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The Department of Law and Legal Studies is pleased to share that Associate Professor Phillip Kaisary has been appointed the 2023-2025 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor of cultural mediations at �Ӱ�ԭ��’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC). Professor Kaisary’s research theme for this tenure will focus on “Directions and Dead Ends in the ‘Law and Literature’ Movement.”

More info about this appointment:

“As Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor, Philip Kaisary will embark on a major interdisciplinary research project that is global in its scope and has as its goal, (1) the contestation of ideas predominant in the ‘law and literature’ movement and the burgeoning sub-field of ‘Law, Culture, and the Humanities,’ and (2) the reconstruction of those fields along more materialist lines. As part of the Professorship research project, Professor Kaisary will also teach a graduate seminar on the theme of “Directions and Dead Ends in the ‘Law & Literature’ Movement.” The seminar will critically analyze themes, approaches, and debates in the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and the related field of ‘Law, Culture, and the Humanities’ (‘LCH’). The seminar will begin by tracing the formation of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement from c. 1965 to the present day, paying particular attention to its goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Observing the movement’s Eurocentrism, the tendency of scholars working in the field to reference only an attenuated corpus of literary and cultural materials, and its indebtedness, on the one hand, to liberal humanism, and, on the other, to post-structuralism, the productive capacities and critical limitations of the field as it is presently constituted will be assessed. Having established a working knowledge of the field in theoretical and historical terms, the seminar participants will then consider: (1) the critical traditions of cultural materialism and Marxist cultural studies, the major thinkers of which are conspicuous by their absence – or extreme scarcity – within Law and Literature scholarship, and (2) recent debates within world literary studies which have sought to elaborate world literature’s relation to the modern capitalist world-system. In opposition to the predominant approaches, the potential usefulness of these alternative approaches to a reconstructed and reoriented ‘Law and Literature’ movement will be considered in the undertaking of a series of experimental readings of primary materials (novels, films, statute law, and case law) drawn from both ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ global locations in an effort to develop a materialist and worldly approach to ‘Law and Literature.”

Philip Kaisary is an Associate Professor with the Department of Law and Legal Studies and is also a cross-appointed faculty member with the Department of English Language and Literature as well as Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture (ICSLAC). Please join us in congratulating Professor Kaisary on this exciting new project!