Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities

(Spring 2026)

My book project aims to show that the huge outpouring of print during the English Revolution, when press censorship largely collapsed, was in many ways a unique period of literary and political history, a new age of “free writing and free speaking” (as the great poet and polemicist John Milton described it in 1644) when ideas of tyranny and freedom were the subject of intense debate and competing interpretations. Other scholars have stressed that freedom in Milton’s writings involves rational and knowledgeable human choice. But they have neglected to investigate ways that freedom and tyranny were highly contested concepts in Milton’s England. Notions of freedom and tyranny then often drew upon the Bible and upon Greek and Roman authorities.  But they were also redefined in radical ways during this period of political and religious upheaval.  My book project aims to illuminate how the concepts of freedom and tyranny became a major battleground in seventeenth-century England, a crucial and fertile period in Western history and culture for understanding the ways these concepts were defined and redefined.  In Tyrannical Powers I hope to illuminate how writers played a particularly vital and creative role in the contest over their meanings.