Carol T. Christ

Carol Tecla Christ (born 1944 in New York City) was the president of Smith College from 2002-2013. Smith College, located in Northampton, Massachusetts, is a liberal arts college and one of the Seven Sisters colleges.

In 1966, Christ graduated with high honors from Douglass College, the women's college at Rutgers University. She received a Ph.D. in English from Yale University. Her late husband, Paul Alpers, was a scholar of Renaissance English literature.

In 1970, Christ joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley and was chair of the English department from 1985 to 1988. In 1988 she was appointed dean of humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. She also served as provost and dean of the College of Letters and Sciences. In 1994, Christ was appointed vice chancellor, assistant manager, and provost (and later became executive vice chancellor) at Berkeley. She was the highest-ranking female administrator at Berkeley until she returned to full-time teaching in 2000.

She became Smith's 10th president in 2002.^[2] At Smith, Christ led an energetic and wide-ranging strategic planning process to identify the distinctive intellectual traditions of the Smith curriculum and foster initiatives to further develop students’ essential capacities. Throughout her administrative career, Christ has maintained an active program of teaching and research. She has published two books: The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics. She also edited a Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and co-edited the Norton Anthology of English Literature and Victorian Literature and The Victorian Visual Imagination. She is professor of English at Smith and continues to teach, offering seminars on science and literature and on the arts.

Christ announced in May 2012 that she had, along with the Board of Trustees, begun the search for her successor. She retired in June 2013.^[3]

Christ serves on the board of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) and is a trustee of Sarah Lawrence College and Dominican University of California.

Honors

Christ was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004^[4] and a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013.^[5] Additionally, she was awarded Yale University's Wilbur Cross Medal in 2007,^[6] and in 2011, the American College of Greece awarded her an honorary doctorate.^[7]

References