Dan Poston, PhD/MFA

Assistant Professor

I am an interdisciplinary literary, performance, and theatre scholar in the English/American Studies Department and the International Literatures Program. My expertise is in global and transcultural theatre histories as well as British and American literature of the long 18^th century. Other current research and teaching foci include Elizabethan and 17^th-century poetry and drama, the history of the novel from the early modern period to the present, psychoanalysis and literature, and Native American theatre and diplomacy. Thematically my courses and writing explore the complex relationships between writing, theatre, politics, specific cultural and social milieus, intellectual history, personal inscription, and performance more generally—in short, how artists speak through forms as authors and politicians.

Education

Ph.D. Theatre and Performance Studies, Chancellor’s Fellow, CUNY Grad Center, 2018
M.F.A. Writing, MFA Fellow, Bard College, 2008
M.A. Myth, Performance, and Behavior, Koopenaal Fellow, NYU Gallatin School, 2007
B.A. English and American Literatures, Harvard University, 2004

Other

Beyond the university, my creative experience has included opportunities to write and perform for theatres in New York, California, and Oregon as well as for many international art-world contexts, including MoMA, Museum Ludwig, the Dallas Art Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Le Musée Fabre, the Liverpool Biennial, the Berlin Biennale, and Art Basel. In the formal political arena, I also have experience staging large public events as a site manager on the 2008 Obama National Advance Team and 2009 Presidential Inaugural Committee.

In Tübingen, I coordinate the ERASMUS+ exchange programs for International Literatures and encourage everyone to study “abroad.”

Publications

Monograph

Joseph Addison: An Intellectual Biography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023, 344 pages

Book Chapters

“Silent Enlightenment: Joseph Addison and Newton’s New Optics,” Silence in eighteenth-century arts, history, and philosophy, edited by Francesca Saggini with Dan Poston and Adam Schoene, Paris: Honoré Champion, forthcoming 2025
“The Eighteenth Century: The Novel, from 1700 to 1750,” The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 104 (covering work published in 2023), edited by William Baker and Kenneth Womack, Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025
“Radio silence: the arrival of the Pax Americana in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding,” Politische Ideen in der Literatur: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Max Roehl and Corinna Sauter, Freiburg im Breisgau: wbg/Herder, 2024, pp. 213-241, https://www.herder.de/-/media/files/herder/zusatzdownloads/9783534640171_OA.pdf
“Joseph Addisons Cato und die Poetik der Bewunderung,“ ZwischenSpielZeit. Das Theater der Frühaufklärung, edited by Jörn Steigerwald and Leonie Süwolto, Munich: Fink, 2022, pp. 81-107
“Still on Classic Ground: Joseph Addison’s Italy,” Addison in Europe / Addison en Europe, edited by Claire Boulard-Jouslin and Klaus-Dieter Ertler, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020, pp. 67-77
“Enlightenment Subjectivity and the Hamlet Paradigm in The Lancaster Treaty of 1744,” Drama & Theater: Festschrift zu Ehren von Bernhard Greiner, edited by Eckart Goebel and Max Roehl, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2020, pp. 145-176

Journal Articles

“Report from London (Ghosts) and Berlin (Theatertreffen festival),” European Stages, Volume 19, Fall 2024

Teaching

University of Tübingen

Global Theater Paradigms 1, Summer 2025
Blogging the Eighteenth-Century Essay, Winter 2024-5
Performance Studies: Key Texts, Summer 2024
"Shakespeare's Kings and Their Doubles: the second Henriad," seminar, Winter 2023-4
“Shake/spear(e),” seminar, Winter 2022-3
“The Balance of Powers (1600-1800),” graduate seminar, Summer 2022
“Indigenous North American Theatres, from 1400 to today,” seminar, Winter 2021-2
“Recent Restagings of Classic German Dramas,” online seminar, Winter 2021-2
“Philip Sidney: Poetry and Masques,” online seminar, Summer 2021
“Classics of Psychoanalysis,” online graduate seminar, Winter 2020-1
“Wordsworth,” online seminar, Summer 2020
“Ensemble Theatre Composition,” online praxis seminar, Summer 2020
“Transcultural Theatre,” graduate seminar, Winter 2019-20
“Global Theatre Paradigms: Histories, Theories, and Practices,” seminar, Summer 2019
“Staging Native America,” seminar, Winter 2018-9
“Restoration Theatre,” seminar, Summer 2018
“Three Modernist Lives: Woolf, Stein, and McCullers,” seminar, Winter 2017-8
“Performance Studies: Key Texts,” seminar, Summer 2017
“Liberty & Form: The British Essay from Bacon to Wollstonecraft,” seminar, Winter 2016-7
“Special Relation: 18th-Century British and American Theatre,” seminar, Summer 2016
“Theatre and State Politics: The Head of State from Richard II to House of Cards,” seminar, Winter 2015-6

Baruch College (Graduate Teaching Fellow)

“Speech Communication,” lecture/workshop, Fall 2012-Spring-2015

Technische Universität Berlin (Visiting Fellow)

“Performative Knowledge and Philosophy: Plato to Butler and Rancière,” graduate seminar, Spring 2014

Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires (Adjunct Lecturer)

“Public Speaking” and “Creative Writing,” lectures/workshops, Spring 2008

Talks and Presentations

2020s

“Jefferson on the second floor,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, online, March 2025
“Silent Hues: Wordsworth’s footnote to an age of song,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto, March 2024
Respondent to a roundtable on “Addison's Cato in Tennessee, 2023," American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto, March 2024
“Steele’s gendered husband,” American Society for 18th-Century Studies, St. Louis, March 2023
“The Medium is Politics. The radio and the production of a domestic play in Carson McCuller’s WWII novel, The Member of the Wedding,” Politische Ideen in der Literature (1800-2000), University of Tübingen, January 2023
“Art x Technology: Performing on the Cyber Stage,” Curated Online Roundtable, Para Site, Hong Kong, June 2022
“Fainlove: Ironic Sublimation in The Tender Husband,” American Society for Theatre Research, San Diego, October 2021
“The Theatrical King: Staging Civic Religion from the English Monarchy to the American Presidency,” Center for Religion, Culture, and Society, Universität Tübingen, February 2021
“Sublimation, Again,” American Society for Theatre Research, Online Working Group, November 2020

2010s

“Annotating Silence: Wordsworth,” International Conference on Annotating Literature, Tübingen University, August 2019
“Joseph Addison’s Italy,” International Conference on Addison and Europe, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, December 2018
“Addisonian Sovereignty: The Body’s Silent Persistence through the Delightful Imagination,” International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars, Università della Tuscia, Viterbo, September 2018
“The Soul’s Site-Specific Performance: Joseph Addison’s Unique Theory of Theatricality,” Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Boston, August 2018
“English, Iroquois, German: Historically Staging Conrad Weiser’s Interpretative Work in the 1744 Lancaster Treaty,” International Federation for Theatre Research, University of Arts, Belgrade, July 2018
“Rome-ing the Suburbs: Joseph Addison’s Cato and the reception of Rome in 18th-Century
London,” Abiding Cities, Remnant Sites, CUNY Graduate Center, November 2014
“Promethean Expositions and the Technē of Existence,” a collaborative international lecture performance, Congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft, Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, September 2014

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