Department of English

• Wednesday, November 12, 2025 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

FBH Grad Lounge (room 330)

Professor Arvas's project is entitled "What Samson Predicts from Gaza." He writes, 

John Milton published his final literary work, Samson Agonistes (1671) in the aftermath of the English Civil War. In this dramatic reimagining of the biblical Samson, Samson, “Select, and Sacred, Glorious,” is born as a promised annihilator, conscripted into violence by ideological apparatuses for mass destruction. What might Milton’s Samson predict from Gaza today? Pursuing this question, this essay offers a historically oriented trans reading of Samson Agonistes—one that moves beyond subject and identity to trace how the poem destabilizes and reroutes the structural binaries (male/female, self/other, Jew/Philistine, sovereign/subjugated) that animate it within political power structures. Focusing on Samson’s gendered embodiment, the essay first explores how the poem performs various tensions (Israel/Philistine, East/West, circumcised/foreskinned) through the poetics of spectacle, rendering Samson as a nonconforming figure made legible through exposure, mutilation, and theatrical excess. It then turns to Gaza as a site of annihilation in Milton’s theater of destruction to highlight the Samsonic logics of divine election, gendered punishment, and racial terror that are once again made visible in our own time.

 Please reach out to us for a copy of Prof. Arvas's draft, and come with a question or two that you'd like to pose and discuss as a group!