The papers for this special session are drawn from the Emily Dickinson International Society call for an MLA session on “Emily Dickinson in Her Time and Ours.” Amidst the many excellent submissions, we were struck by a strong strand of proposals by young scholars that in varied but coherent ways recognize Emily Dickinson as a prescient media theorist. The transformative force of 21^st-century media shifts have made us increasingly aware of how choices of media shape every facet of perception, memory, and expression; 19^th century America, of course, experienced similarly intense changes in the technologies of publication, communication, and preservation, and Dickinson proves keenly attuned to these dynamics. The four papers in this panel each focus on different media of communication; put in conversation with each other these papers demonstrate both Dickinson’s acuity in observing her shifting media landscape and the ways in which attention to medial forms provides new insight into Dickinson’s own anomalous and frequently intermedial productions.

Ranging from herbariums, gravestones, and letters to photographs, radio, podcasts, and TV, these papers trace a long medial arc, but we will strictly limit the length of each presentation so as to preserve time for conversation. Mary Loeffelholz, whose own work on Dickinson has done much to set the terms for thinking about Dickinson’s medial landscape, will chair the session and ensure a robust discussion. The panel will begin with Evan Wisdom-Dawson’s paper “A Poem Pressed in Flowers: Emily Dickinson’s Botanicals as Media for a Climate Changing World.” Wisdom-Dawson asks how a media studies approach might illuminate “the figurative and material valences” of the flowers that Dickinson often attached to letters and poems. In thinking about how flowers served as a 19^th-century medium of communication Wisdom-Dawson investigates the ways Dickinson’s poetics attend to ecological change. Her paper articulates “the stakes of the poet’s work for our contemporary moment of environmental crisis.”

Wisdom-Dawson’s discussion of Dickinson’s herbarium, digitally accessible through Harvard’s Houghton Library, aims “to explore the paradigms of archival conservation against the realities of species extinction, and to ask how poetic temporalities are destabilized by the current climate emergency.” In the next presentation, “‘Between the light – and me –’: The Intimate Poetics of John Dugdale and Emily Dickinson,” Andrew Hill elaborates these questions of temporality and extinction in relationship to vision, memory, and photography. This paper centers on John Dugdale’s self-portrait, “Heart, We Will Forget Him” (c.1999), in which the photographer rests his bare body against Emily Dickinson’s headstone, and on the photobook Life’s Evening Hour (2000), which chronicles Dugdale’s artistic process in response to the near loss of his eyesight, a trauma Dickinson had also lived. In the mesh of vision, mourning, and preservation the relationships Hill charts within and across Dickinson’s poems and Dugdale’s photographs creates a surprisingly intimate “intermedial vulnerability.”

Zachary Tavlin’s paper “WEMD: Dickinson Radio Network” inverts these temporal dynamics to consider how “the writerly technologies of Dickinson's poetic dissemination”—letters and poems in letters as well as “the mixed media of correspondence-poetry”—presage many of the insights of recent media theory. Tavlin makes three provocative claims about Dickinson's poetics and meta-poetics: that her “lyric techne is premised on rethinking the difference between ‘live’ and ‘recorded’ speech”; that her “use of correspondence as a central part of her poetic process anticipated ‘phatic’ understandings of communication ‘channels’ in network systems”; and lastly that her reclusivity appears prescient when grounded by a history of media forms that stretches to podcasts and the present.

For the final paper in this panel Kimberly Ann Southwick-Thompson explores a contemporary media hit, treating Alena Smith’s Apple TV+ Dickinson as not only a television series but also a critical reading of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Southwick-Thompson presents Dickinson as “a hybrid critical text” one that utilizes the medium of television in ways that reflect on Dickinson’s anxieties about print publication depicted within the show. Thus, Southwick-Thompson’s reading frames both Smith and Dickinson as intermedial “masters of hybrid genres,” self-consciously stretching and interrogating the bounds and expectations of the media available to them. “This instance of hybridity in contemporary media can only better fortify the overlap of genres that Dickinson’s work exists within,” Southwick-Thompson explains, and the richly overlapping insights offered by this special session on “Emily Dickinson’s Media Shifts” serves simultaneously to probe the variety of Dickinson’s modes of expression and, through Dickinson’s intermedial example, to raise far-reaching questions about the impacts and possibilities of changing medial forms.