E. Jennifer Monaghan

E. Jennifer Monaghan (born Edith Jennifer Walker; January 19, 1933 – September 14, 2014), also known as Jennifer Monaghan, was an educator and historian. She was regarded as the leading expert on literacy education in early America. She published three books and dozens of book chapters and journal articles.^[1]

Education

Edith Jennifer Walker was born in Cambridge, England to Clement and Margery (née Elton) Walker. She was educated at Perse School for Girls. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, where she attended Lady Margaret Hall and studied Greats (classics), receiving first-class honors in Honour Moderations. She received a Fulbright travel award and was sponsored by the English Speaking Union to teach as a graduate assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she earned an M.A. in classical Greek.

After marrying journalist Charles Monaghan in 1958 in Cambridge, the couple moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they raised their three children. Later, she entered the reading education department of the Ferkauf Graduate School of Education at Yeshiva University in New York City, where she received an Ed.D in 1980, with a dissertation on Noah Webster and his blueback speller.^[2]

Career

Monaghan was professor emerita of English at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, where she specialized in developmental reading, English as a Second Language, and the teaching of composition. Her early work included articles on reading research and a historical examination of the problem of dyslexia.^[3]

In 1983 her dissertation, Noah Webster’s Speller, 1783-1843: Causes of Its Success as Reading Text, was a co-winner of the biennial Outstanding Dissertation Award offered by the Society for the Study of Curriculum. In 1975 Monaghan founded the History of Reading Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association, and was for many years an active member of its executive board. She served as editor or coeditor of its newsletter, "History of Reading News", from its inception in Fall 1976 to Spring 2002.^[4]

The History of Literacy

Monaghan's interest in the study of the history of reading evolved by chance. She was volunteering as a tutor at a local public elementary school in Brooklyn and was dismayed at how reading was being taught. She began to look at the background of reading instruction and eventually completed her dissertation on Noah Webster's speller. Her first book, A Common Heritage: Noah Webster's Blue-Back Speller (1983), was an outgrowth of her dissertation. She also published numerous book chapters, journal and encyclopedia articles, reviews, and a catalog, including several coauthored with Douglas K. Hartman.^[5]

The History of the Book

Monaghan began a general study of the history of reading instruction, eventually becoming involved in an area known as the "history of the book." Scholars investigate the impact that books have had upon our culture, looking at books and the connections among author and publisher, publisher and printer, printer and reader, as well as author and reader. The "history of the book" considers crucial topics such as the commercial aspects of reading, the cultural and social aspects, and so forth.

The Charles and E. Jennifer Monaghan Collection

Young American Readers^[6] is an exhibition drawn from donations to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library from Charles and E. Jennifer Monaghan, totaling over 1,500 volumes.

Selected Publications

Books

• The Illustrated Phonics Booklet, illustrated by Virginia Cantarella (Greenville, New York, 2012)
• Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, in association with the American Antiquarian Society, 2005; released as paperback, 2007)
• Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy. The 1998 James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2000)
• A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983)

Books and Journals, Edited

• Susan E. Israel and E. Jennifer Monaghan, eds., Shaping the Reading Field: The Impact of Early Reading Pioneers, Scientific Research, and Progressive Ideas (Newark, Del.: International Reading Association, 2007).
• Guest editor, special issue, “Then and Now: Readers Learning to Write”, Visible Language 21 (1987).

Books, Translated

• Translator from French, Le Massacre des Indiens by Lucien Bodard. This was published as Green Hell (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971) and as Massacre on the Amazon (London: Tom Stacey, 1971).

Chapters in Books

• E. Jennifer Monaghan and Douglas K. Hartman, “Integrating the Elementary Language Arts: An Historical Perspective,” in Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts, 3rd ed., ed. Diane Lapp and Douglas Fisher (New York: Routledge/Taylor Francis, 2011), pp 113-19.
• Charles Monaghan and E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Schoolbooks,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and the American Antiquarian Society, 2010), pp 304-18.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Scientific Research and Progressive Education: Contexts for the Early Reading Pioneers, 1870-1956,” in Shaping the Reading Field: The Impact of Early Reading Pioneers, Scientific Research, and Progressive Ideas, ed. Susan E. Israel and E. Jennifer Monaghan (Newark, Del.: International Reading Association, 2007), pp 1-31.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan, “The Uses of Literacy by Girls in Colonial America”, Girls and Literacy in America: Historical Perspectives to the Present, ed. Jane Greer (Santa Barbara, Cal.: ABC-CLIO, 2003), pp 1-21.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England”, reprinted in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), pp 297-315.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan and Douglas K. Hartman, “Undertaking Historical Research in Literacy”, Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III, ed. Michael L. Kamil, Peter B. Mosenthal, P. David Pearson, and Rebecca Barr (Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 109-121. (This was reissued in Methods of Literacy Research: the Methodology Chapters from the Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III [2002], pp 33-45.)
• Ross W. Beales and E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy and Schoolbooks”, A History of the Book in America, Volume 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: American Antiquarian Society and Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp 380-87. This was reprinted in The History of the Book in the West: 1700-1800. Volume III, ed. Eleanor Shevlin.…Part V, Reading and Related Matters: Practices of Reading: Part 1. “Literacy and Schoolbooks”.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Phonics and Whole Word/Whole Language Controversies, 1948-1998: An Introductory History”, Finding Our Literacy Roots: Eighteenth Yearbook of the American Reading Forum, ed. Richard J. Telfer (Whitewater, Wisc.: American Reading Forum, 1998), pp 1-23.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy in Eighteenth-Century New England: Some Historiographical Reflections on Issues of Gender”, Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759-1800, ed. Margaret Conrad (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991), pp 12-44.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England”, Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp 53-80.
• E. Jennifer Monaghan and E. Wendy Saul, “The Reader, the Scribe, the Thinker: A Critical Look at the History of American Reading and Writing Instruction”, The Formation of School Subjects: The Struggle for Creating an American Institution, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (Philadelphia: Falmer, 1987), pp 85-122.

