Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are happy to announce Bryan Wagner as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Bryan is Professor in the English Department and American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has specific interests in legal history, vernacular culture, urban studies, and digital humanities. Bryan will convene a workshop with Ravit Reichman on questions of Property, Law and Literature.

He is Principal Investigator for two multidisciplinary research projects in the digital humanities: Louisiana Slave Conspiracies (lsc.berkeley.edu), a documentary archive of trial manuscripts related to slave conspiracies organized at the Pointe Coupée Post in the Spanish territory of Louisiana in 1791 and 1795; and Tremé 1908, which tells the story of a year in the everyday life of an extraordinary neighhorhood that was a crucible for civil rights activism, cultural fusion, and musical innovation.

He is currently writing a book, The People’s Court: Law and Performance from Slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, that reconstructs a period-bound demotic tradition in folklore, music, popular theater, and vaudeville comedy based in the process and procedures of the minor judiciary.

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We’re in the final stages of planning and can finally share with you the draft program for this year’s Summer Institute! On top of the exciting workshops that our great team of conveners are planning, we are hard at work organizing a concluding conference on the weekend of the 22.07. – 24.07. On top of that, you will get the chance of exploring Osnabrück’s historical sites, museums as well as university events.

Stay tuned to find out more in the next weeks. We are looking forward to seeing all of you!

We are happy to announce Leti Volpp as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law and the Director of the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. She has served as a Visiting Professor affiliated with the Amerika-Institut of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and as past Faculty for the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of Law. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award, and the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award. She has served as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Leti will convene a workshop with Marianne Constable on questions of Property, Migration and Belonging.

At Berkeley Volpp is also an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies.  She is a core faculty member of the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Her current research projects include examining the term “shithole countries,” thinking about abolition in the immigration context, and drafting the entry “Citizenship” for the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature.  She is looking forward to returning to the OSI this summer.

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Cristina S. Martinez and Nora Slonimsky will convene Workshop 2 under the title “Marking Ownership: Contested Properties of Cultural Production”. The workshop will deal with questions of property, copyright and cultural production. Find out more in their introduction:

This workshop considers the many layers, meanings and effects of what it is to own works of intellectual and creative labour. We will view these complex and interwoven topics through the lenses and experiences of race and gender to better understand how legacies of contested properties in the historical past relate to our current moment. We will therefore deliberate upon how copyright has been complicit in exclusion and marginalization.Drawing on historical and contemporary debates from multiple disciplines, we also plan to evaluate how demarcations of ownership, from visual symbols and signatures to other formal and informal signifiers, establish (or destabilize) proprietary control. In addition, taking into consideration Michel Serres’s notion of the parasite, we will examine contentions of intellectual property and discuss how authors, artists, and other creators navigate, experiment and influence the legal landscape and its periphery with related concepts of appropriation, piracy, theft and inheritance through declarations, contestation or rejections of ownership.

We would like to inform you that the deadline for submitting abstracts for the OSI 2022, originally scheduled for 30 April 2022, has been extended by two weeks and the new deadline is 15 May 2022.

Head over to our Application page for more info!