Podcast Transcript | Dr. Rhema Hokama: What is Religious Studies at UW?

Danny Hoffman:

Hey, hello everyone. My name is Danny Hoffman. I am the director of the Henry M Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. For this 2025 26 school year, it is also my honor to serve as the Interim Director of the Religious Studies program at the UW this recording is the third in a series of short interviews with religious studies scholars from across the University of Washington. Our goal in this series is twofold. First is to address the question of what religious studies is and what it can be as a field of academic inquiry. The second is to introduce to a wider audience to the incredible depth and breadth of research, writing, artistic practice, inquiry and experimentation that falls under the umbrella of Religious Studies here at the UW. This is an exciting, challenging and often unexpected area of knowledge production, and it’s one that touches all corners of our campus. So thank you in advance for your interest and for spending this time with us now, as always when we record podcasts and interviews here in the Jackson School, I would just remind you that we record these in the attic studio of historic Thompson Hall on the UW campus, so you may very well hear the sounds of a vibrant campus or a creaky old building in the background and that’s why. Now I’m very pleased and excited to welcome for this conversation, Dr Rhema. Hokama. Rhema is a scholar of early modern English literary and religious history. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University, and is an assistant professor in English Literature here at the UW. Previously, she was an associate professor of English literature at Singapore University of Technology and design (SUTD), so Rema, first of all, welcome. So glad you’re here.

Rhema Hokama:

Thank you so much. Danny, I’m really happy to speak with you today. Thanks for inviting me.

Danny Hoffman:

Of course, no, they’ve been looking forward to this. And as you know, we’ve had a great time recording these conversations to give people a sense of just some of the spectacular scholarship that happens here at the at the UW, under the large umbrella of Religious Studies, and I’m excited to be able to explore that a little with you.

Rhema Hokama:

So am I, thank you. It’s really exciting to be a part of the Jackson school and to kind of learn from everyone across time periods and places and geographical locales, especially as my research moves in a global direction. So I’m excited to be here. Thank you.

Danny Hoffman:

Great, excellent. And that’s, now, that’s an important piece of what I was hoping to talk to you about today. So I wonder if you could introduce people a little bit more to your scholarship, what you’re working on right now, and we’ll unpack a little bit more some of the valences, the religious studies, valences, and some of the global perspectives that you work on. But I wonder if you could, how do you introduce people to your scholarship right now?

Rhema Hokama:

Yeah, thanks so much. Danny, so I’m a scholar of early modern religion, and I think about that question through the literary tradition of the time period that I look at, which is Shakespeare’s Renaissance England. And I’m currently working on my second book project, which really came about during my time teaching and living in Southeast Asia and Singapore for almost a decade. And my current research essentially asks what happened when Europeans realized, I mean, they always knew this, but truly understood and realized that Christianity, in their own religion, was just one of many religions among many. And so I look at writers like Shakespeare and John Milton. Milton was sort of the other major, big Renaissance writer apart from Shakespeare. He’s number two. But you know, he’s not. He doesn’t have that kind of household name knowledge that everyone attributes to Shakespeare. But he wrote this major, incredibly beautiful long poem called Paradise Lost. And it’s his retelling of the story of the fall of Genesis, Adam and Eve’s fall. And I look at these writers like Shakespeare and Milton in order to see how they responded to encounters with Islam, the Turks of the Ottoman world, to Chinese traditional religions, Southeast Asian traditional religions, and also indigenous religions of the Americas. And I look at how those global encounters reshaped ideas about toleration and universal rights, and that’s something I’m working on now and so basically, I’m interested in this moment in human history, or European history, which is special, because I think that’s when theology truly becomes global for the first time. And so at the center of everything that I’m currently working on in this new book project is this question, which is, you know, what do we owe to people who don’t share our religion? And it’s a question that I feel, you know, I was out of the United States Danny for almost a decade, and I’m coming, I came back last year to the University of Washington to take this position, and I’m loving, you know, getting to meet everyone and getting to know my colleagues here in the Jackson School, in the English department. But I also came back in January of last year, right when Trump was starting his second presidency. And it feels like that question of what do we owe to people who don’t share our cultural backgrounds and our religions is really more relevant than ever before today. And you know, my research shows that early modern writers, they were already asking that question in a wide variety of different ways in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. And they were using theology, and they were writing poetry, they were writing plays. They were reading travel writing and thinking about travel in order to answer that question for themselves. So I guess you can say, you know, if I were introducing myself really broadly, that my work really does sit at the intersection of theology of literature and also the history of Global Exchange. And I guess you could say that I really study the history of ideas and how new knowledge was formed and produced in the European intellectual tradition. And I do that through the study of literature. And I think literature is too often overlooked in how we think about the history of ideas and the history of knowledge formation. So that’s kind of like what I do, in a nutshell, and some of my current work thinking about comparative religion and global history of ideas.

