Researcher biography

  • Past Degrees: BA Hons.(UQ)
  • Supervisors: Dr Peter Holbrook (EMSAH; Dr Benjamin Myers (CHED)
  • Area of Research: My thesis will examine the art and prose writings of Milton and Blake by uncovering and examining the utopian aspects of their work. I will to turn this utopian moment in their work as a way of examining the relationship between their political world-views and their religious beliefs, meditations and writings. Milton’s late epics and Blake’s long prophetic poems are both grounded in poetic myth-making and the mythopoeic consciousness. It is the juncture or inter-relation between the political, religious and mythological aspects in Milton and Blake’s work which I describe as the “utopian”. My main theorist of utopia and the utopian will be the philosopher Ernst Bloch whose “philosophy of hope” will provide a theoretical background to my critical readings. As a Marxist theorist whose work has also been influential in theology, Bloch’s system put forth the relation between the religious and the political dimensions of human action as a problematic explored in terms of political revolution and of Christian messianism which I will employ in my examination of the utopianism of Milton and Blake.