| Dear Milton Society, I write with various bits of news submitted to the MSA. MILTONATHON 8 November 2024 (this coming Friday) marks the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death. Milton’s Cottage writes: “To commemorate this landmark occasion, Milton’s Cottage – his only surviving residence – are working with partners around the world to stage a 24-hour shared reading of his works online. Launching on Bread Street, where Milton was born, and culminating at St Giles Cripplegate, where he’s buried, we’ll take in a wide range of Miltonic locations en route, from the Rue Milton in Paris to the Milton State School in Queensland.” As you know from the MSA Secretary’s recent missive, the MSA has been asked to co-ordinate the readings of Books I, III, and IV of Paradise Lost. Very great thanks to every one of you who has agreed to join the readings; Marissa Greenberg (our Secretary) or Lauren Shohet (our Treasurer) or I will be in touch by 6 November with specific details about the online login and asks. In the meantime, and for everyone: we are delighted to pass on the Eventbrite invitation with the link for public listening: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/miltonathon-tickets-1070108075059?aff=oddtdtcreator. Registration is encouraged but not required. To listen or watch online, please use this link: https://www.miltonscottage.org/miltonathon/. Feel free to share the links with friends, family, students, and potential auditors, wherever they are. |
| PUBLICATIONS Islam Issa’s Alexandria: The City that Changed the World was published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK in November 2023, by Simon & Schuster in the US in January 2024, and as an audiobook. In early 2024, it had already been named a Book of the Year by The Times, Sunday Times, TLS, Waterstones, and Booklist. It is now the winner of the prestigious Runciman Award. Despite competition from the likes of Emily Wilson’s Iliad, Adam Nicolsons How to Be, and Peter Sarris’s Justinian, the judges announced that this was a unanimous decision. Lynne Greenberg’s anthology Fairy Poems was published by Knopf in its Everyman’s Library series in 2023: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/718230/fairy-poems-by-edited-by-lynne-greenberg/. Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz, as co-editors, have published Milton’s Moving Bodies(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024), with the following lineup of contributors and chapters: “Introduction” by Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz; “Be Still: Milton’s Poetry of Motion” by John Rumrich; “That ‘Strange / Desire of Wandring’: Physical and Ideological Movement in Paradise Lost” by Sydney Bartlett; “Extraterrestrial Eden: The Migration of Paradise in the Early Modern European Imagination” by Erin Webster; “Milton’s Moving Bodies at the Border: Kinopolitics in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes” by Rachel Trubowitz; “Moving Jewish Bodies, Moving Jewish Souls: Milton’s Paradise Regain’d, the Jewish (Readmission) Question, and John Toland” by Achsah Guibbory; “Decomposing Milton: Romantic Reading and Demotic Dispersal” by Jennifer Wallace; “Shapes of Things to Come: Milton, Evolution, and the Afterlife of Species in Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H.” by Ryan Hackenbracht; “Anon They Move: Two Hispanoamerican Translations of Paradise Lost, Book 3” by Mario Murgia; “Presencing the Author: Illustrations of Milton in Hispanoamerican Publications” by Angelica Duran; “Moved and Surprised by White Sin: Milton’s Satanic Influence in Part 1 of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter” by Reginald A. Wilburn; “Snaking the Path: Disability, Pedagogy, Justice” by Marissa Greenberg; and “Moving in and with Milton” by Stephen M. Fallon. See https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147409/miltons-moving-bodies/. Matt Rickard lets us know of his article “The Probability of Paradise Lost,” just published in ELH: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/929152. Matthew Stallard sends word that his Paradise Regained: The Biblically Annotated Edition will be published by Mercer University Press in April 2025. CONFERENCES MLA 2025 The MSA will sponsor two sessions at the upcoming Modern Language Association Convention to be held from 9 to 12 January in New Orleans. Session 389, on Milton and Visibility, is on Friday, 10 January 2025, 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM at the Hilton Riverside New Orleans – Salon 12 (1st Floor), withTop of Form Tom Clayton, Frances Ringwood, and Joseph Torres. Bottom of FormSession 494, John Milton: A General Session, is on Saturday, 11 January 2025, 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM at the Hilton Riverside New Orleans – Chart A (Riverside Complex), with Su Fang Ng and Amrita Dhar. Please watch out for more details, and for plans of an informal dinner on Friday, 10 January 2025. Costs for graduate student members of the MSA will be covered by the MSA. If you are in any other Milton-related panel, or one that will be of interest to the MSA membership, please let us know via the MSA news intake form here: https://miltonsociety.net/news-form/. We’d love to spread the word. BMS Spring 2025 Hugh Adlington and Sarah Knight write that the Spring 2025 meeting of the British Milton Seminar will be held on Zoom on Friday 14 March 2025: https://britishmiltonseminar.wordpress.com/. RSA 2025 The Renaissance Society of America Conference of 2025 promises to be rich in Milton offerings. The MSA will sponsor four panels at the RSA next spring. RSA 2025 will be held jointly with the Shakespeare Association of America Conference. Please watch out for details of the MSA-sponsored RSA panels, other Milton-related panel news, and excitingly, specifics of the MSA Annual Dinner to be held in Boston during the RSA. CMS 2025 The Canada Milton Seminar XVIII will be held at the University of Toronto 9-10 May 2025: https://crrs.ca/crrsevents/milton2025/. The Lieb Milton Seminar Regina Schwartz sends word that “The Newberry Milton Seminar has been re-minted “The Lieb Milton Seminar” in honor of one of its founders, Michael Lieb. It will now take place one Friday in early May at the Newberry Library, and feature two presenters, one late morning, the other early afternoon, with a lunch in between. One speaker will be completing their dissertation, and the other will be a published scholar. We are excited about this new format! The Newberry will accept donations to help fund the annual event of the Lieb Milton Seminar.” See https://www.rsa.org/news/673957/The-Lieb-Milton-Seminar.htm. CAREER CHANGES Lynne Greenberg has been promoted to Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY. Amrita Dhar is now Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California San Diego. MILTON IN THE WORLD Lucy Rand sends word that the “British lecturer and poet, Alex Wylie, has created a brand new interactive and illustrated guide to Paradise Lost, which is available on the Audrey guided audiobook app. The app features an unabridged audiobook version of the poem read by Anton Lesser, and after each of the 12 Books, Alex provides a brief voice note digesting the events of the Book, alongside textual, photo and video notes providing further cultural and historical context, different perspectives and further reading. To download the app and this exciting new edition of Paradise Lost, search for Audrey audiobooks in the App Store or Play Store (the app is currently mobile only).” Stephen Dobranski had a letter published in The New Yorker (16 September 2024), in which he quotes from Areopagitica in response to the article by Louis Menand on bookstores. |
| PASSAGES Our thoughts remain with the friends and families of John Mulryan and Warren Chernaik–Miltonists, towering scholars, and dear friends of the MSA. Amrita Dhar, MSA President |