The Group for the Study of Early Cultures at the University of California,
Irvine announces its Second Annual Graduate Student Conference. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Center, the Center in Law, Society and Culture, the Department of English, and the UCI Chancellor's Fellows Program.
PRE-MODERN LEGAL FICTIONS
With a key-note address by Laurie Shannon, Associate Professor of English and the Wender Lewis Teaching and Research Professor, Northwestern University
Key Note Address: "n the Beginning: Genesis, Animal Entitlement, and the Legal Fiction of Human Authority in Early Modernity"
“…fictions are to law what fraud is to trade.” –Jeremy Bentham
This conference will explore the intersection between the practice of law and other forms of extra-legal thought (including literary, theological, artistic or other cultural forces) and the figural extension of both to cultural expression. In the broadest sense, “legal fiction” refers to any work of literature or art that takes law or the practice of law as its central thematic focus. We also invite papers dealing with “legal fictions” in any pre-modern period in the technical sense – that is, any fictional assumption invoked in law to solve procedural difficulties (e.g. corporate personhood).
The Group for the Study of Early Cultures at UCI
Second Annual Graduate Student Conference:
Legal Fictions in Early Cultures
Friday – November 13
UCI Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) Room 135
8:30 – 9:00 Breakfast & Coffee (catered)
9:00 – 9:15 Welcome and Introductory Remarks
9:15 – 10:30am Illegal Fictions
CJ Gordon, UC Irvine, “Bread God, Blood God: Mandatory Fictions in Late Medieval Eucharistic Piety”
Nicolette Bruner, University of Michigan, “False Prophets: Justice, Law, and Prescience in Njáls Saga"
Jennifer Nelson, Yale University, “Salvation History on Trial: Visual and Legal Representation in Bellaert’s Belial of 1484”
10:30 – 10:45am Break
10:45 – 12:00pm Writing Jurisdictions
K-Sue Park, UC Berkeley, “On Law, the Legal Document and Legitimacy: Revisiting the Requerimiento”
Paul Johnson, UC Irvine, "The Legal and Literary Status (es) of the Early Modern Spanish Captive”
Macy Todd, NYU, "Verdicts North and South: Irish Law in Spenser and Carleton"
12:00pm – 1:30pm Break for Lunch
1:30pm – 2:45pm Keynote Address
Laurie Shannon, Northwestern University, "In the Beginning: Genesis, Animal
Entitlement, and the Legal Fiction of Human Authority in Early Modernity"
2:45pm – 4:00pm Fictiones Legales
Éloïse Lemay, University of Western Ontario, “Quantum interrēx nōbīs!”
Michael W. Heil, Columbia University, "The Uses of the Placitum in the Late
Tenth Century: the Example of Cremona"
Alex Perkins, UC Irvine, “Citizens of God: Early Christian Identity and the Ethereal Boundaries of Augustine’s Civitas Dei”
4:00pm – 4:15pm Break
4:15 pm – 5:45pm Women, Men, and the Law in Early Modern England
Laura Nowocin, Miami University, "My will shall be to me instead of law”: Silence, Excess, and the Female Petitioner in the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque
Josh Pearson, Kansas State University, “The Husband’s Office”: The Doubling of Domestic and Civil Power in A Comedy of Errors
Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw, Michigan State University, “But now her price is fall’n”: Devalued Brides, Disappearing Dowries, and the Legal Economies of Marriage in Shakespeare’s Lear
Daniel Bergen, Marquette University, WI, "The Female Ungoverned: The Case of Thomas Crowther vs. Elizabeth Moorfoote"
6:30pm – 8:30pm Reception: Food and Drinks Provided
Saturday – November 14
UCI Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) Room 135
8:30am – 9:00am – Breakfast & Coffee (catered)
9:00am – 10:15am – Narrative and Adjudication
Kathleen Zvarych, University of Texas at Austin, "Mining the Jurisprudential Landscape: Legal Discourses in Paradise Lost"
Nicole Wright, Yale University, “The consciousness of being half-caught in the act”: Self-awareness, culpability and “legal dignity” in Walter Scott’s later novel
Jeff Wilson, UC Irvine, “Straightening Out the Tudor Myth: Politics, Law, and
the Modern Audience of the Shakespearean History Play”
10:15am – 10:30am – Break
10:30am – 11:45am – Legal Alchemy
Jenny Liou, UC Irvine, "Not Betraying but Translating: Treason and the Legal Fictions of Restoration Science"
Jackie Way, UC Irvine, "The Magical Nature of the Law in Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai"
Dan Keegan, UC Irvine, “Of A Montebank: The Poison Effect in
Hamlet"
Anannya Dasgupta, Rutgers University, “I’ll bring thee rogue within the statute of sorcery”: Vagrancy, Witchcraft and Secular Law in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist
11:45 – 12:00pm – Break
12:00pm – 1:15pm – The Medieval Legal Character
Patrick Blong, UC Irvine, “The Word: Providence and Law in the Towneley Cycle”
Jonathan Fine, UC Irvine, “Judge as Figure/Judge as Function: The Role of Judgment in Late Medieval German Literature”
Elizabeth Strakhov, University of Pennsylvania, "Historical Fiction and the Practice of Rhetoric: Chaucer's Man of Law"
1:15pm – 3:00pm – Lunch (catered) and Roundtable discussion |