Danny Hoffman:

No, that’s fantastic. That’s, there’s so much I want to explore with you in that. And I’m glad that you started with your physical location, right? That this is a project that emerged out of your experience of teaching, living, doing research in Southeast Asia, right? Because it doesn’t seem like, I mean, I would imagine, for many people who are not specialists in the field, it doesn’t seem like an obvious place, one would start looking at their early, modern English literary tradition, right? So, could you say just a little bit more about kind of the origins of the project, like, what was it about those experiences that said this is really the way to think about, you know, how people experience religion, how they experience the literary traditions? You know that? Where did that? Where did that spark come from?

Rhema Hokama:

Yeah, so, everything that I’ve said so far is sort of like how Singapore and living outside of the context of the Anglo American world profoundly shaped my thinking about these. My field is an old field. It’s, you know, Shakespeare’s time period, it’s incredibly a canonical set of texts. And to have this extraordinary opportunity to spend almost a decade teaching as faculty in my first position in Singapore before coming to UW was transformative. It helped me see this really old canon in totally new light, and it helped me see things in that archive of text, so to speak, that were always kind of there early modern people like Shakespeare and those living in his time were always interested in the non-Christian world. But it’s easy to kind of miss that when you don’t have those, that particular orientation, and the set of you know when you don’t have enough information yourself about those traditions and those places and you can’t but help see your texts differently when you’re living outside of the place that produced those texts, and Singapore itself was, I think, key to this project. And like you say, place really shaped my way into this project. Singapore is a hugely religiously diverse society, and I taught students. I taught at a public institution that was actually relatively new, less than 20 years old, and it was a kind of like UW, a very stem centric institution, and it was founded by MIT. And my students, some of them were Singaporean, but Singapore is very internationally oriented. It was, you know, around 30% of my students were international students, and I taught students from all over  Asia, Pacific, world, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore itself as a country is, it is a country of many religions. So my students were Buddhist, they were Muslim, they were Hindu, and many were Catholic or Protestant, but they come to those traditions in ways that are in many ways culturally different from the Anglo American Christian communities that we know as Americans here in the United States well, and all of these people are living side by side. And so teaching early modern European texts there made me realize that oftentimes the questions that we ask and foreground in our own early modernist literature classrooms can actually feel kind of provincial, and that’s a good thing to have your parameters, you know, reimagined. And so Singapore did that for me, and Singapore itself has been since Shakespeare’s time period in the early modern world, a maritime port city state and the high seas of Southeast Asia really were a kind of geographical nexus for global exchange. The spice trade was a source of extraordinary wealth for Mariners and travelers and adventurers and even pirates who were willing to undertake these difficult maritime journeys to Southeast Asia and Singapore. The contemporary Singapore that we know today inherits that tradition, which is a centuries old tradition that goes back to the heart of the Reformation and Renaissance world so it was on a personal level, as a human being, a fascinating place to live. And, you know, we all bring to bear our personal experiences, from our lives into our research. And so that’s a little bit of how this project came to be.

