[2][3] Upon ending her fellowship, Crawford accepted a position in Vanderbilt University's history department.
[2] She wrote her first book in 2004 called Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France, which focused on how the French monarchy adapted to women rulers when the appointed King was unfit to serve.
She discussed how the political environment shifted as women moved from a place of passiveness to ruling a patriarchal society.
The book was aimed at undergraduates and focused on many aspects of gender and sexuality such as; marriage and family, religion and sexuality, science and medicine, crime and social control, and deviancy and the culture of sex.
[7] In 2010, Crawford published her third book The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance, through the Cambridge University Press.