Faculty Profiles

Hugh Hochman joined the Reed College faculty in 1999 and is Professor of French and Humanities. He received his BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1990, and his PhD in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. He teaches French language courses, courses in 20th-century French poetry and prose, and Humanities 220, Reed’s interdisciplinary modern European humanities course. His research focuses on 20th-century French poets, and he is especially interested in the relationship of language to material reality and in the ways in which the interpretive gestures demanded by literary texts are related to ethical questions of human action. He has published articles on Yves Bonnefoy, Guillevic, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Jacques Réda, and most recently, Francis Ponge and the ethical goals of a poetics of the nonhuman.