Joan D. Hedrick papers

Joan Doran Hedrick was born on May 1, 1944 in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended Vassar College as an undergraduate, majoring in English, and studied for her doctoral degree in American Civilization at Brown University. Hedrick's teaching career began at Wesleyan University as an English instructor in 1972. She began working at Trinity College in late September 1980, filling in for a professor who became ill. Hedrick liked Trinity so much that she would stay on for the better part of four decades, teaching courses in American Studies, English, and History, ultimately becoming a full professor and Director of the Women's Studies program (later renamed the Women, Gender and Sexuality program). During her teaching career, Hedrick's areas of specialty were Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American History; the Intersection of Class, Race, Gender, and Sexuality; and Feminist Theory.

In 1995 Joan Hedrick was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Biography for her book, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, the culmination of thirteen years of work that began as a spark of curiosity after having read a student's senior thesis. Considered the nation's preeminent scholar on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hedrick was one of the scholars and historians to appear in the PBS docudrama "The Abolitionists," which aired in 2013. Hedrick is also the author of multiple journal articles and book reviews, as well as the book, Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Work, and co-editor of The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader. Hedrick was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and was twice the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served on numerous boards and advisory committees, among them the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society in Hartford.

Featured as the Baccalaureate speaker in 2018, Joan Hedrick retired from Trinity College that year.