Jonny Lawrence completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2022, where he then worked as the Departmental Lecturer in Classical Arabic Literature until coming to Cornell. His current book project, Sexual Sinners and Chaste Heroes, 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.