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2013 International Conference Schedule


EDIS 2013 – Emily Dickinson, World Citizen Schedule



Throughout the conference:

  • Michelle Boswell, Susanna Compton, Aaron Dinin, Julie Enszer, and Sarah Sillin (University of Maryland) and Geoffrey Schramm (National Cathedral School) will assist with helping conferees find rooms, etc.

  • The Gorgeous Nothings (Jen Bervin, Fitt Artist in Residence, Brown University, & Marta Werner, D’Youville College) on display in Special Collections, Hornbake Library, M-F 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Please tell whoever is on the desk that The Gorgeous Nothings is being held on the “Rare Hold” truck!:

  • 

  • This bust by Valentina Mazzei (sculptor, Rome, Italy) will be featured as well:
  • As will this painting by Gretchen Cline (artist) based on the 1859
    daguerreotype:




    Media Room Featuring Digital Projects and New Media Presentations, TWS 3252

  • Amherst College Digital CollectionsMichael Kelly (Head of Archives & Special Collections)
  • Dickinson Electronic Archives 2 (University of Virginia & University of Maryland) – Jessica Beard (University of California Santa Cruz), Aaron Dinin & Julie Enszer (University of Maryland)
  • iTunes DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course) on Emily Dickinson will be part of this demonstration; all conference participants are invited to submit course content—lesson plans, readings, lectures, and so forth
  • Emily Dickinson Archive (Houghton & Harvard University Press) – Leslie Morris (Houghton Library, Harvard) & Emily Arkin (Harvard University Press)
  • Juliana Chow & Gillian Osborne (University of California Berkeley) [and in absentia] – “California in New England Eschscholzia Californica (California Poppy) in Emily Dickinson and Celia Thaxter” (virtually, in demonstration room)
  • Stephanie Strickland (Electronic Literature Organization) and Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) – Sea and Spar Between (http://blogs.saic.edu/dearnavigator/winter2010/nick-montfort-stephanie- strickland-sea-and-spar-between/).


Thurs. August 8th

4:00-6:00 p.m. Registration, Tawes Hall 1st Floor (easy walk from Inn & Conference Center)

5:00-7:30 p.m. Opening Reception sponsored by American University (light supper), Tawes 1st floor; Diana Wagner (Salisbury University) on guitar 6:00-7:00 p.m.

  • Presentation of Distinguished Service Award to Georgiana Strickland (Emerita Editor, Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin and University Press of Kentucky)

8:00-10:00 p.m. – “Evening of ‘Bolts of Melody’” - Ulrich Recital Hall

  • Nicole Panizza (soprano), accompanied by Jane Sheldon (piano), performing Chanting to Paradise: A Recital (based on music found in Emily Dickinson's piano bench)
  • A staged reading of excerpts from WIDER THAN THE SKY: The Mystery of Emily Dickinson by Barbara Dana, featuring Elizabeth Morton (Emily), Kathleen Shimata (Eternal Emily), Laurie McCants (actor), Martin Hennessy (pianist)
  • William Andrews (University of North Carolina) presents his musical adaptations of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” “I Cannot Live with You,” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”


Fri. August 9th


***PLEASE NOTE THAT THE PRESENTATIONS OF THOSE FEW WHO HAVE HAD TO CANCEL AT THE LAST MINUTE HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM THIS SUMMARY SCHEDULE. THEIR ABSTRACTS REMAIN ONLINE, HOWEVER.***


8:30 – 9:30 a.m. – Registration, coffee, Tawes Hall 1st floor


9:30 – 10:00 a.m. – Welcome from Conference Organizers – Ulrich Recital Hall


10:00 – 11:15 a.m. – Keynote “Escaping Emily” by Alexandra Socarides (EDIS Board Member; University of Missouri)
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes 1st floor
Introduction by Jason Rudy (University of Maryland)


11:30 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. – Judith Farr (Emerita, Georgetown University; writer of critical works and fiction), “Emily Dickinson and the Tropical Eden”
Ulrich Recital Hall
Introduction by Jonnie Guerra (Emerita, Cabrini College; EDIS Past President)


11:30 – 1:00 p.m. – Light Lunch Available Tawes 1st floor (slight overlap with lunchtime talk)


1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. – 3 Concurrent Sessions – Paper Presentations, Discussions

  • Religion: Amherst to the World, TWS 2115
    Jennifer Leader (Mt San Antonio College), “’Wicked as I am, I read my Bible sometimes’: Emily Dickinson in Her New England Hermeneutical Community”
    Richard E. Brantley (University of Florida emeritus), “The Interrogative Mood of Emily Dickinson’s Quarrel with God”
    Roger Lundin (Wheaton College), “Vicariously from Vesuvius: Dickinson Meets the World”
    Jane Donahue Eberwein (Oakland University emerita), Chair

  • Emily Dickinson’s “Supposed Person” and the Art of the Dramatic Lyric, TWS 3134
    Páraic Finnerty (University of Portsmouth, UK), “It does not mean me, but a supposed person”: Browning, Dickinson and the Dramatic Lyric
    Paula Bernat Bennett (Southern Illinois University Carbondale emerita), Dickinson’s Supposed Person in its 19th-century American Context
    Faith Barrett (Duquesne University), “If I can stop one heart from breaking”: the Dramatic Voice in Phoebe Cary and Emily Dickinson
    Cristanne Miller (University of Buffalo), respondent
    Faith Barrett, Chair

  • Emily Dickinson’s Transatlantic, Transtemporal Contexts, TWS 3248
    Melissa Girard (Loyola Baltimore) “Dickinson After Modernism”
    Michelle Kohler (Tulane University), “‘Her – last Poems’: Barrett Browning, Brontë, and Posthumous Authorship in Dickinson’s Elegies”
    Cindy MacKenzie (University of Regina), “‘A Barefoot Citizen’: Anglo-American Marriage Laws, Citizenship and the Woman Artist in Emily Dickinson”
    Elizabeth Petrino (Fairfield University), “‘Alone and in a Circumstance’: Spiders, Artistry, and Dickinson’s Letter to George Sand”
    Elizabeth Petrino, Chair



2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. - 3 Concurrent Sessions – Paper Presentations, Discussions

  • Dickinson & Children’s Literature - Portraying Emily Dickinson in Books for Children and Young Adults, TWS 2115
    Kathryn Burak (Boston University), “At That Exact Moment When Poetry Might Change Your Life: Bringing Emily Dickinson into the Lives of Teen Readers through Fiction”
    Lesley Clement (Lakehead University), “Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf: Depictions of Death and Depression in Isabelle Arsenault’s Picture Books for Children.”
    Burleigh Mutén (Children’s Writer), “Miss Emily, ‘Our Laughing Goddess of Plenty’: Writing About Dickinson to Capture Young Readers”
    Eleanor Linafelt (Takoma Park, MD), respondent
    Barbara Dana (Emerita EDIS Board; playwright, screenwriter, writer), Chair

  • Inscriptions, TWS 3134
    Jayne Chapman (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) - Fetishizing Emily Dickinson’s Literary Hand
    Seth Perlow (Cornell University) – Erased Dickinson: Janet Holmes and the Trace as Historical Absence
    Steve Rojcewicz (University of Maryland), “The night became Emily”
    Geoffrey Schramm (National Cathedral School), Chair

  • Dickinson Pop Culture Trivia and Prizes!, TWS 3248
    Graduate Student Section of EDIS

    Scott Pett (Rice University), Representations of "Pure Madness" in Polish Multimedia
    Jessica Beard (University of California Santa Cruz), Emily Dickinson's Archive at Play
    Catherine Forsa (Case Western Reserve University), Crystalline Planes: Measures of Science, Feeling, and Form in Dickinson’s Science Poems
    Nate Allen (University of Buffalo), Dickinson and Digital Pop-Culture: the EDIS Graduate Student Website
    Kate Dunning (Case Western Reserve University), Chair

4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. – Coffee

4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. – Emily Dickinson, World Citizen Roundtable, Ulrich Recital Hall

  • Antoine Cazé (Université Paris Diderot, France), “I felt myself a visitor”: From Privacy to World, and Back Again
    Barbara Mossberg (California State University Monterey Bay), The Generative Stress of Washington
    Jane Wald (Emily Dickinson Museum), Dickinson in Amherst: Reading Dickinson through Household Objects
    Michael Yetman (Purdue University), Respondent and Chair



