Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

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.”

We are proud to announce that Karen-Margrethe Simonsen will be joining the 2014 Summer Institute faculty and will be co-convening the workshop  “The Humanities and Human Rights” with Prof. Joseph Slaughter.

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. Between 2005 and 2007 and again between 2008 and 2009, Simonsen was Director of the Nordic Network for Law and Literature, a research project which assembles leading scholars of Legal and Literary Studies in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to explore law and legality in modern culture. Since 2007, Simonsen has been Associate Member of the Institute for Law and Humanities at the Cardozo Law School, New York.

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