2025
Angela Esterhammer
Angela Esterhammer Wins Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
2025
Angela Esterhammer Wins Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
At moments of upheaval, societies look for ways to understand themselves. Dr. Angela Esterhammer turns to nineteenth-century literature to show how people have long grappled with rapid economic, political and cultural change.
A Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Esterhammer studies the work of John Galt, a Scottish-born writer whose novels, journalism and public life capture a world in flux in the 1800s.
She examines how Galt pushed the boundaries of genre and voice, blending fact and fiction to respond to emerging media, expanding markets and increasing global mobility.
“I’m seeking to open up new perspectives on literature and society of the early-to-mid-nineteenth century,” she explains. By tracing how writers navigate economic uncertainty, political debate and cultural transformation, her research shows that literature is not only reflective, but participatory. Galt’s own life also underscores that connection. Deeply tied to Canada, he played a key role in early settlement and founded the Ontario towns of Guelph and Goderich.
What first drew Esterhammer to Galt was the breadth of his remarkable imagination and the scope of his social vision. “Yet his writing has been largely lost from view since the nineteenth century — and it’s worth bringing back into circulation!” she says. Through multiple narratives and social perspectives, Galt explored questions that remain urgent today: power, injustice and moral responsibility.
In bringing John Galt’s world back into focus, Dr. Angela Esterhammer reminds us how humanities research sharpens our understanding of the present. Her work reflects the strength of Canadian literary scholarship and how the study of literature remains central to how societies interpret disruption and possibility today.
