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| MSA Newsletter – November 2025 Dear Milton Society, I hope that you are all well, or as well as can be, at this very challenging time for higher education. The Milton Society will host panels at MLA and RSA in the coming months. Please make sure to save the date for our annual cash bar and dinner at the RSA in San Francisco on Friday, February 20th (more information and tickets will be available in the new year). I am sad that many of our members in Canada and elsewhere will be unable to join us, but please know that you will be missed and that we will be raising a glass in honor of all your amazing work. We will have an opportunity to be together virtually—stay tuned for more information about our on-line spring event, a roundtable on publishing on Milton. As many of us face reductions in graduate programs, lay-offs, and other cuts to the humanities, joining together as scholars and teachers remains a precious source of sustenance. I am grateful to all of you for this community, and I hope to see you either in person or on-line soon! For other updates, please see below. Conferences MSA @ MLA2026If 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, January 9th, 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 @ RSA2026RSA will meet in San Francisco, CA, on February 19-21, 2026 (please note the earlier-than-usual date this year). Our cash bar and dinner will be Friday, February 20th (details and tickets available in the new year). Our four MSA-sponsored panels are: New Voice, New Directions in Milton Studies: Friday, 20th, 2:30-4pm, Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Union Square 18 – Tower 3 – 4th Floor, Chair: Emily Griffiths Jones Papers:“Paradoxical Pages: Canonizing and Disrupting Milton in Thomas Warton’s 1785 Poems Upon Several Occasions,” Mollie Bowman“The Binding of the Strong and the American Divorce Debate on Milton’s Tercentenary,” Mark-Elliot Finley“Milton’s Realism,” Matthew William Rickard“Diasporic Feminism and Milton’s Eve: Chimamanda Adiche’s ‘Tomorrow Is Too Far’,” Sebastián Andrés Grandas Who’s Afraid of Areopagitica?: Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, Once More, Friday, 20th 9-10:30am, Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Union Square 18 – Tower 3 – 4th Floor, Chair: Sharon Achinstein Papers:“Areopagitica from Milton’s Day to Mill’s,” Randy Robertson“The Positive Liberty Problem in John Milton’s Areopagitica,” Jeffrey Gore“Modernizing Milton: The Letter and Spirit of Areopagitica,” Stephen Dobranski“‘How Books Demean Themselves’: Milton’s Bibliographical Imagination,” Alice Wickenden Four Types of Ambiguity in Milton, Friday, 20th, 11:00-12:30, Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Union Square 18 – Tower 3 – 4th Floor, Chair: Ari Friedlander Papers:“Keep Milton Weird: Fun as Resistance in Milton Pedagogy,” Emily Griffiths Jones“Milton’s Humorlessness and the Hyper-Ironic Age: Reconsidering Areopagitica,” Lenhardt StevensResponse by Ari Friedlander John Milton: A General Session: Saturday, February 21st, 11-12:30, Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Union Square 24 – Tower 3 – 4th Floor, Chair: Erin Murphy Papers:“‘And All the Faded Roses Shed’: Reimagining Miltonic Paradise in F. W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931),” Sarah Baber“Night and Day,” Maggie Kilgour“Unsung Oral Formulae in the Literary Epic: The Example of Paradise Lost,” James Carson Nohrnberg,“‘Exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative’: Divine Wisdom and Mathematics in Areopagitica,” Rachel Trubowitz Conference on John Milton—October 2026The 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. Sightings, etc. Tom Kinninmont, the current Master of the Revels, reports that the Inner Temple in London has recently acquired an annotated 4th edition of Paradise Lost which seems to indicate that the Royal Master of Revels planned to stage a version of the poem in the Inner Temple around 1711. On June 26th, Tomos Evans attended a remarkable one-man performance of Paradise Lost by William Spaulding, the conductor of the Royal Opera, at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. Spaulding began memorising Paradise Lost during the lockdown in 2020, and he delivered an extraordinary rendition of an abridged, two and a half hour Paradise Lost. https://actorschurch.org/whatson/paradise-lost/ Publications Tobias Gregory’s Milton’s Strenuous Liberty has been published by Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/miltons-strenuous-liberty/A65D778308CAA01A9CBCBA9CAA7C5379 Jeffrey Miller published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about Montclair State University’s plan to eliminate the Department of English:https://www.wsj.com/opinion/montclair-states-inhumanity-to-the-humanities-3da168fa?