Martha Nell Smith

The feature film Wild Nights With Emily (2018) was based largely on her work and she consulted on the second and third season for Apple TV’s Dickinson (2019-2021). Her numerous print publications include several singly and coauthored or coedited books—Open Me Carefully: The Sapphic Love Letters of Emily Dickinson, with a Foreward by Julien Baker (2027; rev. of 1998); Everywoman Her Own Theology: Essays on the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker (2018); I Dwell in Possibility: Collaborative Emily Dickinson Translation Project, edited with Professor Baihua Wang, Fudan University (2017); Companion to Emily Dickinson (Jan 2008); Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (1998; Choice); Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993; Choice); Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992; Hans Rosenhaupt First Book Award Honorable Mention, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation)—and scores of articles and essays in journals and collections such as American Literature, Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture, Textual Cultures, ESQ, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Journal of Victorian Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Profils Americains, San Jose Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, ESQ, Journal of Victorian Culture, and A Companion to Digital Humanities. Most recently, working with Professor Baihua Wang of Fudan University (Shanghai), Smith has edited sections on Dickinson for three different international journals—Comparative Literature, World Literature, Cowrie: A Journal of Comparative Literature and Culture, and the International Journal of Poetry and Poetics. At present she is completing “Tell My Story” – Susan Dickinson, Emily’s Most Faithful Reader, and Life Before Last: Martha Dickinson Bianchi's Memoir (ed. with Jane Wald, Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, consultant). 

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 (http://emilydickinson.org). Smith co-edited Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (2008; http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/edc) published by Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, University of Virginia Press, and worked in the early stages on the Mellon-sponsored data mining and visualization initiative, NORA (2003-2007), which grew into MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge; http://www.monkproject.org/). Smith also serves on the Advisory Board of Harvard University Press’s Emily Dickinson Archive (http://edickinson.org). 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 a founding board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS), for which she served as President (2013-2018). On the advisory board for The Emily Dickinson Journal, she also serves on the advisory council of the Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, as well as in an advisory capacity for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. A leader in innovations in academic