David Loewenstein

David Loewenstein is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities at Penn State-University Park. He was previously Helen C. White Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he taught for nearly twenty-five years.

David Loewenstein has published widely on early modern English literature and culture, Milton and his contemporaries, and literature in relation to politics and religion. His recent scholarly work has addressed early modern English literature in relation to such topics as the construction of heresy, nationalism, and concepts of tyranny. His major publications include: Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge UP, 1990; winner of The Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book); Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (co-editor with James Grantham Turner; Cambridge UP, 1990); Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge UP, 2001; winner of The Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award); Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (co-editor; Cambridge UP, 2006); The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (co-editor with Janel Mueller; Cambridge UP, 2002; paperback, 2006); Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (co-editor with Paul Stevens; U of Toronto P, 2008); The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. (co-editor; Oxford UP, 2009); John Milton, Prose: Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education (editor; Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Oxford UP, 2013; paperback edn., 2016); Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (co-editor, Cambridge UP, 2015; paperback edn., 2018); Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation (co-editor; Routledge, 2020); The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War (co-editor with Paul Stevens; Cambridge UP, 2021).

David Loewenstein has been awarded major fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where he was a Senior Fellow). He has held year-long fellowships at the Folger and Newberry Libraries. He has also held Visiting Research Fellowships at Merton College and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, and at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. In 2025-26 he will hold the Fletcher-Jones Distinguished Fellowship at the Huntington Library. He has also twice won the Milton’s Society’s Irene Samuel Memorial Award for editing a distinguished multiauthor collection of essays. In 2006 he was elected Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America, its highest honor.

David Loewenstein is the co-editor (with Thomas N. Corns) of the new Oxford University Press edition of Paradise Lost (OUP, 2024). This two-volume edition, part of The Complete Works of John Milton, is unique. Unlike previous editions of the poem, the Oxford edition includes, alongside the twelve-book 1674 edition, a version of the 1667 ten-book edition of Paradise Lost. This will allow readers to compare more easily and precisely differences between the two major editions published in Milton’s lifetime, without necessarily privileging, from a textual point of view, one over the other. The Oxford edition also includes a new critical account and transcription of the manuscript of Book 1, the only part of the poem that exists in manuscript (preserved at the Morgan Library in New York City).