Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

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.