Angela Esterhammer — a professor in the Department of English and the former principal of Victoria College — has been awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.
The prestigious fellowships, presented annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation since 1925, support mid-career professionals who have shown exceptional capacity as scholars or artists, and who continue to produce transformative work.
“I’m still having trouble believing it, but I’m thrilled and extremely grateful for the Guggenheim Foundation’s outstanding support of scholarship and creativity, especially in arts and humanities fields,” says Esterhammer.
She is the sole scholar of English literature to be named a fellow this year and one of only four fellows from Canada among the Guggenheim Foundation’s 100th class, which includes 198 artists and scholars across 53 fields.
This was the last portrait of John Galt and was commissioned by the Watt Club of Greenock. It was unveiled in January, 1839, at the annual dinner of the James Watt Club. Image courtesy of the Watt Institution.
The fellowship will enable her to pursue her research on the Scottish-born writer and entrepreneur John Galt (1779–1839), and what his work can tell us about the changing nature of authorship, print culture, and the international affiliations of British literature in the early-mid 19th century.
“The world needs more John Galt!” declares Esterhammer.
A popular writer in the 1820s and 1830s, Galt was read in Britain, North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Though best known for his humourous tales and serious sagas about Scottish life, his fiction spans several genres including historical novels, gothic tales, political satire, travel writing and short stories.
Studying this wide range of genres, Esterhammer is fascinated with how Galt was able to write from so many different perspectives.
“He imagines the perspectives of fictional characters in his own time, but also in other places and in different historical periods,” she says. “His favoured way of writing fiction is in the form of fictional autobiography where he writes from the point of view of characters of different periods, classes, genders, and psychological profiles.
“I aim to show how Galt’s experiments with genres of writing and media of communication, idiosyncratic voices and narrative perspectives, and hybrid forms of fact and fiction capitalized on and extended the possibilities afforded by new publication practices, greater international mobility, and the global entanglements of his age.”
In addition to being a prolific and popular fiction writer, Galt was also an entrepreneur who played a key role in Canadian settlement, founding the town of Guelph in 1827. He also founded the town of Goderich, Ontario the same year. And the town of Galt — now part of Cambridge — was named after him by a friend.
Galt conversed and corresponded with writers, artists, Indigenous leaders, politicians, diplomats and technological innovators on both sides of the Atlantic. Exploring the entanglements of the local and the global, his writing zeroes in on themes that remain as urgent now as they were in his time: identity, community, power, injustice, truth and moral action.
Galt was also the first superintendent of the Canada Company — a private British land and colonization company established to bolster the settler population of Upper Canada, now southern Ontario, in the first half of the 19th century.
“Galt conversed and corresponded with writers, artists, Indigenous leaders, politicians, diplomats and technological innovators on both sides of the Atlantic,” says Esterhammer. “Exploring the entanglements of the local and the global, his writing zeroes in on themes that remain as urgent now as they were in his time: identity, community, power, injustice, truth and moral action.
“I’m very excited about this amazing opportunity to forge ahead with my research, which feels very timely even though I study texts written two hundred years ago.”
According to Esterhammer, that was a period when British and European societies were transformed by new forms of reading material and consumption. Steam-powered technologies revolutionized transport and communications. Volatile economic conditions fueled emigration to America and colonies around the globe. And colonization, slavery and emancipation were vigorously debated.
Looking at this dramatic change, Esterhammer is struck with the connections to today’s rapidly changing world.
“One is the idea of globalization, which we think of as a phenomenon of today's world,” she says. “But when I study the literary economy of the early to mid-19th century, it's hard not to think of that as an age of globalization as well. Books were circulating and being read by people around the globe. British tales were being translated across Europe, reprinted in North American newspapers, and exported to British colonies around the world.”
As well, Esterhammer is intrigued by the writing and journalism of the 1820s and ‘30s and the blurred lines between truth and fiction.
Professor Esterhammer is a star in 19th century literary studies, as an important critic and a powerhouse in her editorial work. She's also a brilliant teacher who inspires our students and facilitates their development as researchers in extraordinary ways.
“We talk a lot about that now, calling it fake news. There are a lot of similarities there, and sometimes also for the same reasons, because we're living in an age of tremendous change in media, especially digital media. The 1820s was also an age of rapid change in media, with readerships expanding massively along with new forms of publication, especially periodicals and newspapers.”
The announcement of Esterhammer being named a Guggenheim Fellow was cause for celebration in the Department of English.
“Professor Esterhammer is a star in 19th century literary studies, as an important critic and a powerhouse in her editorial work,” says department chair Robert McGill.
“She's also a brilliant teacher who inspires our students and facilitates their development as researchers in extraordinary ways. She's a very deserving Guggenheim Fellowship winner, and we're thrilled that her work is being recognized in this manner."