Joseph F. Lawless

Background

Joseph F. Lawless is an M.A./Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary, with an interest in the nexus shared by law, sexuality, and digital personhood. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, where his studies were oriented toward political theory and continental philosophy, particularly that of late twentieth-century France. From 2012 to 2014, he was a member of the Las Vegas Valley corps of Teach for America and served as the chair of the English/Language Arts department of the middle school at which he taught. While teaching, he completed his M.Ed. at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with an emphasis on critical pedagogy and curriculum development. In 2017, he obtained his J.D. from Columbia University. His current research examines the relationship between HIV-criminalization jurisprudence and theories of the affective, the effects of sexuality criminalization on the making of legal subjects more broadly, and the relationship of the digital to the sexual in the fashioning of psychic subjectivities.