Dr. Judith Scholes

Judith Scholes received her PhD in English from the University of British Columbia, and specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and print culture, women’s poetry and poetics, Emily Dickinson, and archival research practices. Her work on Emily Dickinson’s peculiar methods for circulating her poems in letters appears in the Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (2022), and her work can also be found in the Emily Dickinson Journal and American Periodicals.

As anyone who has taken a course with her can attest, Dr. Scholes loves talking about context and place, considering the historical, cultural, and material worlds in which literature was produced and read. She is also fascinated by nature writing, which is all she ever reads these days. She is currently teaching academic writing, introduction to literary genres, and American literature at Corpus Christi College, where she helps students identify and develop their critical inquiries and creative pursuits.

Current Projects

Dr. Scholes is currently completing a book that examines the rhetoric of women’s poetry as it emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American periodicals, and shaped Emily Dickinson’s understanding and representation of herself as a poet.

She is also pursuing a new book-length project that investigates the existence and rhetoric of women’s editorial work at U.S. daily newspapers during the first 70 years (~1830-1900) of women’s presence in newsrooms.

Education

Ph.D. in English, University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver BC | September 2015
M.A. in English, McMaster University, Hamilton ON | 2007
B.A. (Hons.) in English, summa cum laude, McMaster University, Hamilton ON | 2005
B.A. (Hons.) in Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton ON | 2003

Selected Publications

“‘My business is to love’: Address and Affect in Emily Dickinson’s Circulated Poems.” The Handbook of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Oxford UP, 2022.

“Emily Dickinson and Fidelia Hayward Cooke’s Springfield Republican.” Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1-31.

Selected Conference Presentations

“An Exchange of Territory, or World”: Dickinson to Higginson, February 1863," Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting, Amherst MA, July 20-23, 2023.

“Dickinson’s Foreign Reader.” Emily Dickinson International Society Conference, Seville, Spain, July 12-14, 2022.

“‘To Be Well While We Live,’ or What the Women Knew.” Shelter in Place – Lessons on Pandemic Life from 19c American Women Writers & Culture Roundtable, Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference, Baltimore MD, Nov 2-6, 2021.

“Receiving Emily: Dickinson’s Epistolary Poetics,” Canadian Comparative Literature Association: Poetics, Ideas, Structures: Situating the Poetic Object, Joint-Sponsored Panel, Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC. June 2019.

“Recovering the Unarchived: Newspaper Women in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century U.S.” Gender and the Archives Roundtable, Special Session, MLA Annual Convention, Vancouver BC. Jan. 2015.

“Emily Dickinson, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry and Mrs. Cooke’s Springfield Republican.” Emily Dickinson International Society Conference, College Park MD. Aug. 2013.

“Discovering Fidelia Hayward Cooke.” What’s New in the Old: Archives Roundtable, The Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, Denver CO. Oct. 2012.

“American Women’s Poetry and Civil War Relief in The Drum Beat.” Northern Women and the Civil War Panel, The Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, Denver CO. Oct. 2012.

Previous Appointments

Sessional Lecturer, Dept. of English Language and Literatures, UBC, Vancouver BC
Sessional Lecturer, Arts Studies in Research and Writing, UBC, Vancouver BC