Bio

In addition to teaching courses in American Literature, Children’s Literature, and writing, Professor Lawrence studies censorship controversies and American political and social movements. His primary areas of specialization are 20th-century literatures of the United States, American Studies, and Literary Theory. He is currently co-editing a collection of essays about the impact of obscenity discourses on comics history and theory. The book is under advance contract with University of Texas Press. His book Obscene Gestures: Counter-Narratives of Sex and Race in the Twentieth Century (Fordham 2022) reconsiders the divergent afterlives of twentieth-century texts that depict taboo subjects based on different narratives of racial, sexual, and gendered possibility. His work has been published in Mosaic, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, and Intertexts and in collections from Cambridge University Press, University Press of Mississippi, and Utah University Press.