Speakers

AchinsteinSharon AchinsteinSir William Osler Professor of English at Johns Hopkins, is author of Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994) and Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (2003) and editor of two collections, Milton and Toleration (2007) and Literature, Gender and the English Revolution (1994).  Her recent research faces the history of marriage towards literature, law, politics, and theology, directions pursued in work on her edition of Milton’s writings on divorce (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Through this project, Achinstein’s current work engages in debates over secularism, gender, sexuality and human right in early modernity.

 

Benite2011 (1)Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Ben-Dor Benite has received several awards and honors and is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Berggruen Institute. Ben-Dor Benite’s research centers on the interaction between religions in world history and cultural exchanges across vast space and deep time. He is the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); and co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); and an edited volume on Sovereignty (forthcoming with Columbia University Press). He is currently working on a number of projects related to Jews, Jesuits, Chinese, and Muslims. Ben-Dor Benite enjoys writing short fiction in Hebrew and pieces for the wider public on Confucian philosophy and on the Bible’s prophets and scribes.

 

10-23-14-HBennettPhoto (1)Herman Bennett is Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has written extensively on the presence of African slaves and freedmen in Mexican society during the colonial period and on the consequent interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in colonial Mexico. His books include  Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Indiana University Press, 2009) and Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Indiana University Press, 2003), in which he offers a social historical examination of free Afro-Mexican kinship practices in the mature and late-colonial periods. Bennett has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

 

Nelson_photo2Eric Nelson is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University, and the author, most recently, of The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Harvard/Belknap, 2014), which received the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize and was named a Choice “Top 25 Books for 2015” selection. His other books include The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard/Belknap, 2010), which received the Erwin Stein Prize and the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, and The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He has edited Hobbes’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2008). He has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has also been a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a British Marshall Scholar.  He is currently at work on a long-term project on the theory of justice.

 

Nyquist (1)Mary Nyquist is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago, 2013), which unpacks the relationship between political and chattel slavery in the thought of, among others, Hobbes, Milton, and Locke. With Feisal Mohamed she edited Milton and Questions of History: Essays by Canadians Past and Present (Toronto, 2012), recipient of the Milton Society of America’s Irene Samuel Award. Her numerous and widely cited articles read early modern texts in light of feminist, critical race theory, and Euro-colonialist slavery and freedom studies, as well as scholarship in classics and religious studies. Nyquist is an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. She is currently working on three SSHRCC-funded monographs on interrelations among rights, barbarism and animality in the context of Euro-colonialism, one of which is provisionally entitled Hobbes in the Age of Milton.

 

SRivett017finalwebSarah Rivett is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Princeton University. Her first book, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011) was awarded the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History.  The Science of the Soul highlights the unity of science and religion in transatlantic networks of knowledge formation by arguing that empiricism and natural philosophy transformed the scope of Puritan religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s.  Forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2017, Rivett’s second book, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation, explores the impact of New World language encounters between indigenous and European populations on Enlightenment language philosophy and early American literary history. Additionally, Rivett has co-edited a volume of essays on Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (2014)Her articles have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, American Literature, Early American Literature, The William and Mary Quarterly, and Early American Studies.

 

UnknownDomna Stanton, Distinguished Professor of French at the Graduate Center, CUNY, is the author, most recently, of The Dynamics of Gender in Early-Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (2014). In addition to her book, The Aristocrat as Art, on the honnête homme and the dandy, Stanton is the editor of several volumes, including The Female Autograph; The Defiant Muse; and Histories of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS. She coedited “A Woman who Defends all the Person of her Sex”: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings of Gabrielle Suchon (Chicago UP 2010), and Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by 17th-century Women Writers (Toronto, 2011). Stanton was president of the Modern Language Association in 2005 and editor of PMLA from 1992 to 1997; she co-edited with Judith Butler a special issue of PMLA (Fall, 2006) on human rights and the humanities. Stanton sits on several non-profit boards and committees, including Columbia University’s Maison Française, the Modern Language Association, Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, and Scholars at Risk. In November 2014, she was named Commissioner to the New York City Commission on Human Rights. Stanton’s next book, to be completed in 2017, is The Monarchy, the Nation and its Others: France in the Age of Louis XIV.

 

WarrenChristopher N. Warren is an Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.  His book Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 (Oxford University Press) was awarded the 2016 Roland H. Bainton prize for Literature.  Warren is co-founder (with Daniel Shore) of the digital humanities project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, and his work has appeared in English Literary Renaissance; The Seventeenth Century; Digital Humanities Quarterly; Humanity; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and the European Journal of International Law. He directs the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and he has held visiting fellowships at Keble College, Oxford, the University of Chicago, and NUI Galway’s Moore Institute.

 

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