Dr. Melanie Hubbard

Visiting Assistant Professor

Education:

1998. PhD, MPhil, MA in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.
1999. BA in Philosophy and Religion, New College of Florida.

Interests:

My book on Emily Dickinson’s poetics invites intellectual history, history of science and technology, and a sort of historical anthropology or archaeology of things into close readings of Dickinson’s poems and compositional practices as a way to get at her poetics. Such a complex approach yields a new understanding of Dickinson as having thought through the shifting philosophical grounds of her day, from Scottish Common Sense idealism over against Hume’s skeptical empiricism, to Brown’s associationist psychology and Bain’s synthesis of associationist learning models and advances in evolutionary neuroscience. My work historicizes her skeptical sensationalism, her favoring of electric (well nigh synaptical) insight, and her late (wholly Victorian) prizing and memorializing of fragmentary evidences of life, and life’s passing.

Increasingly, I am interested in the materiality, historicity, and situatedness of literary and cultural productions. By extension, I am learning about ecocriticism, a kind of literary theory which decenters humans and grants inherent value to ‘things,’ especially including things not made by human hands, and ecosystems and their occupants.

I like to bird! I like native plants, and I care about Florida’s environment. I write creatively in a variety of genres. I even paint sometimes. I like to cook and especially to bake. I am open to a variety of tutorial ideas.

Selected Publications:

Emily Dickinson: Poetics in Context, Cambridge (2020).

We Have With Us Your Sky. Subito Press at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 2012.

Courses:

In Praise of Copying: Contemporary ‘Uncreative’ Writing.

Modernist American Poetry.

Whitman and Dickinson: Poets in the Nineteenth Century.

Reading Poetry: An Introduction to Close Reading.