This seminar brings together new work in comparative literature, legal studies, and cultural history to explore the relationship between literary representation and the social and legal issues that shape historical experience. Across periods, regions, and genres, literary texts have served as powerful sites for examining legal institutions, social inequalities, political conflicts, and questions of justice. Rather than treating literature as a passive reflection of historical realities, this seminar investigates how literary works engage with, critique, and reimagine the legal and social frameworks of their time.

How does literature respond to systems of law and governance? In what ways do novels, poems, plays, and other cultural forms expose social injustices, challenge dominant legal narratives, or imagine alternative forms of justice? What can literary texts reveal about lived experiences that legal records and official histories often obscure? These questions are especially urgent in a moment when debates surrounding rights, citizenship, inequality, and institutional power continue to shape public discourse across the globe.

The seminar welcomes approaches that examine the intersections of literature with legal, political, and social history. Possible topics include representations of crime and punishment; slavery and abolition; gender and legal identity; class conflict and labor rights; colonialism and imperial law; migration and citizenship; race and civil rights; surveillance and state power; environmental justice; and literature’s role in documenting or contesting social change. Contributions may focus on individual texts, comparative case studies, transnational perspectives, or theoretical approaches that bring together literary criticism, legal studies, philosophy, sociology, and cultural theory.

Papers are encouraged that explore how literature not only records historical moments of conflict and transformation but also participates in broader conversations about justice, responsibility, and social reform. By placing literary texts in dialogue with the legal and social conditions from which they emerge, this seminar seeks to illuminate the enduring capacity of literature to interrogate power, challenge inequality, and imagine more equitable futures.