Jonny Robert Lawrence

Assistant Professor

Overview

My current book project, Love and Morality in Medieval Arabic Literature, focuses on how stories and storytelling, both religious and profane, became central to the construction of moral ideas around sexual lives and desires, how stories were used to imagine the feelings and emotional experience of people caught in the grip of passion. 

 

I am keen to hear from prospective graduate students working in the fields of pre-modern Arabic literature, Islamic studies (primarily pre-modern) and medieval and early-modern Islamic history.  

Research Focus

Arabic literature, Islamic studies, gender, Islamic history

Awards and Honors

  • Runner-up for the Royal Asiatic Society’s David Morgan Prize 2022

Publications

"Imagining the Lūṭī and the People of Lūṭ" in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (2025), FirstView

"Emotional Manipulation, Coercion, and Precarity in the Tales of Jamīl and Buthayna" in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025): 149-180

It’s All Just Poetry: Writing ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿah’s Life” in Journal of Arabic Literature 52:3–4 (2021), 321–50

Colonial South America, Identity and Race as Seen by a Chaldean Priest from Baghdad” in CompLit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society 2 (2021), 115–43

Building a Library: The Arabic and Persian Manuscript Collection of Sir William Jones” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 31:1 (2021), 1–70