Dr James Hodkinson

Curriculum Vitae:

Please note: I will be away on research leave and will be visiting researcher at the Universität Paderborn during the Spring/ Summer term of 2012, as a guest of Prof. Dr Michael Hofmann. I can be contacted by e-mail: j.r.hodkinson@warwick.ac.uk

 

I began my academic career as an AHRC scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, where I completed a PhD on the treatment of gender in the works of the German Romantic writer Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801). My doctoral research also took me as a D.A.A.D scholar to the Universität Trier and I am a member of the Internationale Novalis Gesellschaft.

Currently Associate Professor in German Studies, I came to Warwick in September 2006 from Oxford Brookes University, where I had taught as a lecturer in German since 2004. I have worked as a lecturer in the School of European Studies at Cardiff University, and as a teaching fellow at the Universities of Dublin and Liverpool. I successfully completed a PGCE in Modern Language Learning, taught German for business and offered translation in the commercial sector. A specialist in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, I have taught widely in the areas of German language and literature.

 

Research Interests:

  • Cultural Representations of Islam in nineteenth-century Germanophone thought and literature
  • Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paradigms of cultural difference: German Orientalism, Philhellenism and Cosmopolitanism
  • German Romanticism, its historical context, modern and postmodern receptions
  • Constructions of gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought and literature

My current research is geared towards producing a monograph to appear after 2013. The work has taken me outside my original period of interest into a thematic study of how Islam was conceived and represented in German and Austrian writing of the long nineteenth century (from the late Enlightenment to the end of World War I). The project is interdisciplinary, embracing 'high' and 'popular' literature, the academic discourses of philosophy, theology, historiography and Oriental Studies, as well as travel writing in German. The discourses examined emanate from differing and often radically competing ideological sources across the German-speaking world and the period. The project challenges the idea that Islam was a focus of the German Enlightenment, only to cease being of interest throughout the nineteenth century until Germany (re)engaged politically with Ottoman Empire in the latter phase of the period. Instead, Islam, be it as a theme, a trope or a complex corpus of cultural information and learning, is an object of fascination throughout the period, though it migrates between the discourses described, with a gradual shift discernible away from literature towards travel writing, academic study and the political.

The ideological valency of the German 'take' on Islam also shifts with the changing ideological currents of the century: Islam serves variously as a stylized literary ideal which helps to articulate a vision of a new connection between Germany and the Orient set in a cosmopolitan future, though it is also reduced to a template of Germany's radical other, to be admired though also despised from afar. Islamic Studies emerges as an admirably objective university discipline in the latter half of the century, presenting itself as a 'weltbügerliche Wissenschaft’, though is later co-opted in various ways to underpin ideologically Germany’s political allegiance with Ottoman Turkey. And German and Austrian travel writing by men and women, soldiers, clergymen, missionaries and tourists alike, both critiques the British and French colonisation of Islamic territories and also participates in kind of para-colonial fantasy, which allows German speakers both to reject imperialism ostensibly, and yet still to judge Islam according to European and Christian norms. A complex story, which, it should be noted, also tells the story of the ideological tensions at play in the construction of German and Austrian National (and Imperial) identity.

Within this context, I am currently involved in organising and promoting the Occident-Orient Research Network, an international research network involving scholars of German and Austrian studies from Europe, Asia and North America. The network meets yearly at differing locations for research symposia, each of which is dedicated to a different aspect of East-West, European-Asian cultural history, with a Germanic though increasingly also a Central and Eastern European focus: the so-called 'Orient', as the network's projects illustrate, shifts eastwards as the locus of the Euorpean subject shifts, and its deployment, function and efficacy within discourse fluctuates similarly. A volume of essays is currently in preparation by members of the network, co-edited by myself, Dr John Walker (Birkbeck, London), Prof. Shaswati Mazumdar (Delhi University, India) and Dr Johannes Feichtinger (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna).

I have also worked (and continue to work) on the relationship between German Romanticism and contemporary critical theory: I have previsouly investigated the extent to which the Romantic notions of meaning and language, from which much of the writing of this period flows, make Romanticism remarkably modern in its treatment of concepts such as individual and collective identity. In the light of this, theory is not merely something which we postmoderns 'do' to Romantic texts, but those texts are also part of a historical theoretical canon which informs and gave rise to our contemporary theoretical culture. Whilst there is much that differs between Romanticism and contemporary theory, not least in the area of metaphysics, I believe in questioning some of the false dichotomies exisiting between eighteenth and twentieth-century modes of thought and writing.

 

Research Supervision

I am currently supervising Mr Brian Haman's PhD on 'Literary and Philosophical Representations of the Journey in German Romantic Culture'.

In the past I have supervised and/ or co-supervised Doctoral and Masters level dissertations on themes such as:

  • 'Representations of the Female Singer in German and French Literature around 1800' (PhD).
  • 'English Translations of Mozart's Operas', (MA)
  • 'English Translations of Paul Celan's Poetry' (MA).

I welcome enquiries from further research students interested in undertaking supervised postgraduate work with me in my areas of specialisation.

 

Publications

Monographs

 

Edited volumes

 

Chapters in edited volumes

  • 'Der Islam im Dichten und Denken der deutschen Romantik: zwischen Kosmopolitismus und Orientalismus' in: Michael Hofmann, Klaus von Stosch (Hg.) Islam in der deutschen und türkischen Literatur (Beiträge zur Komparativen Theologie; 4), (Paderborn u.a.: Schöningh-Verlag, 2012), 61-80.
  • 'Moving beyond the Binary? Christian-Islamic Encounters and Gender in the Thought and Literature of German Romanticism', in: James Hodkinson and Jeff Morrison (eds.), Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture, ed. by James Hodkinson and Jeff Morrison (New York: Camden House, Dec 2009), 108-127.
  • ‘Novalis und die Poetisierung des Weiblichen’ in: Novalis – Poesie und Poetik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004).
  • ‘The Cosmic-Symphonic: Novalis, Music and Universal Discourse’ (pp.13-26) in: Siobhán Donovan and Robin Elliot (eds.), Music and Literature in German Romanticism (New York: Camden House, 2004).

 

Essays in Journals

  • 'Engaging with Islam: a Cosmopolitan Dynamics in fin-de-siècle German Culture and Politics?' forthcoming, Spring 2013

  • 'Romantic Cosmopolitanism? On the Tensions and Topicalities of an Intellectual and Literary Tradition', forthcoming, in: LIMBUS: Australisches Jahrbuch für germanistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft / Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies, No. 5, 2012.

  • ‘Genius beyond Gender: Novalis, Women and the Art of Shapeshifting’ in: Modern Language Review (Vol. 96, Jan 2001).

 

Reviews

  • Review of: Romantic Prose Fiction (A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, vol. XXIII), edited by Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel, Bernard Dieterle, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 2008). In: The Yearbook of English Studies,Volume 40, Numbers 1-2, 1 July 2010, pp. 320-22.

  • Review of: Paradox, Aphorism and Desire in Novalis and Derrida. By Clare Kennedy. (MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 71) London: Maney. 2008. In: The Modern Language Review, Volume 105, Number 1, January 2010 (206-8).
  • Review of: Sophie Mereau: Verbindungslinien in Zeit und Raum. Ed. By Katharina von Hammerstein, Katrin Horn. Heidelberg/ Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008. 458 pp. In: German Quarterly, Vol 82, Autumn 2009 (529-31
  • 'Dangerous Women? Gender, Authorship, and the German Literary Scene around 1800' in: The Cambridge Quarterly - Volume 37, Number 2, 2008, pp. 276-280. A review article focusing on: Women and Literature in the Goethe Era 1770-1820: Determined Dilettantes, by Helen Fronius, (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2007.
  • Review of: Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine. By Lucia Ruprecht. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. In: The Modern Language Review, Volume 103, Number 3, 1 July 2008, 895-896 (2).
  • Review of: A Companion to European Romanticism, ed. by Michael Ferber (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) in: BARS: Bulletin and Review, Issue No 31 March 2007, pp. 25-28.

 

Teaching

Undergraduate:

Postgraduate:

 

Departmental Responsibilities:

  • Personal tutor
  • Link tutor for the BA in English and German
  • British Council Foreign Language Assistantships in Germany and Austria.
  • Departmental IT and E-learning representative

 

Contact Details

E-Mail: j.r.hodkinson@warwick.ac.uk

Tel: +44 247 615 0387/ Internal: 50387

Office: Humanities 216

Office Hour/ Sprechstunde: Fridays 11:00 - 13:00 or by appointment

 

 

 

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