Martha Nell Smith, Senate Past Chair
Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH http://www.mith.umd.edu). Internationally renowned for her work on the writings and life of Emily Dickinson, her numerous print publications include five books, three of them award-winning--Emily Dickinson, A User's Guide (2012); Companion to Emily Dickinson (Jan 2008); Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (1998); Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993); Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992)--and scores of articles and essays. 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 Archivesprojects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia http://emilydickinson.org> and co-editor of Emily Dickinson's Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (Dec 2008) published by Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, University of Virginia Press. Smith has worked on two interrelated Mellon-sponsored data mining and visualization initiatives, NORA and MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) http://www.monkproject.org/ A founding board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS), Smith also serves on the editorial board and steering committee of NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship; http://www.nines.org), serves in an advisory capacity for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and is on numerous advisory boards of digital literary projects such as The Poetess Archive, Digital Dickens, and the Melville Electronic Library (MEL). A leader in innovations in academic publishing, Smith served on the Executive Council of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (2001-2004), co-chaired the Modern Language Association (MLA)'s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE, 2004-2008), and chairs the University of Maryland's Library Council (2008-2011). 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 in 2009, the highest honor that the college bestows upon its former students. In 2010, Smith was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, and in 2011 she was appointed ADVANCE Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities as part of a NSF-funded project to cultivate inclusive excellence.