Dr Hankinson studied English at Balliol College, completing his DPhil in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Matthew Reynolds. His research explores how literary language, and above all the poem, negotiates climatic differences. His current research traces the influence of these differences in British and American writing from the nineteenth century onwards, with a particular focus on exchanges, movement, and translations between temperate and tropical climates.
His first book, Relational Worlds: Kojo Laing, Robert Browning, and Affiliative Literature (2023), exemplified these interests by tracing vital affiliations between tropical and non-tropical writing in the modern colonial period. He has published widely on relations between tropical and non-tropical imaginative worlds, as well as on the cross-temporal imagination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, with articles appearing and forthcoming in Style, Essays in Criticism, Mosaic, Green Letters, Journal of Cultural Research, and elsewhere.
Dr Hankinson is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at both The Queen's College and St Anne's College, and has worked at Jesus College and St Hilda's College in similar roles. He has worked as the Co-ordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre, based at St Anne’s College, and teaches on the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation. He teaches Preliminary Examinations Papers 1b (Introduction to English Literature), 3 (Literatures in English, 1830-1910), and 4 (Literatures in English, 1910-present) to undergraduates, and regularly supervises a wide range of dissertation topics at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Previous dissertation supervision topics include: Kate Atkinson; Alice Oswald; Alice Munro; Amos Tutuola; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; David Foster Wallace; Paul Beatty and Chloe Arijdis; Robert Browning and Alice Nottley; Yeats; Nabokov; Mohammad El-Kurd; Christina Rossetti; Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson; Eileen Myles; Hopkins and MacNeice; Anais Nin; Geoffrey Hill; Kate Chopin; Derek Walcott; Don DeLillo and Graciliano Ramos; Vivek Narayanan; James Berry; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Blake and Whitman; Amy Levy; Herman Melville; Raymond Chandler; Thomas Hardy.
