Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

It is our pleasure to welcome Devin Zuber as a member of the OSI 2026 faculty!
Dr. Devin Zuber is Associate Professor of Literature, Religion, and American Studies at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California, where he has served as Chair for the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion. He has published widely on ecocritical approaches to literature and religion, as well the place of spirituality in contemporary art; most recently he contributed two chapters to the exhibition catalogue Marina Abramovic: the Spirit Under Any Condition Does not Burn, with the Royal Academy of Art. Dr. Zuber’s last book, A Language of Things (UVA Press, 2020), received the Borsch-Rast Book Prize in Religion, and he is presently working on a new project entitled Angel Headed Hipsters: Art & Esotericism in Cold War California. Before coming to Berkeley, Dr. Zuber taught at the University of Osnabrück; he has held further visiting professorships and been a visiting scholar at institutions including the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London, Stockholm University’s Department for Aesthetics and Culture, the Ingmar Bergman Estate on Fårö, the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society (LMU München), and the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is also a co-founder of Endzeit, a techno collective bringing avant-garde electronic music and audiovisual arts to the San Francisco Bay area and beyond.

In keeping with OSI tradition, we’re pleased to launch our institute with a workshop on interdisciplinarity, which this year will be convened by Arthur Rose and Devin Zuber.

The introductory workshop begins the OSI’s weeklong exploration of the relationship between law and culture by addressing the challenges and opportunities offered by ‘interdisciplinary’ approaches to research and teaching. Moving beyond a single discipline is both exciting and increasingly necessary in the face of the world’s ‘wicked’ problems. But it can also be uncomfortable, uncertain and lonely, confronting emerging scholars with multiple potential subject areas whose integration poses unexpected pitfalls. Drawing on readings about interdisciplinarity and emphasising the students’ individual research projects, this session will approach interdisciplinarity through a focus on experimentation, a complex form of knowledge production that often operates beneath the level of discipline, in response to concrete problems, to establish its objects of inquiry. Together, we will think about how we decide on the definitions, groups, issues and situations we study, and how this awareness may help us adopt new research strategies. 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.