Bio

Patrick S. Lawrence is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster. His research links obscenity controversies surrounding artistic production with American political rhetoric and addresses issues of race, gender, and sexuality. His primary areas of specialization are 20th-century literatures of the United States, American Studies, and critical theory. He is currently working on a book called Obscene Gestures: Counter-Narratives of Sex and Race in the Twentieth Century, which reconsiders the divergent afterlives of novels, plays, and other works that depict taboo subjects based on different narratives of racial, gendered, and sexual 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.