David Loewenstein
Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor
Department of English

My earliest research focused in the intersections between politics and aesthetics in Milton's writings. I was particularly interested in moving away from a history-of-ideas approach to Milton's political writings and in examining connections between Milton's controversial prose and his great poems. This work resulted in two books: Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (1990) and Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (1990, co-edited with James G. Turner).

During the 1990s I became increasingly interested in exploring Milton's relation to his immediate contemporaries, especially in the context of radical religion. I was also interested in contributing to a particularly lively area in early modern literary studies: the literature of the English Revolution. My most recent book, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religions, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001) thus examines the ways Milton and his contemporaries responded to the contradictions of the English Revolution. Developing out of this recent book—and reflecting my interest in radical religious culture—is my newest project, Factious Ways: Writing and Persecuting Heresy in Early Modern England. This book examines the ways heresy was imagined, feared, and written about in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

Other major projects include the new Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2002), edited with Janel Mueller of the University of Chicago, and an edition of the complete works of the Digger writer Gerrard Winstanley, with Thomas Corns and Ann Hughes (for Oxford UP).

Publications:

• Editor and contributor, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
• Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religions, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Editor, The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1995)
• Milton: Paradise Lost, a critical volume in the Cambridge University Press Landmarks of World Literature series, gen. ed. J. P. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Winner of the Milton Society of America's James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book.
• Editor, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• In addition to publishing articles in such journals as SEL, Milton Studies, and Criticism, I have contributed chapters and essays to a variety of recent volumes, including: The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge UP, 1999), The Cambridge Companion to the English Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2001), The Blackwell Companion to Milton (Blackwell, 2001), Milton and Heresy (Cambridge UP, 1998).

Selected Awards and Honors:

• Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002-2007
• Overseas Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1999
• John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1995-96
• American Philosophical Society Research Grant, 1992
• The James Holly Hanford Award of the Milton Society of America for Distinguished Book, 1991, 2002
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, The Newberry Library, 1989-90
• William R. Heart Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 1988

Teaching:

Graduate: Milton; Seventeenth-Century Texts and Modern Critical Interpretations; Literature, Politics, and Religion in Early Modern England (which I will be teaching in 2002-3); Literature and Revolution in Early Modern England; Milton and Marvell: Religion, Politics, and Poetry in Revolutionary England.

In addition, my graduate teaching and research include a strong interest in early modern women writers, especially in their religious and political contexts.