By Zack Sampson, News Staff
Christina Gilmartin, founder of Northeastern’s Asian Studies Program and an internationally renowned scholar of 20th-century Chinese history, died July 12 from breast cancer.
Focusing specifically on the history of women and gender in contemporary China, Gilmartin authored several books and visited East Asia a number of times. At Northeastern, she directed the Asian Studies Program and fostered close relationships as a mentor to graduate students.
“She had a really great just personal touch,” Zachary Scarlett, a PhD candidate specializing in Chinese history, said. “She just had an ability to really connect to people on a personal level, and frankly that’s a rare thing in graduate school.”
Scarlett said he worked with Gilmartin since he arrived at Northeastern in 2005, often visiting the professor’s house with his wife for dinners. What always stood out, he said, was Gilmartin’s generosity and ability to relate.
“I think she was one of the most eccentric people I ever knew but was also one of the most human people,” Scarlett said.
One of Gilmartin’s trademarks was her emails, he said. They always came late at night and appeared hastily written. They often followed the same format, Scarlett said, with Gilmartin telling students she was just sitting up thinking about their projects and had an idea, sometimes as fantastic as to suggest a flight to Hong Kong the next day for a conference.
“For her, the idea of flying to a foreign country with a days notice was no big deal at all,” Scarlett said.
Gilmartin received her bachelor’s degree from the now-defunct Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio in 1968, according to a letter about her death sent to the university community by Dean Georges Van Den Abbeele of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She later received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. Gilmartin leaves her husband, Peter, and two children, Benjamin and Elizabeth.
At Northeastern, Gilmartin always maintained an individual presence, her friends said.
“She had a great laugh, red hair and often swept across campus in floating coats and exotic silk jackets from China,” Professor Maureen Kelleher, who knew Gilmartin through the Women’s Studies Program, wrote in an email to The News. Gilmartin directed the Women’s Studies Program from 1997 to 2001.
Laura Frader, associate dean of faculty in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, taught with Gilmartin and was on the faculty committee that hired her when she came to Northeastern in 1989.
Frader said Gilmartin had an activist’s spirit and a sense of justice that shone during her time as head of the Women’s Studies Program. She said Gilmartin led an initiative in the 1990s to get the university to stop holding faculty members responsible for producing scholarly work during maternity or paternity leaves.
“It was a real struggle to get the university to [do] this, but she held a series of meetings and she really pushed on it, and it happened,” Frader said.
Gilmartin’s devotion to cause also applied to her craft, fellow faculty members said. She visited China often, and was one of the first Americans to enter the country when it reopened in the 1970s, Scarlett said.
“Her passion was China and when you missed seeing her on campus, the fallback assumption was that she was on the other side of the world,” Kelleher wrote.
“She was global long before we proclaimed that on the banners on campus,” history Professor Bill Fowler said. “She was way ahead of the rest of us and we ran to catch up.”
But above all else, her peers said, it was Gilmartin’s devotion to her students that set her apart.
In the spring of 2006, Scarlett was a first-year graduate student and Gilmartin was on leave to undergo cancer treatment, he said. She had been diagnosed the previous year but thought it was important to continue working with Scarlett early in his Northeastern career. So Gilmartin set up an independent study and traveled to the school each week to meet with him.
“She was literally going through the study with me and was taking medications and was clearly exhausted from the entire thing,” he said. “But [she] still never faltered in her dedication.”
