College of Humanities People

Hannibal Hamlin, Associate Professor

Department of English: http://english.osu.edu/

Office Information
501 Denney Hall, 164 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, OH, 43210
Email: hamlin.22@osu.edu
Phone: 614-292-6869
Fax: 614-292-7816

Office Hours:
WI 2011, MW 11:30-1, or by appointment.

Education:
Hannibal Hamlin (B.A., B.Ed., and M.A., Toronto; Ph.D., Yale).

General Background:
Having grown up largely in Canada, I worked for many years as a singer, specializing in Early Music, and later as a high school teacher, also serving on the Executive of the Toronto Council of Teachers of English, before returning to academia. My scholarly interests focus on Renaissance literature and culture, especially Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, the Bible as/and/in literature, metrical psalms, and lyric poetry. Allusion (biblical and poetic) is also a topic explored in much of my work. I have written Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004) and articles and reviews in Renaissance Quarterly, Spenser Studies, The Sidney Journal, The John Donne Journal, The Yale Review, The Spenser Review, and Early Modern Literary Studies. I also have book chapters in Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same (Beinecke Library, Yale), The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature (Delaware), The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and English Literature, and Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (Notre Dame), as well as others forthcoming in Literary Raleigh (Manchester), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern England (Ashgate), The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (Wiley-Blackwell's), and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (3rd ed.). With Margaret Hannay, Michael Brennan, and Noel Kinnamon, I edited The Sidney Psalter: Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009). I guest edited a forum on Poetry and Devotion for Religion & Literature 42:3 (Spring-Summer 2011).

I've served as discipline representative for English literature (2003-2006) on the Council of the Renaissance Society of America and as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Spenser Society, and I am Editor of Reformation. In 2004 I was given the Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2004), The Ohio State University, Mansfield, and my fellowships include a Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library (2002), a National Humanities Center Fellowship (2007-2008, declined), an NEH Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2007-2008), and a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the ACLS (2008-2009).

The 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011 has been the focus of much recent work: editing, with Norman W. Jones, and contributing to The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences (Cambridge); organizing The King James Bible and its Cultural Afterlife, a major conference at OSU (May 5-7, 2011); and curating an exhibition, Manifold Greatness, jointly mounted by the Folger and Bodleian Libraries and the Harry Ransom Center (Texas). The contents of this exhibition will also travel to 40 libraries across the country on a panel display funded by a Chairman's Special Award from the NEH. A joint Bodleian-Folger book, Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible, in which I've written on the King James Bible in America and the Style of the King James Bible, has been published as a companion to the exhibition. I have also co-written and edited a permanent educational website for the exhibition, Manifold Greatness, also funded by the NEH award.

My current projects include a book on Shakespeare and the Bible, under contract with Oxford University Press, and an edition of early modern English Psalms translations (Tudor & Stuart Translations, Modern Humanities Research Association).

The following (just suggestions, not an exhaustive list) are topics I could easily supervise for independent studies or senior theses -- my approval is still required!):

Shakespeare – many topics, incl. S. and the Bible, or religion; and genre, e.g., Tragedy, Romance; on Film; adaptations (dramatic, filmic, novelistic, poetic)
John Donne – sacred and secular; and the metaphysical lyric; religion; sermons and devotions
John Milton – many topics, incl. Bible and religion, sacred and secular, genre, life and art
Bible as/in Lit – literary approaches to, analyses of; Bible translation; biblical paraphrase and adaptation (from Renaissance to modern; metrical Psalms; Bible films; Passion narratives and meditations)
Allusion – esp. biblical, in English poetry (biblical allusion in lyric from Wyatt, Donne, Herbert to Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, beyond); Shakespeare and allusion; Classical allusion in Renaissance literature
Music and Poetry – Renaissance song (Wyatt, Campion Dowland, madrigals and motets); songs on stage in Shakespeare and others; songs and song cycles from Renaissance to Modern (e.g., settings of Shakespeare and Renaissance poets; settings by Finzi, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Ives, Barber, Bernstein); masques from Cornysh to Jonson to Purcell
Pastoral – versions of pastoral from Theocritus to Brokeback Mountain (via Virgil, the Renaissance, Pope, Crabbe, and Grey, Wordsworth and the Romantics, Hardy); Renaissance pastoral (Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton); anti-pastoral; pastoral elegy from the Greeks to Yeats and Auden.

Renaissance
Bible and Literature