Nina Baym
CAS Professor Emerita of English

Professor Baym, Swanlund Professor Emerita of English, is a
distinguished revisionary historian and critic of American literature,
specializing in nineteenth-century writers, women writers, fiction,
nonfiction prose, and the relations of literary culture to other aspects
of nineteenth-century American society. She serves as general editor of
the Norton Anthology of American Literature, the most widely used
college anthology in the field. Her book, American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences, was published in January 2002 and selected by Choice magazine as an outstanding academic title for the year. Her most recent book, Women Writers of the American West,
(2011) is about American women writers from the Old West (1865-1928)
for which she has been awarded a Mellon Foundation Emeritus
Fellowship.
  Other books include American Woman Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (1995), which traces themes and variations in history writing by women; The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (1976), studying Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary output in the context of literary movements of his own day; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70
(2nd ed., 1992), which helped to establish and shape what is now a very
large field of study focused on American women writers; and Novels, Readers and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America
(1984, 1987), which attempted to retrieve the original conditions under
which novels were read by studying numerous contemporary reviews of
nineteenth-century fiction. A collection of her critical essays
originally published during the 1980s, Feminism and American Literary History,
appeared in 1992.  Her forthcoming book (University of Illinois Press,
2011) uncovers and describes books by some 340 women who published about
the American West up through 1927. Her most recent book, Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), describes more than 600 books published by over 340 women. In that the American West has long been thought of as an exclusively male literary domain, this work expands the understanding of American literature in general as well as contributing to the history of women writers.

Her work
has been recognized through election to the American Antiquarian Society
and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She has won the Hubbell
Lifetime Achievement Medal, awarded by the American Literature Section
of the Modern Language Association. In all she has written eight
scholarly books, edited another seven, and published more than 60
articles, as well as more than 125 scholarly book reviews. She regularly
taught the large undergraduate lecture-survey of American literature to
1870 and has directed 39 Ph.D. dissertations to completion. She served
with distinction as director of the University's School of Humanities
(1976-87), was named in the first class of Senior University Scholars
(1985), and was appointed a Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and
Sciences in 1988, the first year of that program as well.  She has been a
Guggenheim Fellow (1975) and an NEH Fellow (1982).



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