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

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1936 and educated at Cornell University and Harvard, literary critic Nina Baym's career revolves around what she considers to be the necessary project of making the minor nineteenth-century American women writers a subject of literary study. Noting that theories of nineteenth-century American literature tended to exclude women, Baym centers not only on the works of women writers, but on the question of major versus minor authors, and the contexts of authorship. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship (1975-76) and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1982-83), Baym teaches at the University of Illinois.