Barbara Mossberg is President Emerita of Goddard College, Senior Scholar in James McGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland, and Director and Professor of Integrated Studies, California State University. She is one of the first researchers working in the Lilly Library when the Plath materials arrived when working on her PhD at Indiana University, and has lectured extensively on Plath studies in an international setting. Known for her Dickinson scholarship, she published Emily Dickinson: When a Writer is a Daughter (1982).