Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

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!

We are so excited to announce that the opening keynote of this Institute’s concluding conference will be held by Ravit Reichman on the topic of “Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times”! Check out our convener introductions to read up on her full bio and see the abstract in the following:

“How do we come to feel possessive over intangibles—memory, identity, history, citizenship—that, strictly speaking, we cannot own? In taking up this question as a way to understand the modern condition, this lecture examines the propertied imagination: the psychic life of property through which we experience the world as a series of possessive cases, and through which we make claims to repossess what we believe to be ours. Navigating the psychic terrain of possession, I propose that property in the modern era comes into view predominantly through loss rather than acquisition, and that this loss is accompanied by an expanded sense of property that shapes relations of ownership beyond the law. Drawing particularly on examples from law and literature, I suggest that this propertied imagination calls for a particular mode of reading, one attuned to property’s affective registers like grief, possessiveness, self-possession, or entitlement, and to its rhetorical turns—those moments when language alerts us to the existence of a propertied relationship that law is often at pains to address.”

The Keynote will be held on the 22.07.  at 4 pm. Join us in room 11/E08!