Lawless has devoted her career to ethnographic research with underserved groups in the American Midwest, including charismatic Pentecostals, clergywomen, victims of domestic violence, and displaced African Americans. She has consistently focused her research on women's speech in these contexts and has developed a new approach to ethnographic research which she calls "reciprocal ethnography," while growing a detailed corpus of work on women's narrative style and expressive speech. Reciprocal ethnography is a feminist and collaborative ethnographic approach that Lawless developed as a challenge to the reflexive turn in anthropological fieldwork and research in the 1970s, which was often male-centric, ignoring the contributions by and study of women's culture. 

During her time in the English Department, Lawless received the Faculty Alumni Award, the Kemper Award for Excellence in Teaching, a Gold Chalk Award (for graduate instruction) and a Purple Chalk Award (for undergraduate instruction), and the Chancellor's Award for Research. In 2002, she was named a Curators' Professor by the MU Board of Curators; in 2004, she was named MU Alumni Distinguished Professor.  In 2003, she founded and is the producer of the Troubling Violence Performance Project, with Professor Heather Carver (director), MU Theatre Department.  From 2005-2008, Dr. Lawless served as the Director of the Center for Arts and Humanities, Conley House, on the MU campus.  

Lawless served as Editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 2000-2006, President of the American Folklore Society from 2008-2010, and served as the Nan Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, 2011-12.

Following her retirement from teaching at MU, Lawless moved to North Carolina, where she continues to write.  In 2024, she completed her first work of fiction, Only Girls Bleed: A Novel, which is currently being optioned to publishers.

She also teaches graduate seminars in Ethnographic Writing, serves as a member of Ph.D. committees, both nationally and internationally, and gives lectures across the country on her areas of expertise, including her coining of “Reciprocal Ethnography,” women’s narratives, and the role of women in religion. She has also taught in the Summer SIEF International Ethnographic School, University of Aberdeen, in Portsoy, Scotland.