Laura Knoppers

Laura Lunger Knoppers works on seventeenth-century British literature, especially the works of John Milton. Her particular interests include the intersections of literature, politics, religion, and visual culture, as well as gender and history.  She is the author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge, 2011), Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661 (Cambridge, 2000), and Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (University of Georgia, 1994). Her scholarly edition of Milton’s Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes (Oxford, 2008) won the John Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America. Knoppers has edited or co-edited a number of essay collections, including most recently The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2012).  Knoppers is currently serving as co-editor for two companion volumes to a new scholarly edition of Oliver Cromwell's writings and speeches to be published by Oxford University Press.

A past president of the Milton Society of America, Knoppers has served since 2010 as the editor of Milton Studies. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Folger Shakespeare Institute.

Knoppers teaches undergraduate courses in Milton, Shakespeare, revenge tragedy, seventeenth-century women writers, literature and the English Revolution, satire, early British Literature, and seventeenth-century prose and poetry. At the graduate level, she teaches Milton, English revolutionary literature, early women writers, and Renaissance prose and poetry.

Books