Christina Crosby ’82 PhD

Christina Crosby ’82 PhD, of Middletown, Conn.; Jan. 5, of pancreatic cancer. As an undergraduate she attended Swarthmore College, wrote a column called The Feminist Slant for the student newspaper and helped found Swarthmore Gay Liberation. At Brown, she was part of a socialist feminist caucus that focused on such issues as domestic violence. She and the caucus established a hotline for battered women and in 1976 founded Sojourner House, a domestic violence agency based in Providence. She worked in Wesleyan University’s English department and 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. She received Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1994 and in 2003 the University faculty elected her chair of the department. She published the novel The Ends of History: Victorians and “the Woman Question” (Routledge, 1990) and after a 2003 bicycle accident that left her paralyzed, she published A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain (NYU Press, 2016). Her BAM essay, “Others Stop Looking,” appeared in November/December 2016. She is survived by her partner Janet Jakobsen.