The Emily Dickinson International Society

The EDIS Conference 2022 - “Dickinson and Foreignhood” was held in Sevilla in July! For program information, click here. Please join us and zoom to Seville!

Call for Papers

You can download a PDF version of the conference poster here.




The Emily Dickinson International Society invites proposals for papers and panels at its international conference “Dickinson and Foreignhood,” scheduled at the College of Philology, University of Seville, Spain, from Tuesday, July 12, to Thursday, July 14, 2022.

In “A South Wind – has a pathos” (c.1864), the poet refers to “much not understood – / The fairer – for the farness – / And for the foreignhood.” These lines represent the unknown as more beautiful when distant and unfamiliar, or foreign. The conference seeks to develop knowledge of how Dickinson understood the foreign, how she has been understood as foreign, and how foreign peoples have understood her.

The Program Committee welcomes all work on configurations of the foreign, broadly understood, in Dickinson’s writing, including:

• Conceptions of the foreign (or what we might call otherness) in Dickinson’s culture and historical moment, including e.g., race, ethnicity, class, disability, gender, sexuality
• Dickinson, geography, navigation, and foreign travel
• Parts of Dickinson’s environment, culture, or identity that seemed foreign to her
• Immigration, emigration, and exile
• Dickinson’s reception abroad
• Dickinson, foreign languages, and translation
• Lyric alienation and the poetics of estrangement
• Invasion, contagion, and infection as encounters with the foreign

All proposals engaging serious scholarship on Dickinson’s work will also be welcome. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words maximum, to Jefferey Simons (dickinsoninseville@dfing.uhu.es) and to Cristanne Miller (ccmiller@buffalo.edu) before November 1, 2021. Please specify if you plan to present virtually rather than in person. The conference Program Committee will respond to proposals by December 15, 2021.

For further information and to REGISTER, please see the conference Web site (https://edisforeignhoodconference.org/).