Nina Baym

Nina Baym died on June 15, 2018. Baym was an American literary critic and historian whose work expanded the field to include women writers and launched a reexamination of how society judges what writing is significant. She was a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from 1963 to 2004, where she was named one of the twenty-five most influential people in the history of the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Baym was awarded the Jay Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Advancing American Literature Study. The author or editor of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism—including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004)—Baym was also the general editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and was credited with broadening the scope of the anthology to include more women writers.