Fellowship Lunchtime Lectures: Erica McAlpine

This is Teddy Hall’s online lunchtime lecture series which aims to highlight the incredible depth and breadth of research across the Teddy Hall Fellowship. This event is hosted by the Principal of St Edmund Hall, Professor Katherine J. Willis.

Speaker and Topic

Professor Erica McAlpine on ‘Emily Dickinson’s Eloquent Lies’

This talk asks whether Emily Dickinson, the famously reclusive 19th-century American poet, deliberately filled her poems with grammatical, spelling, and factual mistakes or if she was simply careless and carefree with words. Is it possible to err on purpose, or is a mistake always a mistake?

About the Speaker

Professor Erica McAlpine is A C Cooper Fellow and Tutor in English Language & Literature at St Edmund Hall.

Erica McAlpine teaches 19th-, 20th- and 21st- century literature in English at St Edmund Hall; she has particular interests in Romantic and American poetry. Her research focuses on lyric poetry from Romanticism onwards. She has recently written a book called The Poet’s Mistake, which addresses the various kinds of errors poets make in poems (grammatical, factual, and otherwise) as well as critics’ responses to such mistakes over time. She is also interested the ways that poetry and its forms correspond to aspects of the unconscious mind.

In addition to teaching and writing academic work, Erica is also a practising poet and translator. The Country Gambler, her collection of original poems and translations from Horace, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016. Her poems have appeared in magazines including the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, and Parnassus.

Registration

You must register in order to receive the Zoom joining link the day before the lecture.

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED. Email the Communications Manager at communications@seh.ox.ac.uk for the joining details.

Please note that this lecture will be recorded and published on St Edmund Hall’s digital and print communication platforms where appropriate.