Doors: Reflections on an HBCU Career (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781456300722)

Benjamin S. Lawson has had a long and productive career as a scholar and educator. A Midwesterner with academic degrees from Purdue University, Indiana University, and Bowling Green State University, he taught for thirty-two years at a historically African American university in the South. During these years he won several awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the School of Criticism and Theory for further summer study. Invitations and awards also led to his lecturing for four semesters in Europe at the University of Helsinki in Finland, University College London, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands (where he was the Fulbright Commission-sponsored "Walt Whitman Chair of American Literature"). For three subsequent years he served on the national Fulbright committee which selects distinguished American lecturers for Europe and Canada. More recently, he has served as an adjunct professor of English at Florida State University and performed as an enrichment speaker aboard cruise ships. Benjamin Lawson's major scholarly interest is American literature from 1840 until 1940. He has spoken at many academic conferences and published articles on Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Joaquin Miller, Elizabeth Gaskell, James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, and George Schuyler. His books include "Joaquin Miller" in the Western Writers Series and "Rereading the Revolution: The Turn-of-the-Century American Revolutionary War Novel." Lawson is fascinated by the effects of culture, society, and history on works of literature. He extends this fascination from literature to life in his memoir "Doors: Reflections on an HBCU Career" (Historically Black College or University), which combines a life story with observations on the role of race and minority status in American higher education and American literature.