Rate My Professor Laura Knoppers

Knoppers's primary research focus is on John Milton’s works and life in religious, political, and cultural contexts, alongside seventeenth-century British literature, early modern women writers particularly Margaret Cavendish, gender in history, poetry and poetics, and the English Revolution. Her key publications include editor of Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, Volume 5 of The Oxford History of Poetry in English (Oxford University Press, 2024); Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge University Press, 2011); editor of The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2009); the award-winning scholarly edition of The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, Volume II of The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford University Press, 2008); Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661 (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (University of Georgia Press, 1994). She edited the journal Milton Studies from 2009 to 2018 and currently works on a book about luxury, cultural politics, and the court of Charles II. Knoppers has received the Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America for lifetime achievement (2016), Irene Samuel Memorial Award (2015), 2025 College of Arts & Letters Graduate Student Mentorship Award, and selection to Notre Dame’s 2025 All-Faculty Team, along with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Folger Shakespeare Library, and others. She has supervised ten completed dissertations and served on over thirty committees.