Candidates: EDIS 2021 Member at Large Election

Standing for: Member at Large

    • Gerard Holmes
    • Name: Gerard Holmes
    • Candidate Statement:
      I want to join the Board of Directors because of what the Emily Dickinson International Society has done for me, and what I might do for EDIS. I joined the year I applied to graduate school. Since then, EDIS has been central to the development of my scholarly work. I attended the 2016 triennial conference in Paris, presenting some initial thoughts about Dickinson and musical improvisation. That year, and again in 2017, I was fortunate to participate in Dickinson Critical Institutes. These experiences allowed me to test out the ideas that eventually drove my dissertation, and that I developed into published essays. Last spring I completed a dissertation, “‘Discretion in the Interval’: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances,” at the University of Maryland, College Park. I would like to stay connected with EDIS, and to support its work. I would bring a couple of unusual qualities to the Board. First, I have considerable experience managing, developing programs and events, and fundraising for small nonprofits. Currently, in addition to teaching, I manage operations for a small foundation that funds neuroscience education, so I am also learning nonprofits from the funder’s perspective. Second, during my time in graduate school I engaged with graduate-student advocacy, public humanities, and alternative career-path preparation, both at Maryland, where I founded a student group, Humanities Beyond the Academy, and in professional associations like the MLA and ACLA. This recent experience in the doctoral-study trenches, and my work in non-tenure-track positions, could provide a useful perspective on fostering and supporting participation by graduate-students, adjuncts, and independent scholars. I have organized panels and presented on Dickinson, music, and improvisation at the Modern Language Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, the Popular Culture Association, and other conferences. I remain engaged with Dickinson studies post-PhD. In addition to publications in The Emily Dickinson Journal and Reception, I recently co-edited (with the amazing Samantha Landau) a special issue of Women’s Studies with the theme “New Directions in Dickinson and Music.” The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, forthcoming this spring, includes a chapter on my research. In March, I led two Virtual Poetry Discussion Groups sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum. I am currently at work on a monograph that expands on my dissertation.
    • Adalberto Müller
    • Name: Adalberto Müller
    • Candidate Statement:
      I am a professor at U Federal Fluminense (Rio de Janeiro) and since 2013 I have been translating Dickinson’s complete poems into Portuguese, presently being published in 2 volumes in Brazil. I have been a member of EDIS since 2015, when I attended the society’s annual meeting in Paris and met many of its members, with whom I am in regular contact. Since that time, I have also visited the Dickinson Museum and collection at Amherst College a few times to improve my knowledge of the author. In 2018, I spent two semesters at the University at Buffalo as a visiting researcher, and that year I was also able to visit the Houghton Library at Harvard, as my research required consulting Dickinson’s manuscripts. In January 2020, just before the pandemic, I was invited to give a talk in a panel from EDIS at the MLA Conference in Seattle, where I spoke about the importance of translation for Dickinson readers and researchers. Hence, during all these years, Emily Dickinson’s legacy has been part of my personal and professional life, which is why I am honored to postulate my candidacy to be a Member-at-large of the Emily Dickinson International Society.
    • Wendy Tronrud
    • Name: 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.
    • Cheryl Weaver
    • Name: Cheryl Weaver
    • Candidate Statement:
      My interest in Emily Dickinson began years ago and continues through my doctoral work. I have workshopped and presented papers at previous EDIS conferences of my Dickinson research related primarily to her familial ties and, more recently, for a dissertation exploring her childhood connections from Amherst including her “circle of five,” Emily Fowler Ford, and Helen Hunt Jackson. This latest project is an exciting journey that has begun by communicating with various archives during our global pandemic—fact-finding from afar—and will progress next month with the first step of my physical journey to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in search of Dickinson’s “lost sheep” Hattie Merrill. I hope to share my work at future conferences and meetings and will be participating in a roundtable discussion next year on Dickinson’s epistolary correspondent Helen Hunt Jackson. Most particularly, I am eager to assist in the upcoming meetings and conferences, “‘Stratford on Avon’ - accept us all!”— Dickinson and Shakespeare and “Dickinson and Foreignhood” to be held in Seville, Spain. (I am especially interested in this conference as a student of the Spanish language!) I hope to contribute to these conferences in addition to planning events related to Dickinson’s girlhood through her kinship and acquaintance connections, sharing what my research reveals through the archives and through absences in the archives. I am committed to working with EDIS and the goal of extending the influence and appreciation of Dickinson’s work in educational institutions in the United States and abroad. As an instructor at an International Baccalaureate high school and at Buffalo State College, I have the unique vantage point of a wide audience for Dickinson’s work in terms of age range and a global context through the international program. I plan to work on projects that extend to events hosted by EDIS and the Emily Dickinson Museum. My research interests in education, nineteenth century epistolary practices, and nineteenth century American literature lead me to Dickinson’s work again and again, and I would like to meaningfully contribute to EDIS as a Member-at-Large. I believe that I will successfully be able to assist EDIS in its goals, notably increased interest and membership, through my work with a high volume of students at various levels in order to foster interest, literary contributions, and historical preservationist practices.