Dr. Laura Petersen
|
Dr. Laura Petersen is a research fellow at the Center for the summer semester of 2025. As part of her fellowship at DiML, Dr. Petersen pursues her current research on the cultural and legal history of the Weimar Republic, with a special focus on the role of artistic expression within institutional and marginal contexts. Dr. Petersen’s stay has been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). "Anonymous Avant-Gardes: Artistry of the Prisoners as an Aesthetic Intervention in the Weimar Republic": Notable as one of the first catalogues of prison art, Hans Prinzhorn’s book, Bildnerei der Gefangenen: Studie zur Bildnerischer Gestaltung Ungeübter (Artistry of the Prisoners: Studies of the Art-Making of the Untrained) (1926) exhibits and analyses objects made by unnamed prisoners in penal institutions in Germany and throughout Europe. Trained as an art historian as well as a psychiatrist, Prinzhorn’s book was a follow-up to his successful publication Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) (1922) but, in contrast, the reception to Artistry of the Prisoners was ambivalent. Analysing and then going beyond Prinzhorn’s own account of his work, this project will explore themes such as the role of artistic communities and influences, training, materials, and the relationship between objects, art-making and institutions. The aim is to re-frame Prinzhorn’s publication, situating it within the penal reform and radical artistic communities of the Weimar Republic. Dr. Laura Petersen’s research is cross-disciplinary, integrating approaches to visual culture and literature with jurisprudence, particularly in Germany in the 20th Century. Currently, Laura is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies in Lucerne, Switzerland, working with a team on a major SNSF research grant on the project “Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Visual Culture in Weimar Germany”. She is also an Adjunct Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Laura won the international writing prize Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice (2021) and the Harold Luntz Prize (2023). She is currently the Vice President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia. Her first monograph, Practices of Restitution: Law and Aesthetics in Modern Germany will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. |
|
