Joe Moshenska
Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford
I'm a professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. I work principally on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with frequent forays into later periods. My thinking about this period usually gets drawn back, in one way or another, to close and sustained encounters with Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost. I’ve tended to work at the intersection between literature and contiguous fields – philosophy, theology, science, visual arts – and have longstanding interests in critical theory. I am a 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. I am currently working on my fifth book, which will be focused on the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza. At the centre of this book will be the question: why has Spinoza - who is perhaps the least obviously literary of the great philosophers, his dense and abstract prose aspiring to the status of geometry - been so admired and beloved by a long series of great imaginative writers?
EXPs by Joe Moshenska
The reason to read John Milton’s poetry today is that he captures the most exciting, extreme conflicts and tensions of his own time and can therefore resonate with the conflicts and tensions of ours.
The word iconoclasm refers most literally to the breaking of icons, which is to say, the breaking of images of God that are believed to have God or some sense of divine force residing in them.
What distinguishes the sense of touch, historically, is that it’s had an extremely unstable status among the human senses.