Dr James Hodkinson

About

Dr James Hodkinson is Reader (senior Associate Professor) in German within Warwick's SMLC, where he has worked since 2006. He has taught German language, literature, intellectual history, and culture at a range of universities in the UK and Ireland since 1996 and has been a visiting scholar at Monash University, Stockholms Universitet, Sweden, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In 2023-24 he was Honorary Principal Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and from September 2024 until November 2025 he is a Leverhulme Research Fellow.

James is a specialist in German culture from the eighteenth century to the present, with particular interests in Islam, religion and (post)secular modernity, Romanticism and its legacies, and in the growing field of sound studies. He teaches a wide range of undergraduate courses, supervises research at MA, PhD and post-doctoral levels, and has held a number of key leadership and management roles in German Studies, across the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Between 2017-19 he served as Head of German Studies. He has also become a recognised practitioner, mentor and leader in public engagement, engagement-led research methodologies, and 'impact' work. He was a Foundation and later Senior Fellow of the Warwick Institute of Engagement (WIE) and from September 2025 he is WIE's Faculty Public Engagement Lead (Arts).

Leadership and Management

• WIE, Faculty Public Engagement lead, Arts (September 2025 and ongoing)
• WIE, Learning Circle 'Communities and Co-Production', Chair (2021-23)
• SMLC, Director of Recruitment and Admissions' (2020-23)
• SMLC, Head of German (2017-19).
• SMLC, Director of Widening Participation, (2018-19).
• SMLC, Director of Academic Communications, (2014-16)
• Examinations Secretary, Admissions Officer and Director of Graduate Studies in German Studies.
• External examiner in the fields of German Studies, Translation Studies (Masters level) and Comparative Literature at THREE UK universities to date.

Research interests

James has published in the following fields:

• cultural representations of Islam in Germanophone thought, scholarship, literature and visual culture, from the Enlightenment to the present;
• religion in contemporary societies and the 'postsecular' turn; religion in modern, German-speaking Europe;
• the role and representation of sound and music across modern German Culture from 1800 to the present; German Popular music; sound studies and the 'sonic turn' in the arts and humanities;
• 18th-19th century German culture; German Romanticism, its historical context, modern and postmodern receptions; constructions of gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought and literature.

Between 2010-14 James founded and managed an international research network dedicated to engaging in ongoing debates surrounding nineteenth-century cultural representations of East-West encounters: read more about the international Occident-Orient Research Network here.

In 2016 he co-founded the German Pop Music Studies network together with Dr Uwe Schütte, which was dedicated to bringing this field into the heart of teaching and research agendas in UK German Studies.

In March 2024, James was awarded a twelve-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship from September 2024 to complete work on his sole-authored book project on German-Islamic kinships.

Public Engagement

James is a practitioner, innovator, and leader in the university's culture of public engagement. He continues to work on projects that deliver demonstrable social, cultural, and educational impact, both nationally and internationally, and also seek to re-model the relationship between academia, artistic practice, and community-based research: find out more about his research and innovation projects here.

James:

• is Warwick Institute of Engagement's (WIE) Faculty Public Engagement Lead (Arts) from September 2025.
• was made first a foundation fellow (2020) and then a senior fellow (2022) in Warwick's Institute of Engagement in 2020. He chaired the Co-Producing Research and Collaborating with Communities Learning Circle, which has set up and runs the Collaboration and Co-Production funding stream within the university. In 2022 he won and WAPCE award for his work.
• has been awarded funding by the competitive Warwick Impact Fund three times since 2015, and once by Warwick's Public Engagement Fund, to investigate, design, and deliver a major public engagement programme based on his research into Islam in German and Austrian Culture, and leading to an impact case study rated 3.5-4* in the REF 2020, entitled Re-imagining Islam: From Alterity to Empathy.
• has chaired and/ or sat on the board of the Birmingham arts collective Soul City Arts since 2020. This role, especially his working relationship with creative director Mohammed Ali MBE, has helped him to deliver a range of projects reaching and benefitting diverse communities in the Midlands, nationally, and in Australia. He led a successful bid to the UKRI Enhancing Research Culture Fund to work on the Waswasa project attached to the Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022: the programme looks beyond impact to explore how research itself can be co-produced with community stakeholders.
• played a leading role in setting up the DeutschZusammen network, which is a non-hierarchical, collaborative and creative project designed to broker new relationships, new ways of working, and mutual enrichment between schoolteachers of German and colleagues teaching and researching German in Higher Education.

