Benjamin J. LaBreche

Ben LaBreche, Assistant Professor of English, holds both a Ph.D. in English and Renaissance Studies and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. His research focuses on seventeenth-century literature and the emergence of political modernity. He has published on authors including John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon, and topics that include free speech and religious liberty, the politics of gender, and Elizabethan patronage strategies. He is currently working on a book that will examine John Milton’s changing conception of liberty both in its historical contexts and in connection with the debates of twenty-first century political theory.

Dr. LaBreche received the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for the most distinguished essay on John Milton in 2010. He has also received fellowships from the Folger Institute and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Beinecke Library, and the Mellon Foundation, and he has recently been a seminarian at the National Humanities Center and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Areas of expertise
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature and history
Classical and early modern continental literatures
Political theory

Articles
“‘The wheat from the tares’: Areopagitica and the Limits of Pluralism” (forthcoming in Milton Studies 54 (2013))

“Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism and the Politics of Miltonic Divorce,” ELH 77.4 (Winter 2010), pp. 969-94

“Patronage, Friendship, and Sincerity in Bacon and Spenser,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 50.1 (Winter 2010), pp. 83-108

Dr. LaBreche received the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for the most distinguished essay on John Milton in 2010. He has also received fellowships from the Folger Institute and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Beinecke Library, and the Mellon Foundation, and he has recently been a seminarian at the National Humanities Center and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Areas of expertise
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature and history
Classical and early modern continental literatures
Political theory

Articles
“‘The wheat from the tares’: Areopagitica and the Limits of Pluralism” (forthcoming in Milton Studies 54 (2013))

“Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism and the Politics of Miltonic Divorce,” ELH 77.4 (Winter 2010), pp. 969-94

“Patronage, Friendship, and Sincerity in Bacon and Spenser,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 50.1 (Winter 2010), pp. 83-108