Paul Stevens, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Toronto, has just been elected the Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America for 2022. His award will be presented to him at the Society’s annual dinner in Dublin in April 2022. He is the fourth Honored Scholar of the Milton Society from the Department of English at the University of Toronto, the others being Arthur Barker (1974), Northrop Frye (1975), and Mary Nyquist (2011).
Stevens’ Academic Career
Until recently Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature & Culture, Professor Stevens has as his primary area of teaching and research Milton and seventeenth-century literature, especially as that area illuminates colonialism and nationalism, secularism and religious change, theory and literary history. He has published four books and 94 refereed articles and other essays. Professor Stevens’ first book Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost” (Wisconsin 1985) examined the way Shakespeare appears to function in Milton’s writing as a metonym for imagination, so much so that as Milton strove to rationalize the psychology of religious faith, the Puritan poet somewhat ironically played a critical role in facilitating the Romantic idealization of imagination. In a subsequent sequence of articles, the two most influential of which remain “‘Leviticus Thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,” Criticism 35:3 (1993) and “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,” Milton Studies 34 (1996), Stevens’ focus turned to colonialism and post-colonial theory, most notably showing how Scripture gave Western colonialism its peculiar character and challenging the conventional view that Milton was “a poet against empire.”
In Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (Co-ed with Viviana Comensoli, Toronto 1998), he began his continuing engagement with the genesis and significance of the New Historicism, two later articles, “Pretending to be Real: Stephen Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism,” New Literary History 33:2 (2002) and “The New Presentism and its Discontents,” Rethinking Historicism (Cambridge 2012), identifying the shortcomings of New Historicism but suggesting how liberating historicist thinking more broadly construed can be. His interest in colonialism led to nationalism and his prize-winning collection, Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Co-ed with David Loewenstein, Toronto 2008), foregrounded the Janus-faced nature of modern nationalism. Professor Stevens’ latest book is The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War (Co-ed with David Loewenstein, Cambridge 2021) and his current book project is Sola Gratia: English Literature and the Secular Ways of Grace for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and which analyzes the ways in which the religious doctrine of grace morphs into all kinds of surprisingly different, secular forms of cultural surplus.
A former President of the Canadian Association of Chairs of English and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, he was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has won research grants and fellowships from SSHRC, NEH, the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Balliol College, Oxford, and Jesus College, Oxford. He is the founder and coordinator of the annual international Canada Milton Seminar and a passionate graduate and undergraduate teacher, recent prizes including the Northrop Frye Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research (2008), Finalist for the TVO Best Lecturer Competition (2009), and the President’s Teaching Award (2010).
