
Professor Kate Hodgkin
Director
Director of Impact & Innovation, ACI
, School of Arts and Creative Industries
Kate Hodgkin is Professor of Cultural History and UEL Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. Her research focuses on the culture of early modern England, and on memory studies.
Areas Of Interest
- History of madness and melancholia
- Early modern subjectivity
- Memory and the self
OVERVIEW
I am an active researcher and a committed teacher. Having taken a BA in History, an MA in English Renaissance Literature, and a PhD on autobiographical writing, my approach to both research and teaching is interdisciplinary, and I enjoy teaching on both History and English programmes at UEL.
I am currently working on early modern memory cultures, including nostalgia, time, and space, and writing a general overview of the figure of the witch.
CURRENT RESEARCH
My research focuses on the cultural history of seventeenth-century England, with particular interests in the following areas:
- History of madness and melancholia; madness and gender; madness in autobiographical writing
- Early modern subjectivity; memory and the self, especially in relation to self-writing
- Early modern witchcraft, with particular reference to historiography and the cultural meanings of witchcraft in later periods, including witchcraft and psychoanalysis
I also have a broad interest in work relating to history and memory, the history of the emotions, and history and psychoanalysis. I have published and edited work in all these areas.
As UEL Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership between UEL, Birkbeck University of London and Queen Mary University of London, I am one of the organisers of the international conference 'Radical Histories/ Histories of Radicalism', held in London, June 30-July 3 2016.
I am a convenor of two seminars at the Institute of Historical Research: 'Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800' and 'Psychoanalysis and History'.
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Single-authored books
- Katharine Hodgkin, Witches, Reaktion Publishers (forthcoming 2017)
- Katharine Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert, Ashgate 2010. Manuscript edition with introductory monograph (dual text in original and modernised transcripts, with introduction of approx. 45,000 words)
- Katharine Hodgkin, Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography, Palgrave 2006. Monograph.
Edited books
- Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O'Callaghan and S. J. Wiseman (eds), Reading the Early Modern Dream: the terrors of the night, Routledge 2007
- Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: the politics of memory, Routledge 2003; reprinted as Memory, History, Nation: contested pasts, Transaction Publishers 2005
- Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (eds), Regimes of Memory, Routledge 2003; reprinted as Memory Cultures: memory, subjectivity and recognition, Transaction Publishers 2005
Journal articles
- 'The place of memory in early modern studies', introduction (co-authored) to Memory Studies special issue 'Memory and the Early Modern', forthcoming January 2018 (issue 11.1)
- 'Witches and demons in the English village: witchcraft in women's detective fiction between the wars', Journal of Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, September 2017 (forthcoming)
- 'Childhood and Loss in Early Modern Life Writings', Parergon special issue 'Approaches to Early Modern Nostalgia', September 2016
- 'Religion and the body in seventeenth-century women's melancholy', Studies in the Literary Imagination, 44.2 2011 (2013), 1-21
- 'The Labyrinth and the Pit' History Workshop Journal 51, 2001
- 'Thomas Whythorne and the Problems of Mastery', History Workshop Journal 29, 1990
- 'Lady Anne Clifford: a study of class and gender in the seventeenth century', History Workshop Journal 19, 1985
Chapters in edited books
- 'Time and Space', in A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age, Alessandro Arcangeli and Marek Tamm (eds), Bloomsbury (forthcoming 2017)
- 'Abject hypocrisy: gender and the legibility of the body in early modern religious writing', in Lucia Nigri and Naya Tsentorou (eds), Hypocrisy in the Early Modern Period, Ashgate (forthcoming 2017)
- 'Autobiographical Writings', in Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox (eds), Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Religion, Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2017)
- 'Women, Memory and Family History in Seventeenth-Century England', in Erika Kuijpers and Judith Pollmann (eds), Memory Before Modernity: memory cultures in early modern Europe, Brill 2013
- 'Elizabeth Isham's Everlasting Library: memory and self in early modern autobiography', in Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (eds), History and Psyche: culture, psychoanalysis and the past, Palgrave 2012
- 'Dreaming Meanings: some early modern dream thoughts', in Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O'Callaghan and Susan Wiseman eds, Reading the Early Modern Dream: the terrors of the night, Routledge 2007
- 'Gender, Mind and Body: feminism and psychoanalysis', in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), The Palgrave Guide to Witchcraft Studies, Palgrave 2007
- 'The Witch, the Puritan and the Prophet: some seventeenth-century issues', in Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (eds), Metahistory and Metanarrative in Contemporary Women's Writing, Palgrave 2007
- 'Reasoning with Unreason: witchcraft, visions and madness in seventeenth-century England', in Stuart Clark (ed), Languages of Witchcraft, Macmillan 2000
- 'Dionys Fitzherbert and the Anatomy of Madness', in Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, Suzanne Trill (eds), Voicing Women: gender and sexuality in early modern writing, Keele UP 1996
- 'Conceits of Mind, Conceits of Body: Dionys Fitzherbert and the discourses of religion and madness', in Stanley Porter (ed), The Nature of Religious Language, Sheffield Academic Press 1996
FUNDING
AHRC network 'Memory and Community in Early Modern Britain', 2012-2014, £30,000 (fec).
This project, run under the 'Connected Communities' highlight notice, held a series of symposia addressing theoretical and methodological issues, memory practices, life writing, and contemporary representations of the early modern. I was Principal Investigator; the co-investigator was Ramona Wray, Queen's University Belfast, and other members of the steering group were Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle University, and Elspeth Graham, Liverpool John Moores University. We are currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Memory Studies which will be based on papers given in the course of the project (forthcoming 2018).
MODULES
I currently teach on the BA History degree, where I contribute to modules on early modern history and on the history of witchcraft, and on the BA English degree, where I teach a module on early modern literature (1540-1680). I also teach on the MA Heritage Studies, and supervise a number of PhD students. I am happy to supervise in any of my areas of interest (see Research).