Josephine Miles

Josephine Louise Miles (June 11, 1911 – May 12, 1985) was an American poet and literary critic; the first woman tenured in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley.

[1] Due to disabling arthritis, she was educated at home by tutors, but was able to graduate from Los Angeles High School in a class that included the composer John Cage.

"[6] Miles attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English literature before moving to Berkeley to pursue a doctorate.

[9] The project had been initiated years earlier by her colleague in the English department, Guy Montgomery, who by the time of his death had amassed 250,000 manual index cards listing the various words used by Dryden and the poems and line numbers where they occurred.

After five years of work by Miles, her graduate students Mary Jackman and Helen S. Angoa, and with assistance from several punch card operators, the concordance was completed and published in 1957.

[8][9] This has been described as "possibly the first literary concordance to use machine methods"; it was published seventeen years before the first volume of Roberto Busa's Index Thomisticus, a work widely credited with this first.