Colin Hoch

Colin Hoch is a seventh-year doctoral candidate in History and Early Modern Studies. His research explores how contested historical memory, or the way people imagined themselves in relation to the biblical past and the history of the Church, constituted the creative engine at the heart of shaping the early modern Bible (c. 1450-1650). Working with understudied manuscripts and printed Bibles in German, French, English, and Latin, the project highlights how particular translations and genres of translation shaped new historically-informed identities for linguistic and religious groups in the context of an emerging global early modern Christianity. The project seeks to transcend traditional temporal, geographic, and confessional boundaries to address how the early modern Bible answered the most pressing questions of memory and identity, both in its own era and into the present through contemporary cultures of commemoration. Interdisciplinary in nature, the project draws upon and contributes to a number of vibrant early modern subfields including the history of religion, cultural history, translation studies, memory studies, diaspora studies, and book history.

 

Colin’s work has been supported by the Baden-Württemberg Stipendium Award while in residence at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, and presented at conferences in the field. Before the doctoral program, he received an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and an M.A. from Yale in European and Russian Studies.