Danny Hoffman:

Yeah, that’s great. And to me, that it so perfectly epitomizes what I think a lot of us who are affiliated with religious studies here, because it, you know, its institutional home is the Jackson school, right? So we are, we’re kind of led to thinking about how, you know, religious studies as a truly global field, right? And also one that spans all kinds of different time, dimensions. And I think your work really captures that in a very beautiful way. And the way that you’ve described it is, I think, quite evocative of the productive ways in which you can look at these global connections, you know, through the lens of literature, through the lens of religion, and see, the connections that have always been there, but have tended to be invisible by the way that we construct our academic fields. So I guess part of what that leads me to kind of wonder about with you is, how do students respond when you take them through this kind of journey that you’ve made? Right? Because, you know, I know this is part of your teaching as well as your research and you referenced that, you know, you came to the UW at a very particular moment, right where religion in public life is top of mind for a lot of us. How do we address that? How do we think about it? And here you’re bringing this incredible experience, but one that’s probably fairly challenging for a lot of students, because they haven’t thought of because they haven’t thought about this in in the way that you’re presenting it to them. So how does that work in the classroom? Like, where do you, how do you see students willing to kind of go there with you? Do they get excited by this? Are they resistant to it?

Rhema Hokama:

Oh, that’s interesting. I will. I guess I’ll talk about both of my sets of students, my Singaporean ones. I guess they weren’t all Singaporean, but my students in Singapore, and then my current students here at UW, and I have to say, I think that, you know, 18 year olds, 22 year olds everywhere in the world, they all have the same kinds of questions, and they’re all, you know, they’re excited about the texts that we read. And what’s interesting is that, you know, even though Shakespeare and Milton, they’re writing centuries before our own time, some of the larger questions that they raise, that these texts raise in extraordinarily beautiful ways, they cut to the heart of the human condition. And I think that our students, my students, both, you know, in my last institution, and here at the UW, they understand that immediately. So I’ve actually, I’ve not encountered from my students at either of my institutions this kind of resistance to religion, or this view that religion is not important. And I think partly it has to do with the way in which I, you know, set up our exploration of religion, that when you think about you know, the further you go back in human history, everything you know, all literature, all history of ideas, all philosophy, even political economy. It’s really inseparable from religious history and theological exploration. And I think our students understand that and so, and they also understand that the kinds of paradigms that we bring to bear that shape religious discourse in our own time, they don’t always, you know, in the broad sense, you can apply them to the earlier time periods. And indeed, we should, because we should try to draw those culture through lines between our historical archives and our own time, but they can’t really be mapped on one to one in the granular level. They just don’t always work. And when you come to the archive, you sit with these texts and you understand the historical context in which these texts are being written, produced, how they change even by decade. In response to, you know, religious tensions, religious wars within the European context, the rise of maritime travel and exchange, you begin to realize that one these Renaissance writers, they actually knew more about the non-Christian world than we sometimes give them credit for. They’re surprisingly open to what those non-Christian religions and non-Christian peoples, you know? They’re curious, right? They want to know about the world that really is at the periphery of, you know, European knowledge of the world. And when students understand that these writers are sometimes operating under different assumptions and paradigms, I think that they can, they themselves, can be generous toward our text and the time periods that we’re looking at. So I think my students respond well, and they, I learned from them, and they inspire me, and they remind me, you know, particularly when I teach the gen ed classes here, the 200 level classes at UW DUB. UW is such a big computer science school, I sometimes feel like we’re, you know, token humanists and social scientists that are attached to a big medical school. And that was absolutely true. My last job as well, most of my students were computer scientists. And you have to ask yourself, you know, why do these texts? Who are, you know, texts that are very, very old matter for 18-year-olds now who aren’t English majors, and it helps keep me on my toes and keeps me fresh as well. So no, I love ours. I love our students. I don’t think that they’re, I don’t think that they’re suspicious of the texts that I teach.

