Smith, Martha Nell 1953-

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SMITH, Martha Nell 1953-

PERSONAL: Born May 14, 1953, in San Angelo, TX; daughter of Earl Wesley (an attorney) and Hattie (Mozelle) Smith; married Timothy Lee Higginbotham, August 2, 1975 (divorced, September 8, 1982); partner of Marilee Lindemann. Education: Rutgers University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1977, M.A., 1982, Ph.D., 1985. Politics: Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, University of Maryland, 3101 Susquehanna Hall, College Park, MD 20742.

CAREER: Writer. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, assistant director of writing program, 1985-86; University of Maryland, College Park, assistant professor, 1986-92, associate professor, 1992-98, associate director of graduate English, 1990-94; professor of English, 1998—. Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, 1999—.

MEMBER: Association for Computers and the Humanities, Emily Dickinson International Society (founder), European Society for Textual Scholarship,Free State Justice, Modern Languages Association, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Leadership Honor Society, National Organization of Women, Northeastern Modern Languages Association, Omicron Delta Kappa, Society for Textual Scholarship.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellowship, 1984; Bill Casey Award, 1987, 1988; American Council of Learned Societies grant, 1988; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1990; Networked Association fellowship, 1994.

WRITINGS:

Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1992.

(With Suzanne Juhasz and Christanne Miller) Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1993.

(Editor, with Ellen Louis Hart) Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Paris Press (Ashfield, MA), 1998.

Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Paris Press (Ashfield, MA), 1998.

Contributor to The Emily Dickinson Handbook, edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Contributor to Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, edited by Wendy Martin, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Also contributed to more than thirty journal articles on topics such as humanities computing, Emily Dickinson, and textual studies.

ADAPTATIONS: Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson was adapted for stage by Madeleine Olnek.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Dickinson Electronic Archives; The Life of Susan Dickinson; Emily Dickinson: A User's Guide; Companion to Emily Dickinson; a volume of essays on humanities computing, digital studies, and the future of humanities work and publication.

SIDELIGHTS: Martha Nell Smith is an English professor and writer who was described by Christopher Benfey in a New York Review of Books essay as "a ubiquitous and influential feminist scholar of [Emily] Dickinson's work." Smith's first book, Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, was described by Heather Kirk Thomas in American Literature as a "fine dialogic study [that] investigates Dickinson's intense devotion to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson." Thomas declared that "this scholarly study breaks new ground," and she concluded that it "raises important questions about artistic intent and creative cooperation in Dickinson's 'Letter[s] to the World.'" Another reviewer, Paula Uruburu, called Rowing in Eden an "original and provocative study" and affirmed, in her Belles Lettres assessment, that Smith "convincingly answers those who continue to ask why Dickinson did not publish more while she was alive." P. J. Ferlazzo, meanwhile, wrote in Choice that Rowing in Eden serves as "a well-argued and insightful reinterpretation of the poet."

Smith's other publications include Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, which she edited with Ellen Louis Hart. In a New York Times Book Review appraisal, Renee Tursi observed that Smith and Hart "wisely let these letters speak for themselves," and she contended that the book provides "a fresh and overdue context" for appreciating Dickinson's verse.

Smith told CA: "My work on Emily Dickinson's manuscripts and American poetry eventually led to the production of the Dickinson Electonic Archives and to the establishment of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Work in humanities computing, contextualized as it is by publishing crises for humanities scholarship, promises not only alternative, sustainable new models for publication of humanities work but also promises to change the way humanists work."