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| MSA Newsletter – October 2025 Dear Milton Society, I hope that your Fall semesters, trimesters, or quarters are off to a great start! The Milton Society will host panels at MLA and RSA in the coming months, with our annual dinner at the RSA in San Francisco in February. Stay tuned for more information about an on-line spring event. We are especially pleased to announce that our MLA panel has been chosen as one of the sessions for inclusion in this year’s President’s theme, “Family Resemblances.” For other events and updates, please see below. Please make special note of the fast-approaching British Milton Seminar on October 24th on Zoom (see below for the link to register). Conferences MSA @ MLA2026 If you’re attending the MLA Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, on January 8-11, 2026, we hope that you will join us for the MSA’s sponsored panel: Milton’s Afterlives ~ Friday, 9 January, 10:15AM-11:30AM, 802A (Metro Toronto Convention Centre) Chair: Andrea Walken Papers: “Equiano, Revolution, and the Lyricizing of Paradise Lost,” Nicholas Allread “‘The O of Wonder’: Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os and the Queer Rewriting of Paradise Lost,” Shaun Nowicki “Milton’s Premodern American Afterlife,” Elizabeth Sauer “John Akomfrah’s Post-Migrant Epic,” Orlando Reade MSA @ RSA2026 We will soon be announcing full information about MSA-sponsored sessions and the MSA Annual Meeting and Dinner at RSA, which this year meets in San Francisco, CA, on February 19-21, 2026 (please note the earlier than usual date this year). The dinner will take place on February 20th. Our four panels will be: John Milton: A General Session New Voice, New Directions in Milton Studies Who’s Afraid of Areopagitica?: Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, Once More Four Types of Ambiguity in Milton British Milton Seminar, October 24th (Zoom Event) The next meeting of the British Milton Seminar, hosted jointly with the Andrew Marvell Society, will be held online on 24 October 2025. Session 1, 2.00-3.30pm BST /9.00-10.30am EDT Ruby Lowe (Melbourne), ‘Milton’s Open Door: Print Oratory and Freedom of Speech in 17th-century England’ Stephen Hequembourg (Magen David Yeshivah, NYC), ‘The Poetry of Falling Bodies: Galileo, Gravity, and Satan’s Fall’ Break: 3.30-4.00pm BST 10.30-11.00am EDT Session 2, 4.00-5.30pm BST / 11.00am-12.30pm EDT Emma Wilson (Southern Methodist University), ‘Milton’s Orphic Logic: Looking Back to Homer and Forward to Eliot’ Emanuel Stelzer (Verona), ‘Two 1634 Comuses: Milton’s Masque and a Ballet at the Turinese Court’ See full details at https://britishmiltonseminar.wordpress.com/. Conference on John Milton—October 2026 The next iteration of the Conference on John Milton will take place at Brigham Young University in October 2026, hosted by MSA Executive Committee Member Jason Kerr. Stay tuned for the CFP and other details. Career Changes Islam Issa has been appointed as the UK’s first Professor of Public Humanities, effective September 1, 2025, at the Birmingham City University. The strategic appointment was announced as leading news in an interview with Times Higher Education (www.timeshighereducation.com/news/essential-humanities-be-championed-author-new-role). Publications The Discourse of John Selden, Esq., ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joshua Eckhardt (Oxford University Press, 2025) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-discourse-of-john-selden-esq-table-talk-9780199660674?q=JasonPRosenblatt&lang=en&cc=gb Based on critical scrutiny of twenty-one surviving manuscripts, fifteen more than any previous editor knew existed, this fully annotated early modern classic, admired by Dr. Johnson and Coleridge, should be of interest to Miltonists. Kristen Poole is “happy to announce the publication of my new book, Philip Pullman and the Historical Imagination: Seventeenth-Century Literature, Science, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust (Oxford University Press, 2025). Kristen reports that she was thrilled to have a book launch at Blackwell’s bookstore in Oxford, featuring Kristen and Philip in conversation, https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/kristen-poole-with-philip-pullman-and-david-fickling-tickets-1320132143779. “’Los monstruos complicados de El Paraíso perdido” (“The Complicated Monsters of Paradise Lost”), by Mario Murgia, is a Spanish-written article published in Argentina’s Cuarenta Naipes Journal (National University of Mar del Plata): file:///Users/mariomurgia/Downloads/8990-32697-1-SM-1.pdf. Phillipa Earle published “Miltonic Diplomacy in Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Wedding Speech,” in Royal Studies 11(2):340-362 has been updated after some errors were introduced by the journal during the production process. (link: https://rsj.winchester.ac.uk/articles/10.21039/rsj.441). The research received some international media coverage. Earle also published “Maimonides and Milton’s Monistic ‘Mental Sight’,\” in Notes & Queries (link: https://academic.oup.com/nq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/notesj/gjaf067/8195219?utm_source=advanceaccess&utm_campaign=nq&utm_medium=email). Brooke Conti, “Kushner Does Milton: Wrestling with the Revolutionary Poet in Angels in America and Other Plays,” Contemporary Literature 65:4 (Winter 2024), 433-64. Brian Russell Graham sends news of the publication his A Casebook Edition of ‘The Diabolic Tragedy’ (Brill, 2025), a volume comprising a translation of and critical essays about a nineteenth-century French prose poem which takes the form of a refutation of Paradise Lost. https://brill.com/display/title/71610 Passings Michael C. Schoenfeldt, a brilliant scholar, teacher, beloved colleague and lifetime member of our Society, passed away on September 4th in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Professor Schoenfeldt was the John R. Knott, Jr. Collegiate Professor of English. He was a major force in Renaissance Studies, and an academic leader, serving as Associate Dean of the Humanities at the University of Michigan and the Chair of English. His work on Milton, Herbert, Shakespeare and others has shaped our field in profound ways. The author and editor of nine books, he was in the midst of editing yet another, George Herbert and Eloquence (Cambridge University Press). The volume will now be published posthumously by his co-editors Kenneth Graham and Christopher Hodgkins, and will be dedicated to his memory. For more on Mike’s amazing career and life, see https://obits.mlive.com/us/obituaries/annarbor/name/michael-schoenfeldt-obituary?id=59392646 Join Us Please recommend MSA membership to your academic friends, colleagues, and graduate students who are not members yet. Student membership is only $10! There are so many scholars actively engaged in Milton studies who are not yet members of the MSA and who would enrich our conversations. You are our best ambassadors, so please help us sustain and expand our community by reaching out to colleagues and students. Please also keep in mind non-tenure track colleagues and scholars of Milton in non-professorial roles as you recruit. We love sharing the good news of our members’ publications, career changes, and other professional news and accomplishments. And if you encounter interesting Miltoniana in your wanderings, virtual or otherwise, we’d love to share that too. Just drop us a line using the news update form at the bottom of the home page of the MSA website; the form is also linked here. Erin Murphy, MSA President Unsubscribe | Manage subscription Add your postal address here! |
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