Lucia Hodgson

Short presentation

I am a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture with a focus on slavery, settler colonialism, women reformers, childhood, race and sexual violence. I am currently at work on “New Sweden Texas: Swedish Settlers and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Texas,” a project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

https://drluciakhodgson.org/

Keywords

• Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• African American Literature
• Swedish Atlantic Studies
• 19C Women’s Reform Literature
• U.S. Slavery
• Critical Race Theory
• Critical Childhood Studies and Children’s Literature
• Gender Studies

Biography

Dr. Lucia Hodgson is a Researcher in the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS) and the Department of English at Uppsala University in Sweden. She is also a Visiting Researcher at the Swedish Emigrant Institute and an Affiliated Member of the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University. She has been awarded a three-year Humanities and Social Sciences Project Grant (2024-2027) from the Swedish Research Council for her project, New Sweden Texas: Swedish Settlers and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Texas.

She earned a BA in Literature from Yale University, an MA in American Literature from Claremont Graduate University, and a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. She has taught at the University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts, California State University, Northridge, and most recently as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, where she founded and convened a Critical Childhood Studies working group funded by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. Prior to her career in academia she worked in public policy at the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University, the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children, and the Los Angeles Roundtable for Children at the University of Southern California. She currently works as Dean’s Special Initiatives Project Coordinator in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Hodgson is the author of two books: Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail Its Children? (Graywolf Press) and Taking Liberties: Slavery and the American Seduction Narrative (under contract with SUNY Press). She is the co-editor of The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays co-edited with Allison Giffen (Routledge). Her essays have appeared in Early American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Journal of Juvenilia Studies, and The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the New Humanities (University of Georgia Press).

Research

Peer Reviewed Publications

“The Biopolitics of Sexual Consent in Lydia Maria Child’s Reform Fiction” and “Introduction: The Biopolitics of Childhood” (co-authored with Allison Giffen) in The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American Nineteenth Century. Eds. Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen. Routledge, 2025

“The Biopolitics of Childhood.” With Allison Giffen. Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies, 2025. Editor in Chief, Heather Montgomery.

“Trauma in Phillis Wheatley’s Juvenilia.” Journal of Juvenilia Studies 4.1 (2021): 9-16.

“Age and Consent in Charlotte Temple." Studies in American Fiction 46.2 (2019): 169-194. Special Issue: Critical Approaches to Age in American Literature. Eds. Sari Edelstein and Melanie Dawson

“Infant Muse: Phillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of Childhood." Early American Literature 49.3 (2014): 663-682.

“Childhood of the Race: Towards a Critical Childhood Studies” in The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the New Humanities. Ed. Anna Mae Duane. University of Georgia Press, 2013. 38-51.

Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail Its Children? St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1997

Under Contract and Accepted Publications

“Hyphenated: Swedish-Texans and the White Reunion Myth in Early 20th-Century America." Scandinavian Studies. Accepted for publication.

“Swedish-Texan Slaver Settler Colonialism in the Plantationocene." Settler Colonial Studies. Special issue: “Settler Colonialism and Nordic Migration.” Accepted.

Taking Liberties: Slavery and the American Seduction Narrative. SUNY Press. Under contract.