Transatlantic Series: Alexandra Socarides, "Henry James & the American Poetess"

Alexandra Socarides is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri where she teaches nineteenth-century literature and culture as well as the history of poetry and poetics. Called “astonishing,” an “important, timely, and crucial contribution” born of “discerning intuition” and setting a “high standard for rigor and care,” Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics (Oxford University Press 2012), her first book, looks at nineteenth-century American compositional practices and material culture through the lens of Emily Dickinson’s writing career. Her next project, The Lyric Pose: Antebellum American Women's Poetry and the Problem of Recovery, is an exploration of the paratextual and extratextual conventions that accompanied the production, circulation, and reception of women’s poetry during the pre-Civil War period. The winner of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the National Humanities Center, Socarides’ writing has appeared in the Emily Dickinson Journal, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, for which she will be writing a regular poetry column in the coming year.