National Endowment for the Humanities Stipend to Support Trinity Professor’s Next Book

Christopher Hager, Hobart Professor of the Humanities and professor of English at Trinity College, has received a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his project, “The Public Library and the Unfinished Civil War.” The stipend will cover research and writing leading to a book about how the ascendancy of U.S. public libraries during the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877) has shaped their subsequent history.

Hager said that the modern idea of the public library—funded by taxes and freely accessible to everyone—became popular around the Civil War. “But nobody ever talks about why this happened when it did,” Hager said. “Was the Civil War in any way relevant to the birth of this now widely accepted public institution? In what ways were the politics, the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction necessary for or conducive to the creation of public libraries? Why was this the moment? I want to find out more about that.”

Reconstruction was a time when the United States was engaged in a variety of projects that extended the authority of the federal government as it tried to ensure universal civil rights for its citizens, Hager said. “Even though the public library is a local institution on the town or county level, it emerges out of a moment when there was widespread support for an increased role of government in people’s lives,” he added. “Although it happened in a decentralized way, I think it’s helpful to understand it as part of Reconstruction, as part of a national project to ensure certain rights and opportunities to all Americans.”

That moment in history has relevance today, according to Hager, who serves on the board of trustees for his hometown library, which recently addressed an effort to ban a particular book.

“Thinking about the roots of their history would be helpful to understand why libraries are being swept up in culture war today,” he said. “As a humanist, I think that often if you look to the past, you can find answers. Understanding the ideological moment that gave birth to libraries might help us understand what’s behind some of the controversy and polarization now.”

Receiving the NEH grant is a sign to Hager that his book could speak to a larger question that may engage readers beyond librarians. He said, “I would like it to appeal to people interested in studying the Civil War era, people who care about libraries, or people who want a deeper understanding of cultural controversies today.”

Hager began his career in literary studies as an undergraduate at Stanford University, where he wrote a thesis on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. As a graduate student at Northwestern, he studied 19th-century American literature in relation to slavery and the Civil War. At Trinity since 2007, Hager teaches courses in American literature and culture from the 19th century to the present.

He has previously received several other awards from the NEH. A fellowship in 2010 supported Hager’s first book, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Harvard University Press, 2013), and a 2015 summer stipend and a 2016 NEH Public Scholar award both supported his second book, I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018).

In addition to publishing two books, Hager co-edited Timelines of American Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) with Cody Marrs, and he co-edited the digital anthology Hidden Literacies with Trinity colleague Hilary E. Wyss, Allan K. Smith and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of English.