Christina Crosby

Crosby was born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Her father, Kenneth Crosby, was a professor of history at Juniata College.[2] Her mother, Jane Miller Crosby, worked as a professor of home economics at Juniata[3] until the birth of Crosby's older brother Jefferson in 1952.

Crosby attended Huntingdon public schools[4] and graduated from Swarthmore College,[1] in 1974 with a major in English.[5]

While at Swarthmore, Crosby joined other students in founding Swarthmore Gay Liberation, and was active as well in Swarthmore Women's Liberation.[6][7] She wrote a column called “The Feminist Slant” in the student newspaper.[6]

In 1975, Crosby enrolled as a graduate student at Brown University and began studying for a Ph.D. in English.[8] After completing her degree in 1982[9] she accepted a position a Wesleyan University[10] 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.[11][12] Crosby was promoted to associate professor[13] in 1989 and to professor in 1996, all the while continuing to work as a core member of Women's Studies.[1]

In 1984-1985 Crosby held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers;[14] she was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 1990-1991;[14] and she held faculty fellowships at the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities in fall, 1986 and fall, 1996.[15] She was honored 1994 with the second annual Binswanger Family Teaching Prize for Excellence in Teaching.[14]

Crosby is the author of "The Ends of History: Victorians and '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.[16][17]

In February, 2016, New York University Press published A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain,[18] a memoir motivated by the serious spinal cord injury she sustained at age 50.

Crosby broke her neck in a bicycle accident on October 1, 2003 at age 50.[19] After a month in Hartford Hospital, four months in a rehabilitation hospital, and a year and a half of physical and occupational therapy,[20] she returned to work half-time in September, 2005.[21] She remains quadriplegic.

Crosby is a lesbian; her partner is Janet Jakobsen, a professor at Barnard College.[22]