Ph.D., Northwestern Univ. (2003)
M.A., Northwestern Univ. (1997)
A.B., Stanford Univ. (1996)
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.
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.