About
Crystal Lynn Lubinsky, PhD., Director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Associate Teaching Professor in the History Department, researches in various topics related to the field of early ecclesiastical history, hagiographical analysis, late antique Christian fan fiction, and comparative religions.
After graduating cum laude from University of North Carolina at Wilmington with a double major in History and Religious Studies, for which she earned the Pauline Kallman Award, she went on to New York University to study and become a teaching assistant under William E. Arnal. She received her MA in Religious Studies from NYU in 2002.
While an adjunct, she decided to go abroad and obtain her Ph.D. in Ecclesiastical History at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, at one point living at the Sisters of Mercy convent. While there, she received the Reverend Dr. Murray McGregor Memorial Scholarship awarded by St. Deiniol’s Library for research and two language bursaries gifted from the Fondation Catholique Ecossaise for intensive study at Institut Catholique in Paris, France.
At the University of Edinburgh, she discovered the way patristic and monastic writers characterized and praised notable Christian women (martyrs, apostles, widows/virgins, ascetics) in literature using masculine adjectives and referents to describe them. This led to her main research focus, non-binary Christian fan fiction, which lies outside of scripture in hagiographies and martyr stories, to understand the “popular mind” of the late antique Christian audiences that popularized these legends.
She graduated with her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2012 and published her dissertation within the Studia Traditionis Theologiae Series from Brepols entitled, Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a Holy Womanhood: The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity. Upon her return to the United States in 2012, she accepted a position in the History Department of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
Currently, she teaches the ancient and classical history courses and religious studies courses, specializing in Mediterranean religions/cultures and early Christianity, while still researching on the themes in Christian hagiographical legend discovered at Edinburgh. She also compares how all cultures, including both indigenous Peoples and those associated with World Religions, construct mythology, and therefore religious systems, as a type of human language. This latter focus is at the heart of her textbook, Introduction to Religious Studies (written in 2020 specifically for the first of Covid’s full remote semesters, published by Kendall Hunt).
She is also active as: Honor College Lecturer; Executive Board member of the Faculty Federation, AFT-MA Local 1895; Editor of the Faculty Federation blog; Faculty Senator; Director of the Religious Studies Program; member on the Interdisciplinary Committee; member on the Committee for Women, and a trustee for the Friends of the Dighton Rock Museum.