Regina Schwartz is a scholar of English literature and elements of Jewish and Christian religion. A Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern University, she has been known historically for her research and teaching on 17th-century literature, on the Hebrew Bible, and on the interface of literature with the subjects of philosophy, law, and religion.
Schwartz won the James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America for that year's "distinguished... critical monograph" for her 1988 work on Milton, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost. She followed this work by The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory in 1990, Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature in 1994, and The Postmodern Bible in 1995. Her 1997 work, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, described by the Episcopal News service as "a study of monotheism, national identity, and violence in the Hebrew Bible", was lauded as a "stunningly important book" by Walter Brueggemann in Theology Today and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her 2007 book, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World on "the Eucharist in Renaissance literature" was published as a part of the Stanford University series, "Cultural Memory in the Present". The monograph has been called a "tour de force", and "one of the most important studies of our critical moment." Schwartz's scholarship includes further published essays:
on postmodern theology, in Post-secular Philosophy, Questioning God, and Transcendence;
on Milton and Renaissance literature, in The Blackwell Companion to Milton, and The Oxford Handbook of Milton; and
on Shakespeare and law, in Triquarterly.
Appearances and other work
Schwartz gave the paper, “Questioning Narratives of God”, at the second “Religion and Postmodernism” conference in October 1999 at Villanova University in northwest suburban of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a conference that featured Jacques Derrida; her ideas, which appeared subsequently in the conference proceedings, "explore her suspicion surrounding the adequacy of narratives about God... suggest that as important as narrative is, we must recognize that it, like visual representation, is a form of idolatry." She has subsequently been a featured speaker at:
the Adelaide Festival of Ideas in 2001, on issues related to sustainability and the environment, in the session,"The 21st Century: How much water, how many people?";
Schwartz was the 2014 Respondent to the Tanner Lectures given by Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, at Harvard University. Schwartz wrote the libretto for composer John Eaton's opera, Paradise Lost based on Milton, and the separate stage adaptation, "John Milton's Paradise Lost", performed in May, 2010 by the Chicago Shakespeare Project.
Organizational leadership positions
Schwartz has served as:
Chair of Northwestern University's Interdisciplinary Hiring Initiative in the Humanities;
