About
My research into how Renaissance authors financed the printing of their books, published in Montaigne's Career (Oxford, 1998) led to a more general interest in how historical contexts shape forms of literary experience. Reforming French Culture argues that religious satire not only fostered the crucial reformed experience of spiritual alienation but that this experience informed the trajectory of French culture more broadly, descending to today’s republican universalism and laïcité.
Current projects include an on-going interest in the material bases of Reformation-era faith and a legal and political history of French pacification policy during the Wars of Religion. Zero Tolerance: Montaigne and the Gallican Response to Religious Difference during the French Wars of Religion focuses on policies that excluded toleration in favor of treating the conflict as a civil problem that could be addressed as a matter of jurisdiction. A fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities will support the completion of this book.
Recent and Selected Publications
The Reformation of French Culture: Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018).
Itineraries in French Renaissance Literature, co-edited with Jeff Persels and Kendall Tart (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
“Was Montaigne a Good Friend?” Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France. Eds. Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca Wilkin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 31-60.
“Littérature dissidente ou tributaire de la polémique réformée?” special issue on Expressions de la dissidence à la Renaissance, ed. Nadine Kuperty-Tsur and Mathilde Bernard, Dossiers du Grihl 2013: 1 (2013), http://dossiersgrihl.revues.org/5570
“From Communion to Communication: The Creation of a Reformation Public,” Memory and Community, ed. Cathy Yandell and David LaGuardia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 113-33.
“An Ethics for Anti-Humanism? Belief and Practice,” Anti-Humanism, ed. Jan Miernowski (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 25-48.
“Atheism as a Devotional Category,” Republics of Letters 1: 2 (2010).
http://arcade.stanford.edu/journals/rofl/node/55.
"Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne's 'Of cannibals,'" Publications of the Modern Language Association 117: 2 (2002), 207-21.
Montaigne's Career. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
>>summary and reviews of Montaigne's Career
"Hoffmann's book is a tour de force, poised delicately between literary interpretation, social and economic history, and archival scholarship."
--Ullrich Langer, South Central Review
Recent graduate courses taught:
Theory and Criticism of the Secular
Montaigne
Theories of the Object
Recent undergraduate courses taught:
The French Pacific: Artificial Paradise
France and the New World
The Algerian War in Film and Literature
A Creative-Writing Approach to Advanced Composition
What Objects Have to Tell Us
Research Areas(s) & Interests
- 16th-Century French Literature
- Object Theory
- Post-Secular Theory
- Algeria
- Pacific Studies
- Institutional and Judicial History
- Anthropological Approaches to Literature
- Reformation Studies
- Religious History
- Theories of Consciousness
- Artificial Intelligence
- Repetition
