Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson
Associate Professor of English
California State University, Northridge

My research and teaching focuses on questions of authority and its construction. I have special interest in how those questions and constructions are manifested in the early modern era, but my interest (even passion) transcends period. My book, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King, focuses this interest on John Milton and the English 17^th century, a place and time in which questions of freedom and authority eventually brought a nation to revolution, civil war, and a failed attempt to permanently overthrow a centuries-old tradition of monarchical government.

My current projects include an essay on Negative Theology and Samson Agonistes in the March 2008 issue of Milton Quarterly. This is based on my seminar presentation at the Newberry Library Milton Seminar in Chicago, May 2005, and a shorter form of that essay that was presented at the

International Milton Conference in Grenoble, France in June 2005. I also have recently contributed a chapter on the 1667 edition of Paradise Lost for a book edited by John Shawcross and Michael Lieb for Duquesne UP, and in April of 2010, I will have an essay on negative theology in Paradise Lost in a collection entitled Milton and the Visionary Mode: Essays on Prophecy and Violence. Eds. Peter E. Medine and David V. Urban. Duquesne UP.

I wasn't always an academic, however. In a previous life, I tried to crack the only job market in the Western World that is even tighter than academia---the music business. Here are several samples of me as a guitar player, with several recent pieces, and others from the years before Milton and graduate school.... the performances range from rough to fairly polished (instrumentally). The vocals (not mine...I don't even try) are another matter entirely.

Once in a while, I try my hand at poetry too...such as it is.

By the way, here is a fun little toy I cooked up while at a conference years ago.

And finally, a general comment on the economy of California here in 2010. To all the legislators who refuse to raise taxes on commercial real estate even a tiny bit (and have refused since the disasterous Proposition 13 in 1978)) thanks for making California poorer than Arkansas...