Contact Information
Biography
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.
During my thirteen years of university teaching at UW, Singapore, and Harvard, I've taught a variety of courses spanning Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, the lyric form (from the Renaissance to contemporary), British literature from Beowulf to Milton, medieval and early modern travel literature, Shakespeare in global adaptation, science fiction, literature and ethics, the philosophical novel, Asian American literature, contemporary anglophone Asian literature, classical Chinese lyric in translation, and world literatures across 2,000 years of global culture and philosophy.
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.
Research
Selected Research
- Rhema Hokama, Cosmopolitanism after the Reformation: Natural Law, Toleration, and Religious Exchange in the Global Renaissance (second book project in revision stage).
- Rhema Hokama (ed.), East and Southeast Asia in the Making of the Global Renaissance, in preparation for Oxford University Press, with an intended manuscript submission date of late 2026. 21 contributors.
- Rhema Hokama, “Introduction: Europe and Asia in Global Early Modern Literary History,” in East and Southeast Asia in the Global Renaissance, ed. Rhema Hokama (in preparation for Oxford University Press).
- Rhema Hokama, “Milton, Asia, and the Origins of Idolatry in Paradise Lost,” in East and Southeast Asia in the Global Renaissance, ed. Rhema Hokama (in preparation for Oxford University Press).
- Rhema Hokama, “An Arabic fable for the early global age: Translation, cosmopolitanism, and radical religion in the early modern Atlantic world” (under review).
- Rhema Hokama, “‘Give me the ocular proof’: Certitude and experiential knowledge in Othello and the English Calvinist tradition,” Early Modern Theology, Corporeality, and Literary Aesthetics, special issue of Literature and Theology, ed. Patrick McGrath (forthcoming 2025).
- Rhema Hokama, “Cannibal religion: Maritime exchange and English Protestant identity in early modern English travel writing on Francis Drake and the Americas,” Fictions of Sacrifice: Early Modern Texts, Political Theology, and Secularization, eds. Freya Sierhuis and Francesco Quatrini, Routledge Series in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming 2025).
- Rhema Hokama, “Shakespeare and Calvinism,” in the Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Religion, ed. William Stockton (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming 2025).
- Rhema Hokama, “Shylock in Fuquieo: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the trial of a Portuguese stranger by China’s courts in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations,” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, and Performance 29, no. 44 (2024): 39–60.
- Rhema Hokama, “Shakespeare’s Cathayans: Twelfth Night, maritime exchange, and early modern China,” Notes and Queries 70, no. 4 (2023): 254–9.
- Rhema Hokama, Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literature Culture of the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2023).
- Rhema Hokama, “Sexual Freedom and New World Conquest in Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis and John Donne’s ‘To his Mistress going to bed,’” Notes and Queries 69, no. 3 (2022): 231–33.
- Rhema Hokama, “‘Wanton child’: Fantasies of Infanticide, Abortion, and Monstrous Birth in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 62, no. 2 (2022): 347–72.
- Rhema Hokama, “‘Loves halowed temple’: Erotic Sacramentalism and Reformed Devotion in John Donne’s ‘To his Mistress going to bed,’” Modern Philology 119, no. 2 (2021): 248–75.
- Rhema Hokama, “Shakespeare in Hawai‘i: Puritans, Missionaries, and Language Trouble in a Hawaiian Pidgin Translation of Twelfth Night,” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 18 (2018): 57–77.
- Rhema Hokama, “Praying in Paradise: Recasting Milton’s Iconoclasm in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 54 (2013): 161–80.
- Rhema Hokama, “Love’s Rites: Performing Prayer in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2012): 199–223.