Orlando Reade

Orlando Reade is an academic, art critic, and writer of experimental nonfiction. Inspired by the genre experiments of Thomas Traherne, W.G. Sebald, and Saidiya Hartman, his work draws on historical research, critical theory, and memoir. His essays have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Frieze, Tank, and The White Review, where he also served as a contributing editor.

He studied English Literature at Cambridge and Princeton, where he received his PhD in 2020. His PhD focused on the literature of the English Civil War (1640-1660), but recently he’s also been interested in the uses of literature in the movement to abolish slavery in the English-speaking world (1770-1865). For a period of five years, he taught classes in New Jersey correctional facilities, an experience that informs an enduring interest in the struggle for prison abolition. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University London.

His first book, What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost (forthcoming in October 2024) is the first book about John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the twenty-first century general reader. It looks at twelve readers – including Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Hannah Arendt, and Malcolm X – whose lives demonstrate the extraordinary and disturbing influence of Paradise Lost on the modern age. He has also written an introduction for a new Vintage Classics edition of Paradise Lost.