Conference Agenda
Thursday, October 22
6:00pm Opening Reception
FRIDAY, October 23
8:30 - 8:45 Welcome
8:45 - 9:00 Break
9:00 - 10:15 Session
Cosmology and Creation
- “Fallen Voyagers: Sin, Sea, and Cosmic Witness from Eden to the Albatross”
Z. I. Mahmud, Independent Scholar - “Sacred Fury: The Cosmos in Milton and Kepler”
Steve Hequembourg, Magen David High School - “Michael’s Cosmos-Building: A Defense of Milton’s Conclusion”
John T. Walsh, University of Dallas
Government
- “Prophetic Republicanism in Paradise Lost”
Jared Nabhan, University of Oklahoma - “‘Reigning in Hell’: Paradise Lost as Dystopian Literature”
Ellen Pariser, Salem State University - “Milton, Two Presidents, and an Archbishop: A Study in Partisan Politics in Modern Ecuador”
Matt Dollof, Albany State University
Book History
- “Milton’s Late Poems and the Case of the Missing Prelims”
Olin Bjork, University of Houston-Downtown - “Milton’s Modes of Publication”
Stephen Dobranski, Georgia State University - “‘In Prospect of Eden’: Deliberate Devotion and the 1688 Illustrated Paradise Lost”
Amber Bird, University of Alabama
10:15 - 10:30 Break
10:30 - 11:45 Session
Orthodoxy and Interpretation
- “A Time to Weep: Ecclesiastean Milton”
Brendan Prawdzik, The Pennsylvania State University - “Milton and Angelic Stages of Development”
Margaret Thickstun, Hamilton College - “Delivery and Prevention in Milton’s Poetry”
Tom Clayton, Colgate University
Sci-Fi
- “Immediate Worlds: Creation and Narration in Paradise Lost and Du Bartas’s Semaines”
Ryan Netzley, Southern Illinois University - “In Liu of Milton: Paradise Lost in Ken Liu’s Science Fiction”
Alex Garganigo, Austin College - “‘Not without dust and heat’: Philip Pulman’s The Rose Field (2025)
Margaret Kean, St. Hilda’s College - Oxford
Empire and Cosmopolitanism
- “Colonial and Gendered Structures of Epistemic Authority in Paradise Lost”
Aisha Humaira, Rutgers University - “Empire and History in Book 11 of Paradise Lost”
Clay Greene, University of Austin - “Milton’s Cosmopolitan Virtue: Poetic Theory and Humanist Aesthetics”
Lenhardt Stevens, University of Birmingham
11:45 - 1:30 LUNCH
1:30 - 3:00 Session
Words
- “Literary Influence in Elegy 6”
Lottie Page, Princeton University - “First Words”
Andrea Walkden, University of Toronto - “‘Milton as Known in his Latin Poems’: A Website for Teachers and Researchers”
John K. Hale, University of Otago - “‘Milton Made Easy!’: Paraphrasing the Unreadable Paradise Lost”
Mollie Bowman, Pennsylvania State University
Satan
- “‘The Hell Within Him’: A Theological Dive into the Mind of Lucifer”
Jacqueline Collo, Monmouth University - “‘This Knows My Punisher’: The Author of Satan’s Sin in the Niphates Soliloquy”
Hsing-hao Chao, National Taichung University of Education - Taiwan - "Memory in Paradise Lost”
David Boocker, University of Nebraska - Omaha - “Paradise Lost, Romeo and Juliet, SATAN Acrostics”
Arnie Perlstein, Independent Scholar
Getting Crip (Roundtable)
- Discussants: Pasquale Toscano, Amrita Dhar, Angelica Duran, Marissa Greenberg, Teri Fickling
Inheritances and Milton’s Son of God
- “Milton’s Hermeneutics and the Politics of Collective Punishment”
Amy Weng, Princeton University - “The Absolute Necessity of the Son in Paradise Lost, A Christian Poem”
David V. Urban, Calvin University - “Always Already Begotten: Queer Temporality and the Son in Paradise Lost”
David Ainsworth, University of Alabama
3:00 - 3:15 Break
3:15-4:30 Session
Salvation
- “Me softer airs befit”: The Miltonic Prophet’s Growing Pains
Daria Sadovnikova, Rutgers University - New Brunswick - “The Medieval Felix Culpa and the lists in Milton’s Paradise Regained”
Miriam Piedade Mansur Andrade and Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá, Federal University of Minas Gerais-UFMG/Brazil - “The Father’s Satanic Scapegoat: A Critical Analysis of Divine Favor in Paradise Lost by Chronology, Heresy, and Hebraic Allusion”
