This summer, Rhema Hokama, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, joined the Religious Studies program as Chair. Hokama recently spoke about her background and visions for the program.
Religious Studies Chair Rhema Hokama.
What sparked your interest in religious studies?
I came to religious studies through literature. I’m a literary historian by training, specializing in early modern English Protestantism during the age of Shakespeare, Milton, and their contemporaries. My research has always focused on how religious ideas shape the ways people understand the world and their relationships with one another.
I’m joining the University of Washington and Religious Studies after nearly a decade as research faculty in Singapore. Being an American living and teaching in Asia fundamentally expanded the geographical and comparative scope of my research. I became increasingly interested in how European Christians encountered — and tried to understand — the religious traditions of Asia, and in how those encounters transformed Protestant ideas about belief, religious difference, human variance, and toleration.
My newer work examines early modern Protestantism as a global phenomenon through its encounters with world religions — with Ottoman Islam, Indigenous religion in the Americas, Chinese Confucianism, and Southeast Asian traditional belief. I’m fascinated by what happens when religious ideas travel: how people interpret unfamiliar traditions through their own conceptual frameworks, and how encounters with radically different ways of understanding religion can unsettle and reshape those worldviews. That intersection of religion, global history, and cross-cultural encounter — both in my research and in my time living abroad in Singapore — drew me more deeply into religious studies.
What is Religious Studies at UW?
Religious Studies at UW is an interdisciplinary and dynamic group of faculty with expertise from across the humanities, social sciences, international studies, and area studies. What unites us is a shared commitment to understanding how religious ideas, practices, and communities have shaped human societies across cultures and throughout history. This porosity is what makes Religious Studies especially well suited to the Jackson School of International Studies, which houses our program. Our affiliation with the Jackson School is one of our greatest strengths, allowing us to draw on world-class expertise in international research, area studies, languages, and cultures while studying religion in comparative perspective.
I recently had a chance to chat with Danny Hoffman, Director of the Jackson School, on the Religious Studies podcast. As I told Danny, one of the challenges of studying religion is that the category of “religion” itself is much less straightforward than we often assume. Different cultures and historical periods have drawn the boundaries separating religion, politics, philosophy, ethics, and everyday life in radically different ways than we do now. The study of religion in context — and across the multiplicity of vantages points within the ambit of our Religious Studies program — allows us to recognize that our own categories for understanding our world and ourselves have been historically and culturally produced.
What do you hope to accomplish as chair?
I’m excited to build on the visionary work done by my predecessors: Jim Wellman, Christian Novetzke, Danny Hoffman, Noam Pianko, and not least of all our founding chair Eugene Webb — who established the program more than 50 years ago in 1974. From its inception, Webb envisioned Religious Studies as a broad, interdisciplinary enterprise — one that that drew strength from comparison across traditions, regions, and historical periods. That expansive vision continues to shape the program today. One of my first priorities as chair will be to continue strengthening Religious Studies as an interdisciplinary intellectual community for faculty and students working on religion across UW’s many departments, programs, and schools. I want Religious Studies to become a visible meeting place for new conversations and collaboration across fields.
I’m also especially excited to introduce more of our undergraduates to Religious Studies at UW. Because we are an interdisciplinary program rather than a standalone department, students may not always encounter us immediately when they arrive at the university or know about us when they’re considering applying to UW. But I see our program’s home within the Jackson School as our central advantage — it’s what distinguishes us from other religious studies programs. Our students study religion with faculty from across UW while also participating in the broader intellectual life of the Jackson School. They can approach religion through history, literature, anthropology, politics, law, and area studies, and place the study of religious traditions in genuinely global and comparative contexts. This makes us exceptionally well suited to think and work capaciously, without allowing ourselves to be siloed into any one religious, regional, or even disciplinary tradition. One of my aspirations as chair is simply for more students to discover the remarkable Religious Studies faculty and courses that already exist at UW — and to see the program as their primary intellectual home.
I also want to communicate more clearly why the study of religion matters to students now. Religion is central to understanding questions of great intellectual and personal significance for our students — questions of global conflict, migration, colonialism, law, identity, and cultural difference. Studying religion in context gives us a framework for understanding the present precisely because it gives us historical depth. Taking the long view of religion allows us to see that the problems and concerns of our own moment are not inevitable or self-evident. They’re historically contingent. They have origins — and alternatives. I hope students come to see religious studies as a field that helps them understand the present more deeply by recovering other ways human beings have organized meaning, community, authority, and ethical life.
Anything else you’d like readers to know?
I’m particularly excited to be taking on this role at the Jackson School because my own academic career has crossed disciplines and countries — much like Religious Studies at UW. These experiences have helped me see the value in asking what happens when disciplines, intellectual traditions, and cultures encounter one another.
I think Religious Studies can be an unusually generative space for those encounters at UW. I’m looking forward to meeting more of our students, faculty, and alumni and to hearing their ideas about what the next chapter of the program should look like.
