Rhema Hokama

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 will be a tenured associate professor in September 2026). I am also chair of the Religious Studies program, housed in the Jackson School of International Studies, where I direct the MA program in Religious Studies. I was previously a tenured associate professor of English at Singapore University of Technology and Design, a new university established in collaboration with MIT. 

Protestants, poetry, sex, and the history of knowledge

I am the author of Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2023), which explores how bodily experience became a site of knowledge in English Calvinist devotional culture—a development that shaped Renaissance poetic accounts of what it was possible to know in both erotic and devotional life. At its core, my first book argues that the English Reformation did not simply change what people believed. It changed how they thought they could know anything with certainty. I maintain that English Calvinism introduced a new epistemology—one that treated bodily and emotional experience as evidence capable of confirming invisible truths. Religious experience was not merely something one felt; it was a means of acquiring and verifying knowledge. This experiential model then migrated beyond religion into English poetry, shaping how writers imagined love, desire, intention, and interpersonal knowledge. I ask how a major cultural transformation—the English Reformation—altered the epistemic assumptions of English literary culture. In doing so, I trace how changing ideas about knowledge, evidence, experience, and certainty influenced poetry, devotional practice, emotional life, and human relationships. In that sense, I see my first book as a contribution to the history of knowledge as much as to Reformation studies and literary criticism.

Global Protestantism, Asia, and world religions

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 literary impact of Protestant engagement with world religions in the global early modern world. 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 toleration 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: an article on the English and Dutch reception of an Arabic language Muslim fable in radical Protestant contexts, 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.

Teaching

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.

Collaboration and community

I'll be hosting an interdisciplinary conference Imagining the Global Past: Antiquities, Early Modernities, and the Humanities Today at UW on May 17–18, 2027, and am currently taking paper abstract submissions. 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 Philadelphia (see my calls for papers here) and let me know if you would like to co-organize a session for 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.