Barbara T. Christian (December 12, 1943 – June 25, 2000) was an American author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

[1] At the age of fifteen, Christian moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to attend Marquette University, graduating in 1963 cum laude.

Though her parents urged her to pursue medicine, Christian enrolled in graduate studies for literature at Columbia University in New York City.

[2] The school did not offer black studies at that time, but Christian chose Columbia because it would give her access to the Harlem intellectual community.

In it, she argued that an obsession with theory and the use of literature to advance ideological viewpoints were thwarting scholars from focusing on the literary traditions of the work itself.

Christian tied this phenomenon directly to a rise in critics being trained solely as academics, without any experience as creative writers.

[5] She stated that this method of producing theory helped exclude peoples of color, black women, Latin Americans, and Africans from the category of theorists.