Laura Knoppers
George N. Shuster Professor of English Literature
Areas of study
- Early Modern
- Gender and Sexuality
- Religion and Literature
Education
Ph.D. and M.A., Harvard University
B.A., Calvin College
Research and teaching interests
Seventeenth-century British literature, Milton, early modern women writers, gender in history, English Revolution, visual culture
Biography
Laura Knoppers takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the seventeenth century, focusing on the intersections between literature, politics, religion, and visual culture. Most recently, she edited Seventeenth-Century British Poetry (2024), volume 5 of the Oxford History of Poetry in English. Knoppers’s work on John Milton includes two monographs, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011) and Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (1994), a co-edited volume (with Gregory Colon Semenza), Milton and Popular Culture (2006). She edited Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes for Oxford University Press and served as editor of the flagship journal, Milton Studies, from 2009-2018. In 2016 she was named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. Knoppers’ work on literature and the English Revolution includes a monograph, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661 (2000), as well as the Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (2012). She also teaches and researches early modern women writers. In 2009, she edited the Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, and she has published on Margaret Cavendish, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, and Mary Rowlandson. She is currently completing a monograph on literature, luxury, and the court of Charles II.
Representative publications
- "Looks of Sympathy and Love: Seeking Miltonic Companionship in Frankenstein and The Truman Show." Milton Studies, Vol. 67, No. 2 (2025), 235-64.
- Editor, Seventeenth-Century British Poetry (2024), volume 5 of The Oxford History of Poetry in English xxi + 554 pp
- "Aemilia Lanyer." In Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Laura L Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 321-38, volume 5 of The Oxford History of Poetry in English.
- “For the Benefit of the Afflicted’: Unsettling Comfort in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative." In The Puritan Literary Tradition, ed. Johanna Harris and Alison Searle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 164-79.
- “Changing Places: Relocating the Court Masque in Early Modern Women’s Writing.” In Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, ed. Danielle Clarke, Sarah Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 351-64.
