About

Thomas Vozar is a scholar of early modern literature and intellectual history with particular expertise in the writings and thought of John Milton. His core research interests include learned culture, classical reception, the history of scholarship, Neo-Latin studies, the European republic of letters, and conceptions of intellectual, academic, and political liberty. His work extends into book history; Shakespeare and Renaissance drama; orientalism and European-Islamic encounters; and colonial America. Vozar has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, receiving accolades such as the Natalie Zemon Davis Prize for the best article in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme and the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for the best essay on Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. His books include Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century, which won the Milton Society of America's James Holly Hanford Book Award, and Isaac Barrow's On the Turkish Religion: A Latin Poem on Islam from Ottoman Istanbul, the first annotated edition and translation of De Religione Turcica, composed during a visit to Istanbul in the late 1650s by Isaac Barrow. Currently, Vozar is completing a second monograph, Polemical Erudition: Scholarship and Politics in the European Republic of Letters during the English Revolution, which investigates the intersections of British politics with European learned culture in the 1640s and 1650s, focusing on figures such as John Selden, Georg Horn, Claudius Salmasius, and John Milton. He is also working on a new project titled Liberty to Know: Free Speech and the Advancement of Knowledge from Areopagitica to the First Amendment, supported by fellowships from the Russell Kirk Center and Marsh's Library, Dublin.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Humanities
• Classics
• Art
• Literature
• Theology
• Law
• History
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Art history
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Epigrams on the Castrated Martial: From Joseph Scaliger to John Donne and Beyond

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2026-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article demonstrates the prevalence of the German Jesuit Matthäus Rader’s (1561–1634) “castrated” (i.e., expurgated) edition of the bawdy Roman poet Martial as an early seventeenth-century Protestant epigrammatic theme. It shows for the first time that John Donne’s (1572–1631) vernacular verses on this topic were part of a wider vogue of anti-Rader epigrams, otherwise composed in Latin, by such figures as Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Attention to these epigrams not only provides a new context for Donne’s poem but also offers the opportunity to explore the ways in which Neo-Latin poetry engaged with questions of criticism, confession, and censorship.

  PublisherDOI

• Academic Freedom in the English Revolution: Libertas Scholastica, Libertas Philosophandi , and the Reformation of the Universities

  Journal of the History of Ideas · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article contributes to the genealogy of the concept of academic freedom with a focus on the English universities in the middle of the seventeenth century. It argues that libertas scholastica (the corporate freedom of the universities) and libertas philosophandi (liberty of philosophizing, within and without the universities) were distinctive guiding concepts, sometimes in opposition but occasionally complementary, in debates over the universities in this period. If these two notions together constitute the antecedents of the modern concept of academic freedom, their conjunction must be recognized as a much more contingent and irregular phenomenon than has been previously understood.

  PublisherDOI

• JohnMilton: Paradise LostStephen B.Dobranski, ed. The Norton Library. New York: W. W. Norton &amp; Company, 2022. xxxi +429 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780393870879. $11.00 (paper).

  Milton Quarterly · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Leipzig Edition of Milton’s <i>Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio</i>

  The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America · 2025-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Long before Paradise Lost, John Milton’s Pro populo Anglicano defensio (1651), an apology for England’s revolutionary regime in Neo-Latin prose, was widely read throughout Europe. First printed in London, it soon appeared in a variety of editions produced by Continental presses, predominantly in the Netherlands. Archival sources indicate that an edition was printed in Leipzig as well, though this was suppressed on the order of the Elector of Saxony and no copies have ever been located. Here I propose a tentative identification for the first time, arguing on the basis of a grotesque head device and an ornamental headpiece that a previously known Continental edition is likely the one printed in Leipzig. This recognition adds to our understanding of the printing history of a major work by Milton and speaks to its contemporary impact within the Holy Roman Empire.

  PublisherDOI

• “Miltoni Petulans Epigramma”: Did Milton Write the Pontia Epigram?

  Milton Quarterly · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the summer of 1652 appeared the Regii Sanguinis

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Thomas Farnaby’s 1613 Edition of Seneca’s Tragedies and Shakespeare’s <i>Julius Caesar</i>

  Notes and Queries · 2025-11-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Elizabeth Jane Weston’s Verses on the Death of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II

  Notes and Queries · 2024-12-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The English Renaissance Playwright’s Classical Encyclopedia: The <i>Lectiones Antiquae</i> of Caelius Rhodiginus as a Resource for Jonson and Chapman

  Ben Jonson Journal · 2024-04-18

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ciceroniana of the Froben Press

  2024-11-04

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• : <i>Horace across the Media: Textual, Visual and Musical Receptions of Horace from the 15th to the 18th Century</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Horace across the Media: Textual, Visual and Musical Receptions of Horace from the 15th to the 18th Century. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Marc Laureys, eds. Intersections 82. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xxxviii + 726 pp. $275. - Volume 77 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

Education

• PhD in English

  University of Exeter

  2021

• Master of Arts in Classical Studies

  University of Pennsylvania

  2015

• Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Latin

  Oberlin College

  2013

Awards & honors

• Natalie Zemon Davis Prize
• James Holly Hanford Book Award from the Milton Society of Am…
• Haworth Free Speech Fellowship from the Russell Kirk Center
• Maddock Research Fellowship for archival work at Marsh's Lib…