Director of American Studies
Professor of English
Class of 1932 Research Professor, 2002-03
Tel. 484-664-3315
Fax 484-664-3633
Office: Center for the Arts 275
Email: Lawlor@muhlenberg.edu
Education
B.A., University of Maryland;
M.A., Ph.D., New York University. (1990)
Select Awards, Publications and Presentations:
Class of 1932 Research Professorship, 2002-03
Fighter Pilot's Daughter: A Story of the Sixties and the Cold War. (WDIY 2012)
In My Own Cold War, Prof. Lawlor shifts gears from the academic writing of her first two books to a more personal, nonfiction narrative mode. She tells the story of her experience as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family during the Cold War. Her father, an aviator in the Marines and later the Army, was transferred more than a dozen times to posts from Miami to California and Germany as the government's Cold War policies demanded. For the pilot’s wife and daughters, each move meant a complete upheaval of ordinary life. The car was sold, bank accounts closed, and of course one school after another was left behind. Friends and later boyfriends lined up in memory as a series of temporary attachments. The book describes the dramas of this traveling household during the middle years of the Cold War. In the process, My Own Cold War shows how the larger turmoil of American foreign policy and the effects of Cold War politics permeated her domestic universe.
Public Native America: Tribal Self-Representations in Museums, Powwows, and Casinos (Rutgers UP, 2006)
Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP, 2000)
“The Sacred and the Slight of Hand in American Indian Gambling Casinos” in Performing Art on the Western Stage, eds. Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck (Palgrave, 2009)
“Identity in Mashantucket,” American Quarterly (forthcoming 2005)
“Indigenous Internationalism: Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights and the UN,” Comparative American Studies (Fall 2003)
“Keeping History at Wind River and Acoma,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 26 (1995): 139-162.
“Placing Source in Greed and McTeague,” in Intertexuality in Literature and Film, ed. Elaine Cancelon & Antoine Scapagna (University Press of Florida, 1994)
“The Fictions of Daniel Boone,” Desert, Garden, Margin, Range:
The Significance of Frontiers in American Literature, ed. Eric Heyne (Macmillan, 1992)
“The Late Lacan Show,” Pequod 25 (1990): 106-111.
Teaching
Dr. Lawlor’s primary field is nineteenth-century American Literature – American Naturalism and Romanticism – but she also teaches courses in Native American Literature, Literature and Film of the Cold War, Militarization in American Narrative, Literature and Film of American Suburbia, Literature and the Environment, and Literature of the American Frontier.
