Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

Marco Wan and Laura Zander will be convening Workshop 1 on the topic of Interdisciplinarity. Find out more in their description:

The introductory workshop explores the relationship between law and culture, and provides a forum for thinking about what it might mean to adopt an ‘interdisciplinary’ approach to research. It will examine the potential benefits of moving beyond a single discipline, while being mindful of the challenges confronting scholars who work at the crossroads of multiple subject areas. Our discussion will be anchored in readings that might loosely be placed under the rubric of ‘interdisciplinary analysis’, but the emphasis will be on students’ individual research projects. Along the way, we will engage with cognate issues such as the translatability and transferability of texts and concepts; the representations of gender, race, and sexuality; and the role of the critic in society. This workshop will provide a foundation for the other discussions in the week by encouraging its participants to reflect upon the assumptions, ethos, and value of their critical practice.

We are happy to announce Laura A. Zander as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Laura is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1385) “Law and Literature” at the University of Muenster (WWU), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her current research focuses on Literature as Equity in British Cultural History most specifically on legal fictions and the works of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontës. For the upcoming funding phase of the CRC, she is preparing a research project on Subjects on the Move in Literature and Human Rights in collaboration with the law school at the WWU Muenster and the Institute of English and American Studies at Osnabrueck University. Laura will convene a workshop with Marco Wan on the topic of interdisciplinarity.

Laura holds an M.A. in English Literature and Linguistics and both state examinations in Law after completing her postgraduate judicial service traineeship. After receiving her PhD by the faculty of language and literatures at the University of Munich (LMU) she worked as a lecturer in the English Department. She also worked as a research assistant and taught at the Faculty of Law at the Universities of Munich, Frankfurt and Saarbruecken, for a master’s program in Digital Forensics. Publications include Writing Back / Reading Forward: Reconsidering the Postcolonial Approach (Berlin 2019), as well as articles on law and literature, gender and postcolonial studies, and both South African and Caribbean literature