Peter S. Baker is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978. Before his position at the University of Virginia, he was an associate professor of English at Towson State University in Maryland. Baker's scholarly work focuses on Old English and medieval literature. He is the author of Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn (1995) and the editor of The Beowulf Reader (2000). He has also published numerous articles on Old English language and literature and has developed font software for Anglo-Saxonists, including Junicode.
In addition to his work in medieval studies, Baker has contributed to Boswellian scholarship. He is co-editor, with Richard C. Cole and Rachel McClellan, of the two-volume The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1766-1769, which is part of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell. He also wrote the introduction to the correspondence between James Boswell and Edmond Malone in another volume of the Yale series, The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone.