Candidates: EDIS 2022 Member at Large Election

Standing for: Member at Large

    • Ryan Heryford
    • Name: 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.
    • 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 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.
    • Cheryl Weaver
    • Name: Cheryl Weaver
    • Candidate Statement:
      My interest in Emily Dickinson began years ago and continues through my dissertation exploring Dickinson’s childhood connections from Amherst including her “circle of five,” Emily Fowler Ford, and Helen Hunt Jackson. I have traveled to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Beverly, Massachusetts, to search archives that include Dickinson’s childhood friends. I have also spent time at the New York Public Library in Emily Fowler Ford’s archive, and I will continue and expand on this archival work. I am thrilled to have been awarded the EDIS Graduate Fellowship Award which will allow me the opportunity to conduct research at Houghton and Frost Libraries, and I look forward to being able to share my work at future conferences. I would love to be able to assist in future conferences, and I hope to share my ideas with EDIS regarding possible themes centering on Dickinson’s childhood. 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 with my students that extend to events hosted by EDIS and the Emily Dickinson Museum. As EDIS is always looking to expand its membership, I feel that I can contribute in a meaningful way with young scholars with an eye toward an exciting future for EDIS. 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.