Professor Christopher Hager
Hobart Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English
For the last 18 years, the office tucked away in the corner of the second floor of 115 Vernon Street has had one inhabitant: Professor Christopher Hager. When a visitor peers into his office, they are greeted by an array of chairs, books, whale memorabilia, and likely Professor Hager himself, pouring over a book or at his standing desk.
Before working at Trinity, Professor Hager attended Stanford University for his undergraduate degree—a Bachelor of Arts in English—and received his PhD from Northwestern University. It was not until he attended Northwestern that he realized that he may want to teach—academia was not something he desired to do after graduate school: “I didn’t want to leave school. I wanted to continue learning. So, I went to graduate school.” It was while teaching classes as a graduate student that he realized that he may have wanted to teach.
It was this realization that he enjoyed teaching that drew him to the idea of being a professor at a small liberal arts college, such as Trinity. While in school, Professor Hager observed the competitive environment of research universities and knew that it was not for him. He said “[the world of research universities] was not something I was temperamentally suited to.” Because of his lack of interest in the intense research world, Professor Hager followed his interests. He has been able to take this tendency to follow his interests to Trinity. His most recent research project is on the relationship between the Reconstruction Era and the emergence of the public library during it. He seeks to see if the cultural impact of the Civil War can be found in the early public library. He credits the ability to follow a thread of interest to how wonderful the English department here at Trinity is: “Other academics do not work in a department with such openness, friendliness and collegiately….[my recent research] is not literary methodologically, but my colleagues have been wonderfully tolerant of my foray into cultural history.”
Professor Hager has been able to occasionally integrate that research into his teaching—such as the Spring 2024 session of his course Literacy and Literature, which featured a new unit on the public library and other institutions of literacy. Similarly, the readings for his course Civil War Literature were drawn in part out of his research. But the readings were not entirely chosen by what research is most interesting within the world of Civil War scholarship, but rather, what he believes will engage his students as readers. However, he feels like his courses and research do not inform each other constantly. While he primarily researches the Civil War, his most popular courses are on literary texts. Professor Hager’s 300-level seminars on Thoreau and Melville are only partially connected to his work as an academic. The kinds of work that he is interested in as a potential for scholarly contribution are not always what students find engaging; some courses develop out of what he finds interesting a reader and is curious about as someone who still likes to read.
While Professor Hager could not pinpoint a moment in time where he determined that he was going to be an English Major—he always loved to read and it seemed obvious he would do something with literature—he pointed to graduate school as when he knew that he was growing, both as a scholar and as a person. He pointed to a book on the shelf by Daniel Chambliss, How College Works which said that the way to college make college great was to find “one good professor, and a few good friends” and he believes that he found that in graduate school, which, when combined with intellectual curiosity, led to a lifelong career in education, research, and literature.
When asked about his future plans for the next 18 years at Trinity—this school year marks the notable milestone of being the first time that Professor Hager has students in class who were born after his arrival at Trinity—he said that he is now at a point where he has no explicit goals, beyond the hope that none of his classes ever “go stale.” One has yet to; every time that he teaches a course, he changes aspects of it in order to keep it fresh and something new. Professor Hager has no desire to perfect his classes as he continues at Trinity, only a desire to keep them interesting to students.
~ Jennah Simpson (’27)