Danny Hoffman:

That’s great. And actually, I mean, it’s, it’s so interesting because you, I mean your scholarship, in some ways, harkens back to the origins of the Religious Studies program at UW right, which came out of the of literature and comparative literature studies. And so, I think one of the challenges of this program from, you know, which is a, as you said, at an institution, a big state institution, that is heavily stem focused, right? You know, for 50 years, one of the exciting challenges and spaces of possibility for this field at this university is to introduce students, you know, from a wide variety of perspectives, you know, some of whom certainly come in because they want to be you know, study English literature or literature in other languages, other fields, but oftentimes, because this is just something that they have sparked an interest to them that’s parallel to what they imagine they want their careers to be. And we can, we can bring to them this kind of critical thinking skills about the way they encounter difference, whether it’s difference of religion or language or tradition. And so, it’s fun to see how this, you know, how your work and your teaching kind of imagines that long tradition in a new way for a new group of students. Let me kind of shift gears a little bit, if you would, because I want to, I do want to talk with you about where your work is going, but I also want to look back a little bit to some of your earlier work, because  you focused in a previous book on the period of the Renaissance, the English reformation, and some of the spaces of possibility opened in religious writings on religion in the Renaissance period. Could you just say a little bit more about what that what that first project was?

Rhema Hokama:

Yeah, so, you know, in my current work, and as we think, you know, as my work becomes more and more global, I find that my thinking moves both backward in time and forward in time. And so, I’ll talk a little bit about my how my current work really emerges from my first book, they’re actually quite different projects, but I think the core of it is the same. So, my second book, I’ll just say very briefly, it’s really a study of how early modern Europeans grappled with religious difference and religious difference on a global scale, and that the current work and I’m working on now. It argues for, you know, the ideas that we think of as Enlightenment ideas, secular ideas, you know, questions like toleration, cosmopolitan difference in even rights, before that term really, fully developed, they actually emerged earlier from the Reformation itself. The Reformation in Europe was this watershed moment in which the Protestants splintered off from the Catholic Church. And my work really does, in my first and second book, focus on Protestantism, my first book in a nationally bounded context in Shakespeare’s England, and my second work, my second book and how global Protestantism developed in the context of global exchange and in response to new knowledge that was coming back to Europe about world religions. And so, this second book tries to take the core of what I think of as being my work on Protestant theology and situating that in a in a global context. And so, in that, in the current work I’m doing, I’m looking at literature and devotional texts really as archives of how people made sense of global religious diversity. You know, before the approach that we take care of, the Jackson schools came into existence. You know, there was no comparative religious studies. There was no global religious studies, comparative theology, no ethnic studies, no anthropology. Danny, I know you were trained as an anthropologist that all of these disciplines, you know, hadn’t come into existence yet, and yet, people were already thinking through some of the core questions that we think about in our work as scholars, and so I’m interested in thinking now about how Protestants in particular, use this new knowledge about global religious diversity, not to secularize religion or to say religion’s bad or not useful, but to rethink those questions of diversity and toleration from within that theological core. And so I take some of the questions that you know are sort of hallmark questions of the Enlightenment, and I pull that conversation back earlier, that current thinking is it really did come out of the work that I did in my first book, which is what you’re asking about, Danny. And so my first book really argues that English Protestants, they develop this form of experiential religion, and it’s in doing so they really made the body and sensory experiences kind of physical site of evidentiary proof and knowledge. And so the body you know and its external behavior in the world, tears, trembling, sighs, groaning, and even you know, ordinary acts or daily acts like eating, having sex, all of this could function as evidence of salvation and to be able to determine, am I saved or not? Am I going to hell or not? That was the most important question for English Protestants who lived in Shakespeare’s time period, and that really helped explain, like, the literary obsession from the work that was being written during this time period with proof and certainty. And so, I know all of us have read Othello, but maybe not since, like middle school or high school. Othello is a, you know, he’s a North African moor. He’s originally culturally Muslim. He gets converted to Christianity, and he is this impeccably successful military general, and he’s hired by the Venetian state, a Christian Catholic country, in order to wage wars for them against the Ottoman Turks. And he does that incredibly well, but his insistence on, you know, ocular proof, wanting to know how he can externally validate what lies within these invisible truths that we can’t see otherwise. When he brings that to bear in his marriage to a white Christian woman named Desdemona, that’s when things go awry. And I’m basically arguing that early modern Protestants, because of this watershed moment of the Reformation, and how the literary tradition in Shakespeare’s time period responded to that shift and change, the body became this new site of experience. It also became a new site of knowledge. In the Reformation, when Protestants rejected images and the ritual mediation that shaped the former Catholic worship practices that really forced them to relocate religious certainty in bodily experience. And the literary tradition that grew up around that absolutely is alert to that, in response to that. And so certainty, devotional certainty, you know, became something that was felt, it was sense, it was tested. You could feel that in your body. You could witness that. In the world, and it produced, you know, what I can describe as a kind of vernacular empiricism, right? People were trying to think through, in an era before the scientific method, how you can ascertain and know things. And Othello, in the case of Shakespeare’s play, he takes, really, this textbook Protestant approach to knowing through bodily sensation, and he really applies it incredibly disastrously in the context of his marriage. And I think you know Shakespeare, he’s pushing back against this development that everyone was alert to, both in religious life, but also in private life, domestic life, erotic life. And again, it shows how religious, how religious developments in my time period that I study. But really all time periods that we all study, Danny at the Jackson School, shapes every domain of our life. And you can’t really have that separation between religion and the secular, they’re all one thing.

