Hawkes attended Stanwell Comprehensive School near Cardiff, Wales.
1986), and later the Marjorie Hope Nicolson fellowship to Columbia University (M.A.
At Oxford, Hawkes was a student of the left-wing literary critic Terry Eagleton, and an activist in the socialist-feminist group of scholars Oxford English Limited.
At Columbia he worked with the Palestinian critic Edward Said, and contributed to various alternative and underground journals on the Lower East Side.
He received a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2002–03), and the William Ringler Fellowship at the Huntington Library (2006).