7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. – RECEPTION & BANQUET

  • Reception: Performance by Sofie Livebrant and her accompanist
  • Reception: Poetry Readings by David Keplinger (American University) Marilyn Nelson (University of Connecticut emerita), Elizabeth Arnold (University of Maryland)
  • After Dinner: Keynote by Joseph Donahue (Duke University)




Sat. August 10th

8:00 – 9:00 a.m. – Coffee available in Tawes, 1st Floor


9:00 – 10:45 a.m. – 4 Concurrent Sessions – Paper Presentations, Discussions

  • 21st Century Pedagogies, TWS 2115
    Terry Blackhawk (Founding Director, InsideOut Literary Arts Project, Detroit), “Creative Pedagogy”
    Ellen Louise Hart (Portland State University), “Topics in Literature: The ‘Green World’ in American Poetry.”
    Travis Matteson (University at Buffalo) – Reading Dickinson Distantly: GIS Mapping and ED’s Poetry
    Jefferey Simons (University of Huelva, Spain) – “Hearing Dickinson in Spain”
    Julie Enszer (University of Maryland), Chair

  • Conditions, TWS 3134
    Mita Bose (Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi) - Emily Dickinson – ‘Enigmatical Sublime’ – an enduring world icon for female dissent and self sufficiency (uses Edie Campbell)
    Jill Spivey Caddell (Cornell University)- War’s Oblique Places: Dickinson, Higginson, and the Geographies of Correspondence
    Alison Fraser (University of Buffalo) – Dickinson’s Domestic Battlefront: “Rearrange a ‘Wife’s’ Affection” and the Civil War
    Amanda Licato (University of California Berkeley) – Clothing, Sewing, and Self in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
    Justina Ines Faccini Lied (UNIVATES, University Center, Brazil) – ED in Her Private Bubble: Poems, Letters, and The Condition of Presence
    Susanna Compton (University of Maryland), Chair

  • Transoceanic, TWS 3248
    Isabel Sobral Campos (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – Affinities between Two Worlds: Dickinson, Baudelaire and the Divinity
    Laura Lauth (University of Maryland) - Going ‘Trans’ with Bettina Brentano von Arnim:A New History of Literary Translation and Transgression in the Transcultural U.S., 1830-1890
    Tatiana Polezhaka & Peter Mitchell (Tomsk State University) – Introducing Emily Dickinson to Russia: Translating Words, Preserving Meanings
    Judith Scholes (University of British Columbia) – Emily Dickinson and New England Women’s Poetry in Mrs. Cooke’s Springfield Republican
    Barbara Mossberg (California State University Monterey Bay, EDIS Board), Chair

  • Affect, TWS 3250
    Patricia Chaudron (University at Buffalo) - “A Route of Evanescence”: Emily Dickinson’s New England Moment of Modernity in the 1890s
    Ann Shih-Yuan Chou (National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan) - “Where the Meanings are—” the unpresentable in Emily Dickinson’s Love Poems
    Laura Dawkins (Murray State University) - “Their coming back seems possible”: Dickinson’s Ghosts (virtual contribution online)
    Anne Ramirez (Neumann University) - Emily Dickinson’s Momentous Mission: Messenger Between the Worlds
    Dali Tan (University of Maryland and Northern Virginia Community College) – Emily Dickinson’s Affectivism: Decoding the Power of Her Poems from the Perspective of Chinese Poetics
    Jessica Beard (University of California Santa Cruz), Chair



11:00 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. – 4 Concurrent Sessions – Paper Presentations, Discussions

  • Ecocriticism, 3134
    Kate Dunning (Case Western Reserve University) – The Ecopoetics of Emily Dickinson
    Mary Kuhn (Boston University) – Dickinson’s Global Floral Network
    Leslie McAbee (University of North Carolina) – “Memories of Palm”: Dickinson’s Tropical Commodities and Unstable Geographies”
    Emer Vaughn (Indiana University) – “The Circulatory Self: Emily Dickinson’s Trans-Corporeality”
    Ellen Louise Hart (University of California Santa Cruz emerita, former EDIS Board Member), Chair

