Simmons College

Kelly Hager is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies and was director of the graduate program in Gender/Cultural Studies from 2003-2007. She specializes in Victorian literature, children's literature, and television studies and has published essays on Dickens, children's literature and canon formation, and the Brontës and adolescence. She is currently working on a project that considers how the novel constructs ideas of physical, intellectual and psychosexual health, combining an argument about the somatic effects of reading with an analysis of the value of participatory reading for adolescent girls and the several ways in which children's literature participates in canon formation. This project is concerned with the ways in which novel-reading is represented in nineteenth-century culture; it brings together the fields of Victorian literature and children's literature with the history of reading practices; and it studies the novel's power to shape readers as intellectuals, healthy bodies, and (albeit in a normative fashion) sexually well-adjusted subjects. A portion of this project, "Betsy and the Canon," is included in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers 2003). Professor Hager is also a contributor to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, a co-author of the Instructor's Guide for the Norton Introduction to Literature, and was a judge for the inaugural Lion and the Unicorn Poetry Award (an annual award for the best book of children's poetry published in North America). She is the MLA Division on Children's Literature Representative to the MLA Delegate Assembly, and she sits on the Executive Committee of the MLA Division on Children's Literature.

Professor Hager teaches Victorian Literature and Culture, The English Novel from Victorians to Moderns, Victorian Children's Literature, 19th-Century American Children's Literature, Women in Literature, and Critical Interpretations. She also teaches a graduate course in narrative theory and television. She received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006.