A scholarly article for Milton Studies, exploring how Paradise Lost was read by abolitionist readers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—most importantly Malcolm X.
An article for AFM magazine, republished by Literary Hub, on the strange world of Harry Potter fan fiction.
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 afterlife.
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 on three prominent American right-wing voices.
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.
“Fortune Is a Mistresse”: Figures of Fortune in English Renaissance Poetry
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.