Literary History and Constitutional Culture
For the MLA’s next conference in Los Angeles, the Discussion Group on Law and Literature invites paper proposals (abstract plus cv to elliott.visconsi@yale.edu, by March 15) that address the relationship, broadly understood, between constitutional change and literary history. Some general questions: what influence do constitutional decisions have on the path of literary history, and to what degree can such decisions or events be said to transform or deflect a literary tradition? Papers that take a theoretical approach to the question are welcome (e.g. can the literary be understood as a modality of popular constitutional interpretation?), as are papers addressed to a concrete moment or event (e.g. LGBT literature after Lawrence v. Texas; LDS fiction in the wake of Reynolds v. United States, the literary history of slavery after Somersett’s case, Franco-Islamic literature after the 2004 headscarf laws, etc. Paper proposals from all legal and literary traditions are welcome.
A nice review of my book in the online journal Jotwell, “a space where legal academics will go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new legal scholarship.” Jotwell looks like a terrific resource for scholars in and near the legal academy.
I’m home from Menaggio, Italy, where I delivered a plenary lecture– Blasphemy and Solitude: Race, Religion, and the Limits of Pluralism in Contemporary England– to the Nordic Network for Law and Literature.
For student advisees:
I will be holding open office hours in my office (SY P12) on Thursday Sept. 2 and Friday Sept 3 in the mornings (roughly 930-12), though I’d ask that you make an appointment if you do plan to come by.
EV
I’m spending the year studying US and comparative constitutional law at Yale Law School courtesy of a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship. The major focus of my current research touches on the cultural and legal history of the separation of church and state; this project is moving towards a book entitled “The Invention of Civil Religion: Church and State in Post-Revolutionary England and America.” A published article “The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor (1676)” is an indication of the kind of work I’m pursuing at this moment. A second piece on religion and toleration in New England war narratives is soon to be published as “King Philip’s War and the Edges of Civil Religion in 1670s London,” in a collection edited by Tom Corns and Tony Claydon, Religion, Culture and the National Community in the 1670s (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2009). I have some general-interest writing on this topic in press, such as God Help the Queen! in a July issue of The New Statesman.
Other odds and ends on my desk:
a review of Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds by Carole Levin and John Watkins
an article on the nexus of race and religion in contemporary England
