Escaping Emily

A Keynote Address by Alexandra Socarides, University of Missouri

“Escaping Emily” examines the reciprocal versions of escape played by Emily Dickinson and her readers. By providing a close look at depictions of the nineteenth-century poetess, this talk aims to contextualize the whys and hows of Dickinson’s escape from a literary culture all too ready to contain her. This is, strangely, an escape upon which our own often-fraught relationship to Dickinson depends.

Alexandra Socarides is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she teaches courses on American poetry and poetics and on nineteenth-century literature and culture. Her first book, Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. She has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, and Winterthur to work on her next book, which is about the para-textual and extra-textual conventions of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. She has recently become a Contributing Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she writes a regular poetry column entitled “The Poems (We Think) We Know.” She currently sits on the Editorial Boards of the Emily Dickinson Journal and Legacy and serves on the Board of EDIS.