Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are happy to announce  our next focus lecture within the context of this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law. Prof. Karen-Margrethe Simonsen will talk about “The Comedy and the Politics of Natural Rights” on Tuesday, 12 August 2014, at 6 pm in room 11/212.

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Research Group “Humanistic Studies of Human Rights” at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research focuses on law and literature, justice in classic literary texts, world literature, and human rights.

Abstract: This talk will argue that comedy is an apt genre for reflections on the political functions of human or natural rights. The premise is that human or natural rights is a discourse appropriated both by perpetrators and victims. Therefore, in order to understand how rights work within a political context one needs to analyze the ‘relation’ between dominant and dominated. Comedy is especially apt at this as it is a genre hugely occupied with power and the downfall of power. I will take my point of departure in Lope de Vega’s comedy “The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus” from 1598-1603. Theoretically, this talk is mainly inspired by Alenka Zupančič and Etienne Balibar. A supplementary argument is that by looking at this early history of natural rights, we can modify our understanding of the modernity of human rights.

We are happy to announce the keynote lecture of this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law on Friday, August 8, at 7 p.m. in room 11/212. Prof. Leti Volpp will speak on “The Indigenous as Alien – The Settler Contract and a Nation of Immigrants.” Together with the mayoral reception in Osnabrück’s city hall prior to the lecture, Volpp’s keynote address constitutes the official opening of the 2014 OSI.

Leti Volpp is Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on citizenship, migration, culture, gender, and identity.

Abstract: Immigration law, as it is taught, studied, and researched in the United States, imagines away the fact of preexisting indigenous populations. Why is this the case?  I argue, first, that this elision reflects and reproduces how the field narrates space, time, and membership. But despite this disappearance from the field, Indians have figured in immigration law, and thus, to understand what this has meant for indigenous populations, I describe the neglected legal history of the treatment of American Indians under U.S. immigration and citizenship law. I then return to explain why Indians have disappeared from immigration law through an investigation of the relationship between We the People, the “settler contract,” and the “nation of immigrants.”