Hackenbracht specializes in English poetry, prose, and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His book, National Reckonings: The Last Judgment and Literature in Milton's England (Cornell UP, 2019), shows how Milton and other authors endeavored to bring divine judgment into the present, thereby invoking reckoning upon England and disrupting existing ideas of the nation. His interests include Milton and pop culture, Thomas Hobbes and political philosophy, book history and print culture, and religion and literature. Ryan is currently writing a book on British georgic (didactic poetry about farming) from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney.

Hackenbracht is the 2013 recipient of the Natalie Zemon Davis Award from the journal Renaissance and Reformation and the 2011 recipient of the Albert C. Labriola Award from the Milton Society of America. In the summer of 2014, he was the William A. Ringler Fellow at the Huntington Library. His work has appeared in SEL, Milton Studies, Philological Quarterly, Studies in Philology, Renaissance and Reformation, and other venues.

Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University

Areas of Specialization and Interest
Renaissance, Book History, Religion and Literature

Book

National Reckonings: The Last Judgment and Literature in Milton's England (Cornell University Press, 2019)

Articles

“Pacis Encomium: Virgil's Georgics, Humanist Allegory, and the Pacifism of Erasmus, More, and Vives.” Erasmus Studies 42.1 (2022): 5-29. 

“Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Commercial Fishing Propaganda during the Anglo-Dutch Wars.” Studies in English Literature 59.3 (2019): 485-506.

"Galactic Milton: Angelic Robots and the Fall into Barbarism in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series." Milton Studies 57 (2016): 293-321.

"Milton and the Parable of the Talents: Nationalism and the Prelacy Controversy in Revolutionary England." Philological Quarterly 94.1-2 (2015): 71-93.

"Mourning the Living: Surrey's 'Wyatt Resteth Here,' Henrician Funerary Debates, and the Passing of National Virtue." Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 35.2 (2012): 61-82.

"The Plague of 1625-26, Apocalyptic Anticipation, and Milton's Elegy III." Studies in Philology 108.3 (2011): 403-38.

Book Chapters

"Milton on the Move: Walking and Self-Knowledge in Paradise Lost." In Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment: "One First Matter All." Ed. by Kevin J. Donovan and Thomas Festa. Duquesne UP, 2017. 59-80.

"Hobbes's Hebraism and the Last Judgment in Leviathan." In Identities in Early Modern English Writing: Religion, Gender, Nation. Ed. by Lorna Fitzsimmons. Brepols, 2014. 85-115.

Associate Professor of English
Renaissance Literature

Email: ryan.hackenbracht@ttu.edu