Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are proud to announce that Karen-Margrethe Simonsen will be joining the 2014 Summer Institute faculty and will be co-convening the workshop  “The Humanities and Human Rights” with Prof. Joseph Slaughter.

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Research Group “Humanistic Studies of Human Rights” at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research focuses on law and literature, justice in classic literary texts, world literature, and human rights. Between 2005 and 2007 and again between 2008 and 2009, Simonsen was Director of the Nordic Network for Law and Literature, a research project which assembles leading scholars of Legal and Literary Studies in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to explore law and legality in modern culture. Since 2007, Simonsen has been Associate Member of the Institute for Law and Humanities at the Cardozo Law School, New York.

Prof. Simonsen is the author of several books and numerous articles on the intersection of law and literature, among them “The Comedy of Natural Rights and Power in the Spanish comedia after the Conquest” (The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, to be published 2015), “The Politics of Universalism: Strategic Uses of Human Rights Discourses in Early Modernity” (Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2013), Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theatre: Nordic Perspectives on Law and Humanities (De Gruyter, 2012), Law and Literature: Interdisciplinary Methods of Reading (Djøf / Jurist- og Økonomforbundet, 2010), “The Confession of a Judge: On Narrative Desire and Law in Steen Steensen Blicher’s Early Crime Story ‘The Pastor of Vejlbye'” (Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theater: Nordic Perspectives on Law and Humanities. Ed. Karen-Margrethe Simonsen. Walter de Gruyter, 2013), and “The Subject Before the Law: On Robert Musil’s Broken Fiction and Narrative Humanism Within the Law” (Polemos, 2013).