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqcQndNMx9Sx0OTLnrCFVe4G1G8hlYDfK4Vj3d-jy7c5j3Ts9P9f-nH5IyjfvT4%3D&gaa_ts=692709df&gaa_sig=MKjcu3bSsTktUWGv3fazPmuApfXp-8f0h5xcThw2EOGmleD5rTsShAvom0OgpRjzYxpphS-GdF7EdPf2oz85gw%3D%3DCFP Call for Posts for a New Milton Blog on the “Darkness Visible” Online Study Guide Christ’s College, Cambridge’s new and improved “Darkness Visible” Milton study site (relaunching December 2026) seeks blog posts of c.1500-2000 words relating to the works, life, times, contemporaries and afterlives of John Milton. The site is primarily a resource for studying Paradise Lost aimed at schools, university applicants, undergraduates, and anyone else interested in getting to know the poem better. The new blog aims to supplement the site’s more introductory material by providing deeper dives into Milton-related topics. It will provide a space for aspiring and established Miltonists to share their latest ideas with a broad audience. The posts will serve as extension material for the majority of the site’s users. Submissions are sought from Miltonists of all kinds: undergraduate, postgraduate, academic, or other. This is an opportunity to have a piece published on an accessible platform which will be promoted widely over the next year. Blog posts can present a developing thought, work-in-progress, an introduction to work published elsewhere, or even a more personal or anecdotal take on Milton; anything that touches on or helps to contextualise Milton’s works is likely to be welcome. You will be published alongside the likes of Orlando Reade, author of What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost (a Financial Times Book of the Year), and Katrin Ettenhuber, editor of a major new edition of Samson Agonistes. Submissions welcomed on a rolling basis. Please submit an expression of interest, a sentence or two of proposal, or a complete draft to the editor (Katie Mennis) at kamm5@cam.ac.uk. Passings Neil Forsyth died on Sunday, November 23rd. Gordon Campbell shared this tribute: “Neil studied Classics at his grammar school and English and Latin at King’s College Cambridge, graduating in 1965. He went on to University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) for an MA in Comparative Literature (1967) and then Berkeley to embark on a PhD, completed after an interval in Japan in 1976. He subsequently taught Greek and Latin at Bryn Mawr, and in 1980 moved to Switzerland, initially to an Assistant Professorship at University of Geneva and in 1985 to a Professorship at University of Lausanne. “Neil’s first monograph The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton UP, 1989) was a vast and learned account of the Devil from Gilgamesh through the Bible and finally to Augustine. Jeffrey Burton Russell, himself the author of a distinguished book on the Devil in antiquity, described Neil’s book as ‘genuinely brilliant and original’, and George Steiner’s TLS review particularly commended the chapters on Augustine, which ‘glow with intelligence and sympathy’. Neil’s second book, The Satanic Epic (Princeton UP, 2003), brought the learning of The Old Enemy to bear on a study of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Michael Lieb described it as ‘a true scholar’s feast, a most impressive and compelling work’. It won the MSA’s Holly Hanford Award in 2004. In 2008, Neil published his final monograph, John Milton: a Biography (Lion Hudson, Oxford), a biography chiefly remarkable for its psychological insights. He retired in 2010, but continued to write, and in 2019 served as the Chair of IMS12, the International Milton Symposium organised by Christophe Tournu in Strasbourg.” Paul Klemp, professor emeritus in the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Department of English, passed away on April 15th. After earning his PhD at the University of Toronto, Paul taught at Penn State and at Oklahoma State University. He was the author of The Theatre of Death : Rituals of Justice from the English Civil Wars to the Restoration (2016), as well as essays on Lancelot Andrewes, Edmund Spenser, Dante, Petrarch, and Italo Calvino, and bibliographies on Milton, Fulke Greville, and Sir John Davies. He served as the associate editor and then senior editor of Milton Quarterly and as a member of the editorial board of Milton Studies. Perhaps his most generous contribution to Milton studies is his work on the Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. Stephen Dobranski describes the importance of Paul’s leadership to the Variorum and to Milton studies: “An early champion of the project, he initially served as Associate Editor, but when Al Labriola passed away, Paul took the reins. As General Editor, he helped to see three volumes to press. His insight, guidance, and encouragement were crucial. He worked tirelessly as liaison with the press and the project’s individual editors. In our many, many email exchanges, his kindness and good humor were unflagging. He was both an exacting scholar and an all-around good guy.” For more details on Paul’s life and many contributions, see https://www.uwosh.edu/today/126882/klemp-uwo-professor-emeritus-in-english-passes/ 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 |