English Associate Professor Natalie Gerber has been named President of the Robert Frost Society, an affiliate organization of the Modern Literature and Languages Association (MLA). In this capacity, she is involved in many Frost projects.
Dr. Gerber recently organized and chaired "Digital Frost," a round-table session at the 2017 MLA Convention that explored the possibilities for launching a digital humanities site gathering together Frost's letters, poems, prose and audio recordings from his many readings and public talks, along with scholarly apparatus. The round-table featured Frost scholars, university archivists and digital humanities leaders that included:
Donald Sheehy, English professor, Edinboro University; Lisa Seale, emeritus professor/emeritus associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, University of Wisconsin Colleges; Jay Satterfield, head of Dartmouth College’s Rauner Special Collections Library; Molly Schwartzburg, curator of Special Collections at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia; Jason Camlot, associate professor of English and associate dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University and principal investigator of SpokenWeb (http://spokenweb.ca/). Also, Setsuko Yokoyama, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, who is spearheading the Digital Frost project; Martha Nell Smith, distinguished scholar-teacher, professor of English and founding director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH http://www.mith.umd.edu) at the University of Maryland and executive editor of the 22-year-old Dickinson Electronic Archives (http://emilydickinson.org)
Gerber has also organized "Robert Frost's Letters and Legacies," a conference panel for the 2017 American Literature Association. The panel, which will bring together natural and social scientists, as well as literary historians, will explore how the five-volume letters currently being published by Harvard University Press promise to change the understanding of Frost's work, knowledge and biography.
Later this spring, The Wallace Stevens Journal (of which Gerber is an associate editor) will also release a special issue, "Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost: A Reconsideration;” Gerber is a co-editor, with Steven Axelrod, University of California, Riverside.
On July 9, Gerber will give an invited talk on Frost's theory of sentence sounds at the Robert Frost Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vt.