Danny Hoffman:

Yeah, no, thank you for walking us through that. And I think you’re right. You can, it’s interesting to think about the arc of your intellectual career, right from the first project to the second, and you can sort of see how the questions begin to feed on each other, and also just how incredibly productive it is to have the religious studies framework right, and to think about faith and theology, practices and difference, how they kind of manifest under this rubric. And maybe that’s the question that I would be interested to hear you speak a little bit more to, I mean, you’ve talked about how in your teaching, as well as in your research, you know, people engage with this as a project of religious studies, but I wonder if you could say a little bit more about like, why is, I mean, one could just say, I’m a literature scholar. And yes, religion is a kind of focus of, you know, some of the writing, it’s preoccupation in the archives. But what does it mean to actually think of what you’re doing as fitting into this interdisciplinary field of Religious Studies? Like, what? What does that? Does that shift at all? How you think about, talk about, who you engage with, who you want to hear your work, or what’s the, what is framing this as a project of Religious Studies in addition to literary studies, or as a like, what is? What does that do?

Rhema Hokama:

I guess I do see myself. I mean, I am a scholar of religion, and that religion is the central through line that links my first book, which is, like I said, very nationally bounded, focused on incredibly canonical writers and poets. And my second book, which is far more ambitious in scope, but you know, the core question that really animates both of those books, my first and my second one is, you know, how big is that tent of Protestantism? The core of it, geographically and intellectually and theologically, emanates from Shakespeare’s English world, and the, you know, the nationally bounded variety of Protestantism that emerges in that context. And how broad does that tent go in the context in the first book of my, you know of thinking about what kinds of behaviors, forms of knowledge production, of knowledge can fall within that, that broad tent right of theologically driven post reformation knowledge production. And then you know, the second one is, how can you think about knowledge production on a global scale? Right? And how do these encounters with the non-Christian, non-European, non-European and non-Christian world shape some of the core questions that we think of as emerging solely within European intellectual discourse, and yet you really can’t think of those questions and those conversations happening outside of the context of global, so I am a religious studies scholar. I don’t always frame my work that way, in part because, you know, like I said earlier, the earlier you go back in time, religion really is political economy. It’s political thought, it’s intellectual history of ideas. It’s literature. It is public sermons, but those sermons are also a form of community building, right? They shape the very structures of the communities that Shakespeare and Milton lived in. We think of religion, church and state as being these totally opposed domains, and that wasn’t the case in, for example, Milton’s England, so much of the kinds of arguments for political freedom. Um, the kinds of government, ideal governments that Milton wanted, whether it should be, you know, rule by a king or rule in a parliamentary democratic structure, fell along religious lines with Milton’s own variety of what you might call more radical Puritan religion. He and his interlocutors, you know, argued for a much more democratic parliamentarian model of governance, whereas those who were his detractors, you know, rallied behind the king at the time he was Charles the First they were they were pro monarchy. And again, these are ways in which religious studies, at least in early modern literary culture and history really, is not just religion, it’s politics, it’s history of ideas, it’s literature as well. So, you know, I think, I hope my work speaks to those who come from all of those sort of adjacent scholarly domains. So that’s, I guess that’s how I think of my work.

