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Walking into Hilary Lithgow’s office, it’s clear she has a love for literature. There are books everywhere. The shelves, the desk, the floor. Notes scrawled on scraps of paper are tacked to the walls, filled with quotes and reminders.

Lithgow’s interest in English began early, sparked by a moment in elementary school when she realized she could interpret poetry in ways her classmates couldn’t.

“I suddenly had this feeling that I was understanding something others weren’t,” she recalls. “And I liked it.”

Her mother, an English professor who helped start the women’s studies program at the University of Massachusetts, was a big influence. Lithgow entered college knowing she’d be an English major.

“It never even occurred to me to do anything else, and luckily it worked out,” she says.

What didn’t work out for her — at least not at first — was the academic world’s emphasis on research. In graduate school at Stanford University and at her first teaching job at a public honors college in Florida, her peers and supervisors encouraged her to focus on research rather than teaching.

But Lithgow didn’t want to spend her time writing papers that “three people might read,” she says. She wanted to mold young minds and foster engaging classroom conversations. So when a rare teaching-and-advising job at UNC-Chapel Hill opened up that didn’t have a research requirement, she took it.

That job turned out to be fertile ground for her most meaningful research. Specifically, for veterans navigating trauma, identity, and reintegration.

Syntax after combat

Lithgow’s early academic work focused on British literature, particularly how writers’ syntax — the arrangement of words and phrases — shifted after major life events. She was fascinated by how trauma reshaped language. How people who had endured something profound often wrote differently, more sparsely, more precisely.

George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” became a text she references often. Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, argued that lazy language leads to lazy thinking, and that prefabricated phrases can eventually erode our ability to think critically at all.

Lithgow believes this is a post-military insight.

“If you’ve faced hard choices in life, you fight harder for the right words,” she says.

She’s seen this shift in other veterans’ writing too. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who served in World War I, wrote like a logician before the war and like a poet after. His famous line, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” captures a paradox of trauma: The more profound the experience, the harder it is to express.

Lithgow shares a vivid example from a British soldier’s account of World War I. The prose is stripped down, almost clinical: dead bodies, telephone wire, horse flesh. The only adjectives used in the piece describe unexploded shells as “bright and shiny.” It’s poetic in its restraint, haunted by what’s left unsaid, according to Lithgow.

“Before the war, they talk about honor and valor,” she says. “Afterward, it’s all pragmatic.”

The real turning point came in 2006, when she began teaching a class called “Literature of War” at the college where she was teaching in Florida, and a student veteran enrolled.

“It was the first time I realized I could meet someone who’d had this experience,” she says. “I was so slow to understand that there were real people still living in America who had undergone this firsthand.”

In Spring 2014, Lithgow began co-teaching the course at Carolina with veterans, starting with John Howell — a former combat medic and English major — who helped her see the classroom as a space for healing. Together, they explored how literature reveals the realities of war and what veterans bring to its interpretation.

Literature as a bridge

Eventually, Lithgow began to shape the curriculum for her “Literature of War” class into something deeper than literary analysis. It became a space for connection, reflection, and growth. Over time, she became an informal resource for veterans on campus — someone who understood how literature could help them process what they’d been through.

From that classroom, another idea emerged. She was approached by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which was looking for people to start book groups for veterans. She and Howell launched one in North Carolina, calling it Vets For Words, with the hope that reading together could offer veterans a space to find community and reflect on their experiences.

The results were profound. Veterans who had struggled to articulate their experiences found resonance in literature. Phil Klay, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and National Book Award winner, describes his experience reading books like “Lord Jim” by Joseph Conrad as discovering “a vocabulary exists for something you’d thought incommunicably unique.”

“It’s just something magic that happens in a reading group,” Lithgow says with a smile. “There is this kind of group connection that happens, which is amazing when we realize we can all work together to see and learn beyond our own experiences.”

Lithgow began researching similar efforts, hoping to find others doing this work. But she was surprised by how few existed. There were writing groups, yes. And reading groups, often focused on self-help or author meet-and-greets. But few were reading literature in therapeutic settings.

She is now deeply invested in making these groups replicable, hoping to create a guidebook for other clinics. And she’s hopeful that as awareness of brain health grows, more clinics will embrace literature as a tool for healing.

So when Carolina launched the Transforming Health and Resilience in Veterans (THRIVE) Program through the Matthew Gfeller Center, a traumatic brain injury clinic on campus, Lithgow stepped in to begin a book group there as well.

“I love talking with veterans about texts because they have more life experience to bring to bear on them,” she reflects.

Lithgow has worked with veterans beyond book groups too. From 2014 to 2023, she worked as a writing instructor for the Warrior Scholar Project, a national program that helps veterans transition to college life, and would spend a week every summer with participants, helping them learn college-level writing. And these days, she is a faculty panelist for Boot Print to Heel Print, a program within the Military & Veteran Student Success Center that assists veterans and active-duty students with their transition to university life.

But what makes her work feel purposeful are the conversations she has with veterans — in the classroom, in her book groups, and around campus. She says she often learns more from them than she could ever teach and that her work with them has reshaped how she thinks about the texts she has been working with for years.

“All humans worry about language once they have experienced pain and loss. So I think most veterans are honorary English majors,” Lithgow says, smiling.