Professor Lawrence Jones graduated from Pomona College (California)  with a BA  in 1956 and went on to study at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he completed  an MA in 1958 and a PhD in 1961.  During those years he held a Danforth Graduate Fellowship.  After three years at Linfield College in Oregon he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Otago in 1964, was promoted to senior lecturer in 1967 and to associate professor in 1975.  He was appointed to a personal chair in 1997 and retired at the end of 1999, although he still lectures on several papers as a Senior Teaching Fellow and was appointed Emeritus {Professor in February 2000.

     He wrote his PhD thesis on Thomas Hardy and came to Otago primarily as a  teacher of Victorian and Modern English literature.  While he still lectures on  Victorian and Modern fiction, his focus changed in his years at Otago.  He was involved in inaugurating papers on American literature,  English language studies,  New Zealand literature, New Zealand studies, and Literary theory.  He lectured in first, second, and fourth-year papers in New Zealand literature as well as in second and fourth-year interdisciplinary New Zealand studies papers.  He also continues to lecture in American literature, literary theory, and modern narrative, as well as in the Victorian novel.

     He served as HOD of the English Department  from 1985 to 1987 and has served on various committees, including the Interim Board of Studies for the Division of Humanities and the Working Party on Communications Studies.  In 1998 he convened the Review Committee for the Depar`tment opf Accountancy.  He has served on the Literature Committee of the Arts Council of New Zealand  and has been judge for the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award and for the New Zealand Book Award in poetry and in fiction, and in 2000 is Category Advisor for fiction for the New Zealand Book Award.  He has been for some years one of the judges for the Freda Buckland Award for New Zealand writing.  He has written about issues of peace and nonviolence and has been active in peace organisations.

     He has supervised a large number of theses and dissertations at PhD, MLitt, MA, and BA Honours level, mostly on New Zealand topics, but also in American, Victorian, and Modern British literatures.    He has published widely on Thomas Hardy in learned journals and scholarly books  in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, and has also published work on George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence.  However, in recent years, his major emphasis has been on New Zealand literature. His publications include Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose (University of Otago Press, 1987, 1990) and the section on the novel in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature  (Oxford University Press, 1991; second editon, substantially enlarged and updated, 1998).  In addition, he has published many articles in journals and collections such as Culture and Identity in New Zealand  (1987) and Ending the Silences: Critical Essays on Maurice Shadbolt (1995), and has contributed to such publications as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures  in English, Encyclopedia of the Novel, Encyclopedia of Life Writing,  Reference Guide to Short Fiction , and the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998).  He ihas been editor or co-editor of the Journal of New Zealand Literature  since 1990, co-edited From the Mainland: An Anthology of South Island Writing (Godwit Press, 1995),  and edited Dan Davin's Roads from Home (Auckland University Press, 1976).  He is a frequent reviewer of New Zealand writing in New Zealand Books and other periodicals. 

     Professor Jones is at present engaged in a study in literary history with the working title of 'Picking up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-45'.  He has presented sections from this work at various conferences, and  preliminary drafts of some sections have already appeared or are soon to appear in Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, the Journal of New Zealand Literature  and in several collections emanating from conferences.