An Expert on Dickinson—and Much Moore

Most recently, that Distinguished Service Award went to Cristanne Miller, professor emerita of English, a founding EDIS member and one of its former presidents.

Miller’s latest book, “The Letters of Emily Dickinson,” co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell, is a landmark collection; it was named among the best books of 2024 by PBS, NPR and the London Review of Books. She also edited the society’s “The Emily Dickinson Journal” for 10 years beginning in 2005, nine of them at UB with graduate student editorial assistants.

The recognition might seem to be the capstone to a prolific career, but Miller’s retirement in 2024 has hardly slowed her work.

“Many of my colleagues don’t know that I spend almost as much time researching Marianne Moore as I do Emily Dickinson,” she says. “I still hold the title of research professor because of my ongoing work with the Marianne Moore Digital Archive, hosted at UB, so the volume of work hasn’t decreased.”

Founded by Miller in 2015, the MMDA has the exclusive permission of Moore’s estate to publish her notebooks, making the materials publicly available for the first time.

Miller recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to add another dozen notebooks to the archive. Moore, one of the foremost modernist poets of the 20th century, kept a total of 122 notebooks, from 1905 until roughly 1970.

“Most poets keep notebooks,” says Miller, “but no other modernist poet kept anything as rich and varied as Moore.”