About the Course
In this 4-week module we will read together and discuss key selections from throughout Paradise Lost. Our classes will be structured around the guided reading questions provided to students one week in advance of our class. We will focus, in particular, on the following key topics:
Paradise Lost and the Epic Tradition
Milton as Prophet
Paradise Lost and Milton's radical theology
Milton's view of Human Nature
Milton's political and historical writings on the English Revolution and the sovereignty of the English People.
I received my doctorate in 2019 from the University of Edinburgh, where I taught several undergraduate courses, ranging from medieval and early modern literature, to Romantic, Modernist and Late-Modernist poetry and drama. My doctoral research examined the relationship between processes of state-formation in early modern England and the spectacular flourishing of religious poetry witnessed during the same period. This work has been published by leading academic journals in my field, and tries to show that religious poetry was vitally and critically responsive to broad changes in social relations and practices of rule in 17C England.
In my teaching, as in my research, I'm drawn to examining intellectual history and literary art in the context of given social and political conditions.