Email: cthodgki@uncg.edu
Office: MHRA 3316
Phone: 336-334-4695
Ph.D. University of Chicago-1988
M.A. University of Chicago-1982
B.A. University of the Pacific-1980
The winner of UNCG’s 2010-2011 Senior Research Excellence Award, Dr. Hodgkins has interests in the literature of the Renaissance, specifically the early modern protestant lover’s quarrel with beauty, art, play, and worldly power. He is co-founder of the George Herbert Society, which in 2007-2008 brought over 300 scholars and poets together for conferences in Salisbury, England and at UNCG to reflect on Herbert’s pastoral life in Britain and his print and cultural legacies worldwide. He also co-planned the recent meeting at Herbert’s birthplace in Montgomery, Wales, in October of 2011. He held a 2010-2011 NEH Digital Humanities Scholarly Editions Grant to co-edit The Digital Temple (University of Virginia Press, 2012) the first authoritative born-digital edition of Herbert’s The Temple incorporating the two known manuscripts and the 1633 first edition. As Director of UNCG’s Atlantic World Research Network, he is developing resources and conference venues at home and abroad to explore the many ways in which history, culture, and the environment have been made and remade around the Atlantic Rim. He has been invited to speak recently at the University of Aarhus, Denmark; Brecon, Wales; the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; the University of Catania, Sicily; Wheaton College, Illinois; and Sarum College, Salisbury, England.
The winner of UNCG’s 2003-2004 Senior Alumni Teaching Excellence Award, Dr. Hodgkins currently offers undergraduate courses exploring the early and later plays of Shakespeare, the literature of 17th-Century England, transatlantic literature from Medieval through the 18th Century, and literary study of the Bible. At the graduate level, he offers courses on the Metaphysical Poets, on the 17th-Century English lyric, on the life and work of Milton, and on the British imperial imagination. As the Department’s first Class of 1952 Professor from 2007-2009, Dr. Hodgkins has offered experimental undergraduates courses on such topics as Renaissance anti-theatricalism and the literature of empire, and experimental graduate seminars on such topics as the teaching of research and the transatlantic tradition in poetry.
Dr. Hodgkins is married to Dr. Hope Howell Hodgkins and has three (mainly) grown children, Mary, Alice, and George. He lives in a century-old Arts & Crafts home in Lindley Park, works in Hope’s very ambitious vegetable garden every summer, and has been splitting for firewood the 200-foot, 230-year-old white oak that recently fell in their yard, miraculously missing everything and everyone. Dr. Hodgkins hails originally from Los Angeles by way of Napa, California, and from a large Italian family made up of 44 first cousins, most of them named DeFazio and living in Sacramento. He loves about every kind of food and wine as long as it’s good, and enjoys music ranging from plainsong to baroque to gospel to folk-rock, and from show tunes to klezmer to classic English hymns to classic American crooners. He actually reads novels for fun, travels to see Shakespeare performed even while on vacation, and reads the Bible every day because it’s true and beautiful.
Books
Selected Articles
George Herbert Conferences
Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature
Atlantic World Research Network
Digital Temple (username and password: herbert1633)