Christina Crosby

Early life and education

Crosby was born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Her father, Kenneth Crosby, was a professor of history at Juniata College,. Her mother, Jane Miller Crosby, worked as a professor of home economics at Juniata until the birth of Crosby's older brother Jefferson in 1952.

Crosby attended Huntingdon public schools and graduated from Swarthmore College, in 1974 with a major in English.

While at Swarthmore, Crosby joined other students in founding Swarthmore Gay Liberation, and was active as well in Swarthmore Women’s Liberation. She wrote a column called “The Feminist Slant” in the student newspaper.

Career

In 1975, Crosby enrolled as a graduate student at Brown University and began studying for a Ph.D. in English. After completing her degree in 1982 she accepted a position a Wesleyan University as an assistant professor in the English Department. She immediately joined the student-faculty collective dedicated to strengthening a Women’s Studies Program begun in 1979. Crosby was promoted to associate professor in 1989 and to professor in 1996, all the while continuing to work as a core member of Women’s Studies.

Writing and awards

In 1984-1985 Crosby held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers; she was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 1990-1991; and she held faculty fellowships at the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities in fall, 1986 and fall, 1996. She was honored 1994 with the second annual Binswanger Family Teaching Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Crosby is the author of "The Ends of History: Victorians and the 'The Woman’s Question'” (Routledge, 1991), a scholarly study of how the nineteenth-century elevation of progressive history as an explanatory concept relies on the systematic exclusion of women from the public domain of consequential action.

In February, 2016, New York University Press published "A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain," a memoir motivated by the serious spinal cord injury she sustained at age 50.

Accident and recovery

Crosby broke her neck in a bicycle accident on October 1, 2003 at age 50. After a month in Hartford Hospital, four months in a rehabilitation hospital, and a year and a half of physical and occupational therapy, she returned to work half-time in September, 2005. She remains quadriplegic.

Personal life

Crosby is openly lesbian and has been in a long-term relationship with Janet Jakobsen, a professor at Barnard College.