American women writers and the work of history, 1790-1860

Nina Baym (Ph.D. Harvard) is Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of "The Shape of Hawthorne s Career"; "Woman s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820 1870"; "Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America"; "American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790 1860"; "American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences" and most recently, "Women Writers of the American West, 1833 1927". Some of her essays are collected in "Feminism and American Literary History"; she has also edited and introduced many reissues of work by earlier American women writers, from Judith Sargent Murray through Kate Chopin. In 2000 she received the MLA s Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies.