Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

It is our pleasure to welcome Marco Wan back as a faculty member of the OSI2024! Marco is Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, where he directs the Programme in Law and Literary Studies. He has published widely on law and the humanities, especially law and literature and law and visual culture. Marco will convene a workshop with Leti Volpp on questions of Migration, Human Rights and Refugees.

He is the author of Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge, 2017; winner of the biennial Penny Pether Prize of the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia). He is currently working on a monograph which takes Hong Kong as a case study for investigating the global circulation and local impact of LGBTQ+ rights.

Marco has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”, the National University of Singapore, and Yale Law School. He serves as Managing Editor of Law & Literature.

We are happy to announce Ted Laros as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Ted is an assistant professor affiliated with the Department of Technology, Media and Culture of the Open University of the Netherlands. His research interests include world literature (as a theoretical concept), the sociology of literature/culture, and the relationship between literature/culture and law. He is currently working on a historical sociological study of the purge of the Dutch literary field after World War II (forthcoming with Amsterdam UP in 2025). Key concepts within this study are the responsibility of the writer and the autonomy of literature (especially vis-à-vis the political and juridical fields). Next to this he is co-editing (together with Jaco Barnard-Naudé and Sauleha Kamal) a special issue on “World Literature and Human Rights” for Journal of World Literature (forthcoming in 2026). Ted will convene a workshop with Cassandra Falke on questions of Literature and Human Rights.

Among his publications in the area of law and literature/culture are: Brigitte Adriaensen, Andrew Bricker, Alberto Godioli & Ted Laros, ed., Humor and the Law: Laughter as Critique/The Limits of Laughter, special issue of Law, Culture and the Humanities (forthcoming); Brigitte Adriaensen, Andrew Bricker, Alberto Godioli & Ted Laros, ed., Humor and the Law: The Difficulty of Judging Jests, special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, vol. 35, no. 3, 2022, pp. 295-508; Ted Laros, Literature and the Law in South Africa, 1910-2010: The Long Walk to Artistic Freedom. The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2018 (Open Access edition 2020).