Peter Hawkins
Professor of religion and literature
Peter S. Hawkins, Professor of Religion and Literature.
Professor Hawkins’s work has long centered on Dante, most recently in Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (winner of a 2001 AAR Book Prize), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2001), coedited with Rachel Jacoff, and Dante: A Brief History (2006). The poet features as well in his expansion of his 2007 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching in Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). His research in the history of biblical reception has led to three coedited volumes to which he also contributed essays: Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs (2006), Medieval Readings of Romans (2007), and From the Margins 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 (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. From 2000 to 2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University. While at BU he won the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has served on the editorial boards of PMLA and Christianity and Literature and on the selection committees of both the Luce Fellows in Theology and the Dante Society of America. In spring 2012 he was a research fellow in Italy at the Centro Studi Ligure in Bogliasco (Genova), and a senior visiting professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has chapters forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Psalms and in a Cambridge University Press volume, Dante in Context. Professor Hawkins is a fellow of Jonathan Edwards College and also teaches regularly in the Directed Studies Program in Yale College. B.A. University of Wisconsin at Madison; M.Div. Union Theological Seminary; Ph.D. Yale University.
Updated July 2012