Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We want to thank all participants of the 2017 Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Studies of the Law for an invigorating week and an inspiring final symposium. It is always a great honor to host such talented young researchers and this year certainly has been no exception. This was never clearer than during the final symposium (here is the program), which featured insightful presentations and discussions on topics as wide ranging as ‘legal performance art,’ land access and rights, and the legal logics employed by civil rights programs.

The symposium concluded this year’s OSI and this means we would also like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to the convenors: Marianne Constable, Danilo Mandic, Cristina S. Martinez, Sabine N. Meyer, Richard Perry, Beth Piatote, and Leti Volpp. Our thanks also go out to all the student assistants who kept things running smoothly, Irina Brittner for her tireless dedication, was well as to our sponsors and collaborating institutions.

We hope to see all of you again, soon!

While we are currently focusing on preparing the individual events of the Summer Institute in detail and thus fine-tuning the schedule, we also had to face some significant short term developments. In effect, the 2015 OSI faculty had to be changed … and we are very happy with the result!

On the one hand, unfortunately Stephen Best had to cancel his participation in the OSI at the last moment, due to some medical complications which make it impossible for him to travel at this moment. Stephen regrets this very much, and so do we, but we also agreed that we would definitely continue to work together in the future.  For now, the OSI sends its best wishes for a speedy recovery!

On the other hand, we have been extremely lucky in finding Hoang G. Phan as a new convener, and we are tremendously grateful that he has accepted to join the OSI 2015 faculty at such short notice. Hoang G. Phan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, studying literature and law from the Constitutional founding through the Civil War. In his work, Phan demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. His latest book Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation (New York UP, 2013) illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. Continue Reading »

Cristina S. Martinez will return to Osnabrück, bringing her expertise in art history and the law to the 2015 Osnabrück Summer Institute. Together with Martin Zeilinger, she will convene the introductory workshop on interdisciplinarity, Humanities and the Law.

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 S. Martinez is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa and a lecturer in the School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University. She is currently working on her book  ‘Art, Law and Order: The Legal Life of Artists in Eighteenth-century Britain’ which will be published by Manchester University Press. The forthcoming book has been recognized by the Historians of British Art with its annual Publication Award. Continue Reading »

We are happy to announce that Dr. Martin Zeilinger will join the Summer Institute as a faculty member again, sharing his expertise in law and culture in the introductory workshop “The Complex Relation between Culture and Law: Methods, Concepts, and Approaches.”

Martin Zeilinger holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. His research interests include appropriation as an artistic practice in analog and digital media; theories of authorship, creativity and cultural ownership; and alternative intellectual property models emerging in digital creative communities. Continue Reading »

We are happy to announce the keynote lecture of this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law on Friday, August 8, at 7 p.m. in room 11/212. Prof. Leti Volpp will speak on “The Indigenous as Alien – The Settler Contract and a Nation of Immigrants.” Together with the mayoral reception in Osnabrück’s city hall prior to the lecture, Volpp’s keynote address constitutes the official opening of the 2014 OSI.

Leti Volpp is Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on citizenship, migration, culture, gender, and identity.

Abstract: Immigration law, as it is taught, studied, and researched in the United States, imagines away the fact of preexisting indigenous populations. Why is this the case?  I argue, first, that this elision reflects and reproduces how the field narrates space, time, and membership. But despite this disappearance from the field, Indians have figured in immigration law, and thus, to understand what this has meant for indigenous populations, I describe the neglected legal history of the treatment of American Indians under U.S. immigration and citizenship law. I then return to explain why Indians have disappeared from immigration law through an investigation of the relationship between We the People, the “settler contract,” and the “nation of immigrants.”