Fall 2024 Office Hours
Tuesdays 3:30-4:30pm in-person
By Appointment remote
Biography
Steven Hutchinson received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, and works primarily on early modern Spain, the Mediterranean, and Africa. He is author of Cervantine Journeys, which delves into the relations between narrative and travel, and Economía ética en Cervantes, which posits the notion of ethical economy in human relations through systems of value, ‘debts’ and ‘payments’. His book Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Manchester University Press, 2020) explores practices of slavery, religious conversion, and related themes as narrated in various languages and a wide range of discursive genres, factual and fictive. He is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on aurality in early modern poetry in which he investigates the theory of poetic rhythm. Currently he is working on two book projects: (1) Leo Africanus and His Altered Legacy, and (2) Genealogies of Ottoman Algiers: Enigma and Anomaly.
He has also published widely in journals and edited volumes on poetics, rhetoric, genre, emotion, ideology, gender, ethnicity, race, eroticism, religion, conversion, captivity, martyrdom, modes of mutual understanding, etc. Many of these topics enter into the courses he teaches, which, among other subjects, deal with literary genres, literary and cultural theory, the early modern Mediterranean world, alterities, travel literature, and the works of writers including Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana. From 2016-2018 he was president of the Cervantes Society of America. He has been invited to speak at many universities in the United States and in numerous countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. His awards include a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Madrid and fellowships at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, including a Senior Fellowship (2016-2020).
Education
PhD, University of Chicago