Articles in Journals

• “Literacy Instruction and the Town School in Seventeenth-Century New England”, Paradigm 2 (7) (December 2003): pp 15-21.
• “Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy”, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 108 (1998): pp 309-41.
• “Values of Literacy History”, coauthored with David W. Moore (senior author) and Douglas K. Hartman, Reading Research Quarterly 32 (1997): pp 90-102.
• “Gender and Textbooks: Women Writers of Elementary Readers, 1880-1950”, Publishing Research Quarterly 10 (1994): pp 28-46.
• “Family Literacy in Early 18th-Century Boston: Cotton Mather and His Children”, Reading Research Quarterly 26 (1991): pp 342-70.
• “The Textbook as a Commercial Enterprise: The Involvement of Noah Webster and William Holmes McGuffey in the Promotion of Their Reading Textbooks” Paradigm 1 (6) (October 1991): pp 7-14.
• “‘She loved to read in good Books’: Literacy and the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1643-1725”, History of Education Quarterly 30 (1990): pp 493-521.
• “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England”, American Quarterly 40 (1988): pp 18-41.
• “Readers Writing: The Curriculum of the Writing Schools of Eighteenth-Century Boston”, Visible Language 21 (1987): pp 167-213.

Catalogs

• E. Jennifer Monaghan and Arlene L. Barry. Writing the Past: Teaching Reading in Colonial America and the United States, 1640-1940: The Catalog (Newark, Del.: International Reading Association, 1999)

Encyclopedia Articles

• Entries on “Literacy” and “Noah Webster” in Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, ed. Mark G. Spencer (New York: Continuum, in press).
• “History of Reading Instruction,” coauthored with Douglas K. Hartman and Charles Monaghan, in Literacy in America: An Encyclopedia of History, Theory, and Practice, ed. Barbara J. Guzzetti (Santa Barbara, Cal.: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 224-31.
• Entries on “basal readers”, “hornbook”, “Noah Webster”, and “reading instruction”, Historical Dictionary of American Education, ed. Richard J. Altenbaugh (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999).
• “Textbooks by and for Women”, The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 874-76.

Newsletter Editor/Coeditor

• Editor, “Focus on the History of Reading: IRA Programs and Resources, 2007”
• Editor and Coeditor, History of Reading News (a publication of the History of Reading Special Interest Group, International Reading Association), vols. 1-12, 1976-1988; vols. 13-14, no. 1, 1989-1991; vols. 15-18, nos. 1 and 2, 1991-2001.

Honors and Awards

• Presented “Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy” as the American Antiquarian Society's annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture on the History of the Book in American Culture (Fall, 1998)
• Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society, April 1995.
• Awarded a Wolfe Fellowship by Brooklyn College of CUNY, 1994-95, for a year free of teaching to work on her book in progress, "Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America"
• Presented the inaugural Esther Clarke Wright Lecture, “Literacy in Eighteenth-Century New England”, at Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 1990
• Interviewed for the series, “Leaders in Reading Research and Instruction” by Richard D. Robinson, “An Interview with Dr. E. Jennifer Monaghan”, Reading Psychology: An International Quarterly 11 (1990): pp 151-58
• Awarded the 1989 Constance Rourke Prize by the American Studies Association for “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England”, published in American Quarterly (1988)
• Elected associate member, Darwin College, Cambridge University, England. Took up residence April-June 1988
• Co-awarded the biennial “Outstanding Dissertation Award” presented by the Society for the Study of Curriculum History for her dissertation, Noah Webster’s Speller, 1783-1843: Causes of Its Success as Reading Text, April 1983

Death

E. Jennifer Monaghan died on September 14, 2014 from a stroke, aged 81.^[7]

References

External links

• Links to sites of interest on the history of literacy, historyliteracy.org; accessed September 21, 2014.

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