Abstract
As part of his study of representations of the polycylic monoids, Lawson described all the closed inverse submonoids of a polycyclic monoid P
n
and classified them up to conjugacy. We show that Lawson's description can be extended to closed inverse subsemigroups of graph inverse semigroups. We then apply Schein's theory of cosets in inverse semigroups to the closed inverse subsemigroups of graph inverse semigroups: we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a closed inverse subsemigroup of a graph inverse semigroup to have finite index, and determine the value of the index when it is finite.