Candidates: 2023 EDIS Member-At-Large Election

Standing for: Member-At-Large

• • Gerard Holmes
  • 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.
• • Brunilda Kondi
  • Name: Brunilda Kondi
  • Candidate Statement:
    My name is Brunilda Kondi and I am an American Literature and Culture instructor at the University of Tirana, Albania. Every year, I teach a course in 19th Century American Literature and one in American Culture to about 200 students at the English Department of the biggest and most reputable university we have here. I have been teaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry for twenty-three years. In addition to enjoying the linguistic and formal composition and the pleasure it provides, I have personally experienced the transformational power of Dickinson’s lyric poems. My teaching of her poetry focuses specifically on the latter, and every year I witness and enjoy seeing students empowered by reciting or quoting highly relatable poems from the ED collection the world has inherited. I also feel that working with her poems provides room for creativity and innovation, so every year my students and I try new exercises with the poems selected for class discussions. I was introduced to the Emily Dickinson International Society when I did my Fulbright research in the United States and have been part of it for seven years now. I have greatly benefited from attending two international conferences in this time, and I have participated in the online events organized during these years. I highly appreciate the community of this society and I find the many varied interests and explorations of Emily Dickinson’s poetry to be enriching and empowering. I would be humbled and honored to provide any kind of support and contribution to promoting the cause of this society as a Member-at-Large. Promoting interest in Emily Dickinson and her poetry is something I have been doing regularly in the academic and informal literary circles I am part of in my small country. I can imagine doing it on behalf of such a society can only expand the power to do so.
• • 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. Most recently, I have joined Queens College as an Assistant Professor of English Education. I am also serving on an EDIS conference committee dedicated to developing new conference venues for Dickinson-related panels. Currently, I am co-editing a double issue of ESQ with Gerard Holmes on Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Higginson, Apart from Dickinson,” for which I also wrote an essay, “Between Transcription, Translation, and Revision: Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Epictetus, “Negro Spirituals,” and “Sappho.” I am also 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. I taught Dickinson in many of the courses I developed while the Associate Director of Education Programs with the Bard Prison Initiative. I have developed a Methods course for pre-service teachers in Bard College’s Masters in Teaching program that focuses on Dickinson’s poems as a way to consider “how to teach complex texts to adolescent readers.” 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. 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 support the various needs of the organization, including finding ways to introduce new readers and scholars to Dickinson’s poetry and Dickinson studies.