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 co-editor of a collection of essays about the impact of obscenity discourses on comics history and theory called Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics (University of Texas Press, 2025). 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 appears in American Literature, Inks, Mosaic, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, and Intertexts, as well as in collections from Cambridge University Press, University Press of Mississippi, and Utah University Press.