Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are so excited to announce that the concluding keynote of our conference will be held by Gesa Mackenthun!

Gesa is professor of American Studies at Rostock University, Germany. Her books include Embattled Excavations. Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past (2021), Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire (1997), Fictions of the Black Atlantic (2004), and many edited volumes, among them Decolonizing ‘Prehistory’. Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (with Christen Mucher, 2021), Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (with Bernhard Klein, 2004), Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference (with Klaus Hock, 2012), and DEcolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory (with Aníbal Arregui, 2017). Her current research deals with representations of the transatlantic history of enclosures, evictions, and ecocide.

She will be holding a Keynote on the topic “Ghostly Gardeners: America’s Ambivalent Discourse on Indigenous Land Tenure.” Join us on the 24.07. at 10:30 am to listen to her exciting talk! Please note that there has been a change in venue! The talk will take place in room 11/212!

We are proud to announce that Anjali Vats will be joining our conference this year and hold a keynote on the topic “The Being and Doing of Critical Race Intellectual Property: A Ten Year Reflection on Method and Praxis.”

Anjali Vats, JD, PhD is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law with a secondary appointment in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She is interested in issues related to race, law, rhetoric, media studies, and popular culture, with particular focus on intellectual property. Her book, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020), examines the relationship between copyright, patent, and trademark law, race, and national identity formation. She has published in law reviews and academic journals, including the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Communication, Culture & Critique. She also recently co-edited a special issue of First Amendment Studies on race and free speech. From 2014 – 2021, Vats was Associate Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and Associate Professor of Law at Boston College Law School (by courtesy), where she taught Critical Race Theory and studied questions of Critical Race Intellectual Property. In 2016-2017, while on an AAUW Postdoctoral Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Law Professor at UC Davis School of Law. She was also previously a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where she was affiliated with the Center for Intellectual Property Research at the Maurer School of Law. Before becoming a professor, Vats clerked for the now retired Chief Justice A. William Maupin of the Supreme Court of Nevada.

Join us on the 23.07. at 10:00 am to listen to her exciting talk in room 11/212!