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).  

• Afterword, Handwriting in Early America: A Media History, ed. Mark Alan Mattes (Amherst: Univ.  of Massachusetts Press, 2023).
• “Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century” (co-authored with Beth Barton Schweiger), A History of the Literature of the U.S. South, ed. Harilaos Stecopoulos (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021), 171-184.
• “What Comes to Hand: Archives of Exigency, 1864,” Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image, ed. Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2019), 143-151.
• “The Literate War/The Literacy War,” Mississippi Quarterly: the Journal of Southern Cultures 71.4 (Fall 2018): 409-422.
• “Lowell Mill Girls: Women's Work and Writing in the Early Nineteenth Century,” A History of American Working-Class Literature, ed. Nicholas Coles and Paul Lauter (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017), 60-75.
• “Letters, Memoranda, and Official Documents: Teaching Non-Fiction Prose,” Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War, ed. Colleen Glenney Boggs (Modern Language Association, 2016), 91-100.
• “’if we Ever Expect to be a Pepple’: the Epistolary Culture of African American Soldiers,” Literary Cultures of the Civil War, ed. Timothy Sweet (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2016), 23-38.
• Afterword (co-authored with Cody Marrs), The Cambridge History of American Civil War Literature, ed. Coleman Hutchison (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), 331-342.
• “The Secondary Source Sitting Next to You,” Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, ed. Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2015), 215-221.
• “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century” (co-authored with Cody Marrs), J19: the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1.2 (October 2013): 259-284.
• “Melville in the Customhouse Attic,” American Literature 82.2 (June 2010): 305-332. 
• “Hunger for the Literal: Writing and Industrial Change in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” American Literature 77.4 (December 2005): 699-728.

• “The Voice of Conscience: American Writers and 19th-century Politics,” Waterford Public Library, 10 July 2023
• “Struck Out: The Illiterate Hand on the Literate Page,” keynote address, The Futures of Handwriting symposium, Univ. of Louisville, 12 April 2019.
• “The Civil War Letter as Medium and Genre,” Jackson Distinguished Lecture, Department of English, West Virginia Univ., 10 February 2016.
• “Letters of the Unlettered: Literacy, Class, and Epistolary Culture,” Department of English, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis, 18 November 2015.
• “Sylvia's Scribble: African American Writing Lost in Transcription,” Univ. of Georgia, 20 October 2015. 
• “1863,” Cultural Life During Wartime, 1861-1865, Harry Ransom Center, Univ. of Texas-Austin, 19 September 2014.
• “What Was Literature?” Annual Lecture in the History of the Book, the Ohio State University, 3 April 2014.

• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend, 2024
• American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, 2019
• NEH Public Scholar award, 2016
• Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society, 2015
• NEH Summer Stipend, 2015
• Frederick Douglass Book Prize (for Word by Word), 2014
• Lincoln Prize finalist (for Word by Word), 2014
• NEH Fellowship, 2010
• ACLS Fellowship, 2010
• Arthur H. Hughes Award for Teaching Achievement, Trinity College, 2010
• Faculty Honor Roll, Northwestern Univ., 2006
• Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern Univ., 2000