Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish (Ph.D., Yale University) is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Law, Florida International University, and Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Distinguished Professor of English, Criminal Justice and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His numerous scholarly works cover a variety of fields, from Milton and early modern literature, to law, to literary theory. His influential books include Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; and a Thirtieth Anniversary Edition in 1997); Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972); The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (1978); Is there a Text in This Class? Interpretive Communities and the Sources of Authority (1980); Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989); There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too (1994); Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995); The Trouble with Principle (1999); and How Milton Works (2001). The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, was published in 1999. Among his numerous honors and awards are the Hanford Book Award (1998) for the second edition of Surprised by Sin and the Milton Society Award (1989) for best published essay and several NEH Directorships for Summer Seminars on Milton and Critical Theory.

Feisal Mohamed
Feisal Mohamed (Ph.D., English, University of Toronto) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (University of Toronto Press, 2008). Among his articles, both scholarly and popular, on Milton, religious violence, and political liberalism, his “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton's Samson Agonistes” was awarded honorable mention for PMLA's William Riley Parker Prize in 2005.

John Rumrich
John Rumrich (Ph.D., English, University of Virginia) is the Thaman Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He has co-edited The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (Random House, 2007) with William Kerrigan and Stephen Fallon and the Norton Critical Edition of British Poetry, 1603 – 1660 (W.W. Norton, 2006) with Gregory Chaplin. He is the author of Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996) and has co-edited Milton and Heresy (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998) with Stephen Dobranski, winner of the Milton Society of America's Irene Samuels Award. He has authored numerous articles on Milton and early modern literature.

Jeffrey Shoulson, Chair
Jeffrey Shoulson (Ph.D., English, Yale University) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. His Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2001) was awarded the Salo W. Baron Book Prize from the American Academy of Jewish research. He has edited Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists, Jews, and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) with Allison Coudert and the forthcoming To Reclaim the Bible: Progressive Explorations in Scripture with Dwight A. McBride. He has published several articles on Hebrew Bible influences on Milton and early modern literature, and is currently working on Fictions of Conversion: Community, Identity, and Instability in Early Modern England.

Regina Schwartz
Regina Schwartz (Ph.D., English, University of Virginia), Professor of Literature, Religion, and Law at Northwestern University, writes on questions of justice. Among her numerous scholarly publications, she has authored a book on John Milton’s theodicy and poetics, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (Cambridge, rpt Chicago, winner of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford’s Book Award). Her The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago) calls attention to the cultural uses of scripture to endorse violence. She edited the collection The Book and the Text, The Bible and Literary Theory (Blackwell) and co-edited The Postmodern Bible (Yale) which helped to broaden approaches to the Bible toward interdisciplinarity, and she edited a volume, Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and Theology Approach the Beyond (Routledge), on the place of transcendence in philosophy from Kant to Levinas, in literature, including Shakespeare and Kafka, and in theology, ranging from negative theology to sacramentalism. Her recent book, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford University Press, 2008) explores the ways a sacramental vision and its understanding of justice infuses the poetry, drama, and the wider culture of Reformation. Her current work is Equity, Mercy, and Charity in Shakespeare. She is a past President of the Milton Society of America, co-Director of the Newberry Milton Seminar and the Director of the Northwestern University Justice Institute.

Susanne Woods
Professor Woods (Ph.D., English, Columbia) is Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Miami and has taught at Brown University, where she was Associate Dean of the Faculty, Franklin and Marshall College, where she was Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College, and most recently at Wheaton College, where she was Provost from 1999 to 2006. The recent past chair of the Northeast Milton Seminar and past member of the Executive Committee of the Milton Society of America, she has also directed the Women Writers Project at Brown University and was co-general editor of Oxford University Press’s series, Women Writers in English, 1350-1850. She is the author of Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999; a Choice notable book for 1999) and Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (Huntington Library Press, 1985), and a coauthor of A Handbook of Literary Feminisms (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) with Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss. She has edited The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (1611) (Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), Milton’s Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained (New American Library, Signet Classic, 2001), and coedited Approaches to Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Modern Language Association, 2000) with Margaret Hannay. Her current project is a book on Milton and the Idea of Freedom.

