Marta Werner

Dr. Werner's research and teaching focuses on the coordinates of the archive variously understood as a center for cultural power and repository of cultural memory and as a whispering gallery of the voices of cultural others who have all but disappeared.

Since her initial foray into the archives, she has been experimenting with different structures for representing Emily Dickinson’s works — first binding some of them into a codex book paradoxically titled Open Folios; then summoning others — or, rather, their digital surrogates — into an electronic archive fueled by millennial energies and called Radical Scatters; next collecting the poems Dickinson wrote on envelopes in The Gorgeous Nothings in order to disseminate them to addressees in a future she could not have imagined; and, most recently, editing the “Master” documents in a presentation that emphasizes their unfolding in time.

Her latest work with Dickinson is a new, collaborative project “‘These tested Our Horizon –’:De-archivizing Dickinson’s Birds on the Shores of the Anthropocene” which seeks to re-construct one thin bandwidth of Dickinson’s vanished soundscape by capturing — albeit incompletely — the calls and songs of the distant descendants of the birds of her world, while simultaneously encouraging us to measure and reflect upon the ecological distances, both actual and perceived, between Dickinson’s sound-world and our own.

Marta Werner is currently the editor-in-chief of Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, the official journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship. Textual Cultures is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing essays on the praxis and theory of textual editing in all national traditions (texts) and historical periods.