Call For Papers, Fifth Biennial Literature and Law Conference: Visualizing Justice @JohnJayEvent

From Andrew Majeske, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Call For Papers

Fifth Biennial Literature and Law Conference – Visualizing Justice

Conference Organizer and Contact Person: Dale Barleben - dbarleben@jjay.cuny.edu

When: Friday, October 27 – Saturday, October 28, 2017

Where: John Jay College (CUNY) – (located on the upper-west side of Manhattan, near Lincoln Center in Manhattan)

This conference brings scholars of literature and law into an interdisciplinary setting to share their research.

We invite proposals for papers and panels that address topics related to cultural, literary, legal and visual texts (all broadly conceived) that engage this year’s conference theme, “visualizing justice.” The conversations among legal, literary and visual discourses highlight the 2017 conference. Please send your interdisciplinary proposals (250 words or less) to Dale Barleben (email above) by June 15, 2017.

The conference’s keynote speaker is Professor Desmond Manderson, an international leader in interdisciplinary scholarship in law and the humanities. He is the author of several books including From Mr Sin to Mr Big (1993); Songs Without Music: Aesthetic dimensions of law and justice (2000); Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law (2006); and Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law—The legacy of modernism (2012). His work has led to essays, books, and lectures around the world in the fields of English literature, philosophy, ethics, history, cultural studies, music, human geography, and anthropology, as well as in law and legal theory. Throughout this work Manderson has articulated a vision in which law's connection to these humanist disciplines is critical to its functioning, its justice, and its social relevance. After ten years at McGill University in Montreal, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Law and Discourse, and was founding Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, he returned to Australia to take up a Future Fellowship in the colleges of law and the humanities at Australian National University. 

The lunchtime-featured speaker is Professor Peter Brooks, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University, who joined the Princeton University faculty in 2008 as Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar, in the University Center for Human Values and the Department of Comparative Literature. At Princeton he directs a project on “The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism,” which included the Symposium, “The Humanities in the Public Sphere,” held at Princeton in April 2012, the source of the recent book, edited with Hillary Jewett, The Humanities and Public Life (Fordham 2014). He has published on narrative and narrative theory, on the 19th and 20th century novel, mainly French and English, and, more recently, on the interrelations of law and literature. He is the author of several books, including Enigmas of Identity, Henry James Goes to Paris (winner of the 2008 Christian Gauss Award), Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Body Work, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and The Novel of Worldliness. He is also the author of two novels, The Emperor’s Body (Norton, 2011) and World Elsewhere (Simon and Schuster,1999). He edited Balzac, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (2014). He co-edited, with Paul Gewirtz, Law’s Stories (Yale, 1996) and, with Alex Woloch, Whose Freud? (Yale, 2000). He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Comparative Literature and Yale Journal of Law & Humanities. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, London Review of Books, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Yale Law Journal, and elsewhere. He has held Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLAs fellowships, and received the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

Conference information and updates on our website: http://johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/lawliteratureconference/

John Jay College of Criminal Justice 4th Literature and Law Conference Call For Papers

The John Jay College of Criminal Justice has issued a call for papers for its 4th Literature and Law Conference, Literature, Labor, and the Law, to be held October 30-November 1st 2015.  The submission deadline is June 30th.

The responsibility of the state described by Plato, the contracts written by Shakespeare's Shylock, or the works delving into the plight of modern laborers all explore the intersections between Literature and Law.  This conference will explore the way that literary renderings of labor concerns, broadly defined, have responded to or have influenced the law. 

Key Note Speaker:  Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law and Director of the  Law and Humanities Program at Cardozo School of Law

Peter Goodrich  has written extensively in legal history and theory, law and literature and semiotics and has authored 12 books. He is managing editor of Law and Literature, and was the founding editor of Law and Critique. His most recent book is Legal Emblems and the Art of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The 2015 John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Law and Literature Conference is especially interested in the following areas although all submissions will be considered.

Slavery and the Law

Armed Services (including mandatory national service/conscription/drafts) and military law

Contract workers (day laborers) and migrant workers

Sex Trade Workers and Health Care Rights

Indigenous Rights and the State

National Expansion and Immigrant Laborers

Colonial Expansion and Bound Labor

Unions and/or Contract Disputes

“Open topics” loosely connected to the conference theme will be incorporated into panels when possible Panel and Roundtable proposals should be submitted as in one email containing all participates emails as attachments

Papers  are expected be 20 minutes in length

Panel will be limited to 3 speakers, plus Chair

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:  June 30th, 2015

Notification of Acceptance: July 30th, 2015

Early Registration: September 1st, 2015

Conference Dates: October 30th, 31st, and Nov 1st

Please submit a 300-word abstract by June 30th

Please place 4LLC Abstract and your Last Name in the subject line.

Veronica C. Hendrick, Ph.D., Conference Coordinator

Associate Professor of Literature and Law

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

City University of New York

vhendrick@jjay.cuny.edu