Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

It is our pleasure to welcome Jeannine DeLombard back as a faculty member of the OSI2026! 
Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Professor and Vice-Chair of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is Affiliated Faculty with the History Department. She specializes in African-American and pre-1900 American literature at the intersection of slavery, law, and culture. She is the author of In the Shadows of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Penn 2012) and Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (UNC 2007). She is currently completing an interdisciplinary monograph, “American Dignity: Injury, Civil Rights, and the Making of Democracy.” Her recent legal humanities scholarship appears in the Representations special issue: “Techniques of Personhood: Law, Literature, Media,” ed. Julie Stone Peters and Lindsay Stern (Fall 2025); Oxford Handbook to Frederick Douglass, ed. Ivy Wilson and Philip Gould (forthcoming 2026); The Handbook of North American Literatures and the Legal Humanities, ed. Mita Banerjee, Stefanie Mueller, and Katja Sarkowsky (De Gruyter, forthcoming 2026). DeLombard has been honored to receive the Penny Pether Award for Law & Language Scholarship; the Robert K. Martin Best Book Prize; and the Melville’s Society Hennig Cohen Prize for Best Work in Melville Studies. Jeannine will convene a workshop on Moving Subjects and Changing Law with Angela Naimou.