Christina Crosby papers (MS.2023.005)

Biographical/Historical Note

Christina Crosby was born on September 2, 1953, in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Her father, Kenneth Ward Crosby, was a professor of history at Juniata College where her mother, Jane Crosby, taught home economics. She had one older sibling, Jefferson Crosby.

After one year at Juniata College, Crosby completed her undergraduate degree at Swarthmore College where she majored in English. She graduated in 1974.

While attending Swarthmore College, Crosby wrote a column for the student newspaper called "The Feminist Slant" that focused on gender and sexuality topics. She also helped found Swarthmore Gay Liberation, a student organization dedicated to civil rights for queer students.

She pursued her graduate studies at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a doctorate in English in 1982. While at Brown, she was part of The Socialist Feminist Caucus that focused on issues like domestic violence. Crosby and the Caucus established a hotline for survivors of interpersonal violence and in 1976 founded a women's shelter called Sojourner House, one of the first of its kind in the country. During that time she met Elizabeth Weed, then the director of the Sarah Doyle Women's Center at Brown, where the Feminist Caucus held its meetings. They were partners for more than 17 years, continuing their relationship long after Crosby left for Wesleyan in 1982. Crosby's dissertation at Brown became her first book, The Ends of History: Victorians and 'the Woman Question' in 1991, which examined how Victorian literature excluded women from public life, raising questions about how history is narrated.

In 1982 Crosby started teaching at Wesleyan University where she became a tenured professor of English. Although she was hired by Wesleyan’s English department, Crosby became a central part of the university’s Women’s Studies Program, which she helped establish as a major and later helped redesign as Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS).

For the next four decades, Crosby was the heart of the program, serving as coordinator and chair of the program in its early years, and as an advocate for the transition to the name FGSS. Crosby helped the program to secure its first autonomous faculty line. In the late 1980s through Fall 2020, Crosby routinely taught half of the program's core classes.

Crosby met Janet Jakobsen who was a visiting scholar at Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities in 1997. Jakobsen was visiting from the University of Arizona and would go on to become the Claire Tow Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Jakobsen and Crosby became romantic partners and remained so until the end of Crosby's life in 2021.

Among Crosby's students was the writer Maggie Nelson, class of 1994, whom Crosby advised on her honors thesis on confessional poetry. Nelson and Crosby remained friends until the end of Crosby's life, as Crosby did with many of her students to whom she was always dedicated.

On October 1, 2003, Crosby had a near-fatal bicycle accident that left her paralyzed from a spinal cord injury. This accident occurred at a high point in her career. She had been elected by her colleagues to serve as chair of the faculty and was preparing for meetings with Wesleyan trustees, which would have been on October 2, 2003.

Three years after her accident, Crosby introduced a new FGSS course called "Ethics of Embodiment," applying feminist and queer theory to perspectives on how bodies matter. In 2016, Crosby's work in this arena expanded beyond Wesleyan University when she published A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain. The book addresses the hardships of her catastrophic injury while resisting a simple narrative about overcoming hardship or becoming wiser because of it. A Body, Undone made a significant impact on disability studies and activism around disability awareness. In the book, Crosby also addresses her relationship with her brother, Jefferson, who also became quadriplegic after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his twenties. Her brother died in 2010 at age 57. It was his death, seven years after her accident, that prompted Crosby to start writing her memoir which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.

In December 2020, Crosby was hospitalized in Middletown, Connecticut, for pain associated with a bladder infection. It was then that she learned she had advanced pancreatic cancer; she died a few days later, on January 5, 2021 at age 67.