Jul
11
2024
OSI
We are proud to announce that Kerry Bystrom will be joining our conference this year and hold a keynote on the topic “African Science Fiction and the Right to Higher Education: Tracking Precarity and Agency in Kenyan Refugee Camps”!
Kerry is Associate Professor of English and Human Rights and Associate Dean of the College at Bard College Berlin. Her research brings expertise on African and Latin American literature and cultural studies to bear on the role of storytelling and the arts more widely in processes of democratic transitions and transitional justice, human rights movements, and humanitarian campaigns. Publications include the monograph Democracy at Home in South Africa (2016) and special journal issues and edited volumes including Humanitarianism and Responsibility (2013), The Global South Atlantic (2018), South and North: Contemporary Urban Orientations (2018), and The Cultural Cold War and the Global South (2021). She is currently working on research projects on the right to higher education; inter-African migration narratives; and stolen children and the right to identity. She also works practically in the field of Higher Education in Emergencies, and holds a Certificate of Advanced Study in Higher Education in Emergencies from the University of Geneva.
Jul
11
2024
OSI
We are so excited to announce the opening keynote of our symposium held by John McLeod!
John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. His books include Global Trespassers: Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture (Liverpool UP, 2024), Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004). He has previously been a Visiting Researcher at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Visiting Professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
He will hold a lecture on the topic of “Borders, Trespass, and the ‘Good Immigrant'”.
Jul
04
2024
OSI
And finally we would like to officially introduce Peter Schneck as not only as our very own Summer Institute Director but also as officially part of the OSI 2024 Faculty!
Peter will convene the workshop on interdisciplinarity along with Leila Neti and Laura Zander.
Peter studied North-American and Media Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University Berlin, where he received his doctorate for a thesis on cultural perception and imagination in American realist painting and literature in 1996. From 1997 to 2004, he was an Assistant Professor at the America Institute, Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich. After the successful completion of his habilitation on “Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in American Culture“, he worked first as a Associate Professor at LMU Munich, before accepting the chair for American Studies at Osnabrück University in 2007. Various scholarships, fellowships and teaching assignments took Peter abroad, among others to the University of California at Irvine, the Venice International University, the University of Nottingham, the University of Turin and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D. C.
His research and teaching focus on the history of the U.S-American culture and literature with a special focus on the 19th century to the present, law and literature, questions of property and ownership in U. S. American-culture, Human Rights and Migration, as well as general questions of cognition, poetics, and aesthetics in literature.
Jul
04
2024
OSI
We would also like to also introduce Laura A. Zander as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Laura is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Osnabrück University and was part of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1385) “Law and Literature” at the University of Muenster (WWU), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), where her research focused on Literature as Equity in British Cultural History most specifically on legal fictions and the works of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontës. Her current research at the University of Osnabrück on Subjects on the Move in Literature and Human Rights is closely connected to this year’s OSI and in collaboration with the law school at the WWU Muenster. Laura will convene the workshop on interdisciplinarity along with Leila Neti and Peter Schneck.
Laura holds an M.A. in English Literature and Linguistics and both state examinations in Law after completing her postgraduate judicial service traineeship. After receiving her PhD by the faculty of language and literatures at the University of Munich (LMU) she worked as a lecturer in the English Department. She also worked as a research assistant and taught at the Faculty of Law at the Universities of Munich, Frankfurt and Saarbruecken, for a master’s program in Digital Forensics. Publications include Writing Back / Reading Forward: Reconsidering the Postcolonial Approach (Berlin 2019), as well as articles on law and literature, gender and postcolonial studies, and both South African and Caribbean literature
Jul
03
2024
OSI
Our concluding workshop will be held by Leti Volpp and Marco Wan on the topic of Mobility and Rights.
Our first session approaches mobility as a key issue in the study of law and the humanities. What happens when legal texts, concepts, and/or persons move into new cultural contexts? We will consider familiar questions such as translation, narrative, and interpretation in a global frame. Students will be encouraged to reflect upon how questions of mobility might structure their own research.
Our second session will focus on the mobility of persons in relation to rights. We will consider the concept of the “right to have rights” as articulated by Hannah Arendt in 1951 in relation to the importance of belonging to an organized political community. We will discuss how “the right to have rights” been taken up in relation to migration and to citizenship, the importance of territorial presence in claims making by immigrants, and the role of rights discourse in migrant struggles.
We are proud to announce that Kerry Bystrom will be joining our conference this year and hold a keynote on the topic “African Science Fiction and the Right to Higher Education: Tracking Precarity and Agency in Kenyan Refugee Camps”!
