Faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences are invited to join a new working group titled “Legal Documents, Aesthetics, and the Materiality of Law.”
Led by Tobias Scheunchen (Society of Fellows, Humanities Council, and Near Eastern Studies), the group will meet monthly to discuss works located at the intersection of law, materiality, and aesthetics. By drawing on literature from history, anthropology, sociology, law, political science, art, and media studies, the group will reflect on how documentary norms, social expectations, and authority have converged in premodern and modern societies.
“Our lives are governed by documents that hold authority over us. They arrange every inch of our existence, from cooking recipes to home ownership to family relations to how we comport ourselves in public,” said Scheunchen. “Despite that, we are only beginning to understand what gives legal and quasi-legal documents the extraordinary power we attribute to them and why we care so much about how they look.”
The working group is supported by the University Center for Human Values, the Humanities Council’s Program in Medieval Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, and the Department of Classics.
The first meeting will be held on Wednesday, September 24 at 5 pm. For more information about the group and to register to participate, please visit the UCHV website.
