Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

It is our pleasure to welcome Jeannine de Lombard as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Jeannine teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she maintains an Affiliation with the History Department. She specializes in African American and pre-1900 American literature, with a particular interest in the intersections of slavery, law, and culture. She is the author of In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Penn 2012) and Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (UNC 2007). Jeannine will convene a workshop with Bryan Wagner on questions of Legal Personhood, Police and Civil Rights Activism.

Jeannine is currently completing two paired book projects: “Bound to Respect: Democratic Dignity & the Indignities of Slavery” and “The Skin Aristocracy in America.” Recent chapters and articles appear in the Elgar Concise Encyclopaedia of Law and Literature, Simon Stern and Robert Spoo, eds. (forthcoming); The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, Robert S. Levine & Russ Castronovo, eds. (Cambridge, forthcoming); the Elgar Handbook of Legal Fictions Simon Stern, Lisa Siraganian, and Kristin Albrecht, eds.; Richard Wright in Context, Michael Nowlin, ed. (Cambridge, 2021); and Frederick Douglass in Context, Michaël Roy, ed. (Cambridge, 2021). Jeannine has been honored to receive the Penny Pether Award for Law & Language Scholarship (2019); the Robert K. Martin Best Book Prize (2013); and the Melville Society’s Hennig Cohen Prize for Best Work in Melville Studies (2009).

Jeannine has also been a major force in establishing strong collaborative links between the legal humanities research focus at UC Santa Barbara and the research in cultural legal studies at Osnabrück university. We are thrilled to welcome her back to Osnabrück as an OSI 2024 faculty member, and we are very much looking forward to her workshop with Bryan!

We happily welcome back Leti Volpp as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Leti 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 Marco Wan on questions of Migration, Human Rights and Refugees.

Her most recent publications include “Weep the People,” UC Law Review (forthcoming),  “Crossing Borders, Criminality, and Indigenous Sovereignty,” in Critical Times (forthcoming), “Citizenship” in R. Spoo and S. Stern, eds., Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming), “Refugees Welcome?” in Irina Brittner, Sabine N. Meyer, and Peter Schneck, eds., We the People: the United States and the Question of Rights (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020) and  “Pushing Out and Bleeding In: On the Mobility of Borders,” in Peter Niesen, ed., The Shifting Border: Ayelet Shachar in Dialogue (Manchester University Press, 2020).  She is also the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner)(Fordham University Press, 2019), and of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Her earlier work includes the much cited “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review (2002), and “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review (2001).

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It is our pleasure to welcome Marco Wan back as a faculty member of the OSI2024! Marco is Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, where he directs the Programme in Law and Literary Studies. He has published widely on law and the humanities, especially law and literature and law and visual culture. Marco will convene a workshop with Leti Volpp on questions of Migration, Human Rights and Refugees.

He is the author of Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge, 2017; winner of the biennial Penny Pether Prize of the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia). He is currently working on a monograph which takes Hong Kong as a case study for investigating the global circulation and local impact of LGBTQ+ rights.

Marco has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”, the National University of Singapore, and Yale Law School. He serves as Managing Editor of Law & Literature.

We are happy to announce Ted Laros as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Ted is an assistant professor affiliated with the Department of Technology, Media and Culture of the Open University of the Netherlands. His research interests include world literature (as a theoretical concept), the sociology of literature/culture, and the relationship between literature/culture and law. He is currently working on a historical sociological study of the purge of the Dutch literary field after World War II (forthcoming with Amsterdam UP in 2025). Key concepts within this study are the responsibility of the writer and the autonomy of literature (especially vis-à-vis the political and juridical fields). Next to this he is co-editing (together with Jaco Barnard-Naudé and Sauleha Kamal) a special issue on “World Literature and Human Rights” for Journal of World Literature (forthcoming in 2026). Ted will convene a workshop with Cassandra Falke on questions of Literature and Human Rights.

Among his publications in the area of law and literature/culture are: Brigitte Adriaensen, Andrew Bricker, Alberto Godioli & Ted Laros, ed., Humor and the Law: Laughter as Critique/The Limits of Laughter, special issue of Law, Culture and the Humanities (forthcoming); Brigitte Adriaensen, Andrew Bricker, Alberto Godioli & Ted Laros, ed., Humor and the Law: The Difficulty of Judging Jests, special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, vol. 35, no. 3, 2022, pp. 295-508; Ted Laros, Literature and the Law in South Africa, 1910-2010: The Long Walk to Artistic Freedom. The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2018 (Open Access edition 2020).

We are happy to announce Cassandra Falke as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Cassandra is a Professor of English Literature at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, where she also leads the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology research group. She has written widely on romanticism, literary theory, phenomenology and representations of violence, with a recent focus on human rights and readerly responsibility in historical fiction. Cassandra will convene a workshop with Ted Laros on questions of Literature and Human Rights.

She has published two monographs and has two more forthcoming. Literature by the Working Classes: English Autobiography, 1820-1848 (2013) uncovers innovative approaches to life narration among a neglected body of working-class literature. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2017) reconsiders the ethics of reading in light of radically intersubjective understandings of personhood in French phenomenology. Global Human Rights Fiction, forthcoming in 2024, describes an emergent genre of historical fiction that rewrites political violence from 1948 to now in light of the hopes and failures of post-World War Two human rights law. Wise Passiveness: Phenomenologies of Receptivity in British Romantic Poetry, due out the following year, explores poetic descriptions of receptivity as precursors to phenomenological conceptualizations of self-becoming in the world. Also in 2024-2025, she will be working on a project called The Reader as Witness: Situated Responsibility and Fictional Histories of Violence, with support from a fellowship at Cornell University ́s Society for the Humanities. Prior work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Joint Committee of Nordic Research Councils, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the US Embassy of Norway. Her editorial work includes two special issues and four edited collections, most recently Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics (2023).