CALL FOR PAPERS: Disrobing the Law in American Culture

The Princeton Program in American Studies Presents:

Disrobing the Law in American Culture: 
A Graduate Conference


Keynote: Laura Edwards (Duke University)
Keynote: Sally Gordon (University of Pennsylvania)

This conference, sponsored by the Program in American Studies at Princeton University, will focus on interdisciplinary questions of being beyond the law – of how people across time and space have managed to detach themselves from legal fabrics. It will examine how law accounts for specific bodies and behaviors, and how those bodies and behaviors can render themselves invisible to legal hermeneutics. We want to bring together scholars from a variety of fields to explore the disjunction between law and social practice. This conference asks how much the law really matters. It questions its historical efficacy and, at the same time, notes just how far reaching the law can be.
We invite graduate students working in the fields of American Studies, History, Religion, English and literary study, Anthropology, Political Science, Performance Studies, Art History, Law, and related fields to submit papers on topics including but not limited to:

-- Piracy & digital media/culture
-- Political movements & resistance
-- The politics of everyday life
-- Anthropology and the law
-- Embodiment & personhood
-- Literary approaches to legal hermeneutics
-- Theories of extralegality
-- Performance & the law
-- Theories and histories of the legal archive
-- And more...

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, a short biographical description, and your contact information by Monday, March 11.

The conference will be held at Princeton University, on April 26th and 27th. Proposals and/or questions should be sent to co-organizers Alix Lerner (allerner@princeton.edu) and Kameron Collins (kacollin@princeton.edu).