Josephine Miles (1911–1985)

Josephine Miles was born in Chicago, Illinois and moved with her family to Southern California. Affected as a child by disabling rheumatoid arthritis, she could not use a typewriter and could not walk.

She was educated at home by tutors but graduated from Los Angeles High School. She then attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received a bachelor's degree in English literature before going to the University of California, Berkeley to earn a doctorate. Her dissertation on William Wordsworth was published as Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion in 1942. She was also an award-winning poet who published a dozen books of poems; her final volume Collected Poems: 1930-1983, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from The Nation magazine and was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. During the 1930s and 1940s, she conducted quantitative and stylistic research projects, first on the adjectives favored by Romantic poets and second on the phrasal forms of the poetry of the 1640s, 1740s, and 1840s. In the 1950s, she became director of a project creating a Concordance to the poetical works of John Dryden using punched cards and card-reading computers. With her innovative computational approach to literary analysis, Prof. Miles became a pioneer of the field of digital humanities. In 1964, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the first woman to receive tenure in the English Department at Berkeley, and at the time of her death, held the prestigious position of University Professor. Prof. Miles was both a host and critic to many Beat poets. In 1974, she founded the Berkeley Poetry Review. The PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award was established in her honor to recognize achievement in multicultural literature.