Hudson Vincent

My background is in comparative literature, and my teaching typically connects early modern English literature to other disciplines, including carceral studies, premodern critical race studies, colonial studies, visual art, music, and the history of science. I am also committed to translation studies, and I regularly work with literature in other languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek. Before joining the Davidson faculty, I taught at Harvard University as well as in prisons across Massachusetts.

I have published peer-reviewed articles on William Shakespeare, settler colonialism in early America, the English baroque, and the poetics of early modern science, as well as interviews with Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and others. 

My research and teaching have been supported by a Mellon Fellowship in English Paleography at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Villa I Tatti Graduate Fellowship for Renaissance Studies, a Derek Bok Center Pedagogy Fellowship, the Bowdoin Prize for Best Graduate Essay in the English Language at Harvard University, and the Morehead-Cain Scholarship at the University of North Carolina.

My book, The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature (Edinburgh University Press, February 2025), argues that early modern English literature was an essential part of the first global aesthetic movement—the baroque. It presents the first large-scale history of English baroque literature.

I am now at work on a second book, tentatively titled “Carceral Colonialism: Literature and Punishment in Early America.” This new project focuses on the history of prison literature in early America and the carceral strategies the English settlers used to colonize the continent and convert the Indigenous Peoples of America.

Website: www.roberthudsonvincent.com