Josh Cohen muses on imagination and daydreaming in Emily Dickinson's poetry, and the ways in which they illuminate an adherence to disappearance, confinement and radical solitude in her life. This post comes from our recent project colloquium, where research associates explored the pleasures and perils of deliberate solitary retreat from society.

In June 2019, our project co-organised a symposium on ‘Solitude and Modernity’ with the Diseases of Modern Life project at Oxford. The final panel discussion at this event was a conversation between Gwen Adshead and Shokoufeh Sakhi on ‘Enforced Solitude’. This post offers a chance to listen to these research associates from our project network discuss the experience of imprisonment and solitary confinement from different perspectives.