Carolyn Baylies, who has died of cancer aged 56, was a scholar and an activist of considerable breadth. A sociologist of health and a development specialist, she was one of the first feminists to link gender and development issues. She was also a trade unionist, a respected teacher and, crucially, an investigator and campaigner on the social impact of HIV/Aids in southern Africa.
Baylies was a product of her American roots. Raised in California, she was at the University of California, Berkeley, during the heady days of its free speech movement, before moving, in the late 1960s, to the equally prestigious and radical University of Wisconsin at Madison for graduate studies. In 1973, these took her to Africa for her doctoral research on class relations in Zambia, where she focused her investigation at grassroots level in the northern province of Luapula.
She soon combined these studies with a teaching post at the University of Zambia, then going through its own radical phase. She was at the forefront of developing new, interdisciplinary courses and skills training programmes for undergraduates related to the challenges facing the country - her teaching influenced many of the first generation of radical Zambian intellectuals. These experiences, and what she learned from Africans at all levels of society, stayed with her throughout her working life.
After a year teaching in California, Baylies began a long association with Leeds University, initially as coauthor of the official History Of The Yorkshire Miners, 1881-1918, with Vic Allen. In 1983, she became a lecturer, then reader, in the sociology department, where she was based until her death. She was known as a rigorous and dedicated teacher, and an endlessly helpful supervisor of overseas graduate students.
One of Baylies's lasting contributions at Leeds was to the centre for development studies. She was an indefatigable member of the inter-disciplinary team that founded it, and its director for two periods (1990-93 and 1997-99), building up the original MA programme to become one of the largest in the university, with students from across the globe. The in terdisciplinary undergraduate programme was started on her watch - one of only a handful offering this specialism in Britain.
Most staff at Leeds knew Baylies as president of the local Association of University Teachers (AUT) branch since 2001, and before that as secretary and an executive member for 15 years. She was on the university's joint bargaining body, and was an elected member of the council and the senate. She also helped to establish the radical Review Of African Political Economy, and was, for 20 years, an active editor, particularly of six special issues on topics such as Aids, gender and cultural production.
Despite these commitments, she continued her research on Zambia and its changing poli tics, publishing The Dynamics Of The One-Party State In Zambia (1984), with her husband, Dr Morris Sheftel, whom she married in 1977; a later focus was on the country's democratisation process after the multi-party elections of 1991. Groundbreaking work on Aids with Janet Bujra culminated in the publication of Aids, Sexuality And Gender In Africa (2000).
· Baylies is survived by her husband, and their children Andrew and Hannah.
Janet Bujra writes: Carolyn and I worked together on several projects. The most significant was driven by our despair at the devastation being wreaked in Africa by the Aids epidemic, both of us having lived through an earlier period of hope and political excitement following independence. Collaborative research is never easy, but Carolyn was one of the best to work with, always calm and reassuring, shouldering an equal or greater share of the load, ever inclusive of others and always generously giving credit.
The work itself was innovative in its vision, aiming to uncover what is generally invisible - the myriad ways in which ordinary people struggle to protect themselves and others from the ravages of Aids, and the way in which these struggles are gendered. With African colleagues, we investigated and participated in this process with people in villages and squatter settlements. Carolyn herself worked in the Zambian capital Lusaka, in western Zambia and in Luapula, with women who had got together against tremendous odds to fight the spread of Aids and mitigate its devastating consequences. She believed passionately that without recognition of these struggles, there was no prospect of reversing the epidemic or protecting people from its tragic reach.
For Carolyn, this built on her work on the politics of post- independence Zambia, on a long commitment to disability research in the UK and Africa, and to solidarity with all those who fight against injustice and exclusion.
Until a fortnight before her death, she was teaching and looking after personal grievance cases for the AUT. A woman of enormous personal courage, she pushed herself to the limit in her commitment to students, colleagues and friends and in fighting injustice.
· Carolyn Baylies, sociologist, born June 2 1947; died November 1 2003