Dr Andrew Lawson

About Dr Andrew Lawson

Andrew's background is in the interdisciplinary study of American literature and history, with a particular focus on the history of capitalism in the United States and the formation of the middle class. His first book explores the tensions and ambiguities of Walt Whitman's lower-middle-class identity; a recent study of American realism shows how a literary genre central to middle-class culture emerged as a response to the instabilities of the nineteenth century economy.

Andrew’s first book was Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (University of Iowa Press, 2006). He has also published Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2011), and edited a collection of essays, Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal (Routledge, 2014).

Current Teaching

• Writing America and Modern American Drama (BA English Literature)
• Neoliberal Fictions (MA in Contemporary Literatures)

Research Interests

Andrew's work has contributed to a new awareness of class in American literary and cultural history. He is currently editing a collection of essays by established and emerging scholars on this theme, Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal, to be published by Routledge.

Andrew’s current research project is “Speculating on the Self,” an interdisciplinary study of how a capitalist economy and culture developed in America from the colonial period to the early nineteenth century.