Danny Hoffman:

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s great. I mean, it’s an incredibly again, you know, I think, as somebody who’s not myself, a religious studies scholar originally, right? And I’m in the position I’m in that right now, mostly administratively, but it’s been fascinating for me to see just the incredible interdisciplinary breadth of this field, and you know your work captures that, I think, quite nicely and it makes sense for me, then, that you know that you can be, you know you’re in dialog with other people on this campus who do religious studies, who are working in political economy, or who are working in history, we’re working in, you know, medicine, right? There’s a kind of common ground for conversation that’s under this broad rubric of Religious Studies. And I think your point is really well taken, that there’s, there is a way to enter into that conversation from almost any starting point.

Rhema Hokama:

I think there is, yeah, and I also think that, particularly in the current work that I do, that you know, expands outward, globally into, I guess what you know in the Jackson school model, which you might call area studies, although we wouldn’t really frame it that way, in earlier time period literary studies, you really realize how little you know once your work expands outward. And so, like you say, Danny, I think you know, one of the sort of scary parts of the current work that I do, as I move toward thinking about the global, but also the exhilarating facets of that work too, is trying to find interlocutors who can meet you and complement your own areas and gaps in early kunai in your knowledge, right, that we can, and also, you know, help you as you work through the sheer variety of languages that a project like this would require. And it’s not a, you know, a set of challenges that I really ever encountered in a much in my first book, which was much more nationally bounded. You know, I worked solely within English, the English literary tradition, on very canonical writers. And so, it’s exciting to see, you know, the kinds of conversations I have that are vital conversations, as I, you know, think through the shape of my current work as well.

Danny Hoffman:

Would you say a little bit more about that? Because you talked about the origins of this project being in your experience in Southeast Asia, but you, before we started recording, you were telling me, you’ve, you know, you’ve been engaged with folks in Cape Town, right? You’re so this seems like a project that you know really is taking you around the world. It is a truly global project. So what is that, you know? Where is it taking you? And kind of, how does the conversation feel like it shifts in some of these different locations.

Rhema Hokama:

