Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

Prof. Helle Porsdam

We are happy to announce officially that Professor Helle Porsdam (University of Copenhagen) will be coming to Osnabrück in August to convene the workshop “Culture, Cultural Rights, and the Nation State” together with Prof. Leti Volpp.

Helle Porsdam is a Professor of American Studies and American History at the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Her primary research interests are focused on American culture and intellectual history, the role of law in American history and culture, American constitutionalism, the relationship between law and politics in the US and Europe, the cultural role of human rights, and law and humanities. She was the project leader of CULTIVATE, a three-year research collaboration between the universities of Copenhagen, Uppsala, London, Utrecht and Iceland and part of the HERA Joint Research Programme for the theme “Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation” (www.cultivateproject.dk).

Prof. Porsdam is the author of several books and numerous articles on law, culture, and literature in Europe and the U.S., among them Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (1999), Fra pax Americana til lex americana: En diskussion af dansk retliggørelse som en påvirkning fra USA (From Pax Americana to Lex Americana: A Discussion of Danish Legalization as an Influence from the United States, 2002); Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity (Edward Elgar, 2006); and, most recently, From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe (Edward Elgar, 2009). Prof. Porsdam holds an M.A. in English from the University of Copenhagen, a PhD in American Studies from Yale University, and a Dr. Phil. from University of Southern Denmark. In 1992-93 and again in 2000-2001 she was a Liberal Arts Fellow at the Harvard Law School.