Rhema Hokama (she/her/hers)

I'm delighted to be back home in the US and to have joined the University of Washington in January 2025 after almost a decade as research faculty in Asia. I am currently an assistant professor of English literature at UW, and was previously a tenured associate professor of English at Singapore University of Technology and Design, a new university established in collaboration with MIT. I am the author of Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2023), which argues that Renaissance poetic responses to the English Reformation imagined capacious Protestant identities—ones that included unconventional and nonheteronormative desires within the broad tent of Reformed religion. My academic articles have been published in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly and Modern Philology.

My time living in Asia and teaching global literatures to students from over 40 countries gave rise to my most recent research interests, which center on the development of Protestantism and English literary culture in the global Renaissance. I am currently working on two major projects and a number of shorter ones: First, I'm revising a second book project on cosmopolitanism and the global Renaissance, which explores how early modern global exchange with Asia, the Near East, and the Atlantic world shaped European discourse about national, political, and religious inclusion in early modern England and the Dutch Republic. Second, I'm in the nascent stages of putting together an edited volume on European cultural and intellectual engagement with East and Southeast Asia during the global Renaissance. This volume will be a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary project with 21 contributors, and grew out of a number of roundtables that I organized or will organize in Singapore (2024), Boston (2025), and San Francisco (2026). Finally, I'm writing articles and chapters about ideas from my long and ever growing list of things-to-write: a piece on Quaker and Puritan ideas about toleration in early modern Britain and the American colonies, two solicited pieces on Shakespeare's engagement with experiential Calvinism, two solicited chapters on English Protestantism and early modern maritime engagement with global religions in Asia and the Americas, and a solicited chapter on Renaissance English literary ideas about Asian languages and poetics.

I'm delighted to have been nominated for a three-year term as the English literature disciplinary representative for the Renaissance Society of America, the largest annual conference of early modernists, and have been tasked with organizing panels and sessions for the RSA's annual conferences in San Francisco (2026), Philadelphia (2027), and Rome (2028). Please send me your abstracts for San Francisco (see my calls for papers here) and let me know if you would like to co-organize a session for Philadelphia or Rome.

Here at UW, I'm very happy to have been nominated to the English department's Executive Committee for a two-year term from 2025 to 2027. If you're in our huge and capacious department and have ideas for how I can help support intellectual and collegial life in English, let me know!

You can learn more about my teaching and research at rhemahokama.com.