Columbia English Professor To Speak On Making "Human Rights Legible"
WILLIAMSTOWN - The Novel in the World Literature Series at Williams College begins on Monday with Joseph Slaughter, author of "Making Human Rights Legible: Legal Norms, the Universal Declaration, and the Novel," on Monday, Oct. 6, at 4 p.m. The lecture will be held in Griffin Hall, room 3.Slaughter's book "Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law" explores the connection between the popular Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, of the 20th century and international human rights law. He is currently working on a manuscript, "New Wor(l)d Orders: Plagiarism, Post Colonialism, and the Globalization of the Novel," an analysis of the role of transnational and translinguistic theft in the development of the novel.
The speaker is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and specializes in the fields of human rights, post-colonial literature and theory, and 20th century ethnic and third world literature.
His work has been published in numerous journals, including his essay, "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law," featured in a special issue of PMLA on human rights. His essay on "The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality" was a winner at the Interdisciplinary Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop held at UCLA in 2004.
He is a member of the advisory board of the Cultural Studies Association, a forum for the exchange of ideas across disciplinary lines and institutional locations.
Slaughter received his B.A from University of Florida in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin in 1998.