  • (Im)mortality, TWS 3248
    Karen Dovell (SUNY Suffolk Community College) – Classical Thermopylae in work by ED: War, Death, Immortality
    Katherine LeNotre (Catholic University) – Dickinson on the Mind and Heaven as Places
    Mary Schuhriemen (Catholic University) – Dickinson’s Paradoxical Union of War and Nature in a New Civil War Poem
    Jane Eberwein (Oakland University emerita, former EDIS Board Member), Chair

  • Citizenship, TWS 2115
    Sean Ash Gordon (University of Massachusetts Amherst) – “Dickinson and Democratic Citizenship”
    Dan Manheim (Centre College) – ED’s republic of suffering
    Vivian Pollak (Washington University) – Muriel Rukeyser, Emily Dickinson, and Visionary Citizenship
    Stephanie Tingley (Youngstown University) – How Emily Dickinson Teaches Her Readers to be Global Citizens
    Marcy Tanter (Tartleton University) – “Elizabeth Stearns Tyler: From Amherst to the World” – community responsibility and Amherst society
    Sarah Sillin (University of Maryland), Chair

  • Inscriptions 2, TWS 3250
    Andrew Dorkin (University at Buffalo) - “the mind alone without corporeal friend”: Emily Dickinson’s Depictions of Language emphasizing the aural over the visual
    Katelyn Durkin (University of Virginia) - To Fragment: Emily Dickinson’s Poetics of Process and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
    Yumiko Koizumi (Ibaraki University, Japan) – ED and “that keyless Rhyme”
    Catherine Walsh (Visiting Holloway Poet, University of California Berkeley) – Patterning, silences, imagination, creative underpinnings and juxtapositions of voice
    Melanie Hubbard (New College of Florida), Chair



12:45 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. - Light Lunch Buffet 1st floor (the lunch and the 1:30 session overlap slightly)


1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. – Knowing Emily Dickinson through the Arts Roundtable, Ulrich Recital Hall

  • Moderated by Jonnie Guerra (EDIS President, Emerita Provost Cabrini College)
    Barbara Dana (Emerita EDIS Board; playwright, screenwriter, writer)
    Maryanne Garbowsky (County College of Morris, New Jersey)
    Emily Seelbinder (Queens University of Charlotte)
    Thom Tammaro (Minnesota State University)



3:15 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. – 4 Concurrent Sessions – Paper Presentations, Discussions

  • Orientalisms, TWS 3248
    Katsuya Izumi (University at Albany, SUNY) – Indicating Kinship between ED’s poetry and Zen Buddhism
    Yanbin Kang (University at Buffalo) – Dickinson’s Orient, Orientalized Poetics and Thoreau/Emerson
    Adam Katz (University at Buffalo) – Sunna at the Bone: Emily Dickinson’s Early- Buddhist Deconstruction
    Nelly Lambert (Catholic University) – Emily Dickinson and the Persian Tradition
    Michelle Boswell (University of Maryland), Chair

  • Transdisciplinary Poetics, TWS 3134
    Trisha Kannan (University of Florida)– Em & Em: Emily Dickinson and Rap Music
    Brad Ricca – (Case Western Reserve University) – Serial Readings, Cliffhanger Expectations: ED as Superhero
    Stephanie Wampler (Haywood University) – “The Riddle of ‘I taste a liquor” – Pecha kucha style presentation
    Shu-ching Wu (Kainan University, Taiwan) – Overcoming Oneself as Subject in Dickinson’s Poetry: A Mediated “I”
    Páraic Finnerty (University of Portsmouth, UK), Chair

  • Transatlantic, TWS 2115
    Renée Bergland (Simmons College) – Politics and Poesis: Dickinson’s Planetarity
    Elizabeth Sagaser (Colby College) – Hearing with Eyes: Dickinson, Shakespeare, and their Readers
    Christa Vogelius (University of Michigan) – Race, Imagination, and Scandinavia’s Emily Dickinson
    Joan Wry (Saint Michael’s College) – “in Lands I never saw”: Emily Dickinson’s Alpine Requirements
    Eliza Richards (University of North Carolina, EDIS Board), Chair

