In the list of annual awards just announced by the Milton Society of America, early modern scholars associated with CRRS figure prominently. Mary Nyquist has just won the Irene Samuel Memorial Prize for Milton and Questions of History: Essays by Canadians (UTP 2012) and Nick von Maltzahn the Hanford Prize for Best Article on Milton which appeared in the same volume. Timothy Harrison won the Albert C. Labriola Award for Best Article published by a Graduate Student.
Mary Nyquist’s book was co-edited with Feisal Mohamed (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), who is himself a U of T graduate and former member of CRRS. This is a banner year for Professor Nyquist since the prize comes hard on the heels of the publication of her magisterial book on slavery, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago 2013). Milton and Questions of History includes essays by such great Toronto figures as A.S.P Woodhouse, Northrop Frye, Arthur Barker, Ernest Sirluck, and Hugh MacCallum and more recent Toronto scholars like Nyquist herself, Paul Stevens, and Muhammad Sid-Ahmad. According to the current President of the Milton Society of America, Rachel Trubowitz, the book is a wonderfully “thought-provoking volume, from its intellectually simulating introduction through to its stunning, tour-de-force afterword.” The focus of the book is the Canadian tradition in Milton studies and this prize gives formal recognition to the vitality and international significance of that tradition. This is the second time in five years that Toronto’s CRRS scholars have won the prize, Paul Stevens winning it with David Loewenstein of Wisconsin-Madison for Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (UTP 2008) in 2009.
Nick von Maltzahn who teaches at the University of Ottawa is a regular member of the Canada Milton Seminar sponsored annually by CRRS. His winning essay in Milton and Questions of History was entitled, “Milton and Deist Prelude to Liberalism.”
Tim Harrison’s essay “Adamic Awakening and the Feeling of Being Alive in Paradise Lost” was published in Milton Studies 54 (2012) and is related to his dissertation, Forms of Sentience in Early Modernity, supervised by Elizabeth Harvey. Tim is, of course, the founding organizer of CRRS’s Early Modern Graduate Forum.
All of these awards will be presented at the Milton Society dinner at the MLA in Chicago in January 2014. The focus of Milton studies at Toronto is the Canada Milton Seminar held annually at CRRS. This coming 9-10 May 2014 CMS IX will feature Stanley Fish, Jason Rosenblatt, J.P. Sommerville, and Ann Baynes Coiro. For more information, please visit http://1650580097-48936e7717784b30.wp-transfer.sgvps.net/event/miltonix/
– Paul Stevens, Professor of English, University of Toronto
