Dear Milton Society,
We are at the busiest time of the year for the MSA—with events, awards, and preparations for our Annual Dinner all at full swing. Please read on for news, updates, and special requests.
CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS
MSA MINI-CONFERENCE 2025: MILTON IN THE CURRICULUM
Milton in the Curriculum: A Global Conversation
The MSA will hold a two-hour-long virtual mini-conference TOMORROW, on 14 February 2025, on the place of Milton in the curriculum in different parts of the world. Our presenters come from seven countries and four continents. The mini-conference will be held across multiple time zones in the world in the two hours corresponding to 6-8am US Pacific Time/9-11am US Eastern Time. All are welcome.
See complete details (including Zoom information) at the conference page: https://miltonsociety.net/milton-in-the-curriculum-a-global-conversation/.
6am Pacific/9am Eastern: Welcome
Opening remarks: Amrita Dhar
6:10-6:45am Pacific/9:10-9:45am Eastern: Panel 1
Alison Chapman (U of Alabama, USA)
Hyunyoung Cho (George Mason U Korea, South Korea)
Tianhu Hao (Zhejiang U, China)
Doyeeta Majumdar (Jadavpur U, India)
Chair: Debapriya Sarkar
6:45-7:15am Pacific/9:45-10:15am Eastern: Panel 2
John Leonard (Western U, Canada)
Vanessa Lim (Seoul National U, South Korea)
Mario Murgia (National Autonomous U of Mexico, Mexico)
Chair: Stephen Dobranski
7:15-7:45am Pacific/10:15-10:45am Eastern: Panel 3
Eva Momtaz (U of Birmingham, UK)
Orlando Reade (Northeastern U London, UK)
Cordelia Zukerman (Brearley School, USA)
Chair: Erin Murphy
7:45-8am Pacific/10:45-11am Eastern: Closing
Final discussion: facilitated by members of the MSA EC
Closing remarks: Emily Jones
BRITISH MILTON SEMINAR
The next meeting of the British Milton Seminar will be held online on 14 March 2025.
Session 1, 11am-1pm GMT
Jacob Hyde (Birmingham), ‘“try’d by visions”: Distempers, Dreams, and Enthusiasm in Paradise Lost’
John Hale (Otago, NZ), ‘The Latin Beginnings of Milton’s Epic’
Session 2, 2pm-4pm GMT
The second session will be dedicated to the life and work of Professor Warren Chernaik (1931-2024), scholar, teacher, and longtime friend of the British Milton Seminar.
See full details at: https://britishmiltonseminar.wordpress.com/.
RENAISSANCE SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Milton Society of America is sponsoring four sessions at the upcoming Renaissance Society of America Conference in Boston 21-22 March 2025.
Trans Milton
20 March 2025, 11am-12:30pm
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Suffolk Room – 3rd Floor
Roundtable featuring: Sharon Achinstein, Urvashi Chakravarty, Ari Friedlander, Colby Gordon, Sawyer Kemp, Su Fang Ng, and Madison Wolfert
Chair: Erin Murphy
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John Milton: General Session
21 March 2025, 4:30pm-6pm
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Salon B – 4th Floor
“Milton’s Body in Eighteenth-Century Celebrity Culture,” Teri Fickling
“Milton’s Demonological Turn,” Ben LaBreche
“The Noise of Folly,” Tessie Prakas
“Milton Between Freedom and Tyranny in the English Revolution,” David Loewenstein
Chair: Amrita Dhar
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Milton and Influence
21 March 2025, 11am-12:30pm
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Fairfield Room – 3rd Floor
“Got Himself a Gun: Paradise Lost and the Gunpowder Plot, ”John Rumrich
“How Milton Got Tenure,” Stephen Hequembourg
“The Afterlife of Milton’s Sabrina,” Stephen B. Dobranski
Chair: Lauren Shohet
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Milton and the Church
22 March 2025, 4:30pm-6pm
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Salon D – 4th Floor
“How Presbyterian was Milton’s Presbyterian Phase?,” Tobias Gregory
“Milton, Quakers, and the Mechanisms of ‘Mutual Tolerance,’” Russ Leo
“Adam, Eve, and the Doctrine of Innatism: The Conflicted Theology of Toleration in Paradise Lost,” John Rogers)
Chair and Respondent: Elizabeth Sauer
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In addition to the MSA’s own sponsored sessions, the Bibliographical Society of America is sponsoring a session on Milton at RSA 2025:
Milton and the Book
22 March 2025, 4:30pm-6pm
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Boston University Room – 3rd Floor
“Milton’s Books and Promiscuous Reading,” Claire Bourne
“The 1668 Story of Milton and the Book Called Paradise Lost,” Amrita Dhar
“Bookwomen in Milton’s Social Networks,” Molly Yarn
Chair: Christopher N. Warren
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The following sessions—organised by or carrying the participation of MSA members—will similarly be of interest to the MSA membership. Many thanks to those who have submitted news of these sessions through the MSA news intake form.
Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment, and Care
20 March 2025, 9am-10:30am
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Regis Room – 3rd Floor
Roundtable featuring: Elizabeth Sauer, John Leonard, Reginald Wilburn, Maura Brady, Teri Fickling, Joan Curbet, Owen Kane
Chair: Pasquale Toscano
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Speculation and Early Modern Literary Studies
20 March 2025, 9am-10:30am
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Arlington Room – 3rd Floor
Roundtable featuring: Liza Blake, Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Marissa Greenberg, Kristen Poole, Lauren Robertson, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld.
Chair: Erin Murphy
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Miltonic Rhetorics
20 March 2025, 4:30pm-6pm
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Fairfield Room – 3rd Floor
“‘The Love I Have to Our Own Language’: Rhetoric in Moseley’s Preface to Poems (1645),” Shaun James Russell
“Ramist Rhetorical Practice and the Logic of Reasoned Reformation in Milton’s Areopagitica,” Daniel Seward
“Paradise Lost and the Physicality of Persuasion,” Vanessa Lim
Chair: Daniel Allen Shore
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Margaret Cavendish and John Milton
21 March 2025, 9am-10:30am
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Exeter Room – 3rd Floor
“The Parallel Materialisms of Cavendish and Milton,” Steve Fallon
“Shifting the Paradigm: Cavendish and Milton on Infinity,” Rachel Trubowitz
“Cavendish, Milton, and the Querelle des Femmes,” Julie Crawford
Chair: Lara Dodds
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Waller and Women
21 March 2025, 2:30pm-4pm
Boston Westin Copley Place – Adams and Baltic Room – 7th Floor
“Waller, Sacharissa, and the Lyric Collection,” Andrea Walkden
“Waller’s Gallantry,” Timothy Raylor
“‘So civil to the Ladies’: Waller, Patronesses, and Protégées in the Restoration,” Michael P. Parker
Chair: Kate Bennett
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Milton, Marvell, and Material Histories of Seventeenth-Century Civic Cultures
22 March 2025, 2:30pm-4pm
Boston Marriott Copley Place – Harvard Room – 3rd Floor
“Milton’s ‘Grateful Digressions’,” Jeffrey Miller
“Heretical Restoration: Literary Evidence,” Elizabeth Sauer
“Other Better Virtues: The Aesthetics of Animadversion in Marvell’s Poetry and Prose,” Ryan Netzley
“Beyond the Travel Narrative: Early Modern Asian Poetry and Dutch and English Epics,” Nigel Smith
Chair: Feisal Mohamed
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***MSA ANNUAL DINNER AT RSA 2025***
The MSA Annual Dinner will be held on Friday, 21 March 2025, at Maggiano’s Little Italy (not far from the conference hotel), following our General Session at RSA. The Dinner will feature a talk by the MSA Honored Scholar 2024, Sharon Achinstein, and a poem by this year’s MSA Annual Dinner Poet, Camille Guthrie.
There will be a cash bar, open to all (members and friends of the MSA alike; attendees and non-attendees of the Dinner alike) at 6:30 with dinner to follow at 7:30.
Tickets for the Dinner should be bought in advance, through the MSA website, by 15 March 2025. The ticket purchase link will go live on the home page of the MSA website on 15 February 2025. Dinner tickets are at $90 for tenured faculty and $70 for all others.
