University of New England

Humanities scholars Matthew Anderson and Cathrine Frank receive $165,000 NEH grant for institute on the rule of law

BIDDEFORD, Maine - University of New England professors Matthew Anderson, Ph.D., and Cathrine O. Frank, Ph.D.,  of the Department of English and Language Studies, have been awarded a $165,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to hold a 2009 summer institute called "The Rule of Law: Legal Studies and the Liberal Arts."

Their five-week summer institute will explore the origins, meanings, and expressions of our national attachment to the rule of law and, more broadly, the idea of law as a discipline of the liberal arts.

Cathrine Frank

Matthew Anderson

As Anderson and Frank note, "The world offers daily reminders not just of how fragile and tenuous the rule of law can be, but that it cannot be legislated into existence."

"At its heart,"  they explain, “the institute aims to appreciate the rule of law at the level not only of statutes and constitutional documents, but also of sensibility and imagination: where and how does the idea of the rule of law originate in the Western tradition? What is its history in the United States? What are its key texts, traditions, and institutions? How does it emerge in the artistic and literary imagination? Is there more than one rule of law in the American experience, and, if so, how do local “rules of law” comport with a national identity?” 
 
In other words, “the institute will consider what it means to live under the rule of law in the United States and to foreground the conditions necessary for it to take hold and flourish.”

Keeping this perspective at the forefront, the institute will contribute both to an understanding of the cultural life of the rule of law and, more broadly, to the project of thinking about the place of legal scholarship in the liberal arts.

The Faculty
Anderson is an associate professor and Frank is an assistant professor in UNE's Department of English and Language Studies. They have taught numerous courses on law and literature as well as broad-based interdisciplinary courses on themes of law and justice (e.g.,“Freedom & Authority,” “Women and the Law in Victorian England”).

They are co-editing (with Austin Sarat of Amherst College) a book, Options for Teaching Literature and Law, forthcoming with the Modern Language Association, as well as the Introduction to Law and the Humanities (under contract with Cambridge UP).

In June 2003, Anderson organized a Law & the Humanities conference, on the subject of “Guilt,” at the University of New England. In 2005, he edited a special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, “Towards a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities.” He is currently working on a series of essays that combines an interest in law, trauma, and literature, particularly the way in which issues of trauma and justice—and of the displacement of the sacred by the secular—are registered in a wide range of texts.

Frank teaches and publishes in the areas of Victorian studies and law and literature. She has presented conference papers on the subject of testamentary law, realism, and legal and literary modes for creating individual and cultural identity. She has published in Law and Literature and has a new article in a special issue on law and literature in College Literature. Her manuscript on the cultural place of the last will and testament and its function in the realist and modern novel is currently under review.

In addition to Frank and Anderson, presenters at the summer institute will include: Austin Sarat, Ph.D., J.D., William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College; Chaya Halberstam, Ph.D., assistant professor of religious studies, Indiana University; Jill Frank, Ph.D., LL.B., associate professor of political science, University of South Carolina; Paul W. Kahn, Ph. D., J.D., Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School; Robert A. Ferguson, Ph.D.,J.D., George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature and Criticism, Columbia University; Caroline Winterer, Ph.D., associate professor of history, Stanford University; Deak Nabers, Ph.D., assistant professor of English, Brown University, and Lief Carter, Ph.D., professor of political science, Colorado College; and Carol Greenhouse, Ph.D., professor of anthropology, Princeton University; and Nan Goodman, Ph.D., J.D.,  associate professor of English, University of Colorado.

(Press release posted Aug. 13, 2008)