Madison Sweetman, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater
Disability
- “Crip Apocalypse: Disability and Eschatology in Milton’s Paradise Lost”
Monica Multer, Independent Scholar - “Milton’s Neuro-inclusive Pedagogy in Of Education”
Hannah Crawforth, King’s College London - “Melancholy as Disability in Samson Agonistes”
Maura Brady, Le Moyne College
Family Ties
- “How Radical Was the Young Milton Again: Primogeniture and Matrilineality in Milton’s Early Works”
Lynne Greenberg, Hunter College CUNY - “The Anxiety of Messianicity in Milton’s ‘Methough I saw my late espoused saint’”
William John Silverman, Jr., SUNY-Suffolk County Community College - “Legal Time-Traveling in Paradise Lost: Milton’s Last Words on Divorce”
Bradley Tepper, Independent Scholar
The Arts and Twentieth-Century Political Resistance
- “‘All art is of its own time': Carlotta Petrina with Milton in Mussolini's Rome”
Wendy Furman-Adams, Whittier College - “Darkness Barely Visible: Demetrios Galanis's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained”
Joshua Reid, Eastern Tennessee State University - “William Carlos Williams Putting Milton to Work and to Music (1949)”
Angelica Duran, Purdue University
4:30-4:45 Break
4:45-6:00 Session
De Doctrina Christiana
- “The Illusion of Unanimity: Sampling the Neglected Reception History of De Doctrina Christiana”
Hugh F. Wilson, Grambling State University - “Exegetical Method and Libertas Inquirendi in De Doctrina Christiana”
T. M. Vozar, University of Florida - “Dominion Undeserved?: Slavery and the Crisis of Divine Justice in De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost”
John Rogers, University of Toronto
Intertextuality & Politics
- “‘Analyzing Apian Anarchists’: The Bee Simile in Milton and Hutchinson’s Puritan Epics”
Chloe Brooke, Wayland Baptist University - “‘Hoist with his own Petard’: Ironies of Gunpowder in Early Modern England”
John Rumrich, University of Texas - “‘Like the Gates of Paradise’: Milton and Romantic Drug Literature”
Richard Parnell, Independent Scholar
Harmonious Ethics
- “Irony, Contingency, and the Environmental Ethics of Paradise Lost”
Louis Cameron, University of Cambridge - “‘The Bait of Honeyed’: Dalila and Milton’s Voices of Temptation”
Sarah Baber, University of Notre Dame - “‘Ear-Witness”: Sound, Disability, and Knowledge in Samson Agonistes”
Samuel Addington, Independent Scholar
6:00 DINNER
SATURDAY, October 24
9:00 - 10:15 Session
Queering Milton
- “Sexed Insubordination in Milton and Grotius”
Madison R. Wolfert, Princeton University - “On That Which is ‘not delicious’: Asexual Resonances in Milton’s Comus”
Emma Gorman, Indian University - “Impossible Unions: Protestant Masculinity, Homoerotic Intimacy, and Nation-building in Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce”
Jessica Tvordi, Southern Utah University
Education
- “‘Slow-Endeavoring Art’ and ‘Mischief Swift’: Wise Pacing in Paradise Lost”
Emily Stelzer, Houston Christian University - “Presbyterians in Paradise: The Reason of Church-Government and Paradise Lost”
Jeffrey Gore, University of Illinois at Chicago - “Dramatizing Delightful Divisions”
Jeremy Larson, Regent University
Tradition
- “Calling Euripides from the ‘old Schools of Greece’: Reading A Maske as Euripidean Tragedy.”
Nicholas Jonee, Oberlin College - “Reading Lycidas through Sannazaro’s Arcadia.”
Nicholas Jones, Oberlin College David Vaughan, Northwestern Oklahoma State University - "Euripides's Ion and Milton’s Sin and Death”
James Ross Macdonald, University of the South
10:15 - 10:30 Break
10:30 - 11:45 Session
Archives (plenary)
- Edward Jones, Oklahoma State University
- Alison Chapman, University of Alabama-Birmingham
- Lauren Shohet, Villanova University