The program for the Annual Dinner and Meeting, distributed at the event and then e-archived, accepts advertisements for relevant programs, publications, and events. Annual Dinner Booklet advertisement costs are at $50 half-page, $90 full page. Taking out an advertisement is a great way to support the MSA and help defray costs of the dinner. Please contact MSA Treasurer Lauren Shohet at Lauren.Shohet@villanova.edu for details.
CANADA MILTON SEMINAR XVIII
The Canada Milton Seminar XVIII will be held in Victoria College of the University of Toronto 9-10 May 2025. Visit the website for complete details: https://crrs.ca/crrsevents/milton2025/.
LIEB NEWBERRY MILTON SEMINAR
The coordinators of the exciting new Lieb Newberry Milton Seminar send word of the Inaugural Annual Lieb Newberry Milton Seminar, to be held at the Newberry Library on 23 May 2025, with the following papers:
“Of Ordinary Men and Angels: Skin Color and Slavery in The Blazing World and Paradise Lost” by John Rogers, Professor (U of Toronto)
“‘And in Their Motions Harmony Divine’: The Materialism of Milton and Cavendish” by Sarah Baber, PhD Candidate (U of Notre Dame)
For details and (free) registration, see here:
SOUTH CENTRAL RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE 2025
The South Central Renaissance Conference will be held at Saint Louis University 9-11 June 2025. See the for complete details: https://southcentralrenaissanceconference.org/.
CFPs
MLA 2026
The MSA will sponsor two panels at the 2026 MLA Convention in Toronto, Canada:
“New Voices, New Directions in Milton Studies” will bring attention to new work in Milton studies by early career scholars and to innovative approaches by scholars of any rank.
“Milton’s Afterlives” will examine Milton’s writings through a lens of adaptation studies, media studies, or reception studies, or their appropriation (social, legal, or political).
To propose a 15-minute paper for either panel, send a 150-word abstract and brief CV to MiltonSocietySec@gmail.com by Wednesday, 12 March 2025.
MSA WEBSITE AND NEWSLETTER
MSA Officers have recently learnt that there have been several hiccups to newsletter emails being delivered to MSA members. Our webmaster is looking into the problem. But I wanted to let you know that notwithstanding the delivery of MSA newsletters to your inboxes, you should always be able to find an archived copy of each newsletter under the Newsletter tab on the MSA site: https://miltonsociety.net/news-nuggets/.
SPECIAL REQUESTS
MSA Secretary Marissa Greenberg recently sent out the following ask to MSA members:
“The MSA Executive Committee needs your help to galvanize and recognize the accomplishments of our members. Here’s how you can help:
- We encourage nominations (including self-nominations) for new MSA Executive Committee members for three-year terms, starting in 2025.
- We also invite nominations for the 2026 Honored Scholar.
- Send your list of recent and forthcoming publications for inclusion in the MSA annual booklet. (To make sure that we don’t miss anything, be sure to resend publications submitted previously via the Update Form.)
All of which you can direct to me at MiltonSocietySec@gmail.com no later than March 1, 2025.”
I want to re-iterate these asks. I also want to add a special note about that third ask. Do please send in a complete list of your 2024 publications by 1 March 2025 to MiltonSocietySec@gmail.com for inclusion in the Annual Dinner Booklet. The Booklet does a wonderful job of spreading the word about member publications. And it is an especially terrific means for junior scholars to get the word out about their work. In this, I speak from experience.
On this vein: please watch out for a request for nominations of your 2024 publications for the 2025 MSA awards.
REMINDERS
As you know, we love sharing the good news of our members’ publications, career changes, and other professional news and accomplishments. If you encounter interesting Miltoniana in your wanderings, virtual or otherwise, we’d love to share that too. Please send in a line using the news update form on the home page of the MSA website (https://miltonsociety.net/) and also linked here: https://miltonsociety.net/news-form/.
Please also recommend MSA membership to your academic friends, colleagues, and graduate students who aren’t members yet. There are so many scholars actively engaging with Milton who are not yet members of the MSA. And we have arguably the best Lifetime Membership rates out there. Spreading the word by mouth and friendship is possibly the best means to bolster our ranks.
Amrita Dhar, MSA President