Philip Connell was educated at the University of Liverpool and completed his Ph.D. at King's College, Cambridge. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on English literature and its contexts between 1650 and 1840, with a particular emphasis upon interdisciplinary studies in the fields of poetry, politics, and intellectual history.

"a brilliant intervention into early eighteenth-century studies." --Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

"The resulting volume may be mined by specialists for individually brilliant essays ... Almost every chapter highlights successive generations of Whigs' and Tories' efforts to tame, sublimate, or appropriate Milton's legacy ... His measured approach is a refreshing alternative to the pugilistic tones of an older generation of revisionist history" -- Niall Allsopp, Modern Philology

"Connell is both an adept and insightful critic with a fine eye for detail and a learned scholar, and this book is likely to shape our understanding of the period for many years to come." --Andrew Hadfield, English Historical Review

"There is much to admire here... He drives a brilliantly illuminating analysis through the shifts in post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century high literary culture." -- Thomas N. Corns, The Seventeenth Century.

"Connell's study is based on an astounding amount of research into print and manuscript sources of the period, here synthesized with enviable grace and fluency. It is a book of enormous erudition and subtlety." --Matthew C. Augustine, Huntington Library Quarterly

"In Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope, Philip Connell offers a richly informative discussion of religion, poetry, and politics in Milton and Marvell ... Connell's book is a welcome addition to studies of Restoration and early eighteenth-century poetry." --George E. Haggerty, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"an exceptional scholarly study, impeccably researched, expertly structured, persuasively argued, and engagingly written ... Connell has done better than others in a project that few critics have been emboldened to attempt" --Eighteenth-Century Studies

"drives a brilliantly illuminating analysis through the shifts in post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century high literary culture [...] Connell successfully redresses a dominant tendency to read post-Restoration literature as the embodiment of a secularizing progression towards modernity, and the study of "Milton's reading, and misreading" discloses much more than a simple reception history." --Thomas N. Corns, Seventeenth Century

"fascinating and wide-ranging [...] Students of eighteenth-century poetry have needed a book like Secular Chains for a long time." --Joseph Hone, Review of English Studies