Nellie McKay, one of the nation’s foremost scholars of African-American literature, died Sunday.
McKay, who was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1978, died at HospiceCare after battling liver cancer for the last year. She was 75.
McKay was best known as the co-editor of “The Norton Anthology of African American Literature,” written with Henry Louis Gates Jr. She was a pioneer in the movement to make black studies an academic area of higher education.