R. A. Lawson is a historian of American culture whose current writing projects include a book on blues history, Jim Crow's Counterculture:  The Blues and African Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1890-1945 (forthcoming from LSU Press), as well as a local/institutional history of Dean College, in Franklin, Mass., where he is Associate Professor of History.  A graduate of Louisiana State University (B.A. 1996) and Vanderbilt University (Ph.D. 2003), Lawson is committed to using historical research and teaching as a pathway to understanding the relationship between the singular experience of individuals and the social experience of civilization.  He is Visiting Assistant Professor of Graduate Studies at Trinity College, where he teaches Primary Research Methods in the American Studies graduate program.