Description:

Nancy Topping Bazin was born in 1934 in Pittsburgh and grew up in Oakmont. She received a B.A. in French and English at Ohio Wesleyan University, M.A. at Middlebury Graduate School for French, studying in Paris in 1956-'57, and Ph.D. in English at Stanford University, where she wrote her dissertation on Virginia Woolf.

Dr. Bazin served as an assistant professor in the Rutgers College English Department from 1970 to 1977. At Rutgers, she pioneered the development of Women's Studies courses and started a women's speaker series. In addition to being active in the Women's Caucus, she helped found the Women's Studies Institute (now called the Institute for Research on Women), serving as the director in the fall of 1974.

After coordinating the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, she became the director of Women's Studies and an English professor at Old Dominion University in 1978. She was the second woman to become a full professor in the College of Arts and Letters and was the third woman to become Eminent Scholar in the university as a whole and the first in the College of Arts and Letters.

In 2000, she retired and became an artist. Her paintings and drawings, along with scholarly publications, are showcased on her website www.nancytoppingbazin.com