Ballot Archive

06 Mar 2025

Candidate Details

Candidate Name

Daniel Starza Smith

Academic degrees, honours etc.

MA, PhD

Profession or occupation

Senior Lecturer, English Literature

Grounds for election

Smith's antiquarian contributions range across the study of archives, literary history, and the history of libraries in early modern Europe. His primary work is on the transmission of John Donne’s manuscripts. In doing so he has brought some order to the damaged and dispersed Conway Papers, edited Donne’s verse letters for the Donne Variorum, and edited the poetry of the courtier Sir Henry Goodere for the first time. Since 2019 he has been General Editor of the OUP Correspondence of John Donne. As a library historian he has published on the collections of Henry King, Donne, and the first and second Viscounts Conway. His contributions to drama include, for instance, an edition of the Melbourne Manuscript, a Jacobean play fragment; and a study of the term ‘foul papers’. His biggest contribution to date, however, has been to the study of letters: as co-director of the ‘letterlocking’ project, he has developed a novel way of studying epistolary security.

Signatories

The following Fellows have signed this Blue Paper