Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are happy to announce Cassandra Falke as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Cassandra is a Professor of English Literature at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, where she also leads the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology research group. She has written widely on romanticism, literary theory, phenomenology and representations of violence, with a recent focus on human rights and readerly responsibility in historical fiction. Cassandra will convene a workshop with Ted Laros on questions of Literature and Human Rights.

She has published two monographs and has two more forthcoming. Literature by the Working Classes: English Autobiography, 1820-1848 (2013) uncovers innovative approaches to life narration among a neglected body of working-class literature. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2017) reconsiders the ethics of reading in light of radically intersubjective understandings of personhood in French phenomenology. Global Human Rights Fiction, forthcoming in 2024, describes an emergent genre of historical fiction that rewrites political violence from 1948 to now in light of the hopes and failures of post-World War Two human rights law. Wise Passiveness: Phenomenologies of Receptivity in British Romantic Poetry, due out the following year, explores poetic descriptions of receptivity as precursors to phenomenological conceptualizations of self-becoming in the world. Also in 2024-2025, she will be working on a project called The Reader as Witness: Situated Responsibility and Fictional Histories of Violence, with support from a fellowship at Cornell University ́s Society for the Humanities. Prior work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Joint Committee of Nordic Research Councils, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the US Embassy of Norway. Her editorial work includes two special issues and four edited collections, most recently Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics (2023).

We are happy to announce Leila Neti as a member of the OSI 2024 faculty! Leila is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She specializes in Victorian literature, contemporary Anglophone literature, and law and literature. Leila will convene a workshop with Peter Schneck and Laura Zander on the topic of interdisciplinarity.

Her recent book Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2021) explores the shared cultural logic of both legal opinions and novels during the Victorian era.

Her published articles have appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Law and Literature, and in various edited collections. Leila has been collaborating with the Universities of Osnabrück and Münster within the context of several research projects and workshops, including “Equity and Postcolonial Legal and Literary Imaginaries” and “Legal Universalism and Empire.”

We are very excited about Leila joining the OSI 2024 faculty, and we are very much looking forward to her workshop on interdisciplinarity!