Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

Joseph Slaughter (Columbia)

Our 2014 Summer Institute has been significantly bolstered by the welcome addition of Prof. Joseph Slaughter (Columbia University) to our faculty, who is a well-known specialist on human rights and literature. Prof. Slaughter will be co-convening the  workshop “The Humanities and Human Rights” together with Prof. Karen-Margrethe Simonsen.

Over the last ten years, Joseph Slaughter has emerged as one of the most important scholars working on the intersections between literary theory and human rights. Among other subjects, he has published extensively on human rights and narrativity, contemporary literature and multiculturalism, humanitarianism, the ethics of literary form, and postcoloniality in a number of journals, including Human Rights Quarterly, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature,  Politics and Culture, PMLA, and Comparative Literature Studies. His most recent book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007)  explores the narrative logics and cooperative social work of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman. Broadly seen as a major contribution to the law-and-humanities field, Human Rights, Inc was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory.

Prof. Slaughter is also known for his translation (into English) of the Argentine author Elvira Orphée’s fiction and his work on various African postcolonial authors. Currently an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Prof. Slaughter was awarded a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Grant for his present project, “New Word Orders: Intellectual Piracy and the Globalization of the Novel,” a forthcoming monograph that will examine the role that piracy, plagiarism, counterfeiting, and other intellectual property crimes have played in the development and diffusion of the novel as a world literary form.

The Summer Institute thus particularly stands to benefit from Prof. Slaughter’s combined expertise in both critical theory and the cultural history of human rights. We are delighted that we’ll be able to have the depth and scope of his interdisciplinarity with us in August, and we look forward to the conversations and debates that his contributions will evoke.