Dear Milton Society,
The big news at the MSA right now is that our Annual Dinner is just around the corner. We can’t wait to see you there. Please remember to get your tickets: https://miltonsociety.net/. And please read on for time-sensitive matters such as new CFPs (MLA 2026), announcements (especially pertaining to MSA at RSA), and a host of news and updates.
CFPs
MLA 2026
The due date for MLA paper proposals is coming up.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.
PUBLICATIONS
Tomos Evans sends news of publication of two articles: “Greek and ‘The Lady of Christ’s College’: Latin–Greek Code-Switching in John Milton’s Prolusion VI,” Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures 10 (2024), 59–81; and “Milton’s Diodatian Poetics,” Milton Studies 67.1 (2025), 1–61.
Jason Kerr writes of the publication of his article “Felbinger Not the Author of De Doctrina Christiana, Currently Attributed to Milton,” Notes & Queries (2025).
Lauren Shohet sends word of the publication of her article “Touching the Shield of Achilles: Ekphrasis and/as Re-Mediation,” Anglia 142, 3 (2024), 515-530. She also writes of work forthcoming in 2025: the Arden Shakespeare co-edited collection Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, and Matter, ed. Lauren Shohet and Christine Varnado (Bloomsbury); “James Shirley and the Use of Caroline Drama,” in The Routledge Companion to Renaissance Literature, ed. Catherine Bates; the essay “The Queerness of Typology,” in Queering Early Modern Death in England; and “Adaptation, Hypermediation, and Feminine Subjectivity: Paradise Lost and The Fall,” in “Milton and Media,” a special issue of Milton Studies, 67.2.
Amrita Dhar has forthcoming an Arden Shakespeare co-edited volume, Shakespeare in the ‘Post’Colonies: Legacies, Cultures and Social Justice (Bloomsbury, 2025), with Amrita Sen.
Editors Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein send news of the imminent publication, in 2025, of the two-part first volume of The Complete Works of John Milton by Oxford University Press: Paradise Lost.
CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS
MSA MINI-CONFERENCE 2025: MILTON IN THE CURRICULUM
Milton in the Curriculum: A Global Conversation
The MSA held a two-hour-long virtual mini-conference on 14 February 2025 on the place of Milton in the curriculum in different parts of the world. Watch this space for an updated conference page documenting the proceedings.
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’ and 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Listening
20 March 2025, 2:30-4pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place – Exeter Room – 3rd Floor
“Elective Listening: Deafness and Devotion,” Heidi Brayman
“Chaste Erotics of Early Modern Listening: Further Reflections on Recte Sentire,” Andrew Dellantonio
“Listening in Prison: Policing Sounds in Early Modern Discipline-Houses,” Matthew Laube
“Listening with Milton’s Eve,” Lauren Shohet
Chair: Jennifer Richards
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
Margaret Cavendish and John Milton
21 March 2025, 9am-10:30am, Boston Marriott Copley Place – Exeter Room – 3rd Floor
Steve Fallon, “The Parallel Materialisms of Cavendish and Milton”
Rachel Trubowitz, “Shifting the Paradigm: Cavendish and Milton on Infinity”
Julie Crawford, “Cavendish, Milton, and the Querelle des Femmes”
Chair: Lara Dodds
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
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
***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 6:30pm with dinner to follow at 7:30pm.
Tickets for the Dinner should be bought in advance, through the MSA website, by 15 March 2025: https://miltonsociety.net/. 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 (Toronto)
“‘And in Their Motions Harmony Divine’: The Materialism of Milton and Cavendish” by Sarah Baber, PhD Candidate (Notre Dame)
For details and (free) registration, see here: https://www.newberry.org/calendar/john-rogers-university-of-toronto-sarah-baber-university-of-notre-dame
SOUTH CENTRAL RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE 2025
The South Central Renaissance Conference will be held at Saint Louis University 9-11 June 2025. See the website for complete details: https://southcentralrenaissanceconference.org/.
MSA FIRST BOOK ASSISTANCE PROGRAM
Applications for the MSA First Book Assistance Program are now being accepted, with a due date of 1 June 2025.Please see complete details here: https://miltonsociety.net/msa-first-book-assistance-program-2/.
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/.
We also learnt that owing to a problem on our payment portal, several members received the absurd message that our Dinner tickets were sold out. Dear Miltonists, we have not sold out. And we very much hope that you will come to the Dinner with your friends, colleagues, and students.
The MSA website now has all the MSA-commissioned Annual Dinner poems in one place: https://miltonsociety.net/msa-annual-dinner-poems/.
UNEXPECTED SIGHTINGS
Alison Chapman marks that the 17 February 2025 Poetry Daily poem was “Paradise Lost” by Rowan Ricardo Philips: https://poems.com/poem/paradise-lost/.
Hyunyoung Cho writes that she owes this sighting to her colleague Dr Bosik Kim in Korea: In a K-drama entitled Family Matters, a character is reading a Korean translation of Paradise Lost.
The 2 March 2025 “Poem-a-Day,” Leonora Speyer’s “The Story as I Understand It” (first published almost a hundred years ago, in 1926), carries significant Miltonic echoes: https://poets.org/poem/story-i-understand-it.
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