Nicholas McDowell

Nicholas McDowell was born and grew up in Belfast, where he was educated at The Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He read English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and then moved to Oriel College, Oxford, to complete M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees. He was a Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, from 1998 before joining the Department of English at the University of Exeter in 2001, where he is now Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought. His visiting positions have included Membership of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

His principal area of research is the literary, cultural and intellectual history of Britain and Ireland from c. 1500-1780, with particular interests in John Milton, Andrew Marvell and the mid-seventeenth century. His books include The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 (Oxford UP, 2003); Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford UP, 2008); The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford UP, 2009); and The Complete Works of John Milton. Volume 6: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings (Oxford UP, 2013). His major new biography of Milton in his formative years, Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton, was published by Princeton University Press on 27 October 2020 in hardback, e-book and audiobook formats.