Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist. She is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University. She is also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University. Smith's best-known work is Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Other works include Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, and an edition of Shakespeare's sonnets; she has published numerous books and articles on language, literature, and critical theory. Smith has also taught at Bennington College and the University of Pennsylvania, and she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She was president of the Modern Language Association in 1988.

Published works

• A Study of How Poems End (1968) ISBN 0226763439
• Shakespeare's Sonnets (ed.) (1969)
• On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language (1978) ISBN 0226764524
• Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988) ISBN 0674167856
• The Politics of Liberal Education (ed., with Darryl J. Gless) (1992) ISBN 0822311992
• Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory (ed., with Arkady Plotnitsky) (1997) ISBN 0822318636
• Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (1997) ISBN 0674064925
• Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (2006) ISBN 0822338483

American literary critics | American academics | Year of birth missing | Living people