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| Dear Milton Society, I hope that the start of Fall has brought all of you good weather and invigorating new academic semesters, trimesters, or quarters! We recently concluded a splendid Conference on John Milton in Provo, UT, hosted by MSA Vice President Jason Kerr. The MSA will host panels at MLA in Los Angeles this coming January and at RSA in Philadelphia in March, with our Annual Meeting and Dinner also to take place at RSA; stay tuned for more information. In another important piece of news, MSA members will soon be asked to vote on a ballot measure to update our Constitution and Bylaws. Upcoming Ballot Measure The Executive Committee of the Milton Society of America is seeking to simplify, clarify, and bring up to date several items in our Constitution and Bylaws. Members will soon receive an email letter explaining and detailing our proposed amendments, with a link to an electronic ballot for ratification. Please watch your inboxes and remember to vote! Upcoming Conferences MSA @ MLA2027 If you’re attending the MLA Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, CA, from January 7-10, 2027, we hope that you will join us for the MSA’s two sponsored panels: 1. Milton and the Forms of Knowledge. This panel will be held on Thursday, January 7, 3:30PM – 4:45PM, LA Convention Center 306B. Emily Jones will chair. Panelists and their papers include: · Amy Weng, “Forms of Evidence in Milton’s Hermeneutics and Politics of Collective Punishment” · Melanie Kissinger, “‘Striving Still the River to Out-go’: Re-envisioning the Natural World in Margaret Cavendish and John Milton” · Daniel Allen Shore, “Paradise Lost and What Was Lost in the Novel” 2. Emancipating Milton: Empire, Disability, Technology. This panel will be held on Saturday, January 9, 1:45PM – 3:00PM, LA Convention Center 510. Emily Jones will chair. Panelists and their papers include: · Angelica Duran, “Emancipatory Narratives of Milton in Spanish-Language Dramas, 1878-1987” · Jahidul Alam, “Milton’s Distant Thunder: Epic Poetics in Meghnad Badh Kavya” · Jeff Rohner-Tensee, “Good to Be Gone: Aquinas, Disability, and the Providential Exit from Eden” · Caitlin Hubbard, “Milton, Meta-theater, and the Technologies of the Scenic Stage” MSA @ RSA2027 If you’re attending the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA, from March 11-13, 2027, please join us for the MSA’s four sponsored sessions (times, locations, and final paper titles TBA): 1. John Milton: A General Session. Emily Jones will chair. Panelists include Tomos Evans, Harry McCarthy, Alison Scarlett, and James Grantham Turner. 2. John Milton, Space Man. Stephen Dobranski will chair. Panelists include Vladimir Brljak, Rhema Hokama, Kristen Poole, and Erin Webster. 3. Milton, Authoritarianism, and Interpretive Technique. Lara Dodds will chair. Roundtable speakers include Samuel Addington, Sam Bozoukov, David Loewenstein, Orlando Reade, and Zeyi Zhang. 4. Milton and Tradition. Pasquale Toscano will chair. Panelists include Yaacov Bronstein, Amrita Dhar, and Lucas Simpson. We will soon be announcing full information about the MSA Annual Meeting and Dinner at RSA in Philadelphia, which will take place on Friday, March 12, 2017, at Estia Restaurant. We will be honored to host Philadelphia Poet Laureate Raina J. León as our Annual Poet. IMS 2027 The 14th International Milton Symposium will take place at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, Hungary, from June 21-25, 2027. The call for papers is currently open; abstracts are due on November 15, 2026. Papers are invited in all areas of Milton Studies, including but not limited to: politics, religion, textual studies, reception, translation, digital humanities, animal studies, and more. Notifications of acceptance will go out in January 2027. Retrospective: The 2026 Conference on John Milton The 2026 Conference on John Milton was held at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, from 22–24 October. A rainstorm meant that the opening reception on Thursday night featured some soggy Miltonists, who nevertheless quickly established a spirit of conviviality and conversation that permeated the conference. The sessions on Friday and Saturday featured 57 presenters, including a plenary session on the topic of archives featuring Edward Jones, Alison Chapman, and Lauren Shohet. The conference banquet on Friday night began with spectacular views of snow-capped mountains and a sunset over Utah Lake, and it concluded with a reading of Lycidas by host Jason Kerr. (Huge thanks to Jason for hosting!) Attendees report that the conference was both welcoming and intellectually invigorating. The next iteration of the conference will be held in Provo in 2028, and the MSA will distribute the call for papers. Retrospective: “Teaching Milton Now: A Pedagogy Roundtable” On August 17, 2026, six scholars on the cutting edge of Milton pedagogy gathered in a recorded virtual session to introduce new ideas and effective strategies for teaching Milton to students at a range of levels. This exciting and inspiring panel offered approaches for guiding students to access Milton’s rich and difficult writing, and for helping them consider his engagements—with art, faith, doubt, gender, politics, liberty, and more—in their full complexity. Our speakers have also been contributing teaching materials for a forthcoming pedagogy archive on our website. Many thanks to Jahidul Alam, Tomos Evans, el friedman, Lindsay Adams, Vanessa Lim, and Pasquale Toscano for sharing their expertise. Career Changes Tomos Evans has been appointed as a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. After two years as the Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Tomos is joining Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity for a three-year postdoctoral fellowship as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project “Literary Platonism from 1500 to the Present” (2026–29). MSA Secretary Marissa Greenberg was promoted to Professor of English, starting fall 2026, at the University of New Mexico. Islam Issa has been formally conferred as Professor of Public Humanities, effective August 1, 2026, at the Birmingham City University. Publications and Works of Art The following essays were published in the most recent issue of Milton Studies (68.2): · Thomas Vozar, “Thomas Young as Puritan Exile among the Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg and Milton’s ‘Elegia Quarta’” · Jason A. Kerr, “Approaching Atonement in De Doctrina Christiana” · Anthony Bromley, “‘Meer Ayr and Bubble’: Nedham, Milton, and Republican Uses of Utopia, 1657-1660” · Daniel Shore, “The Limits of Worst in Paradise Lost” · David Currell, “Harapha’s Intertexts: Comedy and the Hoplōn Krisis in Samson Agonistes” The following essays were published in the most recent issue of Milton Quarterly (60.2): · Estelle Haan, “Milton’s Florentine Encomiast, Antonio Francini: New Evidence” · Gary Kuchar, “Milton’s Macbeth: Time, Irony, and Evil in Paradise Lost” Other recent publications and works of art include: · Amrita Dhar, “Milton and Blindness,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. · Stephen Dobranski, “The Pain and Pleasure of Parting: Missing Persons in Paradise Lost,” ELH: English Literary History 93.3 (2026), 811-34. · Tony Eva, director, “Milton’s Mulberry.” This documentary film centers around a centuries-old mulberry tree at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the context of Milton’s life and world. · Stephen M. Fallon, Milton and Newton: Matter, God, and Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2026. A 30% discount is available when ordering from global.oup.com with discount code AUFLY30. · Laura Fox Gill, John Milton in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2026. · Tom Kinninmont, director, Paradise Lost, The Inner Temple Hall, UK, October 28, 2026. This abridged adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost is brought to life as a dramatized reading. 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. I hope to see many of you at our upcoming conferences in early 2027! Emily Griffiths Jones MSA President Unsubscribe | Manage subscription |