Organizing Committee: Jeannine DeLombard (UC Santa Barbara), Jeanne Gaakeer (Erasmus U. Rotterdam), Melissa Ganz (Marquette), Monica Huerta (Princeton), Jayne Lewis (UC Irvine), Greta Olson (Giessen), Lisa Siraganian (Johns Hopkins), Valerie Sirenko (Seattle Pacific Univ.), Robert Spoo (Tulsa), Simon Stern (Toronto), Nicole Wright (Colorado)

Winter 2022
Tues., Feb. 24: Faith Barter, 6 – 7:30 EST: “Jurisdiction, Black Sovereignty, and Harriet Jacobs.”
Fall 2021
postponed – new date tba : Merve Emre (Oxford), excerpt from Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities
Tues., Oct. 12, 6 – 7:30 EST: Rose Casey (West Virginia U.), excerpt from Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style
Tues., Oct. 26, 6 – 7:30 EST: Geoffrey Kirsch (Harvard), Loss Without Remedy: Moby-Dick and the Laws of Compensation
postponed – new date tba: Tues., Nov. 9, 6 – 7:30 EST: Audrey Golden (Simmons), excerpt from Novel Repair: Literary Histories of Human Rights, Restorative Justice, and the International Criminal Tribunal System
postponed – new date tba: Tues., Nov. 16, 6 – 7:30 EST: Emma Davenport (Duke), Contractual Rape: The Problem of Marriage Reform in Mill, Caird, and Hardy
Tues., Dec. 7, 6 – 7:30 EST: Penelope Geng (Macalester), a chapter from “Precarious Ability,” a project on property law, disability, and early modern drama
Summer 2021
Weds., June 2, 12:30 to 2: Melissa Ganz (Dept. of English, Marquette Univ.): ‘A Kind of Insanity in My Spirits’: Frankenstein, Childhood, and Criminal Intent
Tues., June 8, 12:30 to 2: Property Law Roundtable, with Valerie Sirenko (Seattle Pacific Univ.), Michael Lind Menna (Stanford), and Tal Kastner (NYU) – Panelists; and Bryan Wagner (UC – Berkeley) – Respondent
Tues., June 15, 12:30 to 2: Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton), Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons
Tues., June 22, 12:30 to 2: Belinda Qian He (UC Berkeley), Shooting Enemies: Cine-Photographic Policing and Revolutionary Justice in Wartime China
Weds., June 30, 12:30 to 2: Tanya Agathocleous (Hunter College), Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere
Tues., July 6, 12:15 to 1:45: Birte Christ (Justus Liebig University Gießen), The SHU, the Dungeon: US Contemporary Representations of Solitary Confinement
Tues., July 13, 12:30 to 2: Lisa Haber-Thomson (Harvard Univ.) “Building Character: Newgate, Jack Sheppard, and the Architecture of Escape”
Tues., July 20, 12:30 to 2: Almas Khan (Georgetown Univ.) An Intellectual Reconstruction: American Legal Realism, Literary Realism, and the Formation of Citizenship
Tues., July 27, 12:30 to 2: Stefanie Mueller (Goethe University Frankfurt), “Legal and Poetic Figurations of Wholeness in ‘from unincorporated territory’ and the Insular Cases”
Tues., Aug. 3, 12:30 to 2: Rajgopal Saikumar (NYU), Duty to Disobey: Modernism, Autonomy, and Dissidence
Tues., Aug. 10, 12:30 to 2: Talia Shalev (Stevens Inst. of Technology) Poets of the Inarticulate Constitution (chapter from a book in progress: Some Inarticulate Major Premise: Poetry, the Will of the People, and the U.S. Supreme Court)
Tues., Aug 17, 12:30 to 2: Jolene Zigarovich (Univ. of Northern Iowa & IASH Fellow, Univ. of Edinburgh), Presumption of Death Laws in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Novel (chapter from a book in progress: Necropolitics: Legislating the Dead Body and the Victorian Novel)
Tues., Aug. 24, 12:30 to 2: Zachary Samalin (NYU), “The Age of Obscenity: The Obscene Publications Act and the History of Disgust” from The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust
Tues., Aug. 31, 6 to 7:30: Chris Hilliard (Univ. of Sydney), A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England
Spring 2021
Thursday, January 14, 5:00 – 6:30: Brian Baaki (Dept. of English, U. of Memphis): Murder and Authorial Control in the Early African American Criminal Confession
Thursday, January 28, 5:00 – 6:30: Peter Jaros (Dept. of English, Franklin & Marshall College): Incorporate Things: Toward a Literary Genealogy of the Corporate Form in the Antebellum U.S.
Thursday, Feb. 11, 6:00 – 7:30: Elise Wang (Dept. of English, Comp. Lit., and Linguistics, CSU – Fullerton): Recording Robbery in Fourteenth-Century England
Thursday, Feb. 25, 6:00 – 7:30: Stephanie Elsky (Dept. of English, Rhodes College): Time Out of Mind: Custom, Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature — rescheduled to May 19
Tuesday, March 9, 6:00 – 7:30: Haiyan Lee (Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Dept. of Comp. Lit., Stanford Univ.): Trying History in China
Wednesday, March 24, 6:00 – 7:30: Sarah Winter (Dept. of English, U. Conn.): “Annexing” Rights to Bodies: Habeas Corpus, British Antislavery Legalism, and Human Right
Tuesday, April 6, 6:00 – 7:30: Nicholas T. Rinehart (Dept. of English, Dartmouth): Enslaved Complaint in the Lesser Guianas: Sanctuary, Sovereignty, Social Life
Tuesday, April 20, 6:00 – 7:30: Adam Kozaczka (Dept. of English, Texas A&M International Univ.): Romancing the Eighteenth-Century Courtroom: Henry Cockburn, Walter Scott, and the English Threat to Scots Law
Weds., May 5, 6:00 – 7:30: Sharif Youssef (English & Legal Studies, Ashoka Univ.): Nomos and Numismatics
Weds., May 19, 6:00 – 7:30: Stephanie Elsky (Dept. of English, Rhodes College): Time Out of Mind: Custom, Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature