Ryan Hackenbracht

Ryan Hackenbracht is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, specializing in British Renaissance literature (c. 1500-1700) with interdisciplinary intersections in aesthetics, religious studies, and political theory. As a fourth-generation Japanese American (Yonsei), he also explores Japanese Edo Period poetry and contemporary Japanese American literary responses to race, memory, and internment trauma.

Education:

• Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University

His research centers on Milton's works and their historical reception, exemplified by his book National Reckonings: The Last Judgment and Literature in Milton's England (Cornell University Press, 2019), which examines how apocalyptic expectations reshaped national identity in 17th-century England. His current project investigates Milton's influence on Victorian evolutionists like Darwin and Huxley. Additional scholarship spans Japanese haiku traditions and their subversive cultural functions.

Recent publications form a cohesive corpus around "Milton's Moving Bodies," analyzing movement, migration, and embodiment across global contexts including Hispanoamerican translations, Jewish readmission debates, African American literature, and disability studies. This work demonstrates how Milton's texts engage with spatial theory, political displacement, and cross-cultural transmission.