Josh Lukin taught full-time in Temple University's First-Year Writing Program from 2003-2019, where he earned five Outstanding Teacher citations and was inducted into the Instructors' Hall of Fame. He also taught literature courses in the history of criticism, contemporary global fiction, noir fiction and film, and social issues in literature. 

His scholarly interests were U.S. fiction since 1945 and disability studies. Josh published articles, reviews and interviews in such venues as Journal of Modern Literature, MLN, minnesota review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Encyclopedia of American Disability History. He edited of It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis (Aqueduct Press, 2010) and Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). Invisible Suburbs looks at how, in an era where older modes of resistance were discredited, stigmatized, or destroyed, literature illuminated the efforts of marginalized groups to salvage or to reconceptualize their struggles for rights and recognition.

Josh served on the Modern Language Association's Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and on Temple's Interdisciplinary Faculty Council on Disability. His work has been taught at many schools, among them the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, Purdue North Central, the University of Minnesota, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, Central Michigan University, National Chiao Tung University, the University of Chicago, San Diego State University, Southern Illinois University, and Haverford College. At the time of his death, he was working on a collection of interviews with feminist authors and Noir Recognitions, a study of identity in the 1950s novels of Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Philip Dick.

He lived in Philadelphia with his wife Ann and his cat Horace.