Some recent essays and reviews:
For The Literary Review, a short piece on Harriet Armstrong’s excellent debut novel To Rest Our Minds and Bodies.
‘Sharing a bed with Edmund White’
A personal tribute to the late American writer Edmund White, for the New Statesman.
‘How a little-known French literary critic became a bellweather for the US right’
An essay for the Financial Times about the French thinker René Girard, and his surprising influence on the American right.
An essay on Joseph Hillel’s film At All Kosts, about a theatre festival in Haiti continuing amid the ongoing political unrest, written for the Open City documentary festival.
‘Why is the Right Obsessed with Epic Poetry?’
An essay for The Nation on allusions to epic literature in the writings of American right-wing voices, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson.
For the Financial Times, an essay about the real gardens that inspired Paradise Lost, and the gardens inspired by its visions of infinite abundance and eventual catastrophe.
‘The Rewarding Mystery of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’
An article for Apollo magazine on the mysterious paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and my changing understanding of them over the past twelve years.
‘Princeton Goes to Prison: Teaching Paradise Lost to Incarcerated Students’
An excerpt from my book in Literary Hub, describing a period of five years spent teaching in prisons in New Jersey.
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Recent and forthcoming academic publications:
‘How Malcolm X Read His Milton: Paradise Lost and the Politics of Abolition’ (forthcoming in spring 2026)
An article for Milton Studies, exploring the presence of abolition as a political strategy in John Milton’s poetry and prose, and the reception of that aspect of his work among slavery abolitionists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
‘An Abolitionist Turns to Milton at the Outbreak of the American Civil War’ (forthcoming)
A book chapter for an edited collection entitled Diverse Miltons. It describes an anonymous editorial written in 1861, a few days after the outbreak of the American Civil War, in the popular newspaper The Anglo-African Weekly. It analyzes the editorial’s extended allusion to Paradise Lost, and argues that it was written by the radical abolitionist journalist James Redpath.
‘Radiance in Poetry: An Exchange of Poems between Katherine Philips and Henry Vaughan’ (forthcoming)
An article exploring the mysterious personal relationship between the two most important Anglo-Welsh poets of the Civil War era, Katherine Philips and Henry Vaughan, and the poems they wrote to each other, which use light imagery to imagine how poetry acts across geographic distances.
‘“Fortune Is a Mistresse”: Figures of Fortune in English Renaissance Poetry,’ in Fate and Fortune in European Thought, ca. 1400–1650, ed. Ovanes Akopyan (Brill, 2021)
A book chapter exploring the representation of Fortune in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its bearing on the changing ideas of race and gender.