Dr Orlando Reade
Assistant Professor (Teaching and Research) in English (Writing & Literature)
Biography
Dr Orlando Reade is Assistant Professor of English (Teaching and Writing) at Northeastern University London. He has a degree in English Literature from Cambridge, an MA in Renaissance Studies from the University of London, and a PhD in English Literature from Princeton. His teaching specialities include British and American literature, Creative Writing, and Academic Writing. He is also a widely published writer of creative nonfiction.
Qualifications
PhD, English Literature, Princeton University (2020)
MA, Renaissance Studies, University of London (2011)
BA, English Literature, University of Cambridge (2009)
Research
Dr Reade’s research is on the intersections of literature and politics in the Anglophone world, from the seventeenth century to the present. His first book looked at the political afterlife of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. His new book project is about the influence of migrant intellectuals on contemporary American politics. He writes regularly for newspapers and magazines in Britain and the United States.
Books
What In Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost (Jonathan Cape [UK] and Astra House [USA], 2024)
What in Me is Dark is about the extraordinary influence of John Milton’s Paradise Lost on the politics of the modern age. It looks at twelve readers of Milton’s epic – from Thomas Jefferson to Virginia Woolf to Malcolm X to the present – describing how Paradise Lost provided a kind of dark illumination to their worlds, helping them to make sense of the personal and political struggles they were living through.
It has been widely reviewed in Britain and the United States. It was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, The Guardian’s Book of the Day, and appeared on the Best Books of 2024 lists for The Financial Times, The Independent, The Big Issue, and Counterfire.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“How Malcolm X Read his Milton: Paradise Lost and the Politics of Abolition,” in Milton Studies (forthcoming in 2026)
“Introduction,” Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (Vintage Classics, 2024)
“A Radical Abolitionist Turns to Milton at the Outbreak of the American Civil War,” chapter in Diverse Miltons, edited by Marissa Greenberg and David Ainsworth (forthcoming in 2026)
‘On Poetic Radiance: An Exchange of Poems Between Katherine Philips and Henry Vaughan’, in Marcher Metaphysicals, edited by Joseph Sterrett and Helen Wilcox (forthcoming in 2026)
“‘Fortune is a Mistresse’: Figures of Fortune in English Renaissance Poetry,” in Fate and Fortune in the Renaissance, edited by Ovanes Akoyapan (Brill, 2021)
Teaching
Dr Reade joined Northeastern in 2021. He has taught classes including American Literature, Global Writers Studio, First Year Writing Studio, Cultures of London, Publishing Your Writing, and Creative Nonfiction. He has also taught for Princeton University, the NJ-STEP prison teaching program, McNally Jackson Books, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Other Work
Alongside his academic work, Dr Reade writes creative nonfiction. His work has appeared in publications including The Financial Times, The New Statesman, The Nation, Frieze, The Guardian, The Literary Review, The White Review, Apollo Magazine, Jacobin, and Literary Hub.
More information about Dr Reade’s writing can be found at www.orlandoreade.com.
Contact
Orlando Reade
Northeastern University London is a charity
registered with the Charity Commission for
England and Wales (charity number 1189858).
Location
Devon House
58 St Katharine’s Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
+44 20 7637 4550
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