Lucia Hodgson

Dr. Lucia Hodgson is a Researcher at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS) in the Department of English at Uppsala University in Sweden. She is also a Visiting Researcher at the Swedish Emigrant Institute. 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. She currently works as Dean’s Special Initiatives Project Planner in the Sanford School of Public Affairs at Duke University.

Dr. Hodgson is currently at work on two monographs. The first, “Taking Liberties: Slavery and the American Seduction Narrative” (under contract with SUNY Press), traces the influence of Atlantic slavery on the development of the American seduction narrative. The second, “Unsettling the Legacy of S. M. Swenson: Swedish Slaver Settler Colonialism in 19C Texas,” is based on her research funded by the Swedish Research Council. 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). She is also the author of Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail Its Children? (Graywolf Press). She is the co-founder and co-editor with Allison Giffen of Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project. 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.