She is Curators' Professor Emerita of English and Folklore Studies at the University of Missouri.
[1] She has also co-produced two documentary films: Joy Unspeakable (with Elizabeth Peterson)[3] and Taking Pinhook (2014) (with Todd Lawrence).
[4] In 2003, she founded and was the producer of the Troubling Violence Performance Project, with Professor Heather Carver of the University of Missouri Theatre Department.
[6] In 2019, Lawless and David Todd Lawrence received the AFS's Chicago Folklore Prize (for the best book of folklore scholarship of the year), for their book: When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri.
[7] A travel award from the Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section of the AFS is named in Lawless's honour.