People

Writers House

Writers House

  • Jeffrey Lawrence
  • Jeffrey Lawrence
  • Director of Creative Writing
  • Professor of English
  • JeffreyLawrenceCV_5a4bb28783058.pdf
  • Phone Number: (848) 932-7371
  • Office: Murray Hall, Room 025, College Ave Campus
  • Primary Areas of Specialization: 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture, Latin American/Hemispheric Studies
  • About:

    Jeffrey Lawrence’s areas of specialization are contemporary US and Latin American literature and culture, publishing, translation, and creative writing. He is the author of the scholarly monograph Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Oxford, 2018) and the Spanish-language novel El americano (Chatos Inhumanos, 2024) and the co-editor, with Anjuli Gunaratne, of the volume The Global Anglophone (Routledge, 2025). He has translated Sergio Chejfec’s Forgotten Manuscript (Charco, 2023) and Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing: Latin America in Transit (Restless, 2016) into English.

    Lawrence is currently at work on a second scholarly monograph, tentatively titled “Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and American Fiction of the Long 1960s,” as well as a second novel and a translation, with Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo, of Marta Aponte Alsina’s PR3 Aguirre.

    His academic writing has appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, Interventions: A Postcolonial Journal, Twentieth-Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, and IC-Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación.

    His public-facing writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Bomb, The Point, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, and Rialta.

    As of July 2026, Lawrence is serving as the Director of Creative Writing for Rutgers English-New Brunswick.
  • Book(s):
    "Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño" by Jeffrey Lawrence
    Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño
  • Undergraduate Courses Taught:
    • American Postmodernism: Fiction, Theory and Film
    • Social Movements and American Literature after 1945
    • Roberto Bolaño and the Genres of the Americas
  • Graduate Courses Taught:
    • Culture in Movement: Post-45 Literature and Culture
  • Awards:
    • International Association of Inter-American Studies prize for the best dissertation in Inter-American Studies for 2013/4.
    • Princeton Institute for International Relations Dissertation Fellowship (2012-3)
  • Other Publications:
    • "Why She Wrote about Mexico: Katherine Anne Porter and the Literature of Experience." Twentieth-Century Literature, forthcoming 2017.
    • “‘I Read Even the Scraps of Paper I Find on the Street:’ A Thesis on the Contemporary Literatures of the Americas.” American Literary History 26.3 (2014): 536-558.
    • “The International Roots of the 99%,” IC Scientific Journal of Information and Communication, 10 (2013): 53-72.
    • “El viajero y el lector: Waldo Frank, Jorge Luis Borges, y la disputa por la América whitmaniana,” Pensamiento de los confines30 (Summer 2013): 204-214.
    • “An American History of Infamy,” Variaciones Borges 31.1 (2011), 160-179.
  • Membership Affiliations:
    • Modern Language Association
    • Modernist Studies Association
    • Society for U.S. Intellectual History
    • Latin American Studies Association
    • Katherine Anne Porter Society
    • Percival Everett International Society
  • Education: PhD Comparative Literature, Princeton University, 2014.BA Spanish, Amherst College, 2007.