Joseph Lawless

Joseph F. Lawless is an Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at the College of William & 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, and in 2019 he received his M.A. in American Studies at William & Mary. His dissertation project considers the articulations of digital sexual subjectivity through Foucauldian and Lacanian frames to more thoroughly interrogate relationship between late capitalist globalization, the uneven modalities of subjectification through which queernesses emerge, and the ethical demands of a technologized politics of sexuality.