Chris Hedlin

I am the associate director and an assistant teaching professor in the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society. The program, housed in the College of Arts and Letters, brings together students of business and the liberal arts to explore big questions about work – questions like "What makes work meaningful?" and "What makes an economy just?" My role is to design courses and programs where, drawing upon humanities methods like close reading and dialogue, students can discern not only what they want to do with their lives but why. 

I earned my PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and, before coming to Notre Dame, taught and researched at Valparaiso University in Indiana and Azusa Pacific University in California. I am deeply invested in the public humanities and also worked for a time as a journalist at a local media nonprofit in Pittsburgh. I specialize in studying literature as it shapes people’s everyday lives and worldviews, both in history and at present.