Lawrence Poston, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, received his B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a decade and, after a year as a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1976. He is the author of a monograph, Loss and Gain: An Essay on Browning’s Dramatis Personae (University of Nebraska Studies, 1974) and of The Antagonist Principle: John Henry Newman and the Paradox of Personality (University of Virginia Press, 2014), as well as articles in periodicals, including Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, Studies in Romanticism, PMLA, ELH, Studies in English Literature, Criticism, Genre, Philological Quarterly, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, Modern Philology, and Anglican Theological Review. Book chapters include contributions to Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (University of California Press, 1977), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999; 2nd ed. Blackwell and Wiley, 2014), and The Subverting Vision of Bulwer-Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan Conrad Christensen (University of Delaware Press, 2004). Poston also contributed the entry on John Henry Newman to Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Dino Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes (Blackwell and Wiley, 2015). He has been a member of the Editorial Board of Review 19: New Books on Line, since its inception in 2008.
Poston was a founding member of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, which he served as Executive Secretary (1977-80) and Vice-President and President (1986-90). He served the Modern Language Association of America in several capacities, including the chairmanships of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee (1978-80) and of the ad hoc Committee on Professional Ethics which developed the first MLA statement on the subject (1987-91). He has also served as Second Vice-President of the American Association of University Professors from 1988-90 and has published a number of articles and reviews in the field of higher education.
Last modified 10 November 2020