That’s interesting. So, I was saying that I was in Cape Town just over a month ago. I went to give a talk on the ways in which these Renaissance or early modern radical Protestants, they were Puritans, they were Quakers, and they were operating on both sides of the early modern Atlantic world. They were English. And then they came to the early American colonies. They took this late medieval Andalusian Arabic language fable by a late medieval polymath named Ibn Tufayl, and the fable is called  Hayy ibn Yaqzan and it’s about a it’s kind of a fun work. I’ve taught it in Singapore. Actually, maybe I’ll teach him one day here at UW, but I haven’t yet. It’s about how a boy he finds himself through unknown circumstances on this island, and he teaches himself, you know, the rudimentary foundations of science, and ultimately he leads himself to true religion. And for Ibn Tufayl, that’s Islam through nothing except for his own external sensory input and his knowledge empirically of the world and his rationality, and that leads him to God. And what’s so interesting that even though even to fail, who was culturally Muslim, understood this as a work that was meant to justify the truth of Islam, these radical Protestants then took that work, they translated it into Latin and then into English, and they saw that as a way to justify this kind of origin religion, and to use that for their own justifications of their own religion, which is radical varieties of Protestantism. And so it’s interesting that these Protestants, they were incredibly outward looking and global looking in their interest in this text, even as they were incredibly inward looking and eager to justify their own religion, in their endeavors to translate that work into Latin, into English, I found that, you know, as my own, As a human being, as a scholar, as my work takes me to different places in the world, I do find that I get a slightly different set of questions depending on where I’m presenting that work. So I presented this paper at the University of Cape Town. It’s part of an incredible organization by it’s called MEMO, and it stands for medieval and early modern orients. Orients meaning not the Far East, but the Middle East, what we now call the Middle Eastern world. And the conference was on Islam in the medieval and early modern world. And so, you know, it was a hybrid conference with scholars convening to talk about that question in a wide variety of different literary and historical contexts, and was incredibly productive as my first time in South Africa, and many of the scholars at this conference themselves were practicing Muslim. And I think that you know, to present this work in a context where people are thinking about those questions in a live way from their own religious and confessional and cultural background, was incredibly worthwhile. It certainly helped me see that text in a different way when I taught that work in Singapore, a place that has an active and robust Muslim population in Singapore, through the Malay community in Singapore, in Southeast Asia, my students came to that text with incredible recognition. You know, it was a work that, despite it being a late medieval one, they saw resonances in their own lives, and I learned from my students as well. So, it was great when I talk about my interest in Southeast Asia and East Asia, and I presented my work in the context of Asia before moving here to the United States, I find that my audiences often ask me, so you presented, you know, what Europeans think about Asian peoples, what they thought about traditional Chinese religion? What about what the Asians thought about the Europeans? Right? That there are two ways of looking at an archive, right? And just as Europeans were interested in studying the non-European world, so too, you have to wonder that maybe they, too were objects of study, right? And that opens up a whole other set of questions and vantage points and how you can enter into, you know, the archive and the work. So I have found there are some differences, yeah.

Danny Hoffman:

So where can you say a little bit about where you are in this in this project, this the second project you’ve so the first, the first project is out in book form. Sounds like this is, you’re, you’re putting together the research that you’re doing together in a second book, what can, when can we expect to see it?

Rhema Hokama:

So that’s always it. That’s the anxiety producing question, right? Yeah, this book has been underway, I have to say, for a long time, really, I think since 2019 that’s when I started working on it. Now we’re in 2026 it’s been seven years and it’s by intention that I’ve kind of held on to it. So, I was tenured on my last job. I will be tenured in the fall. Congratulations. Yeah, so nobody wants two books pre tenure, right? So, I, you know, the great thing about working on a second book is that you don’t have those temporal timeline pressures that you do in your first and so I am letting this book and the ideas kind of percolate and mature. And that’s its own pleasure, to be able to work at a slower pace and to have many, many sort of side projects kind of emerge out of it, even while the book is still the backbone of my current thinking. So, the book, you know, I’ve given myself since you asked, until 2031 if I want, I wanted to be an object in the world by then and in the meantime, I’ve taken on this edit volume project. And the title is, it’s a working title, but the broader theme is, you know, Asia and the global Renaissance world. And I mean Asia specifically as East and Southeast Asia. And I think sometimes in my field of literary studies, Asia means really the Ottoman world and the Turkish world. And I think that there’s so much more to say and do in early modern English research when it comes to European engagement with East Asia, and Southeast Asia in particular. And so I have 22 contributors who are contributing to this work. That’s something I’m actively working on right now, and I can talk on and on about this, maybe you have another question about the shape of my current work?

Danny Hoffman:

No, well, I’d love to so, first of all, I’m, yeah, you’re right. I touched the third rail of academic conversation when asking about publication dates. So that’s, but I think you’re actually you touched on something that I think is really important, which is the important, which is that the ability to really spend some time on a project, digging very deeply, to following different kinds of leads is an important part of what we do at a university in general, Right, that university scholarship and it can be incredibly generative, but it’s often very slow. It’s slow work, and it’s, it requires a lot of really dedicated time and labor. So you know it’s, it’s my hats off to you and to it’s really fun to kind of hear about it. So, could you say a little bit more about this when you’re bringing these various scholars together, right? To think about this common theme in the edited volume is that, is there a through line in religious studies for those scholars too, or is this a sort of more literary project, first and foremost, with people coming from lots of different vantage points.

