Lee Morrissey
Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, Clemson University
A member of the Clemson English faculty since 1995, I have served, twice, as Department Chair (2007-2010, and 2013-2017), as Interim Associate Dean of the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities (2018-2019), and as a Fulbright Scholar at the National University of Ireland-Galway (2010-2011).
I am the author of From the Temple to the Castle: An Architectural History of British Literature, 1660-1760 (1999); The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (2008); Milton’s Late Poems: Forms of Modernity (2022); and Milton’s Ireland: Royalism, Republicanism and the Question of Pluralism (forthcoming, 2024). Currently, my research focuses on archipelagic and transatlantic approaches to colonial plantations. Affiliate faculty in religious studies, I was appointed Alumni Distinguished Professor in 2009. I was Founding Director of the Clemson Humanities Hub (2016-2021).
I specialize in English-language literature written between the first half of the seventeenth century and the latter half of the eighteenth century, but I teach a little of everything, from Classics in Translation and Contemporary Irish Literature, from First Year Composition to graduate seminars.
Recent Publications
Milton’s Ireland
Exploring Milton’s emergence as a public figure because of Ireland and tracing the paradoxical resonances of Milton’s republicanism in Ireland to this day.
Winner of the James Holly Hanford Award, Milton Society of America.
Milton’s Late Poems
Recasting Milton’s Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes as narrating three alternative responses to modernity–adjustment, avoidance and antagonism–to rethink where Milton stands in relation to the greatest products of modernity, the novel in particular.
Review of Milton’s Late Poems,
Intertexts (28.1, Spring 2024).
“From Ireland to Barbados”
A chapter in Architecture and Extraction in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800.
Areas of specialization:
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-language literature; John Milton; Religion and politics in the early modern period; history, theory and practice of literary criticism; colonial Ireland; archipelagic and transatlantic approaches to colonial plantation; new literary histories.
Lee Morrissey 