Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Renaissance Literature
Areas of Interest
- Early modern literature and culture
- Milton
- Devotional poetry and prose
- Early modern literature and theology
- Early modern literature of cosmogony and cosmology
- Literature and science
- The British and American reception of Milton
Biography
John Rogers is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature and Culture. He is the author of The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, as well as numerous essays on a range of seventeenth-century literary and cultural topics, from the poetry of Aemelia Lanyer and Andrew Marvell to the physico-theological speculations of Isaac Newton. He is currently completing Milton's Poetry and the Theologies of Liberalism, which examines Milton's religious heterodoxy by means of an examination of his lifelong engagement with the contemporary European heresy of anti-Trinitarianism. And he has begun work on another monograph, Latter-day Milton: Paradise Lost and the Creation of America's God, which explores the unlikely role that Milton's epic played in the inception of two of America's most imaginatively robust nineteenth-century religions, Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism. He has been awarded the Milton Society of America's James Holly Hanford Award for Outstanding Book and the MLA First Book Prize for The Matter of Revolution, as well as the MSA's Hanford Award for Outstanding Article, one for "Transported Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost," and the other for "Orson Pratt and the Miltonic Origins of Mormon Materialism." He taught for many years in the Department of English at Yale University, where he also served as Head of Berkeley College. Twenty-five lectures he delivered for an undergraduate course on Milton at Yale have been recorded and are publicly available via Open Yale Courses and YouTube.
Office Hours
Online office hour, Wednesday, 3-4pm, or by appointment.
Publications
Books
The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Cornell University Press, 1996).
"Milton's Poetry and the Theologies of Liberalism" (monograph in progress)
"Latter-day Milton: Paradise Lost and the Creation of America's God" (monograph in progress)
Articles
"Newton's Arian Epistemology and the Cosmogony of Paradise Lost," ELH (English Literary History) 86 (2019): 77-106.
"Ruin the Sacred Truths: Prophecy, Form, and Nonconformity in Marvell and Milton," Oxford Companion to Marvell (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press), 2019.
"Latter-day Milton: Paradise Lost and the Creation of Mormon Theology," in Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton, edited by John Rumrich and Stephen Fallon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
"Parley Pratt, Mormonism, and the Broken Planet of Paradise Lost," in Milton in the Americas, edited by Elizabeth Sauer and Angelica Duran (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017)
"Orson Pratt and the Miltonic Origins of Mormon Materialism," in Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment, edited by Kevin Donovan and Thomas Festa (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017).
Introduction, "Relation Regained," in Milton's Paradise Regained, special edition of Huntington Library Quarterly, ed. John Rogers (April 2013)
"The Political Theology of Milton's Heaven," in The New Milton Criticism, ed. Peter Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
"Paradise Regained and the Memory of Paradise Lost," Oxford Companion to Milton, ed. Nigel Smith and Nicholas McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
"Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ," in Heresy in Early Modern England, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
"Transported Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost," in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 115-32.
"Milton's Circumcision," in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, edited by Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquese University Press, 2003), pp. 188-213.
"Timing the Redemption in the Early Modern Devotional Lyric," in Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same: New Essays on Poetry and Poetics, Renaissance to Modern, edited by Jennifer Lewin (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, 2002), pp. 92-103.
"The Passion of a Female Literary Tradition: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum," in Forging Connections: Women's Poetry from Renaissance to Romantic, edited by Anne K. Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, and Jonathan W. Post (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 2002), pp. 7-18.
"Delivering Redemption in Samson Agonistes," in the Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Milton's Samson Agonistes, edited by Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 72-97.
Milton, John," entry for The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford University Press, 2000)
"The Secret of Samson Agonistes," in The Miltonic Samson, ed. Michael Lieb and Albert Labriola (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)
"The Enclosure of Virginity: The Poetics of Sexual Abstinence in the English Revolution," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Archer (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 229-50
"The Great Work of Time: Marvell's Pastoral Historiography," in On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1992): 207-32
"Milton and the Mysterious Terms of History," ELH 57 (1990): 281-305
Edited Collection of Essays
Relation Stands: Essays on Paradise Regained, ed. John Rogers, special volume of Huntington Library Quarterly (April 2013)