Dr David Hillman, King's
dah54@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I completed my PhD at Harvard University before training as a child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Tavistock in London. I returned to academia in 2001, taking up a lectureship in Cambridge.
My publications include Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (Palgrave, 2007); Freud and Shakespeare in The Great Shakespeareans series (Bloomsbury, 2012); The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Body (Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2015); The Book of Interruptions (Peter Lang, 2007); The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 1997) and Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity. It has significant areas of overlap with recent philosophical and social-anthropological interrogations of otherness, hospitality and the gift. My recent article in Renaissance Quarterly, 'Salutation and Salvation in Early Modern Theology', addresses some of the central concerns of the book. I am also working on a monograph on Freud and Shakespeare which draws on my experience as a practical clinician to think through the relations between literature and psychoanalysis.
Research Interests
Shakespeare and Renaissance drama; psychoanalytic theory; scepticism; the history of the body; literature and philosophy.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Renaissance Drama, especially Shakespeare; History and theory of the body; Psychoanalysis and culture; Philosophical approaches to literature.
Selected Publications
- David Hillman, ‘Salutation and Salvation in Early Modern Theology’, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 73 (3) (2020), 821-65
- David Hillman, ‘Philosophical Sex’, in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) [in the Centres of Reflection: Literature, Philosophy, and Thought series], 72-104
- David Hillman, ‘Ave Desdemona’, in Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange, ed. David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton (New York & London: Routledge, 2016), 133-56
- David Hillman, ‘The Pity of It: Shakespearean Tragedy and Affect’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 135-50
- David Hillman, ‘“If it be love indeed”: Transference, Love and Anthony and Cleopatra’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 64 (3) (Fall 2013), 370-410
- David Hillman, ‘Freud’s Shylock’, American Imago vol. 70 (1) (2013), 1-50
- David Hillman, ‘"O, these encounterers": On Shakespeare’s Meetings and Partings’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009), 58-68
- David Hillman, ‘Troilus and Cressida: The Worst Case of the Other’, Philosophy and Literature Vol. 32, No. 1 (April 2008), 74-87