Morris Eaves

Morris Eaves (1944 – February 25, 2024) was an American scholar of British literature and Digital Humanities, and Richard L. Turner Professor of the Humanities, at the University of Rochester, where he taught from 1986 until his death in 2024. A specialist in the poetry of William Blake, he developed a digital resource in collaboration with two other scholars - the William Blake Archive - in the mid-1990s; the resource was awarded the Distinguished Scholarly Edition prize of the Modern Language Association in 2004. This project made the distinctive interactions between image, text, and color in Blake's prints accessible to scholars around the world; he also edited the journal Blake Quarterly for many years. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Tulane University in 1972, after undergraduate work at Long Island University. His research was supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. He worked at the University of Rochester after twelve years at the University of New Mexico; once at Rochester, he served the English department as chair from 1988 to 1996. Eaves died on February 25, 2024, at the age of 79.