Edwin Mims (1872-1959) was an American university Professor of English literature. He served as the Chair of the English Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee for thirty years from 1912 to 1942, and he taught many members of the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians, two literary movements in the South. He was a staunch opponent of lynching, and a practicing Methodist. Mims began his career at his alma mater, Vanderbilt University, where he became an assistant professor in 1892. He was a professor of English at Duke University (then known as Trinity College) in Durham, North Carolina and later at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.