Home | Curriculum Vitae | Milton Pages | Writing | Teaching


Michael Bryson
Assistant Professor of English
California State University, Northridge

My research and teaching focuses on questions of authority and its construction. I have special interest in how those questions and constructions are manifested in the early modern era, but my interest (even passion) transcends period. My book, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King, focuses this interest on John Milton and the English 17th century, a place and time in which questions of freedom and authority eventually brought a nation to revolution, civil war, and a failed attempt to permanently overthrow a centuries-old tradition of monarchical government.

My current projects include an essay on Negative Theology and Samson Agonistes in the March 2008 issue of Milton Quarterly. This is based on my seminar presentation at the Newberry Library Milton Seminar in Chicago, May 2005, and a shorter form of that essay that was presented at the International Milton Conference in Grenoble, France in June 2005. I also have recently contributed a chapter on the 1667 edition of Paradise Lost for a book edited by John Shawcross and Michael Lieb for Duquesne UP.

I wasn't always an academic, however. In a previous life, I tried to crack the only job market in the Western World that is even tighter than academia---the music business. Here are a couple of samples (#1 and #2) of me as a guitar player (in the years before Milton and graduate school...). I still play (at home--in the kitchen in the picture to the right), but writing and teaching take up most of my time these days.

Once upon a time, I used to try my hand at poetry too...such as it is.

By the way, here is a fun little toy I cooked up while at a conference years ago.