Law and Literature: Rethinking the Interdiscipline
Description
This seminar reflects on the relationship between law and literature, particularly on how literary forms and narratives interact with political and social legal orders. Julie Peters credits the “antidisciplinarity” of both law and literature as central to the movement that emerged in the 1980s. Bringing this conversation to the 21st century, this seminar seeks to bring fresh perspectives on this interdisciplinary approach by expanding its theoretical scope. Sub-fields like trauma studies have long reflected on the challenges and possibilities of representing and aestheticizing atrocity and suffering. Similarly, human rights and literary scholarship has revealed the limits of universalism by attending to the specific challenges of language, translation, and representation in normative discourses of human rights.
This seminar, then, asks: what new insights may we gain from bringing literary criticism to bear on the law? How can these intersections shed light on urgent global concerns like economic inequality, neoliberalism, carcerality, climate change, and dispossession? Is it possible to read law literarily and in doing so, to uncover hegemonic narrative and rhetorical strategies?
Participants are encouraged to submit proposals that ask or respond to questions that include but are not limited to:
- Where and how do law and literature converge or diverge in their ideas of justice and ethics, and in their respective world-making capacities?
- How can attending to law and literature together open up new ways of reading and interpretation?
- What are some critical challenges that the interdiscipline must attend to?
- What aesthetic form does law take in literary production?
- What kinds of alternative narratives or structures do literatures of witnessing produce as opposed to legal witnessing?
- What literary and legal processes make up truths?
- Does popular culture lend a positive affect to the social relations of law?
- Does the interdiscipline of law and literature fall into statist modes of reading? Is there a way out?
- Who is the subject of literature and of law?
- How is the narrative voice of literature determined before law?
Reach out to Nimisha at [email protected] with any questions.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Shari Sanders holds a Ph.D. in human and animal rights from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law. Her interests include legal discourse, legal analysis, and the intersections of critical literary theory with critical legal theory.
Speaker Bio
Mason L. Wong is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, where his research focuses on modern Chinese & Sinophone literatures, law & literature, and translation. His theoretical interests include global Asias, literary theory, critical theory, postcolonialism, and intellectual history. He holds a MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in English and political theory from Williams College.
Speaker Bio
Faith Barter is Associate Professor in English and affiliated faculty in Black Studies at the University of Oregon. The author of Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (UNC 2025), her work on Black legal imagination, Black privacy, contemporary film, and Black feminist thought has appeared or is forthcoming in MELUS, African American Review, Meridians, Law, Culture, & Humanities, and the European Journal of English Studies.
Speaker Bio
Olga Sanz Casasnovas is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish at Bowling Green State University (OH, US). She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American and Spanish Literature from the University of Cincinnati (OH, US). Her research focuses on Transatlantic Studies, New Formalism, and Contemporary Cuban and Spanish narrative.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yasmin Mendoza is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis studying Literature. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Theatre at Whittier College in the fall of 2021 and her Master of Arts in English at University of California, Davis in the spring of 2024. She currently studies the intersections of speculative fiction, privacy, children’s rights, and technology. Her most recent work, entitled "Banning Without Bans," was published on MLA Sites in the summer of 2022.
Speaker Bio
Stephen Park is Associate Professor English and Latin American and Latino Studies at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century Literature (Virginia). His work has appeared in Comparative American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, The Journal of Modern Literature, Arizona Quarterly and other venues. He is working on a book entitled Forms of Removal: Deportation, Immigration Law, and American Literature.
Speaker Bio
Jason Potts is the co-editor, with Daniel Stout, of Theory Aside (Duke UP) and various articles on American literature and literary theory. After a stint as Department Chair and a major contributor to his university's first Strategic Plan, he has decided that he would like to return to writing literary criticism rather than overhauling curriculums, degree patterns or writing university policies.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Eric Kligerman is an Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Florida. His current research, which focuses on the works of Franz Kafka, examines the intersection between quantum physics and German-Jewish intellectual thought. In addition to his Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts (De Gruyter, 2007), he has published on such topics as Nazis in American popular culture, representations of German left-wing terrorism in German film and painting.
Speaker Bio
Michael G. Malouf is Professor of English at George Mason University and the author of Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (University of Virginia Press, 2009) and Making World English: Literature, Late Empire, and English Language Teaching, 1919-39 (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Speaker Bio
Cait Jones is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Her work addresses literary works by Black LGBTQ+ writers, focuses on themes including cities, modernity, and affect, and invokes historical, sociological, and sociolegal perspectives. She recently taught courses on Black lesbian writing at Carleton University and has presented her work to the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities and the Modern Language Association.
Speaker Bio
Nimisha Sinha is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Binghamton University. She works on narratives of environmental development in literature and law.