Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are happy to introduce Nora Slonimsky as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty!! She is the Gardiner Assistant Professor of History at Iona College, where she serves as Director of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies.

Nora studies the history of communication and book history, political economy, and legal culture, with a particular focus on intellectual property, while her work at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies is concerned largely with public and digital history. Her research offers new and exciting perspectives central to the interdisciplinary format of the Osnabrück Summer Institute. She will convene a workshop with Cristina S. Martinez on the intersection of intellectual property, copyright and cultural production.

Nora’s in-progress book, The Engine of Free Expression: Copyrighting the State in Early America is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press and won the Society for the History of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) prize for best manuscript. This project, along with other research in the digital humanities, is supported by the Huntington Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the New-York Historical Society, and the America Antiquarian Society, among others. She is also co-editing an open-access volume with Cornell University Press, “American Revolutions in the Digital Age.” Nora serves as the Social Media Editor for the Journal of the Early Republic and the reviews editor for SHARP News. You can follow her on twitter @NoraSlonimsky or check out her website, www.hamiltonsolo.com. 

We are happy to announce Cristina S. Martinez as a member of the faculty of the OSI 2022! Cristina teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa; she holds a PhD in Art History and Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

Cristina participated in OSI in 2014. Since then, she has been a regular member of the OSI faculty, joining us year after year in Osnabrück. Her work focuses on art and visual culture from the eighteenth century to the present, and she is particularly interested in graphic satire, the history of copyright law and the use of appropriation strategies in modern and contemporary art. She has presented her work at the Paul Mellon Centre for Study in British Art, Yale Law School’s library, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, and before the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) in New York. She has also been invited to present her research at conferences elsewhere in France, the UK, Italy, Switzerland and Australia. Cristina will convene a workshop with Nora Slonimsky on questions of intellectual property, copyright and cultural production.

Cristina is currently completing her manuscript Art, Law and Order: The Legal Life of Artists in Eighteenth-century Britain which is to be published by Manchester University Press, and is co-editor for the forthcoming collection Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women in Graphic Media, 1735-1830 (under contract with Cambridge University Press). She received the prestigious Association of Print Scholars Publication Grant in recognition of this project. Continue Reading »