Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are happy to announce Marco Wan as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Marco is Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, where he directs the Programme in Law and Literary Studies. He will be Visiting Professor at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge in Michaelmas 2022.

He has published widely on law and the humanities, especially law and literature and law and visual culture. His most recent book, Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines how Hong Kong cinema engages with debates about rights, identity, and the rule of law. His first book, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge, 2017), approaches literary trials in nineteenth-century England and France as scenes of reading that reconfigure the boundaries between literature and law; it was awarded the Penny Pether Prize from the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia. Marco will convene a workshop with Laura Zander on the topic of interdisciplinarity.

Marco is currently working on a study of law and sexuality in East Asia, and is especially interested in the narratives – about identity, family, and history – that underpin legal judgments. The project is funded by a three-year grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

Marco is Managing Editor of Law & Literature. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”, and the National University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD and his first law degree from Cambridge, his LLM from Harvard Law School, and his BA from Yale University.

Ravit Reichman and Bryan Wagner will be convening Workshop 3 on questions of property, law and literature. Find out more in their introduction:

This workshop addresses basic questions in the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature by returning to classic works on authorship, authority, copyright, and jurisdiction. We are planning for an open and wide-ranging discussion informed by, but not tethered to, our common readings. Our first session will address influential and sharply contrasting statements by Michel Foucault, Martha Woodmansee, Meredith McGill, and Oren Bracha on the emergence of the concept of authorship in the eighteenth century and its complex relationship to the development of copyright law. Our second session will focus on two foundational essays by Robert Cover, which take up the notion of normative worlds (“Nomos and Narrative”) and the concept of jurisdiction (“The Folktales of Justice”), and offer fertile ground for examining the connectedness of law, literature, and culture.

We are happy to announce Ravit Reichman as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Ravit is Associate Professor of English at Brown University, where she works at the intersection of literature, law, and psychoanalysis. Ravit will convene a workshop with Bryan Wagner on questions of Property, Law and Literature.

Her first book, The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (Stanford, 2009), examined law and literature in the context of the world wars. She is currently completing a study of property’s cultural and psychological life, Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times, which offers a genealogy of property’s expansive role in our psychic life, beginning with more conventional notions of property and ending in ideas of property restitution as a vehicle for justice. Her articles on affect and law, colonial jurisprudence, capital punishment, and counterfactual life, as well as on writers like Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, have been published in a range of journals and volumes. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Howard Foundation Fellow.

We are happy to announce Bryan Wagner as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Bryan is Professor in the English Department and American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has specific interests in legal history, vernacular culture, urban studies, and digital humanities. Bryan will convene a workshop with Ravit Reichman on questions of Property, Law and Literature.

He is Principal Investigator for two multidisciplinary research projects in the digital humanities: Louisiana Slave Conspiracies (lsc.berkeley.edu), a documentary 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 a year in the everyday life of an extraordinary neighhorhood that was a crucible for civil rights activism, cultural fusion, and musical innovation.

He is currently writing a book, The People’s Court: Law and Performance from Slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, that reconstructs a period-bound demotic tradition in folklore, music, popular theater, and vaudeville comedy based in the process and procedures of the minor judiciary.

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We’re in the final stages of planning and can finally share with you the draft program for this year’s Summer Institute! On top of the exciting workshops that our great team of conveners are planning, we are hard at work organizing a concluding conference on the weekend of the 22.07. – 24.07. On top of that, you will get the chance of exploring Osnabrück’s historical sites, museums as well as university events.

Stay tuned to find out more in the next weeks. We are looking forward to seeing all of you!