Rhema Hokama is assistant professor of English literature at the University of Washington, and was previously associate professor of English at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), a new university established with MIT. At SUTD, Rhema helped to establish a new minor program in the digital humanities, which currently enrolls 100 undergraduate students. She is the author of Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2023), which argues that Renaissance poetic responses to the English Reformation imagined capacious Protestant identities—ones that included unconventional and nonheteronormative desires within the broad tent of Reformed religion.

Rhema’s time in Asia shaped her newer research interests, which center on the development of Protestantism within the contexts of the global Renaissance. At the Simpson Center, Rhema will conduct research toward her second book project, which explores how early modern global exchange with Asia, the Near East, and the Atlantic world shaped European discourse about national, political, and religious inclusion in early modern England and the Dutch Republic.