Christine Hoffmann

Associate Professor

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Hoffmann specializes in early modern English Literature and the rhetoric and ethics of social media. She is the author of Stupid Humanism: Folly as Competence in Early Modern and Twenty-First-Century Culture. Her essays have appeared in edited collections and in such journals as PMLA, SubStance, College Literature and Rhizomes. Drawing comparisons between the Renaissance period and the twenty-first century has allowed her to write and publish work that puts together Milton and memes; sonnets and spam; Spenser and gifs; Shakespearean comedy and negative campaigning; early modern melancholy and 21st-century public shaming. She is currently researching Working the Room, a formalist analysis of the escape room, the smart room, the green room, and the banishment room, along with their precedents in the early modern era.

Specializations

Early Modern British Literature

Ecocriticism & Environmental writing

Selected Publications:

Stupid Humanism: Folly as Competence in Early Modern and Twenty-First-Century Culture.
“A Bird of My Tongue, A Beast of Yours: Much Ado’s Anxious Transformations.” Forthcoming in New Directions in Much Ado About Nothing, William Rampone & Nicholas Utzig, eds. Lexington Books, 2024.
“Early Modern Special Snowflakes.” Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century, Shelley Ingram and Willow Mullins, editors, UP of Mississippi, 2023.
“Shakespeare’s Spam Poethics.” SubStance, Volume 50, Number 1, 2021 (Issue 154), pp. 140-161.
“Folly 2012! The Campaign for Foolishness in 21st-Century Politics.” PMLA 130.2 (2015): 299-314.
“Past the Endurance of a Block’: Much Ado About Planking.” Object Oriented Environs. Punctum books, 2015.
“Middling Through Somehow: Queer Temporality and the Disaster Meme.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 26 (2014).
“Cheaters, Saints, and Simultaneous Narrative: Early- and Postmodern Lessons from Thomas More’s The History of Richard III.” College Literature 40.1 (2013): 96-120.
"Go Make Yourself Un-Useful." TECHStyle. 27 February 2013.
“Teaching, Speaking, Living the Rhetoric of Struggle: Elizabeth Cary’s School of Wisdom.” CEA Critic 74.2 (2012): 39-59.
"Who’s Chasing Whom? Utility, Metamorphosis & the Humanities." TECHStyle. 5 November 2012.
"The Rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street." TECHStyle. 26 November 2011.
“Biting More than ‘We’ can Chew: the Royal Appetite in Richard II and 1 & 2 Henry IV.” Papers on Language and Literature 45.4 (2009): 358-385.
“Happiness is a Warm Scythe: the Evolution of Villainy and Weaponry in the Buffyverse.” Slayage: the Online International Journal of Buffy Studies 27 (2009).