Christine Hedlin

Lecturer in Humanities

Linwood House 116
219-464-6749
christine.hedlin@valpo.edu

Christine Hedlin earned her BA in English and Spanish from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and will receive her PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2018. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American literature, secular theory, American religious history, and historical approaches to the novel. Her essay “‘Was There Not Reason to Doubt?’: Wieland and Its Secular Age” has appeared in the Journal of American Studies. She is currently revising her dissertation, “Novel Faiths: Nonsecular Fiction in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.,” into a book manuscript that considers how American Protestants used popular religious novels to catalyze changes in their faiths. In this project, she argues that the narrative structure and formal flexibility of the novel made it a key testing ground for new beliefs that responded creatively, resiliently, to seismic events like the rise of Darwinian evolution, the death toll of the Civil War, and the failures of Reconstruction. Christine has previously held interdisciplinary fellowships with the University of Illinois’s Network for Neuro-Cultures and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.