Telephone: 646.801.4227
Patrick Colm Hogan
PATRICK COLM HOGAN is a professor at the University of Connecticut, where he is a member of the Department of English, the Program in India Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the Program in Cognitive Science. He is the author of sixteen books, including political work, such as The Culture of Conformism: Understanding Social Consent (2001), and cognitive studies, such as What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (2011). Hogan’s best-known book is The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (2003). Hailed as “a landmark in modern intellectual life” by Steven Pinker of Harvard University, this book examines cross-cultural patterns in narrative genre. One important structure, discussed in this book, is the sacrificial plot. In the Christian world, this plot is epitomized by the story of Jesus, but it is found in a range of other traditions, including in South Asian stories concerning the death of the Goddess.
Hogan has been teaching the literature and culture of India for over twenty years. He first became interested in Indic thought in grammar school, on reading an introduction to Buddhism. This interest was developed later, when he read the Bhagavad Gita in college. In graduate school, Hogan met his wife, Lalita Pandit, the daughter B. N. Pandit, a highly regarded Sanskritist and theologian, honored by the Indian government for his scholarship and his poetry. Hogan found that the social, ethical, and emotional concerns of Indic thought illuminated and were illuminated by work in cognitive and affective science as well as political psychology. These different influences were previously joined in his academic writing. In The Death of the Goddess, Hogan has integrated them in a literary form as well.
Hogan published fiction in The Journal of Irish Literature and poetry in minnesota review, Kunapipi, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and elsewhere. He has also published and exhibited photography (New Letters), collaborated with director Ken Kwapis on two short films, and worked with composer Paul Goldstein on several musical pieces.
