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Christopher Hager
Hobart Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English
Phone: (860) 297-4141 Office Location: 115 Vernon Street 214
Send e-mail to Christopher Hager Personal web page
Trinity College faculty member since 2007 View office hours for Fall 2024
General ProfileTeachingResearchPublications/PresentationsHonors/Awards
Degrees:
Ph.D., Northwestern Univ.
M.A., Northwestern Univ.
A.B., Stanford Univ.

Christopher Hager began his career in literary studies as an undergraduate at Stanford, where he wrote a thesis on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest under the direction of the late novelist and critic Gilbert Sorrentino. As a graduate student at Northwestern, he studied nineteenth-century American literature in relation to slavery and the Civil War. At Trinity, Professor Hager teaches courses in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. From 2012-2015 he co-directed Trinity's Center for Teaching and Learning, and from 2020-2023 he chaired the English Department.

A recipient of research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, Hager has written articles and delivered lectures on many topics in American history and literature. He is the author of Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Harvard Univ. Press, 2013), which was awarded the 2014 Frederick Douglass Prize and was a finalist for the 2014 Lincoln Prize, and of I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard Univ. Press, 2018). With Cody Marrs he co-edited Timelines of American Literature (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2019), and with Trinity colleague Hilary E. Wyss he co-edited the digital anthology Hidden Literacies (www.hiddenliteracies.org).