Prof. Dr. Greta Olson
Greta Olson is Professor of American and British Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen and she is Principle Investigator of the research project "Dehumanizing, Victimizing, or Universalizing? How Images of Migration Interact with Human Rights Discourse" which is part of the interdisciplinary research group "Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies" (MeDiMi).
She was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” in Bonn (2014, 2016) and is a general editor of the European Journal of English Studies (EJES), and, with Jeanne Gaakeer, the co-founder of the European Network for Law and Literature. She works and wishes to facilitate projects on the nexus between artistic practice, political activism, and academic analysis and publishes in the areas of critical American studies, law and culture, feminism and sexuality studies, and narrative and politics.
Within the migration and human rights network, she is interested in developing a project on the cultural-political work of photographs of immigration. She has taught a seminar on Migration/Law/Gender in the winter term 2015-2016 to which members of the network such as Janna Wessels contributed. At the conference “(Counter-)Narratives of Punishment and Criminal Justice” (Siegen, 21-23 June, 2018), Greta has recently presented a paper on “Gendered Narratives of Migration: Criminalization or Pity”.
For further information, see here and here.
Publications on migration and human rights include
- with Janna Wessels. “Imag(in)ing Human Rights: Deindividualizing, Victimizing, and Universalizing Images of Refugees in the United States and Germany.” The State of Human Rights. Ed. Kirsten Schmidt and Margaretha Schweiger-Wilhelm. Publikationen der Bayerischen Amerika-Akademie / Publications of the Bavarian America Academy. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter (forthcoming).
- (2018). “On Narrating and Troping the Law: The Conjoined Use of Narrative and Metaphor in Legal Discourse.”Narrative and Metaphor in the Law. Ed. Robert Weisberg and Michael Hanne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 19-36.
- Organization and opening of the conference “Feelings about Justice/Law: The Relevance of Affect to the Development of Law in Pluralistic Legal Cultures” (13 -14 June 2019) at the University of Giessen
Further publications
- From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect (Under Review).
- with Sarah Copland, eds. (2018). /The Politics of Form/. Abingdon: Routledge.
- with Sonja Schillings, eds. (2017). “Law Undone: De-humanizing, Queering, and Dis-abling the Law – Further Arguments for Law’s Pluralities.”/ On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture /1.3.