Bio

Professor Lawrence’s research links discourses of obscenity concerning artistic production with American political culture. His primary areas of specialization are 20th-century ethnic literatures of the United States, American Studies, and Literary Theory. He is currently working on a book called Obscene Gestures: Counter-Narratives of Sex and Race in the Twentieth Century, which uses obscenity to reconsider the divergent afterlives of literary and cultural 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.