Christine K. Thompson 

Generations of Portland State students and colleagues who have heard Professor Chris Thompson tell one of her finely observed narratives, or recite a Bobby Burns poem, fondly recall the lilt and burred “r” of her Scottish accent. Born to working class parents in Dunfermline, the original capital of Scotland, Professor Thompson attended the University of Edinburgh on scholarship at a time when promising students from all over the Commonwealth traveled to the British Isles to further their education. The internationalist and independence-minded perspectives of these students, many of whom became involved in freedom movements back in their home countries, led her to read books that challenged colonial assumptions. Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mt. Kenya, for instance, gave her a different view of the Kikiyus from what appeared in British newspaper headlines of the 1950s. International friendships, wide reading, and heady political discussions about the future developed a teacher noted for her intellectual approach, global point of view, and depth of knowledge of British literature and history.

Awarded a master’s degree with honors in 1954, Chris Thompson taught English and history in District Schools for four years. In 1957, with the opening of the borders to the West, she traveled by train to attend the Youth Festival in Moscow. Next her adventurous spirit led her to study in Istanbul before setting sail for the U.S. Because of her “classy” accent, she was first hired to run the switchboard of a private girls’ school in New York and then asked to teach there. In 1961 she drove across country to San Francisco where she worked briefly as a ward clerk in the Kaiser Hospital before becoming a houseparent in a residential treatment center for disturbed children in Oakland where she met her future husband, Lynn. When the Thompsons moved to Portland in 1964, Chris began teaching in the English Department at then Portland State College. Upon her retirement in 1999, the department nominated her for the Walk of the Heroines as an expression of the their affection and esteem and in recognition of her many contributions to the community as teacher, scholar, and citizen.

In the later 1960s, Chris’s interest in equity prompted her to participate in the federally funded community project known as New Careers and later to join Tony Wolk in volunteer teaching in the Union Avenue storefront education program, an early and all-but-forgotten demonstration of PSU’s commitment to the community. Professor Thompson identifies the early 1970s as the opening of a new chapter in her life. “I always was a serious teacher,” she says, “but the women’s movement sparked my interest in women’s writing and I decided to go back to school to get my PhD.” No simple matter because, along with many of her students, Professor Thompson had work, home, and school responsibilities to juggle. She earned her doctoral degree from the University of Oregon in 1984, with a dissertation on the modernist British writer Dorothy Richardson’s five-volume novel Pilgrimage.

The women’s movement also led to involvement in PSU’s nascent women’s studies program. One alumna recalls that Chris committed herself to the program on an emotional level that matched the students’. Many faculty contributed courses and scholarship to building women’s studies. Chris did that, but she was also willing to attend meetings and work in an egalitarian manner with the students.

To her teaching of both standard department offerings and the courses in British women’s literature she developed, she brought knowledge of social and literary history, close analysis of textual aesthetics, and respect for the lives of women and the shadowy serving class figures who make possible the lifestyles of the upper and middle classes. Her graduate students fondly referred to Chris as “the slasher” for the care with which she read and commented upon their papers. In 1993 Chris Thompson won the coveted Burlington Northern Award for teaching excellence.

During her career Chris team-taught with colleagues, participated in a Fund for Improvement of Postsecondary Education grant to coordinate the content of introductory literature courses between the community colleges and PSU, presented and published her scholarship, and served as both President and Executive Director of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies professional organization. Colleagues trusted Chris and the balanced, rational perspective she brought to deliberations of the many department and University committees she served on.

Retirement affords Chris time to enjoy the Thompson’s beach house and to pursue her talents for cooking, gardening, and spinning, dyeing, and knitting her own yarns. She served for eighteen months on a Federal Grand Jury. Professor Chris Thompson continues to teach her women writers course. When asked what was different about teaching in retirement, she replied: “In a way that wasn’t true when I was a regular faculty member I feel free to spend my wage however I want and to be more directly autobiographical in the classroom.” A lucky new generation of students to have their understanding of literature thus enriched.