Peter Hawkins
Professor of religion and literature
Professor Hawkins's work has long centered on Dante, most recently in Dante: A Brief History (2006), Dante's Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (winner of a 2001 AAR Book Prize), and The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections, co-edited with Rachel Jacoff. Most recently he published an expansion of his 2007 Beecher Lectures on Preaching in Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). His research in the history of biblical reception has produced three co-edited volumes, Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Song (2006); Medieval Readings of Romans (2007); and From the Margin I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and their Afterlives (2009); together with Paula Carlson he has edited the Augsburg Fortress four-volume series, Listening for God: Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith. He has also written on twentieth-century fiction (The Language of Grace), utopia (Getting Nowhere), and the language of ineffability (Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett). Professor Hawkins’s essays have dealt with such topics as memory and memorials, televangelism, scriptural interpretation, and preaching. He writes regularly for The Christian Century’s “Living by the Word” column. From 2000–2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University. While at BU he won the Metcalf Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He has served on the editorial boards of PMLA and Christianity and Literature and is currently on the selection committee for the Luce Fellows in Theology. B.A., University of Wisconsin at Madison; M.Div., Union Theological Seminary; Ph.D., Yale University.