Barbara C. Crosby is associate professor at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and a member of the School's Public and Nonprofit Leadership Center. . During 2002-3, she was a visiting fellow at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Dr. Crosby was coordinator of the Humphrey Fellowship Program at the University of Minnesota from 1990 to 1993 and director of the Humphrey Institute's Reflective Leadership Center from 1999 to 2002.
She has taught and written extensively about leadership and public policy, women in leadership, media and public policy, and strategic planning. She is the author of Leadership for Global Citizenship (1999) and co-author with John M. Bryson of Leadership for the Common Good: Tackling Public Problems in a Shared-Power World of (2d. ed. 2005). The first edition of the latter book won the 1993 Terry McAdam Award from the Nonprofit Management Association and was named the Best Book of 1992-93 by the Public and Nonprofit Sector Division of the Academy of Management. She is an associate editor of Leadership Quarterly.
A frequent speaker at conferences and workshops, she has conducted training for senior managers of nonprofit, business and government organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Ukraine. She is a former gubernatorial press secretary and speech writer. She also has been a newspaper reporter and editor and has written several book chapters and articles for national journals. Dr. Crosby has a B.A. degree with a major in political science from Vanderbilt University and an M.A. degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a Ph.D. in leadership studies from the Union Institute and University.