Associate Professor of English

(Fall 2027)

Milton’s Library is a collaborative project (with Jason Scott-Warren [Cambridge] and Aaron T. Pratt [Folger Shakespeare Library]) that aims to reconstruct the personal book collection of the English poet and polemicist John Milton (1608-1674), author of the epic poem Paradise Lost and many other significant works of poetry and political commentary. The result will be an open-access online collection featuring easily navigable, cover-to-cover digital images of the ten books that Milton certainly read and annotated, which are currently housed in seven different libraries in the US and UK. This digital resource will allow Milton’s books—and the extensive notes he wrote in their margins—to be studied side-by-side for the very first time. The Milton’s Library project promises increased access to Milton’s now-scattered book collection—including volumes containing texts by Aratus, Boccaccio, Chrysostom, Dante, Della Casa, Euripides, Heraclides, Holinshed, Lycophron, Shakespeare, Varchi—and therefore a way to better understand how knowledge, opinion, and literary value were channeled through Milton’s engagements with his books before, during, and after the turbulent period of the English civil wars. My role in authenticating two of these books as Milton’s (the Shakespeare and the Holinshed) and my ongoing work on Milton’s Library is the basis for a book project, tentatively titled Promiscuous Reading. Inspired by Milton’s rationale for a free press, Promiscuous Reading weaves together an account of my own search for Milton’s books with a fresh study of Milton’s own expansive reading practices drawn from the notes and marks he left in the margins of his books, which have never been studied as a discrete archive. I envision Promiscuous Reading as partly a new take on what Milton meant in Areopagitica (1644) when he referred to the ‘value’ of ‘books read promiscuously’; partly an argument against the optimization of academic research and in favor of ‘slow bibliography’; and partly a manifesto about the value of reading widely and deeply at a moment when the American educational system is generally retreating from offering—or, refusing to offer—students the opportunity for sustained and exploratory engagements with literary and other texts.