About the lecture

While the myth of Emily Dickinson is that of an odd and inaccessible genius, she was in reality an educated and engaged poet, a thoughtful philosopher, and a brilliant Romantic ironist, who experimented with different points of view. In this module, we explore Dickinson's interest in seeing more than one side of the story with her poem 'We see — Comparatively —' (524).

About the lecturer

Linda Freedman is a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford (BA Hons 2.1 in 2003) and King’s College London (MA with Distinction in 2004).

She won an AHRC award to compete a doctoral dissertation on Emily Dickinson in 2004 and completed her PhD at King's in 2007.

Between 2008 and 2011 she held the Keasbey Research Fellowship in American Studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge. In 2012 she took up a permanent lectureship at UCL.

Linda teaches and researches nineteenth and twentieth-century British and American literature. She has a particular interest in transatlantic connections and the relationship between literature, theology and the visual arts.

Her first book, on Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination, explored the tensions and affinities between readings in poetry and readings in theology.

She is currently writing a book about William Blake and America. This takes in literary and cultural reception and engages with questions about myth-making, politics and identity-formation.