David Hawkes

In 2002 a lengthy correspondence in The Nation followed Hawkes' critical review essay on Stephen J. Gould's final book. In 2012 a special issue of the journal Early Modern Culture was devoted to a discussion of his anti-materialist literary theory. In 2013 his 20,000-word article on Recent Studies in the English Renaissance for the journal Studies in English Literature angered critics with remarks on the contemporary economy that many found irrelevant to the topic. Hawkes' work generally explores the connections between economics, literature and philosophy from an anti-capitalist perspective. His later work specifically addresses the cultural and ethical implications of usury and financial derivatives.

Hawkes attended Stanwell Comprehensive School near Cardiff, Wales. He took his B.A. at Oxford University, and his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. At Oxford, Hawkes was a student of the left-wing literary critic Terry Eagleton and at Columbia of Edward Said. Hawkes was associate professor of English at Lehigh University, has held visiting appointments at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and teaches each summer at North China Electric Power University, Beijing. He has received such awards as a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2002–03), and the William Ringler Fellowship at the Huntington Library (2006).

David Hawkes (b 1964; Wales) is a Professor of English at Arizona State University, Tempe, in the U.S. state of Arizona. He is the author of six books and the editor of three. He has published over one hundred articles and reviews in such journals as The Nation, In These Times, Cabinet, Bad Subjects, the Journal of the History of Ideas, ELH, ELR, Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, Clio and many other academic and popular publications. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. He currently lives in Phoenix AZ, Philadelphia PA, and Istanbul, Turkey.

Hawkes' monographs are: Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580-1680 (Palgrave 2001), Ideology (Routledge 2003), The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (Palgrave 2007), John Milton: A Hero of Our Time (Counterpoint 2010), The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England (Palgrave 2011), and Shakespeare and Economic Criticism (Bloomsbury 2015). He has edited John Milton's Paradise Lost (Barnes and Noble 2004) and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (Barnes and Noble 2005).