She started her career as a Romance linguist, and later conducted research in medieval literature as well as branching out from Late Latin and Old French to studies on Provençal, Spanish, Italian, English, and German.

[1] Hatcher earned a BA from Blue Mountain College in 1925 and an MA from the University of Virginia in 1927.

[2] She served as an academic dean for four years at Harcum College, before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1939.

[3] Tributes and retrospectives of her work include Jan Firbas’s 1962 review “Notes on the function of the sentence in the act of communication: marginalia on two important studies in syntax by Anna Granville Hatcher”[4] and Karen Hermann's “A Retrospective Critique of Anna Granville Hatcher's" Reflexive Verbs": Latin, Old French, Modern French (1942).”[5] Hatcher was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953.

[2] Hatcher was also the first woman to receive the title of Distinguished Professor (French and Italian and Spanish and Portuguese) from Indiana University.