Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond
2–4 July 2018
Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge
Law and Literature has come of age, evolving from the vexations of the early 1990s into a thriving field across periods, with the English Renaissance still a major locus. With the authority and intellectual security this progress gives us, however, come new responsibilities. What can we now see about this interdiscipline, and its historically specific interrelations, that we could not have had clarity about at the movement’s inception? What are the disciplinary anxieties it is time to shake off? Have new ones emerged which we need to examine? And what does work on interactions between the legal and literary imagination in other periods or cultures put in perspective for anglophone early modernists? Our 3-day conference on Law and Poetics will address the trends and urgencies in the field now, with a view to teasing out their implications for the methods and motives of knowing, and considerations of knowability. It will, in the process, raise new questions about the remit of legal, poetic or artistic knowledge.
Our speakers are: Kevin Curran (University of Lausanne), Maksymilian Del Mar (Queen Mary, University of London), Kathy H. Eden (Columbia University), Alex Feldman (Haifa University), Peter Goodrich (Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law), Rachel E. Holmes (University of Cambridge), Lorna Hutson (Merton College, University of Oxford), Torrance Kirby (McGill University), Doyeeta Majumder (Jadavpur University), Charles McNamara (Columbia University), Bernadette Meyler (Stanford University), Subha Mukherji (University of Cambridge), George Oppitz-Trotman (University of Cambridge), Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge), Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School), Regina Schwartz (Northwestern University), Sebastian Sobecki (University of Groningen), Christopher N. Warren (Carnegie Mellon University), Gary Watt (University of Warwick), Carey Young (Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London), and Andrew Zurcher (Queen’s College, University of Cambridge).
This conference also features an integrated public event, Law and the Arts: Staging Law, Performing Trials on the 3rd of July.
More details about the conference including a provisional schedule and speakers’ abstracts can all be found here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27722.
Registration is required and accessible here: https://webservices.admin.cam.ac.uk/cbk/vmwy/index.cgi. Fees are £40 (full price) or £25 (student/unwaged). Fees include lunches and refreshments. Those registering for this conference will automatically be registered for the integrated public event, Law and the Arts: Staging Law, Performing Trials on the 3rd of July. Registration will close on Monday 25th June.
This conference is part of the research project Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council, based at the Faculty of English and CRASSH, University of Cambridge.