Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We can finally share our finalized program with all of you!

Marianne Constable will not be able to join us this year, but we look forward to welcoming her back in future OSIs!

Luckily, Vikki Bell has graciously agreed to hold the fourth workshop with Leti Volpp! More details will follow shortly.

We are so excited about the weeks to come and to see all the participants and conveners here in Osnabrück!

Marco Wan and Laura Zander will be convening Workshop 1 on the topic of Interdisciplinarity. Find out more in their description:

The introductory workshop explores the relationship between law and culture, and provides a forum for thinking about what it might mean to adopt an ‘interdisciplinary’ approach to research. It will examine the potential benefits of moving beyond a single discipline, while being mindful of the challenges confronting scholars who work at the crossroads of multiple subject areas. Our discussion will be anchored in readings that might loosely be placed under the rubric of ‘interdisciplinary analysis’, but the emphasis will be on students’ individual research projects. Along the way, we will engage with cognate issues such as the translatability and transferability of texts and concepts; the representations of gender, race, and sexuality; and the role of the critic in society. This workshop will provide a foundation for the other discussions in the week by encouraging its participants to reflect upon the assumptions, ethos, and value of their critical practice.

We are happy to announce Laura A. Zander as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Laura is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1385) “Law and Literature” at the University of Muenster (WWU), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her current research focuses on Literature as Equity in British Cultural History most specifically on legal fictions and the works of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontës. For the upcoming funding phase of the CRC, she is preparing a research project on Subjects on the Move in Literature and Human Rights in collaboration with the law school at the WWU Muenster and the Institute of English and American Studies at Osnabrueck University. Laura will convene a workshop with Marco Wan on the topic of interdisciplinarity.

Laura holds an M.A. in English Literature and Linguistics and both state examinations in Law after completing her postgraduate judicial service traineeship. After receiving her PhD by the faculty of language and literatures at the University of Munich (LMU) she worked as a lecturer in the English Department. She also worked as a research assistant and taught at the Faculty of Law at the Universities of Munich, Frankfurt and Saarbruecken, for a master’s program in Digital Forensics. Publications include Writing Back / Reading Forward: Reconsidering the Postcolonial Approach (Berlin 2019), as well as articles on law and literature, gender and postcolonial studies, and both South African and Caribbean literature

We are happy to announce Marco Wan as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Marco is Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, where he directs the Programme in Law and Literary Studies. He will be Visiting Professor at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge in Michaelmas 2022.

He has published widely on law and the humanities, especially law and literature and law and visual culture. His most recent book, Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines how Hong Kong cinema engages with debates about rights, identity, and the rule of law. His first book, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge, 2017), approaches literary trials in nineteenth-century England and France as scenes of reading that reconfigure the boundaries between literature and law; it was awarded the Penny Pether Prize from the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia. Marco will convene a workshop with Laura Zander on the topic of interdisciplinarity.

Marco is currently working on a study of law and sexuality in East Asia, and is especially interested in the narratives – about identity, family, and history – that underpin legal judgments. The project is funded by a three-year grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

Marco is Managing Editor of Law & Literature. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”, and the National University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD and his first law degree from Cambridge, his LLM from Harvard Law School, and his BA from Yale University.

Ravit Reichman and Bryan Wagner will be convening Workshop 3 on questions of property, law and literature. Find out more in their introduction:

This workshop addresses basic questions in the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature by returning to classic works on authorship, authority, copyright, and jurisdiction. We are planning for an open and wide-ranging discussion informed by, but not tethered to, our common readings. Our first session will address influential and sharply contrasting statements by Michel Foucault, Martha Woodmansee, Meredith McGill, and Oren Bracha on the emergence of the concept of authorship in the eighteenth century and its complex relationship to the development of copyright law. Our second session will focus on two foundational essays by Robert Cover, which take up the notion of normative worlds (“Nomos and Narrative”) and the concept of jurisdiction (“The Folktales of Justice”), and offer fertile ground for examining the connectedness of law, literature, and culture.