• M.A. University of California, Santa Barbara, California March 1982
• Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, California December 1986

• British Romanticism
• Victorian Literature
• Senior Literature Seminar
• Semiotics and Critical Theory

The recipient of Messiah College’s Smith Award for Excellence in Teaching, Crystal Downing has published on a wide variety of literary topics, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen, and has won both national and international awards for her essays on film. Much of her recent scholarship focuses on the relationship between cultural theory and faith. Her first book, Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers (Palgrave Macmillan 2004), was granted an international award at Cambridge University in 2009. Dorothy Sayers and her friend C.S. Lewis entered into Downing’s next two books as well: How Postmodernism Serves (my) Faith (2006) and Changing Signs of Truth (2012), which are studied in Christian colleges and seminaries throughout North America. Her most recent book, Salvation from Cinema (Routledge 2016), is used in “Religion and Film” courses at secular universities in America and Europe.

Downing has several goals in life which she will never achieve: 1) to see every Frank Lloyd Wright house in America; 2) to run every country road, cross every covered bridge, and hike up every waterfall in Pennsylvania.