Martha Nell Smith

Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park. A native of San Angelo, Texas, her numerous print publications include five books, three of them award-winning—Emily Dickinson, A User's Guide (2012); Companion to Emily Dickinson (2008), coedited with Mary Loeffelholz; Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (1998), coauthored with Ellen Louise Hart; Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993), coauthored with Cristanne Miller and Suzanne Juhasz; Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992)—and more than 40 articles and essays in American Literature, Studies in the Literary Imagination, South Atlantic Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Profils Americains, San Jose Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, ESQ, and A Companion to Digital Humanities.

Smith is the recipient of numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for her work on Dickinson, American literary history, and in new media, Smith is also Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. With Lara Vetter, Smith is editor of Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (2008) from the Mellon-sponsored Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, University of Virginia Press. Smith serves on the Advisory Board for the Houghton Library/Harvard University Press Emily Dickinson Archive (forthcoming 2013), which "seeks to make Dickinson’s manuscripts available in open access, around the world, paired with transcriptions and other resources." In 2009, for outstanding scholarly achievement and innovative leadership in which diversity inheres in any definition of excellence, Livingston College at Rutgers University awarded Smith its Distinguished Alumni Award 2009, the highest honor that college bestows upon its former students. At the University of Maryland, Smith has been chosen as a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher 2010-2011 for her groundbreaking work in the study of Emily Dickinson, American poetry, feminist and queer criticism and theory, and innovations in scholarly publishing. In 2011, Smith was named an ADVANCE Professor as part of a NSF-funded program designed to advance women, transform the university, and invest in a culture of inclusive excellence. On May 4, 2011, Smith was elected Chair-Elect of the University of Maryland Senate, and on May 3, 2012 became Chair of the University of Maryland Senate .

With teams at the University of Illinois, University of Virginia, University of Nebraska, University of Alberta, and Northwestern University, Smith worked on two interrelated Mellon-sponsored data mining and visualization initiatives, NORA and MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge; http://www.monkproject.org/). Smith also serves on the editorial board and steering committee of NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship; http://www.nines.org/) and is on numerous advisory boards of digital literary projects such as The Poetess Archive and Digital Dickens.

Smith served on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (ACH) and from 2006-2008 co-chaired the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE). She is a founding member of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) and serves on the EDIS Board. In July 2011, she became Vice President of EDIS.