Murray Roston

Murray (Meir) Roston (מאיר רוסטון; born 1928) is an Israeli Emeritus professor of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University.

Murray (Meir) Roston was born in London in 1928.

Roston married Faith Lehrman and, shortly afterwards, they immigrated to Israel, living for many years in Kiryat Ono and then moving to Nordiya, near Netanya.

They have three daughters ‒ Yardenna (married to Alex Lubotzky), Nina, and Yonit.

Roston won the Open Classics Scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge, and after obtaining a degree in classics, transferred to English literature for a PhD from the University of London.

He taught English, Hebrew and Classics at Carmel College (Oxfordshire), and emigrated to Israel in 1956, to a position at Bar Ilan University where he is now Emeritus Professor of English.

Roston taught a number of times as a visiting professor at Stanford University, as well as at the University of Virginia.

In 1988–90 he was appointed Dean of Humanities Faculty at Bar-Ilan University.

In 1996, he was appointed to the permanent faculty at UCLA as adjunct professor, and subsequently taught there every third year, while retaining his position in Israel.

Roston is a member of numerous Editorial and Advisory Boards and he was a member of Academic Council, and Director of Humanities Program, of Open University of Israel.

Roston is an interdisciplinary scholar, author of a series of books examining how a knowledge of contemporary changes in the visual arts can illumine our understanding of parallel developments in literature.

His Changing Perspectives in literature and the visual arts was rated 'Outstanding' by Choice, described there as: "A sumptuous book ... of paramount significance to literary studies, to cultural and art history, and to aesthetics".

Milton and the Baroque was similarly described by the Times Literary Supplement as: "a study which itself partakes of the power and brilliance of his subject".

He has published six books on the interrelationship with the arts, as well as a number of other books on themes ranging from the Renaissance to the 20th-century.

His most recent book, The Comic Mode in English Literature, was rated, in Choice's annual review, one of the Outstanding Academic titles of 2012.