WGS: Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

Description

The Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality will be hosting a panel discussion to celebrate the launch of Lisa Siraganian's new book, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. Siraganian will be joined by panelists Andrew Miller (English, Johns Hopkins), Melissa Ganz (English, Marquette), Roy Kreitner (law, Tel Aviv), Nate McCabe (comparative thought and literature, Johns Hopkins).

Lisa Siraganian is associate professor, chair in humanities, and department chair in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her research bridges aesthetic and legal theory, with particular attention to modernist art and literature and its long reception. Her first book, Modernism's Other Work: The Art Object's Political Life (Oxford 2012), examined the political legacy and resonance of modernist artists' claims for the autonomy of the art object.

Andrew Miller is professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He works on 19th century British literature, and the connection between literary aesthetics and moral philosophy. He was the long-time editor of Victorian Studies and is author of The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth Century Literature (Cornell 2008) and Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge 1995). His most recent book is On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Harvard 2020), an analysis of the trope of considering alternative in a diverse body of novels, poems, and films.

Melissa Ganz is associate professor in the Department of English at Marquette University. Her research focuses on 18th and 19th-century British literature, with attention to the entanglement of law, ethics, and literature. Her book, Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (Virginia 2019), attends to the underappreciated centrality of nuptial law to the development of the marriage plot, examining the attendant interrelations of public law and private lives in the work of novelists like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Eliza Fenwick, and Amelia Opie.

Roy Kreitner is professor of law at Tel Aviv University. He teaches contracts, jurisprudence, and commercial law, and his research focuses on private law theory, the legal history of contracts, and the theory of money. His book, Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford 2007), provides a history of American contract law centered on the transition to the 20th century, when legal scholars envisioned "calculating promisors" as integral to the notion of contract.

Nate McCabe is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Modernism and the avant-garde in early 20th-century American poetry, photography, and film. He combines this with scholarship in media theory, ordinary language philosophy, and theories of intention and autonomy.