Fred Frohock
Fred M. Frohock (Ph.D., Political Science and Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is professor and chair of political science at the University of Miami with academic concentrations in political philosophy, law, and bioethics. He is the author of ten books and numerous papers, reviews, and articles in scholarly journals that include The American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Studies, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Journal of Religion, Religion, Polity, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Social Theory and Practice, and Human Rights Quarterly. His latest book, Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, September 2006), is a treatment of religion and politics that uses Santería as a case study in a general theoretical examination of the two practices. His work often combines theory and field work. Special Care is an ethnographic account of decision making in an intensive care neonatal nursery (University of Chicago Press, 1986). In 1992 he published Healing Powers (University of Chicago Press), a study of alternative medicine and spiritual healing. Public Reason: Mediated Authority in the Liberal State (Cornell University Press, 1999) delineates public reasoning on post-Wittgenstein theories of language. Lives of the Psychics (University of Chicago Press, 2000), examines anomalous and mystical experiences. At this time Frohock is working on a book that critically scans the evidence for life after death and the implications of beliefs in an afterlife for political regimes (University of Kansas Press). He has twice been a Social Science Research Council Fellow (the second time for a year’s study in London), served for eight years on the University Hospital Ethics Committee in Syracuse, NY, and was one of the founders and vice presidents of the Institute for Ethics in Health Care, a nonprofit institute that served central New York for almost a decade. He originated and was an on-site director of Syracuse University’s Madrid program, and he created and chaired for 20 summers Syracuse University’s Politics and Media program in London. He now directs a program in London for the University of Miami, Security, Globalization, and Human Rights: Ideals and Realities. In 2002 he was awarded a Chancellor’s Citation by Syracuse University for Exceptional Academic Achievement.

Erik Larson
Erik Larson (Ph.D., Religious Studies, New York University) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University. He has authored The Translation of Enoch: From Aramaic into Greek (Brill, 1997) and has edited several texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls for Oxford University Press's Discoveries in the Judean Desert series. Among his regular offerings are courses in Hebrew Bible, Biblical Archaeology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, Early Christian History, Islam, and World Religions, as well as language classes on Biblical Hebrew, New Testament Greek, and Classical Arabic.

Irene Oh
Irene Oh (Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of Virginia; MA, Divinity, University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. Her research focuses upon the intersection of comparative religions and politics, especially religion and human rights, feminist ethics, and environmental ethics. She has authored The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics (Georgetown University Press, 2007) as well as several articles on religion, human rights and political liberalism. She is currently working on a manuscript about the ethics of motherhood. Among her regular offerings on religion, ethics and politics are courses in Religion and Moral Choices; Religion and Politics; and Biomedical Ethics.

Richard s. Olson
In addition to being Professor and Chair of Political Science at Florida International University, Richard Olson (Ph.D. University of Oregon) holds the We Will Rebuild Foundation endowed chair as Eminent Scholar in the university's International Hurricane Center. His early work focused on economic sanctions and coercion, primarily in First World-Third World relations, and was published in World Politics and The Journal of Developing Areas. Starting in the 1980's, Professor Olson was awarded major research grants by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and turned his attention to the political economy of disaster and especially to the political problems associated with hazard mitigation and disaster response. His recent work has focused on issues of violence and comparative genocide in a global context.

Rob Rosen
Robert Rosen (J.D., Harvard Law School, Ph.D., Sociology, University of California at Berkeley) is Professor of Law at the University of Miami. He has published widely on the issues of legal ethics, law and organizational dynamics, legal education and law and culture. A student of Robert N. Bellah's at UC—Berkely, he has served as a fellow in Harvard’s Program in Ethics and the Professions, and in 1994 he was a research scholar at Stanford Law School. He teaches courses in professional responsibility, business associations, children and the law, sociology of law, contracts.

Phillip Church, Director
Phililip Church received his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine and is a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA). He is the Head of the Performance program within the Department of Theatre at Florida International University and has worked with many distinguished actors, including Constance Cummings, Cecily Courtnedge, Jack Hulbert, Paul Massey, Barbara Jefford and Robert Morley. As a professional Equity actor he has appeared in several South Florida Theatres, most notably at Coconut Grove Playhouse, New Theatre, GableStage and the South Florida Shakespeare Theatre. In 1996, Mr. Church teamed up with FIU alum Danny Pino (now the star of the CBS detective series Cold Case), and produced a feature-length AIDS prevention film entitled Conditions of Secrecy. Besides directing numerous plays and musicals at FIU, his latest film Loners Not Losers explores the issues of loneliness and alienation on college campuses and is in response to the Virginia Tech tragedy. His most recent project was a production of Carly Simon's opera, Romulus Hunt at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts.

Cast List

Samson	Fernando Lamberty
Delila	Lauretta Navvaro-Watts
Manoa	Alex Moreno
Herapha	Alain Mesa
Chorus 1	Michelle Fraioli
Chorus 2	Maribel Martinez
Messenger	Adam Ramos
Officer	Daniel Nieves

Symposium Organizers

Jeffrey Shoulson
Jeffrey Shoulson (Ph.D., English, Yale University) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. His full bio appears above.

Andrew Strycharski
Andrew Strycharski (Ph.D., English, University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University. His research explores intersections of rhetoric, education, gender, and literature in the early modern period, especially in England. His current book project is The Literacy Affect: Sir Philip Sidney and Early Modern Education. He teaches courses on Milton, Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature and Sexuality, and New Media.