I met Christina in 1988, my senior year at Wesleyan, when I took her feminist theory course, along with my housemates Mia Fineman, Dan Rosenberg, and Steven Stern. In my memory of the class Christina is at the front of the room wearing a silk shirt, sitting in a student chair like the rest of us, the desk-arm piled with notes. While about 25 of us sit around her in a semicircle, she leads us through an exhaustive interrogation of Simone de Beauvoir. Ideas fly back-and-forth across the room. It feels as if the class had transformed into a giant shared mind. Under her careful guidance, what was opaque and frustrating becomes lucid and exhilarating.

My housemates and I knew this class was special. Nervously, we invited Christina over for dinner. She ate our fried chicken. Eventually, we were having regular martini gatherings with her and our other favorite professors, Dick Ohmann and Kach Tololyan. The summer after graduation, she invited us to visit her in Rhode Island and tried to teach us to windsurf. We continued to stay in touch as we all applied to graduate programs in the humanities. 

When I chose an academic career it was because I wanted to teach the way Christina did. As a professor of literature and film, I’ve made discussion the focus of my pedagogy, and in the classroom I’ve tried to tried to channel Christina. There are so many qualities her teaching combined: rigor, generosity, textuality, clarity, complexity, respect, openness, transparency, playfulness. To me, the key was the way she would welcome any contribution to the conversation and, by putting it into her own words, find a way to make it useful and collective. 

I feel proud of and satisfied with my own teaching, and I believe she has been a living force in whatever good it has done. I hope she would feel the same.