Dr. Laura Petersen
Postdoctoral Research Fellow (SNSF)
Dr.
Frohburgstrasse 3, 6002 Luzern, c/o Room 4.A11
CV
Laura Petersen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research is cross-disciplinary, integrating approaches to jurisprudence with aesthetics. She has a particular research interest in Germany in the 20th Century. Currently, Laura is working on her postdoc project on law and art in the Weimar Republic at the University of Lucerne as part of the SNSF-funded project “Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany”. Her PhD (2022) focused on the jurisprudence of restitution or Wiedergutmachung in Germany after WWII, arguing that legal, literary, artistic and memorial works are practices of restitution. It won the Harold Luntz Graduate Research Prize for the Best PhD in 2022 at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, and will be published as a monograph by Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). Laura also won the inaugural international writing prize Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice run by the University of Texas in 2021. Her paper was based on her research into a German lawyer, Dr Walter Schwarz, and his glossatorial writings. Born in Australia, Laura qualified to be a lawyer in Australia and is a graduate of the University of Melbourne (LLB, 1st Hons) (BA) (PhD) and FU Berlin (MA). She is currently Vice-President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia.
Research
Research Projects
Research Interests
law and the humanities (cultural legal studies)
law and literature
law and art / visual culture
jurisprudence and legal theory
law and society
restitution and justice after atrocity
German art, history and literature in 20th Century
Publications
- Petersen, L. (2023). The Power of an Image: How cartoons championed and criticised the Constitution in the Weimar Republic. Bulletin of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, 27 (2), 48–52. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8289054
- Howe, S., & Petersen, L. (2022). Foreword: Law and Art in the Aftermath. Polémos. Journal of Law, Literature and Culture, 16 (2), 199–204. https://doi.org/10.1515/pol-2022-2013
- Petersen, L. (2021). An Ethos of Restitution: Walter Schwarz and the Gloss. Rapoport Center Working Paper Series, 2. Retrieved from https://law.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2021/10/an-ethos-of-restitution_final-1.pdf
- Goldenfein, J., Petersen, L., & Trabsky, M. (2013). Curating a Museum of Legal Accidents. Griffith Law Review, 22 (1), 1–7. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2013.10854764
- Maget Dominicé, A., & Petersen, L. (2023). Das Bourbaki-Panorama Luzern und die Erinnerungskultur in der öffentlichen Verwaltung in der Schweiz. In Davydov, Dimitrij (Ed.), Erinnerungskultur in der Verwaltungspraxis (pp. 417–439). Weisbaden: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41939-4_19
- Petersen, L., & Reifarth, G. (2022). Behind the Words of Die Buribunken: Translators’ Comments. In Bikundo, Edwin & Tranter, Kieran (Eds.), Carl Schmitt and The Buribunks: Technology, Law, Literature (pp. 29–37). Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324_9781003091066-4
- Petersen, L. (2021). Foot Notes. Reflections on Method and Form. In Chalmers, Shane & Pahuja, Sundhya (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (pp. 138–147). Abingdon: Routledge.
- Petersen, L. (2011). We are story animals’: Aesopics in Holocaust Literature by Art Spiegelman and Yann Martel. In Reifarth, Gert & Morrissey Philip (Eds.), Aesopic Voices: Re-framing Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the 20th and 21st Centuries (pp. 174–207). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- Howe, Steven, & Petersen, Laura (Eds.). (2022). Law and Art in the Aftermath: Special Focus Section of Polemos: Journal of Law, Literature and Culture (Vol. 16.2). Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Goldenfein, Jake, Petersen, Laura, & Trabsky, Marc (Eds.). (2013). Law and Its Accidents: Symposium in Griffith Law Review. Taylor & Francis: Taylor & Francis. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rlaw20/22/1?nav=tocList
- Petersen, L. (2024). Book Review: The Culture of the Case: Madness, Crime, and Justice in Modern German Art by Frederic J. Schwartz. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 20 (3), 635–637. https://doi.org/10.1177/17438721241248946
- Petersen, L. (2023). Encounters with Books from Other Disciplines: Jennifer L. Allen, Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Harvard University Press, 2022). International Journal of Law in Context, 19 (3), 427–430. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744552323000150
- Petersen, L. (2022). Review: Lisa Stuckey, Forensische Verfahren in den zeitgenössichen Künste (De Gruyter, 2022). Kritische Justiz, 55 (4), 528–531. Retrieved from https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0023-4834-2022-4/kj-kritische-justiz-jahrgang-55-2022-heft-4?page=1
