Steve Lynn is Louise Fry Scudder Professor and Chair of the Religious Studies Department. Since joining the University of South Carolina faculty in 1982, he has over twenty years of administrative experience, including chairing the English Department from 2001 to 2007. He has served on the Academic Planning Council of the College of Arts and Sciences, the University Grievance Committee, the Faculty Senate, the Dean of the Graduate School Search Committee, the Regional Campus Dean Assessment Committee (chair), the Greiner Scholarship Fund (chair), and the Scudder Awards Committee (chair). His recent national activities include serving on a SACS Re-Accreditation Committee, hosting the national Association of Departments of English meeting, and leading (with Paula Krebs) an ADE-sponsored day-long training workshop for new department chairs.

Lynn's teaching and publishing interests include eighteenth-century literature (especially Samuel Johnson), rhetoric and composition (especially pedagogy), and science fiction (especially nanotechnology and ethics). His books include Samuel Johnson After Deconstruction, A Short Guide to Writing, Literature: An Introduction, and Texts and Contexts (5th edition forthcoming). His current project is The Cambridge Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition, with Christy Friend, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and he is contributing editor for the eighteenth-century section of The Year's Work in English Studies, published by Oxford University Press. He has published essays in College English, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Age of Johnson, The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson, and Twentieth-Century American Critics, among others.

Lynn is a member of the Nanocenter's NSTS Group, which received a $1.3m grant from the National Science Foundation to organize international conferences and study the societal implications of nanotechnology. He is also part of a group that has received a $200,000 NUE grant from the NSF to develop undergraduate programs in nanotechnology, and he has taught in the Citizens School for Nanotechnology from its inception.