Bio

In addition to teaching courses in American Literature, Children’s Literature, and writing, Professor Lawrence studies how obscenity charges arising over controversial artworks reflect American political culture. His primary areas of specialization are 20th-century ethnic literatures of the United States, American Studies, and Literary Theory. His current book project, called Obscene Gestures: Counter-Narratives of Sex and Race in the Twentieth Century, is under contract with Fordham University Press and uses obscenity to reconsider the divergent afterlives of texts that depict taboo subjects based on different narratives of racial, sexual, and gendered possibility during the late twentieth century. His work has been published in Mosaic, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, and Intertexts, and is forthcoming in collections from Cambridge University Press, University Press of Mississippi, and Utah University Press.