Prof. Noam Reisner

I am interested in early modern literature and its intersection with philosophy and theology, sepcializing on Milton, Shakespeare and early modern drama, and religious prose and poetry. I have wider interests in poetic theory, rhetoric, literature and ethics, classics and English, and the history of ideas. I teach courses on a wide range of topics relating to early modern English literature, includin Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, early modern drama, baroque and metaphysical poetry, early modern poetics, prose and rhetoric.

D.Phil (English) Oxford University
M.Phil (English) Oxford University, with distinction.
B.A (Classics and English) Tel-Aviv University, Magna cum Laude.

Appointments and Academic Honours:

Associate Professor in the Department of English and American Studies, 2008 -

Alon Scholarship for the academic years 2008-11.  

Plumer Research Fellow in English, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University (2006-2008)

British Overseas Research Student Award (For studies at Oxford, 2001-2003)

The Nadav Vardi Scholarship for Academic Excellence (Tel-Aviv University, 1999)

The Becky Greenwald Scholarship (Tel-Aviv University, 1998).

Early modern culture and literature with an emphasis on Milton and his contemporaries, Shakepeare, Marlowe and English Renaissance drama, Revenge Drama, early modern devotional prose and poetry, history of ideas.

Books:

• Wild Play: The Ethics of Revenge Drama in the English Renaissance (in progress)
• John Milton's Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
• Milton and the Ineffable (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Articles and chapters in books:

• “Young Milton’s Pauline Temper”. Forthcoming in Making Milton, ed John Garrison and Marrisa Nicosia (Oxford University Press, under contract)

• ‘The Theatricalization of Patient Revenge in English Renaissance Tragedy’, special issue of Etudes anglaises, 72.1 (2019): 393-408, on “Elizabethan Drama and Religion”, ed. Line Cottegnies.

• "תרבות הרנסנס באנגליה" פרק עבור תולדות הרעיונות, כרך א: העת החדשה המוקדמת, בעריכת יוסי מאלי, (ירושלים: מוסד ביאליק, 2018), 223-46.

  ‘English Renaissance Culture’, in The History of Ideas: volume 1, The Early Modern Period, ed. Yosi Mali (Jerusalem: Bialik press, 2018. Hebrew. 223-46.

• “‘“The spirit of prayer inspired”: Invocation as Prayer in Milton’s Poetic Imagination,” in Prayer and Performance in Early Modern English Literature: Gesture, Word and Devotion, ed. Joseph William Sterrett (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 198-211.

• 'Pre-Eminent Among Gentiles: Milton's Major Poetry in Hebrew' in Milton in Translation, eds. Angelica Duran, Islam Issa and Jonathan R. Olson (Oxford University Press, 2017), 416-42

• ‘Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God’, in Imagining the Jewish God, eds. Leonard V. Kaplan and Ken Koltun-Fromm (Lexington, 2016), 299-318.

• 'The Poetic Promise of 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' The New Blackwell Companion to Milton, 2nd edn, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Blackwell Publishing, 2016), 230-240

• 'Martyred Signs: Robert Southwell's Religious Use of Metaphor', Scintilla 18 (2015): 51-67.

• 'Limited Being: Revising Hamlet in The Revenger's Tragedy', in The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Sophie Chiari (Ashgate, 2015), 145-160.

• 'Framing Religion: Marlovian policy and the pluralism of art', in Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts, eds. Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt (Wayne State University Press, 2013), 311-329.

• 'Obituary and Rapture in Milton's Memorial Latin Poems', in Young Milton, ed. Edward Jones (Oxford University Press, 2011 ).

• 'The Paradox of Mimesis in Sidney's Defence of Poesie and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus'. Cambridge Quarterly 39:4 (2010), 331-49

• ‘The Many Faces of Milton’. The Cambridge Quarterly 38 (2009): 78-87.

• ‘The Preacher and Profane Learning’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, eds. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, Emma Rhatigan (Oxford University Press, 2011), 72-87.

• ‘Spiritual Architectonics: Destroying and Rebuilding the Temple in Paradise Regained’. Milton Quarterly 43:3 (2009), 166-82.

• ‘Textual Sacraments: Capturing the numinous in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes’. Renaissance Studies 21:5 (2007): 662-78.

• ‘The Prophet’s Conundrum: Poetic Soaring in Milton’s “Nativity Ode” and the “The Passion”. Philological Quarterly 83:4 (Sep. 2004): 371-88.