Rhema Hokama:

There are a couple through lines, I think, because my own interest is, you know, the history of Protestantism. And now in global context, a lot of the people who I’ve asked to contribute, they were, and they are, you know, before I invited them, they were intellectual thought partners with me. And so a lot of them do work on the history of religious exchange, and indeed, for, you know, my time period, so many of the ideas that came back to Europe and were brought back to European writers like Shakespeare and Milton came through missions work in Southeast Asia, in China, brought back, not just by Protestants, but also by the Jesuits and by Catholics. And so even if the writers who then work with those ideas are not necessarily trying to make or think, you know, in concrete conversion or missions work terms, those ideas are filtered through that tradition in how they make their way back to England and the European context. So, a lot of them, a lot of these scholars, are, they’re both literary scholars, and some of them are working on religion as well. And again, religion defined, you know, broadly. I don’t think that all of them would frame themselves as religious studies scholars. But when we really think about it, in my field, everything’s really religion, when you push far enough, right? And certainly my own thinking is shaped by that, by that way, into the archive.

Danny Hoffman:

So last question for me is actually to put it back on you. So we framed this as a kind of, you know, what is religious studies at the UW. And I think you’ve given us an incredibly rich sense of, you know, fascinating way in which it is a very, very expansive field. But what’s the question that I didn’t ask you, that you would love to answer?

Rhema Hokama:

Oh, that’s a good question. I have so many questions. I think you know that core question that animates my current work is, you know, what do we owe to people who don’t share our religion? And it’s a question that is, it really lies at the heart of my current thinking. And so, it’s a question that really lies at the heart of, you know, everything that shapes our lives now as Americans in the year 2026 or human beings, you know, in the world. And I’m thinking in my own work about that question, in this, you know, edited volume I just mentioned with the 22 contributors and my own thinking, and I’m going on research leave, actually, for the first time in 12 years, starting in two weeks. Yeah, I’m so happy and grateful to the UW for giving me this opportunity to finally, you know, get to solidify my thinking and my learning from my nearly decade in Asia. And I want to work on, and this is going to be my own contribution to this volume, that poem by Milton called Paradise Lost that I mentioned. His long poem, which is that retelling of the story of the fall of Genesis. And I’m looking at Milton’s idea of Asia, and particularly how he understands China in that in that poem. And my aim is to argue that his poem, he doesn’t really Orientalize Asia in the way that we sometimes understand China now or East West relations now, and Milton’s taking a much more complicated way of thinking about Chinese traditional religions. And he’s staging a global history, really, of religious development. And he’s not actually teaching or portraying Christianity in opposition to the non-Christian world. But he’s thinking about how all of these different religions developed in parallel with each other, and he’s trying to find that universal through line that can be the kind of intellectual and cultural and religious baseline from which he can understand his own variety of English Protestant thought and all of these other world religions too. And in some sense, you can say that’s a tolerationist move, in the sense he’s trying to see how far can I tolerate and deviate from that that universal baseline. And yet, of course, every history and story of toleration also encode safe. It’s sort of flip side, because you’re saying I can tolerate and I can move. You know, my benchmark only so much, but I won’t tolerate everything that lies beyond right? Those are sets of questions that I think, you know, shapes my research and as I, you know, read the newspaper and live my life. I think they’re questions that kind of shape our own time as well. So I leave it at that.

Danny Hoffman:

That’s fantastic again. Couldn’t ask for a better summation of, I think, the real potential and promise in this field, and thank you for everything you’re bringing to it here at the UW and thank you for being in conversation with me today.

Rhema Hokama:

Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed our conversation.