Faculty

Martha Ackmann is the award–winning journalist and author who writes about women who have changed America. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the current (2009) Augustus Anson Whitney Fellow in Nonfiction at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Vice–president of the Emily Dickinson International Society, Ackmann is the author of a forthcoming book (2011) on Dickinson from Harper/Smithsonian. She teaches at Mount Holyoke College.

Wendy Kohler recently retired from her position as the Executive Director for Program Development for the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District, where she served various administrative and teaching roles (subject area: social studies) for more than thirty years. A former member of the Emily Dickinson Museum's Educational Policy and Programming Committee, she has worked with Museum staff and Board to develop educational opportunities for teachers and students and has helped to coordinate the Museum's fifth-grade initiative in the Amherst schools. Kohler directed an NEH Summer Institute in 1991 on Emily Dickinson and has served as a consultant to several Dickinson-related arts and humanities projects, including a 2008-2010 grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to enhance the teaching of Dickinson in the Amherst schools.

Cynthia MacKenzie teaches English at the University of Regina in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. She has written both an M.A. thesis (1988) and a doctoral dissertation (1997) on Emily Dickinson's language. Author of A Concordance to the Letters of Emily DickinsonM (University of Colorado Press, 2000), she is associate editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on Dickinson's letters. A member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society, she is organizing the Society's 2009 annual meeting, which will focus on the art and practice of teaching of Emily Dickinson.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler is Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College. She has taught three undergraduate seminars on Emily Dickinson at the Museum. She wrote the catalog essay for the exhibit Language as Object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art, and both her first book, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body and her present project, The Unpublished Republic: Manuscript Cultures of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States, contain significant chapters on Dickinson. She is a member of the Museum's Board of Governors and chairs its Interpretation, Education, and Programming Committee.

Jane Wald is Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum and oversees the Museum's collections and facilities. Before beginning her tenure at the Dickinson sites in 2001, she worked for seven years at Old Sturbridge Village and has completed graduate work in both history and archaeology. She is the author of “‘Pretty much all real life’: The Material World of the Dickinson Family,” in the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson (2008) and is overseeing the historic structures report for The Evergreens and cultural landscape report for the Dickinson site.

Nan Wolverton is an independent scholar and museum consultant specializing in artifact and exhibit research, historic furnishing plans, and historic landscapes. She has lectured and published extensively on the decorative arts. From 1996 to 2003 she served as Curator of Decorative Arts at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. In 2007 she completed a furnishing plan for the Emily Dickinson Museum. She regularly teaches a seminar on the material culture of New England from 1630-1860 through Smith College and in Spring 2008 taught a course at Amherst College on Victorian Material Culture, using the Emily Dickinson Museum's collections as a primary teaching tool.

Guest Speakers

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He is a prolific critic and essayist who writes for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Slate. Benfey has published a number of highly-regarded books, most recently A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (Penguin, 2008).

Polly Longsworth is author of The World of Emily Dickinson (1990) and Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd (1984). She was a contributing essayist to The Dickinsons of Amherst and is currently at work on a new biography of Emily Dickinson. A popular lecturer, she serves on the Museum's Board of Governors.

LumenArts consists of the husband-and-wife team of Sebastian Lockwood and Nanette Perotte. A poet, teacher, and storyteller, Lockwood studied classics, anthropology and Education at Boston University and Cambridge University. He developed his unique telling style as a poet doing improv readings on the poetry circuit in New York City and Boston. For Lesley University and Endicott College Lockwood teaches in their creative Arts programs teaching the use of poetry, visual arts and storytelling in the classroom. For the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH he teaches Visual Anthropology and Storytelling. A performer, composer and educator, Perotte began her study of music at the age of eleven with voice lessons in classical, Broadway, jazz, country, and rock. She has a B.A. from Berklee College of Music and M.A. in Education from Lesley University. Her first of many rock bands, G.I.R.L (Get it Real Loud) was formed when she was twelve. Perotte and Lockwood produced the project Emily Dickinson- Zero at the Bone– which includes a live show, CD and companion book– about the contemporary power of poet Emily Dickinson.

Mentor Teachers

In addition to Wendy Kohler, the following teachers will serve as mentor teachers during the Workshop:

Cheryl Johnston will serve as mentor teacher for secondary school participants whose discipline is social studies. For more than thirty years, she taught social studies and chaired the department at Amherst Regional High School. She regularly incorporated inquiry–based learning and primary source material in her teaching. As department head, she supervised curriculum development for more than twenty courses.

Bruce M. Penniman will serve as mentor teacher for secondary school participants whose discipline is English language arts. He will also lead one of the poetry discussion groups on Wednesday. He taught writing, speech, and literature at Amherst Regional High School from 1971 until 2007 and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he developed and taught courses on teaching literature and writing at the K-12 level. In 1999 he was Massachusetts Teacher of the Year and a finalist for National Teacher of the Year.

Valerie Penniman will serve as mentor teacher to elementary school educators. Until her retirement in 2007, she taught for more than twenty-five years at Wildwood Elementary School in Amherst. She was a pilot teacher for the Museum's Emily Dickinson program for fifth-grade students.

Project Director

Cindy Dickinson is the Director of Interpretation and Programming at the Emily Dickinson Museum. She has worked at the Dickinson houses since 1996 and is primarily in charge of the Museum's guided tours, public programs, and educational outreach efforts. In 2007 she served as project director for an NEH Faculty Humanities Workshop, "Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry and Place," for teachers from western Massachusetts. She is not related to the poet, except by occupation.