Lawrence is Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College, where he taught from 1980 till 2022. He has written abundantly about diaries, words and music, translation theory, and nonviolence; he has also published translations from French, German, Italian, Latin, and Yiddish, and written and performed some fifty verse narratives for early opera and early music theater more generally. His current large project is Portrait of a Pacifist Critic, an exploration of the relations between pacifism and literary criticism, in support of which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.