 MSA Newsletter – January 2026 Dear Milton Society, I am very much looking forward to seeing many of you at the Renaissance Society of American in San Francisco next month, where we will host four panels (see details below) AND our Annual Dinner meeting on Friday, February 20th. Please make sure to buy your tickets for the dinner by February 10th at https://miltonsociety.net/tickets/(For more dinner details, see below.) This year, we will celebrate the many accomplishments of our Honored Scholar, Professor Edward Jones, as well as the distinguished publications of our other award winners, listed below. I am also delighted to announce that our festivities will begin with an original poem from the award-winning Katie Peterson (for more on Professor Peterson’s acclaimed work, see below). As always, the dinner will be proceeded by a cash bar, so even if you can’t make dinner, please do come by to meet and mingle! For those unable to join us in San Francisco, please note that 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. Please help us build our Milton community by spreading the word to early-career scholars and graduate students about the cash bar and dinner. Even better, buy your graduate student a ticket and bring them along! Or bring a new colleague to the cash bar! Sometimes we forget how much a friendly invitation can mean to someone new to the field. If you can’t escort your PhD students, please still send them and tell them to find me. I promise to introduce them around. And please consider donating to help us support reduced ticket prices for graduate students and untenured colleagues (we run the dinner at a deficit, so these contributions are critical). You can use the button at the bottom of the page: https://miltonsociety.net/tickets/ Joining together as scholars and teachers remains a precious source of sustenance as we face the many challenges to the humanities today. 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. (In particular, please note that the CFP deadline for the Conference on John Milton is January 31, 2026.) MSA Panels at RSA 2026 RSA 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. Our four MSA-sponsored panels are: 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 Stevens Response by Ari Friedlander New Voices, 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 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 MSA Dinnner at RSA (buy tickets BY 2/10) The MSA annual dinner and meeting will be held Friday, February 20, 2026, at AB Steak, a highly reputed Korean restaurant at 124 Ellis St, San Francisco, close to the RSA convention hotel. Cash bar 5:30-7:00; dinner / program begins promptly at 7:00. The meeting includes our annual dinner poem, presentation of awards, and an address by the 2025 Honored Scholar, Edward Jones. All are welcome at the cash bar 5:30-7:00! But there is a strict limit of 84 available places for dinner and you must purchase your ticket by February 10. Because the restaurant features tabletop grills, you’ll be prompted to choose a beef, seafood, or vegetarian table at the time of purchase, at which point you also can indicate dietary restrictions. Tickets will be available until February 10, or until they sell out. In an ongoing effort to make the annual dinner affordable for members who wish to attend, we always have priced dinner tickets at a loss to the organization. With food and restaurant prices rising, we have decided this year to keep the ticket prices at the same level as the recent past ($90 for tenured faculty; $70 for others), but to move to an all-cash bar, where you can purchase drinks throughout the evening by cash or credit card. Additionally, we are newly offering a limited number of $50 tickets that members can buy for an accompanying graduate student. Annual Dinner Poet: Katie Peterson Katie Peterson is the author of Fog and Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024); A Piece of Good News (2019), finalist for the Northern California Book Award; Life in a Field (2021) winner of the Omnidawn Open Book Prize; The Accounts (University of Chicago Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas; Permission (New Issues, 2013); and This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), winner of the 2005 New Issues Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of Robert Lowell’s New Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Originally from California, she received a BA from Stanford University and a PhD from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Howard Mumford Jones Prize for her dissertation on Emily Dickinson. Peterson is the recipient of fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among others. Professor Peterson has taught at Deep Springs College, Bennington College, and Tufts University. She is currently a professor of English at the University of California–Davis. Annual Award Winners 2025 Honored Scholar Edward Jones Hanford Book Award Lee Morrissey, Milton’s Ireland: Royalism, Republicanism, and the Question of Pluralism (Cambridge UP, 2024). Hanford Article Award Timothy M. Harrison. “‘Every Living Thing’: Life and Endeavor in Milton’s Paradise Lost.”Representations 167, no. 1 (2024): 33-63. and James Grantham Turner. “Milton, Lucretius, and the ‘Womb of Nature.’” Milton Studies 66, no. 1 (2024): 1-41. Irene Samuel Award Milton’s Moving Bodies, ed. Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz (Northwestern UP, 2024). Isocrates Award Milton’s Cottage, Miltonathon, shared reading (8 November 2024) and YouTube videos, https://www.miltonscottage.org/miltonathon/. Barbara Lewalski Award Ryan Hackenbracht. “Shapes of Things to Come: Milton, Evolution, and the Afterlife of Species in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, A. H. H.” In Milton’s Moving Bodies, ed. Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz, 181-211 (Northwestern UP, 2024). and Amelia Worsley. “Singing to Echo: John Milton’s Lady in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634.” In Singing by Herself: Lonely Poets in the Long Eighteenth Century, 29-59 (Cornell UP, 2024). John Shawcross Award Colby Gordon, “Trans Mayhem in Samson Agonistes.” In Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature, 130-65 (U of Chicago P, 2024). and Nicolas Barker. “Milton’s Library: The Books He Read and Owned.” Milton Quarterly 58 (2024): 86-96. Labriola Award Diana Little. “‘Bitter Memory’ Meets ‘Dark Retrospect’: Charlotte Smith, Satan, and the Politics of Nostalgia in The Emigrants.” Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 31, no. 4 (2024): 517–35. Publications J. Antonio Templanzapublished \”\’Fitliest Called Chaos\’: The Questionable Metaphysics of Paradise Lost,\” Milton Quarterly 59.3 (2025) Hyunyoung Cho published “A Green Marvell: Seventeenth-Century Draining of the Fens and ‘Salmon-Fishers Moist’ in Upon Appleton House.” Marvell Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–29, https://doi.org/10.16995/marv.26252. Website link: https://marvell.openlibhums.org/article/id/26252/ Orlando Reade has been busy representing Milton beyond academia in the following public-facing endeavors: “Interview: Orlando Reade and Ariana Reines,” BOMB magazine, November 6, 2025, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2025/11/06/ariana-reines-and-orlando-reade (an interview with American poet Ariana Reines, whose recent book Wave of Blood meditates on Paradise Lost.); “Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’–The ultimate gardening manual?” The Financial Times, March 1, 2025, https://www.ft.com/barrier/corporate/94edaa32-bdf3-43e6-8f6a-64d18867bb69 (a brief survey of the gardens that influenced Paradise Lost, and the gardens influenced by it.); and “Why are the right obsessed with epic poetry?” The Nation, January 6, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/right-wing-epic-poetry. CFPs and Upcoming Conferences CFP Deadline (1/31/26) Conference on John Milton, October 2026 The next Conference on John Milton will be held at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT from 22–24 October 2026. A preliminary conference website is now live: https://english.byu.edu/conference-on-john-milton-2026 We invite proposals for 20-minute papers addressing any aspect of Milton’s life or work, including papers that explore connections between Milton and other writers or artists of the time period (or beyond). Proposals for panels or sessions are also welcome. Please send abstracts of 150–200 words along with a CV to Jason Kerr (jason_kerr@byu.edu) by 31 January 2026. Canada Milton Seminar XIX, May 8-9, 2026 University of Toronto This year’s presenters are: Thomas Fulton (Rutgers University), “Reimagining Creation in Cavendish, Hutchinson, and Milton” Colby Gordon (Bryn Mawr College), “Trinitarian Dysphoria in Paradise Regained” Deanne Williams (York University), “Those Egerton Girls” David Loewenstein (Penn State – University Park), “Contesting Freedom and Tyranny in Milton’s England and Paradise Lost” Julie Crawford (Columbia University), “Milton, Cavendish, and the Querelle des femmes” For more information and to register please visit our website (crrs.ca/milton2026) or contact Prof. John Rogers (for questions relating to the conference) or Dr. Natalie Oeltjen (for logistical matters). 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! Unsubscribe | Manage subscription Add your postal address here! |
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