Schaenen Visiting Scholar Christopher Hager is Recipient of New Public Scholars Grant

July 29, 2015

An Inside Higher Ed story on Public Scholars, a new grant program administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities , notes, "Christopher Hager, an associate professor of English at Trinity College in Connecticut, and a visiting scholar at the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, plans on using the narratives he finds in Civil War letters to translate the historical facts surrounding the war and the evolution of letter writing during the era to the general public."

Jacqueline Thomsen writes, "He said that by following a single narrative, like letters exchanged between a soldier and his mother, he can examine the correspondence of the time with a lens that hasn’t been used before. In the past, writers have used excerpts from letters to address political thoughts or major historic events, but the letters themselves have yet to be studied in this way."

According to Professor Hager, "You see the people as characters in history rather than the author of a single snippet quoted in a book."

Access the complete article here.

Christopher Hager will serve as DePauw University's Nancy Schaenen Visiting Scholar at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics during the 2015-16 academic year. He is an associate professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he teaches courses in American literature and cultural history and, for the past three years, has co-directed the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Hager is the author of Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, a study of the writing practices of enslaved and recently emancipated African Americans, which won the Frederick Douglass Prize and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize. The professor's research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, among others.

Hager earned his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and Ph.D. from the Northwestern University.

Nancy Shelly Schaenen graduated from DePauw in 1951 and served as a member of the Board of Visitors from 1993-95 and as a member of the Board of Trustees from 1995-2003. She and her husband, Nelson Schaenen Jr., provided a generous endowment to fund this visiting scholar position.

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