E. Jennifer Monaghan

Jennifer Monaghan, professor emerita of English at Brooklyn College, died on September 14, 2014.  She earned her bachelor’s degree in classics at Lady Margaret Hall of Oxford University in 1955, receiving first-class honors in classical languages. She won an English-Speaking Union grant to attend the University of Illinois, where she earned her master’s degree in Greek in 1958. In 1980, she was awarded a doctoral degree in education from Yeshiva Graduate School of Education. 

Jennifer was a historian of early American reading education and a researcher at AAS. In addition to publishing two books on the subject—A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blueback Speller (1983) and Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (2005)— she delivered the annual Wiggins Lecture at the Society in 1998 on “Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy.” She and her husband were also avid collectors of old literacy textbooks. The collection, amounting to some 1,500 texts dating back to colonial times, now resides at the University of Kansas.