David Posner

Associate Professor, Loyola University Chicago

In January 2009, David Posner became the Executive Director of the Midwest Modern Language Association (M/MLA). As the Executive Director, Professor Posner also serves as the Editor of The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. The Executive Director is responsible for ensuring the scholarly and financial integrity of the Association, and with directing the activities of the Association.

David Posner, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Loyola University Chicago, is a graduate of Stanford University and received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.  He has been at Loyola University Chicago since 1990.  He is the author of The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature (Cambridge:  Cambridge UP, 1999), and numerous articles on Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Corneille, and other topics in Renaissance and 17th-century European literature.  Current research interests include the reception of Classical antiquity in the Renaissance, Renaissance ethical and moral theory, and political and social satire in contemporary Francophone African literature.  He has held fellowships and grants from the NEH, the Newberry Library, and Villa I Tatti, and has been a visiting professor at Cornell University.  He has also helped to start a vocational training program in bicycle repair for AIDS orphans and other at-risk youth in Arusha, Tanzania.

Professor Posner is a native of northern California. He currently resides in Evanston, Illinois with his two daughters.