Glenn (Chip) Hughes

Biography of Glenn Hughes



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GLENN (CHIP) HUGHES is Professor Emeritus at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. He has written four books of philosophy—Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (1993), Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (2003), A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art (2011), and From Dickinson to Dylan: Visions of Transcendence in Modernist Literature (2020)—and edited or co-edited six books of philosophy, including The Eric Voegelin Reader (2017).

 

He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Sleeping At the Open Window (2005) and Erato (2010); the poetry booklet Preparing to Wake Up (2021); editor or co-editor of three books by the poet Robert Sund; and editor of a book of the spiritual poetry of Emily Dickinson.

His early life was spent primarily in Seattle. After attending Atlantic College in Wales for his senior year of high school, he received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Washington.

During the following ten years he worked variously as a taxi driver, printing press operator, library assistant, shampoo delivery truck driver, housepainter, hospital environmental coordinator, wooden boat refinisher, and sound recordist for documentary filmmakers. In 1979 he earned an M.A. in Intellectual History from the University of Washington.

From the 1960s on, he played and sang in various jug bands (Mother's Funky Dancing Shoes, Norman's Barnacle Choir), string bands, and, in 1975, as a bass player and harmony singer in a country rock band (Hamburger Dan's). During the 1970s, he also worked in amateur theatre in Seattle as a director and assistant director. After co-writing and directing an original "youth musical," CA$H, for the City of Seattle in the summer of 1970, staged at the Seattle Center Playhouse, he worked on productions of Beyond the Fringe (co-directed with Paul Kidder), Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (assistant director), and
—for Seattle Children's Theatre (PONCHO)—Through the Looking Glass, for which he was commissioned to write an original adaptation from Lewis Carroll's novel.

Between 1982 and 1990 he lived in Boston, where in 1989 he earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College. After teaching for two years at Simmons College in Boston, he moved to San Antonio to take a position at St. Mary's University, where he taught for thirty years as Professor of Philosophy. Beginning in 2015, he was also the initial holder of the university's Chair in Catholic Philosophy, creating a program of faculty seminars and retreats for the promotion of interdisciplinary understanding. He retired in 2020.

 

He has presented at over 150 conferences, workshops and lecture series, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2008 Fulbright Scholar Grant to study at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO).