Maggie Kilgour

Maggie Kilgour is the Molson Professor of English Language and Literature at McGill University’s Department of English Language and Literature. Her research focuses on Early Modern British literature, particularly John Milton and William Shakespeare, alongside classical reception studies, Renaissance poetry, and Gothic fiction. She advocates strongly for the humanities’ societal value, emphasizing literature’s role in understanding human experience beyond economic metrics.

Dr. Kilgour holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. Her work spans monographs, edited volumes, and over 25 scholarly articles, including *Milton’s Poetical Thought* (OUP, 2021), which defends literature’s relevance in contemporary society. She has held prestigious fellowships at Trinity College, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford, and is a Royal Society of Canada Fellow.

Her research interrogates literary traditions, challenging oppositions like ‘natural genius vs. learned craft’ between Milton and Shakespeare. Current projects include a SSHRC-funded monograph on their intertextual relationship and a new Milton edition for OUP. She also explores classical legacies in Renaissance literature, examining how figures like Virgil and Ovid shaped English poetic traditions.

Teaching and advocacy are central to her career: she has won McGill’s Principal’s and Louis Dudek Awards for Excellence in Teaching and writes public essays defending poetry’s intellectual rigor. As an editorial board member for *Milton Quarterly* and *Milton Studies*, she promotes interdisciplinary scholarship while mentoring students in Milton, 17th-century literature, and classical reception.