Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

The third Workshop will be conducted by Cassandra Falke and Ted Laros on the topic of Literature and Human Rights.

This workshop will focus on literary representations of human rights abuses. Increasingly, scholars “look to literature to gain access to as well as incarnate those facets of selfhood that liberal human rights discourses obscure” (Anker 2) – embodied experience, collective memory, the singularity of the event. Literature seems to offer a freer discursive space in which people can tell a richer tale than the restrictions of legal testimony allow. But literary conventions and book markets impose their own restrictions in terms of both narrative form and who is empowered to write and publish. The workshop will explore contrasts, complementarity and historical intersections between literature and human rights, giving special attention to two works of contemporary fiction as “case studies” for contemporary methods of interdisciplinary work.

Our second Workshop will be held by Jeannine DeLombard and Bryan Wagner on the topic of Police and Person.

From Black Lives Matter, vaccine mandates, and immigration to environmental initiatives, reproductive rights, and corporate power, the terms “police” and “person” figure prominently in current legal-cultural debates. Yet, the tendency to define these terms narrowly –police as law enforcement and the person as a human being –often obscures the larger stakes of these and other controversies. With a session devoted to each term, this workshop seeks to enrich our understanding of the complex meanings that have attached to “police” and “person” in Western law and culture.We look forward to an open and wide-ranging discussion informed by, but not tethered to, our common readings.

In keeping with OSi tradition, we’re pleased to launch our institute with a workshop on interdisciplinarity, which this year will be convened by Leila Neti, Peter Schneck and Laura Zander.

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 and teaching. 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 practic

We are happy to share the draft program for this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Studies of the Law! For one week this July, the OSI will provide young scholars interested in the intersections of Law and the Humanities with the opportunity to have in-depth discussions of current issues in the field, to share their work with their peers as well as experienced researchers, and to meet and exchange ideas with colleagues from around the globe.

It is our pleasure to welcome back Bryan Wagner as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Bryan Wagner is Professor in the English Department and American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard, 2009), The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton, 2017), The Wild Tchoupitoulas (33 ⅓ Series, 2019), and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love (LSU, 2019). Bryan will convene a workshop with Jeannine DeLombard on questions of Legal Personhood, Police and Civil Rights Activism.

He is co-editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (Fordham, 2019), and Principal Investigator for two multidisciplinary collaborations in the digital humanities: Louisiana Slave Conspiracies, an interactive archive of trial manuscripts related to slave conspiracies organized at the Pointe Coupée Post in the Spanish territory of Louisiana in 1791 and 1795, and Tremé 1908, which tells the story of one year in the everyday life of an extraordinary neighborhood that was a crucible for civil rights activism, cultural fusion, and musical innovation. He is currently writing The People’s Court: Law and Performance from Slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, a book that reconstructs a tradition of minor jurisprudence in African American music, folklore, and vaudeville comedy, and working on a public humanities collaboration, An Open Classroom on New Orleans Culture, with partnering organizations including Neighborhood Story Project and the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts.