Charity and the Reformation: A Conversation with Achsah Guibbory

Achsah Guibbory, Professor of English at Barnard College, works on Milton, Donne, seventeenth-century literature and nation-formation, and Christian/Jewish relations and religious identities in the early modern period and into the Enlightenment. Her books include Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Cambridge UP, 1998); Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford UP, 2010), which won the John T. Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America; and Returning to John Donne (Ashgate, 2015). Her article "'Oh let me not serve so': The Politics of Love in Donne's Elegies" (in ELH, 1990) won the John Donne Society distinguished article of the year; and her article "Reconsidering Donne: From Libertine Poetry to Arminian Sermons" (Studies in Philology, 2017) won awards from SP for best article of the year and in 2019 from the John Donne Society. Building on this body of scholarship, Professor Guibbory is currently working on a transhistorical and transnational book on exceptionalism and chosenness from Calvin and early modern nationalism to the present. Join us for an informal and wide-ranging conversation with this lively scholar.