Gerard Holmes

My doctoral dissertation, “Discretion in the interval”: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances, shows that Dickinson's writing is informed by practices and tropes of nineteenth-century improvisation in music and poetry. The final year of writing the dissertation, 2019-2020, was supported by an American Council of Learned Societies / Mellon Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship. My research has also been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, The Emily Dickinson Society, and the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and English Department.

I have published on Dickinson, music, improvisation, birdsong, and related subjects in Reception, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Women's Studies (an issue I co-edited), and The Oxford Handbook to Emily Dickinson. Most recently, I co-edited, and contributed an essay to, a triple-issue of ESQ themed "Thomas Wentworth Higginson, apart from Emily Dickinson," published in 2024. Higginson was a clergyman, writer, editor, abolitionist, and Civil War soldier now best known for two things: leading the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment of African American soldiers in the U.S. Army, comprising formerly-enslaved South Carolinians; and posthumously editing and writing about Dickinson's poems. He did - and wrote, of course - much more, and the essays in the issue begin to dig into some of these. 

My reviews of publications by others have appeared in Legacy, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer. I wrote an essay, “What Academic Humanists Can Learn from Nonprofits” for Contemporaries / Post45. In recent years, I have organized, chaired, and presented on panels at conferences including the Modern Language Association, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers,The Emily Dickinson International Society, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Thoreau Society, and the Charles Brockden Brown Society. More details, including a CV, are available at my Humanities Commons page.

At the University of Maryland, College Park, I have taught courses including:

English 422, Victorian Literature

English 420, English Romantic Literature

English 319C, From Frankenstein to Dracula: The Monstrous and Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Literature

English 398N, Writing for Nonprofits

English 398B, Writing for Social Entrepreneurship (online)

English 398A, Writing for the Arts

English 393, Technical Writing (online)

English 243, What Is Poetry?

English 222, American Literature 1865 to Present

English 101, Academic Writing.

With significant professional experience in the nonprofit sector, I have sought to bridge the gap between the academic and public humanities, and to advance public engagement with the academic humanities. While a graduate student in the English Department, I co-founded a working group, Humanities Beyond the Academy, with funding support from UMD's Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. In addition, I earned a Graduate Certificate in the Engaged and Public Humanities from Georgetown University's Connected Academics program. Currently, I serve on the Board of Directors and the Budget and Membership Committees of The Emily Dickinson International Society. On several occasions, I have led online poetry discussion groups at the Emily Dickinson Museum. In the English Department, I have served on numerous committees and working groups, including, most recently, the Working Group for Online and Blended Teaching.