Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

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.

We are happy to announce Ravit Reichman as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Ravit is Associate Professor of English at Brown University, where she works at the intersection of literature, law, and psychoanalysis. Ravit will convene a workshop with Bryan Wagner on questions of Property, Law and Literature.

Her first book, The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (Stanford, 2009), examined law and literature in the context of the world wars. She is currently completing a study of property’s cultural and psychological life, Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times, which offers a genealogy of property’s expansive role in our psychic life, beginning with more conventional notions of property and ending in ideas of property restitution as a vehicle for justice. Her articles on affect and law, colonial jurisprudence, capital punishment, and counterfactual life, as well as on writers like Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, have been published in a range of journals and volumes. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Howard Foundation Fellow.