Research Supervision:

James Hodkinson:

• currently co-supervises (with Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning) of Annalina Benner's PhD on popular music in contemporary anglophone fiction.
• currently co-supervises of Hannah Roberts' PhD on Clara Schumann's performance and music pedagogy, together with Professors Chris Dingle and Sian Derry (BCU)
• mentored Dr Julia Hartley, Leverhulme Early Research Career Fellow, on her project on Francophone literary representations of Persia during the long nineteenth-century.
• supervised Dr Brian Haman's PhD on "Literary Representations of the Journey in German Romantic Prose".
• co-supervised Dr Julia Effertz's PhD thesis on the "Image of the Female Singer in French and German Literature around 1800" until 2006.

James welcomes interest from potential researchers seeking to work with him, either collaboratively or in a supervisory capacity.

He has examined PhDs, both nationally and internationally, at St Andrew's University, Birkbeck College, Royal Holloway, Kings College London and Monash University.

Recent publications

Full list of publications here.

• 'Families, Similarities and Multi-Faith Futures: Re-Imagining Islam and Muslims in Lessing and Novalis', in: German Life and Letters, Vol 76 (3), June 2023, 334-57. Special Edition: Imagining the Beliefs of Others in German Literature from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. by Joseph Twist and Rey Conquer.
• 'The Hafis-Goethe-Denkmal and Cultural Sounds? As artistic responses to Goethe’s Divan : between close reading and cultural politics' in: Publications of the English Goethe Society, 89 (2), January, 2021.
• Poetics Today, 41 (3), 2020, Special Edition. Postsecularisms. Edited by James Hodkinson and Silke Horstkotte.
• 'Returning Again. Resurrection Narratives and Afterlife Aesthetics in Contemporary Television Drama', in: Poetics Today, 41 (3), 2020, 395-416.
• German in the World. The National, Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, ed. by James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield (NY & Rochester: Camden House, 2020).
• 'Towards a Socially Engaged Academy: Islam in German History and Its Relevance for Nonacademic Publics' in: German in the World. The National, Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, ed. by James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield (NY & Rochester: Camden House, 2020), pp. 194-218.
• 'Trasnnationalizing Faith. Re-Imagining Islam in German Culture' in: B. Schofield and R. Braun (eds), Transnational German Studies (Liverpool: ULP, 2020), pp. 193-212,
• 'Doing German Differently: New Research Practices and Partnerships around the UK,' co-authored with Rebecca Braun, Benedict Schofield and others, in: German Life and Letters, 71(3), July 2018, 374-94.
• 'Playing the Gallery: Time, Space and the Digital in Brian Eno’s Recent Installation Music' in: Oxford German Studies, 46 (3), 2017. Special Edition: 'Eigenzeit' and The Longing for Time in Contemporary Film, Literature and Art, ed. Anne Fuchs and Ines Detmers, 315-328.
• 'Transnational encounters in the Maghreb: Para-colonial writing in the travelogues of German soldiers in colonial Algiers, 1830-1890'. In: Studies in Travel Writing, 21:3, 2017. ed Patrick Crowley, 1-16.

Professional Associations

• Soul City Arts, Birmingham
• Internationale Novalis Gesellschaft
• German Studies Association of America
• Association of German Studies, GB.
• German Studies Association of Ireland

Qualifications

• PGCE (Liverpool) with distinction in pedagogical theory: 2002
• PhD (Trinity College Dublin): 2001
• BA (Dunelm) First class Honours: 1996