Criscillia Benford, PhD

Criscillia Benford has been a Senior Fellow with the FrameWorks Institute since 2021. During her time at FrameWorks, she has contributed to projects in a variety of issue areas, including Child and Adolescent Development, Families, Education, Equity, Climate Change and Environment, Economic Justice, and Racial Justice. A post-classical narratologist and media theorist by training, Criscillia has published peer reviewed work in the fields of Victorian Poetry, Narratology, and Theoretical Neuroscience. Her dissertation explored connections among media affordances, commercialism, and the perception of social identities as they played out in the Victorian literary field. Prior to joining FrameWorks, she taught literature and humanities courses at the University of Chicago, Duke, and Stanford. Criscillia earned her BA from the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her MA and PhD in English at Stanford University.