Biography

    Eric Gardner has been the Chair of SVSU's English Department since 2022. He joined SVSU’s faculty in 1996 and rose to his current rank of Professor of English in 2006. He served two previous terms as the Chair of the English Department (2006-2010) and was the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Behavioral Sciences from 2013 to 2015. He was the winner of the 2025 SVSU House Family Award for Teacher Impact. 

    Professor Gardner’s teaching and learning center on American culture and the praxis of literary history; his research focuses specifically on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture. His latest book, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction, was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. An important new exploration of the life and work of a major nineteenth-century African American author-activist, the book has been featured in, among other venues, the keynote panel at Penn State's "Frances E. W. Harper at 200" Symposium and an American Antiquarian Society virtual event that was rebroadcast on C-SPAN 2 / American History TV. 

    Gardner's work has garnered, among other recognition, two NEH Fellowships (2021 and 2012), SVSU's inaugural DEI Research Award (co-winner, 2022), SVSU’s Roosevelt Ruffin Diversity Award (2020), a Saginaw County NAACP “Regional Hero” Community Service Award (2017), SVSU's Warrick Award for Research (2010), and a Braun Fellowship (2008-2010). He has twice won the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize—for his first monograph, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Mississippi 2009), and again for his second monograph, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature and Periodical Culture (Oxford 2015). He has also edited several books—most recently, the volume on Reconstruction for Cambridge’s African American Literature in Transition series (2021). His shorter work has appeared in journals like African American Review, American Literary History, ESQ, and Legacy and collections including The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge 2022) and The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (North Carolina 2021).

    An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society (2024), he recently finished terms as Chair of the C19 Nominations Committee and as the Features Editor for Legacy, A Journal of American Women Writers. He was also a founding convener of the online Just Teach One: Early African American Print project. In all his endeavors, he remains committed to the importance of the humanities as a mode for exploring, understanding, and improving our diverse world.