Name: Oct 30: “Emily Dickinson Mediated: How Archives and Editions ‘Slant’ Presentation of their Authors"
Start: 2025-10-30T16:45:00+01:00
Location: ul. Dobra 55, 00-312 Warsaw, Poland

$Oct 30: \u201cEmily Dickinson Mediated: How Archives and Editions \u2018Slant\u2019 Presentation of their Authors"$

We are pleased to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025/2026 Winter semester! This time we are pleased to host Cristanne Miller from University at Buffalo with a lecture titled “Emily Dickinson Mediated: How Archives and Editions ‘Slant’ Presentation of their Authors”.
The talk is funded by the U.S. Embassy grant.

Thursday, Oct 30, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
Room: 2.118

Every archive has its own culture and the records in an archive are (as Eric Ketelaar writes) “dynamic objects in motion, continually shifting with each new use and contextualization.” While an archive is always more than the institution where it is housed, that physical structure and other gate-keeping features of a place, can have an impact on perception. Similarly, every edition mediates our access to a poem. With Dickinson, especially, there is active debate about what constitutes “the poem,” what Dickinson intended through her methods of composition, preservation, and circulation. Both archives and print editions can “slant” a poem. Digital archives are equally interpretive in their presentation of materials. This talk will focus briefly on archives generally and then analyze three archival libraries and several print and digital editions or archives of poetry, focusing on the work of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore. With Dickinson, questions of mediation are of significance because there is scholarly debate about what constitutes a “poem.”
Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English at the University at Buffalo SUNY, emerita. She has published broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Her books on Dickinson include Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987), Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012), the edition Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016, winner of the MLA Best Scholarly Edition Prize), and The Letters of Emily Dickinson (co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell, 2024). In addition to her extensive publication on modernist poetry, including Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schüler. Gender and Literary Community in New York and Berlin, Miller is founder and director of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. Among other awards, she recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities award to support the MMDA (2025-2028).