Achsah Guibbory

Achsah Guibbory is a Professor of English at Barnard College specializing in the poetry of Donne, Milton, and Renaissance love poetry. A graduate of Indiana University (B.A., 1966) and the University of California, Los Angeles (M.A., 1967, Ph.D., 1970), she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Clarke Library at the University of Illinois before joining its Urbana-Champaign faculty as an assistant professor, advancing to professor of English in 1989. During her tenure there, she was a twice a Fellow at its Center for Advanced Study (1972-2000) and received the Harriet and Charles Luckman Undergraduate Distinguished Teaching Award (1995).  After having spent 2003 as a Visiting Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, she accepted an appointment there as Professor of English, her current position.

Ms. Guibbory has been a Fellow at the Huntington Library (1987) and an NEH Senior Research Fellow (2000-01).  She has served as President of the Milton Society of America and the John Donne Society, and as Editor of the Journal of English and Germanic Languages. 

Among her many publications are the following:  she wrote "’Oh let me not serve so’: The Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies," ELH, 57 (1990), 811-33, which received the John Donne Society Award; Ceremony and Community in Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP, 1998; rpt., 2006);  ”The Jewish Question’ and ‘The Woman Question’ in Samson Agonistes: Gender, Religion, and Nation," in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge UP, 2004); and "England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649-1660," in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas Brooks (Cambridge UP, 2008); and she edited The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (Cambridge UP, 2006).