  • Affect 2, TWS 3250
    Heidi Hanrahan (Shepherd University) – “My friends are my ‘estate’”: Emily Dickinson’s Facebook Friends
    Mary Kim (Stanford University) – ED’s poetry’s incommensurability between citizenship as an abstract, externalized placeholder of identity and subjectivity as a specific, interior expression of personhood
    Michelle Neely (University of Toronto) – “Scarcity and Delight: On the Pleasure of Denial in Emily Dickinson”
    Ken Takata (Hamline University) – Attachment Ambiguity in “The Malay – took the Pearl – “
    Aiden Patricia Thompson (University at Albany SUNY) – Affect, Language, and Identity: Emily Dickinson’s Embodied Performative
    Paul Crumbley (Utah State University, EDIS Board), Chair


5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m. – On the Horizon of Dickinson Studies: New Edited Collections, Ulrich Recital Hall

  • Paul Crumbley (Utah State University) & Eleanor Heginbotham (Emerita Concordia University St. Paul) Dickinson’s Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities (Ohio State University Press)
    Marianne Noble (American University) & Gary Stonum (Emeritus EDIS Board, Case Western Reserve University) on Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press)
    Eliza Richards (EDIS Board, University of North Carolina) on Emily Dickinson in Context (Cambridge University Press) – Ulrich Recital Hall


    6:45 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. – Dinner (light buffet) & Drinks, 1st floor, Tawes Hall; Diana Wagner (Salisbury University) on guitar


    8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. – “An Evening of the ‘Vitallest Expressions’”, Ulrich Recital Hall
    • Excerpts from Barbara Mossberg (California State University Monterey Bay, Flying with Emily Dickinson
      Walter Davis (Ohio State University), ABERRATION of Starlight (based on “My Life had stood a / Loaded Gun – “)
      Laurie McCants (Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, Pennsylvania), Industrious Angels
      Rosemarie “Mimi” Zannino (Poet, Performer, Dickinson enactor, Maryland), Time Travel with Emily Dickinson
      Emily Anderson (University at Buffalo) will perform a monologue, Sincerely, Master
      Stephanie Strickland (Electronic Literature Organization) and Nick Montfort (Massachusetts of Technology) performance of poetry generator, Sea and Spar Between (http://blogs.saic.edu/dearnavigator/winter2010/nick-montfort-stephanie-s...).
      John Little (University of Maryland), Tell It Slant Act I, Scene II



    Sunday, August 11th




    8:00 – 9:00 a.m. – Coffee available in Tawes, 1st Floor


    Research Circle coordinated by Ellen Louise Hart (Emerita EDIS Board, Portland State University), Tawes 2115


    9:00 – 10:00 a.m. – EDIS Business Meeting, Ulrich Recital Hall


    10:30 – 11:45 a.m. – Wrapping Up – Emily Dickinson Futures: Presentation & Editing of Her Writings – Ulrich Recital Hall

    • Leslie Morris (Houghton Library, Harvard University), Emily Dickinson Archive
      Michael Kelly (Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College), Amherst College Digital Collections
      Cristanne Miller (University of Buffalo, SUNY), "Genetic Editing: The Challenges and 'Possibility' of a New Print Edition of Dickinson's Poems"
      Martha Nell Smith (University of Maryland), "Who Made Dickinson's 'Poems'?" Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-­Digital Textual Inquiry, Dickinson Electronic Archives I & II
      Marta Werner (D’Youville College), "'Their period for Dawn - ': Housing Dickinson's Late Work," Open Folios; Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886 and The Gorgeous Nothings


    12:00 p.m. – 1:30p.m. – Readings by Joseph Donahue (Duke University), Marilyn Nelson (University of Connecticut emerita), & other poets - Ulrich Recital Hall


    2:00 p.m. on – checkouts & departures

    • 2:00 p.m. Off to The Willard for High Tea (advance reservations required by July 10th)



    The Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) Cordially Invites You to High Tea As a Coda to EDIS 2013 “Emily Dickinson, World Citizen” and the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Society
    Sunday, August 11th, 3:15-5:00 p.m.
    The Willard Hotel

    Please write to heginbotham@csp.edu by July 20th for further information on reserving your spot for High Tea.