Call For Contributions, Cambridge Handbook on Law, History, and the Visual @CambridgeUP

From Steven Howe, Desmond Manderson, and Laura Peterson: Call For Contributions for the Cambridge Handbook on Law, History, and the Visual:

The Cambridge Handbook on Law, History and the Visual aims to collate cutting-edge scholarship on key topics in a vibrant and growing space of academic inquiry. We are seeking original contributions that explore the myriad ways in which we experience law visually – and the visual lawfully – in and across diOerent times and places in history. Gathering the expertise of scholars working within and between diOerent disciplines, the collection aspires to reflect the current state-of-the-art, to prompt new agendas, and to provide an up-to-date point of reference for students, researchers and teachers alike. We are soliciting proposals for essays of approximately 5,000-8,000 words, from established and emerging scholars, on any topic that fits within the scope of the volume (see below). The Handbook will be published in English, but we seek to provide a broad geographical coverage. We particularly welcome contributions from the Global South. Please note that manuscripts must be original and not be published elsewhere. All submissions will be peer-reviewed. If accepted, the deadline for full essays will likely be June 2026. Please submit proposals (title, abstract of approx. 250 words, biography of approx. 150 words) to Laura Petersen: laura.petersen@unilu.ch by Tuesday 10 December 2024. Please also indicate which theme or themes listed below you consider most relevant for your contribution. Scope of the Volume In the interests of focusing the Handbook coherently, we have identified the following lead themes: 1. Methods: creating the field of visual legal history We invite contributors to reflect on what it means to do scholarship on and in law using visual objects from the past. How might the study of images cultivate new routes into legal history? What stakes are involved when we think law with images in (and beyond) their time and place? 2. Standpoints: scholarly encounters with law and the visual We urge contributors to think directly about standpoint and the limitations and possibilities of undertaking scholarship in this field, including who is part of the encounter, who is not in the picture, and where, when and what is the address of the image? 3. Sources: mediums, archives, materialities We encourage critical engagement with the sources and institutional repositories of historical enquiry, and invite contributions that consider carefully the medium, materiality and provenance of specific images, including the role of potential ‘counterarchives’. 4. Times: from the epochal to the everyday We ask for analysis which considers explicitly how a chosen image(s) sits within time and changes or stays static throughout a particular time/legal period. We encourage diversity in thinking about the scale, period, background and futurity of specific images and their relations with law. 5. Places: place-making and visual jurisdictions We encourage analysis that focuses on a particular site, place, border-land, or country, and for contributors to investigate the strata of relations between the natural or built environment, legality, authority and visual objects. 6. Cross-sections: shifting legal and visual cultures We invite contributions that consider the traOic of images at specific sites and moments, and which locate these flows within visual legal histories. Such inquiries may connect legal images with historical shifts in visuality, or link visual objects with shifts in legal regimes or theories.

The deaadline for the call for contributions is December 10, 2024.