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Nina Baym is an American literary critic and literary historian. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1963 to 2004.
Before her retirement at the University of Illinois Baym was a Swanlund Endowed Chair, a Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and a Center of Advanced Study Professor of English. Her work in US literary criticism and history is widely credited with expanding the field to include women writers while taking the focus off "great" writers according to a supposed unchanging value judgment and placing it instead on the dynamics of literary professionalism. She is the author or editor of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction, and including Feminism and American Literary History, American Women Writers and the Work of History, and "American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences". She is also the author of scores of articles, reviews, and essays including "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors". Elaine Showalter has called Baym's new Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, "the first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," an immediately "standard and classic text." This book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today but many of them successful and influential in their own time. Since 1991 Baym has served as General Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Beginning with the 9th edition of the anthology Robert Levine, of the University of Maryland, will assume the general editorship.
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