students benefited greatly from participating in two EDIS Critical Institutes. It has also been an honor to present my work at EDIS conferences in Amherst and Taipei. At the same time, it has given me great joy to conduct a virtual seminar for the Dickinson Museum together with Renée Bergland, to facilitate a Critical Institute session, and to now co-edit two EDJ special issues on Dickinson’s Ecologies with Li-hsin Hsu.
It would be a great honor to serve EDIS as a Member-at-Large. I would be glad to support the society by contributing to committee work, participating in ongoing conversations about the field, and fostering connections between EDIS and European academic networks. I would also be interested in helping to expand international participation—especially among early-career scholars—and in discussing initiatives that further highlight Dickinson’s relevance to contemporary concerns such as environmental humanities and global literary studies.