John Rogers
Professor, Department of English
John Rogers is a Professor in the Department of English and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature and Culture.
Rogers is author of The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, as well as numerous essays on a range of seventeenth-century literary and cultural topics — from the poetry of Aemelia Lanyer and Andrew Marvell to the physico-theological speculations of Isaac Newton. He is currently completing Milton’s Poetry and the Theologies of Liberalism, which examines Milton’s religious heterodoxy by means of an examination of his lifelong engagement with the contemporary European heresy of anti-Trinitarianism.
He has begun work on another monograph, Latter-day Milton: Paradise Lost and the Creation of America’s God, which explores the unlikely role that Milton’s epic played in the inception of two of America’s most imaginatively robust nineteenth-century religions, Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism.
He taught for many years in the Department of English at Yale University, where he also served as Head of Berkeley College.
Rogers has been awarded the Milton Society of America’s (MSA) James Holly Hanford Award for Outstanding Book and the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize for The Matter of Revolution, as well as the MSA’s Hanford Award for Outstanding Article, one for Transported Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost, and another for Orson Pratt and the Miltonic Origins of Mormon Materialism. He delivered twenty-five lectures for an undergraduate course on Milton at Yale which have been recorded and are publicly available via Open Yale Courses and YouTube.