Background
Baym, Nina was born on June 14, 1936 in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Daughter of Leo and Frances (Levinson) Zippin.
( During the nineteenth century, the content and institut...)
During the nineteenth century, the content and institutional organization of the sciences evolved dramatically, altering the publics understanding of knowledge. As science grew in importance, many women of letters tried to incorporate it into a female worldview. Nina Baym explores the responses to science displayed in a range of writings by American women. Conceding that they could not become scientists, women insisted, however, that they were capable of understanding science and participating in its discourse. They used their access to publishing to advocate the study and transmission of scientific information to the general public. Bayms book includes biographies and a full exploration of these womens works. Among those considered are: • Almira Phelps, author of Familiar Lectures on Botany (it sold 350,000 copies) • Sarah Hale, who filled Godeys Ladys Book with science articles • Catharine Esther Beecher, who based her domestic advice on scientific information • Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the actual ghostwriter of her husbands popular science essays • Emily Dickinson, whose poetry is replete with scientific images. Baym also investigates science in womens novels, writing by and about women doctors, and the scientific claims advanced by womens spiritualist movements. This book truly breaks new ground, outlining a field of inquiry that few have noted exists.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813529859/?tag=2022091-20
( Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary t...)
Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary texts by American women writers, Nina Baym now uncovers the work of history performed by over 150 writers in over 350 texts. Here she explores a world of important writing unknown even to most specialists. The novels, poems, plays, textbooks, and travel narratives written by women between 1790 and the Civil War defy current theories of women’s writing that stress a female domain of the private, homebound, and emotional. History is inarguably public in its nature and these women wrote it. In doing so, they challenged the imaginative and intellectual boundaries that divided domestic and public worlds. They claimed on behalf of all women the rights to know and to speak about the world outside the home, as well as to circulate their knowledge and opinions among the public. Their work helped shape the enormous public interest in history characteristic of the antebellum nation, and ultimately to forge our national identity in the history of the world. Nina Baym deftly outlines the master narrative of history implied in women’s writings of this period, and discusses in a completely revisioned context the emergence of women’s history in public discourse.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813521432/?tag=2022091-20
(Bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminis...)
Bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminist theory, but their insides are not. Biological bodies always seem to drop out of debates about the body and its importance in Western culture. They are assumed to be fixed, their workings uninteresting or irrelevant to theory. Birke argues that these static views of biology do not serve feminist politics well. As a trained biologist, she uses ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. She rejects the assumption that the body's functioning is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biological science offers more than just a deterministic narrative of 'how nature works'. Feminism and the Biological Body puts biological science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a politics which includes, rather than denies, our bodily flesh.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813518547/?tag=2022091-20
editor literature educator researcher writer
Baym, Nina was born on June 14, 1936 in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Daughter of Leo and Frances (Levinson) Zippin.
Bachelor of Arts, Cornell Univercity, 1957; Master of Arts, Harvard University, 1958; Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1963.
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 United States 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 also the author of scores of articles, reviews, and essays including "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors" (American Quarterly 1981).
Elaine Showalter has called Baym"s new (2011) Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (University of Illinois Press), "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 (the current is the eighth) Robert Levine, of the University of Maryland, will assume the general editorship. She has been active in such professional associations as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987.
She has served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey. Her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin and her mother taught high school English. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University, an Master of Arts from Radcliffe, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University.
She has been married to Jack Stillinger since 1971.
( Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary t...)
( During the nineteenth century, the content and institut...)
(Bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminis...)
(Book by Baym, Nina)
(Book by Baym, Nina)
She is the author or editor of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman"s Fiction (Cornell, 1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (Rutgers, 1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (Rutgers, 1995), and "American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences" (Rutgers, 2004). Feminism and American Literary History: Essays.
Member Modern Language Association (executive committee 19th century American Literature division, chairman 1984, chairman American Literature section 1984, Hubbell Lifetime Achievement medal 2000), American Studies Association (executive committee 1982-1984, nominating committee 1991-1993), American Literature Association, American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts History Society, Nathaniel Hawthorne Society (advisory board), Western Literature Association, Mortar Board, Phi Kappa Phi, Phi Beta Kappa, Mellon Foundation(emeritus fellow 2007-2008).
Married Gordon Baym, June 1, 1958. Children– Nancy, Geoffrey. Married Jack Stillinger, May 21, 1971.