Laurie Wood (2013-14)
Laurie Wood has been named the 2013-14 Law and Society
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Dr. Wood completed her Ph.D. in History at
the University of Texas at Austin in the spring of 2013. She is
a historian of the early modern world and her research focuses
on law and Francophone history in comparative and global
perspectives.
Dr. Wood's dissertation, "Îles de France: Law and
Empire in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1680-1780,"
examines courts, known as conseils supérieurs, as
anchors that connected the far-flung reaches of France's early
modern empire in a common legal culture, from Versailles in
France to Martinique and Mauritius in the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans. More broadly, her research interests focus on the
question of how humans define themselves at the crossroads of
global and local categories and how they act on these
understandings of location and context. Her work reframes
colonial and metropolitan French histories as a shared past and
engages transnational work on legal regimes and comparative
imperialism.
Dr. Wood's research has been supported by the Huntington
Library in San Marino, the John Carter Brown Library in
Providence, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the UCLA William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, and the
University of Texas at Austin.
Ada Kuskowski (2012-13)
Ada-Maria Kuskowski has been named the 2012-13 Law and Society
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. In
summer 2012, Dr. Kuskowski completed her Ph.D. at Cornell
University, where she specialized in medieval legal history.She also
holds Bachelor of Common Law and Bachelor of Civil Law degrees from
McGill University Faculty of Law, and a Bachelor of Arts from McGill
University.
Dr. Kuskowski's research focuses on the development
of legal literature during the middle ages, notably on the development
of the law book, the discourse of customary law, and legal
professionalization. Her dissertation, "Writing Custom: Juristic
Imagination and the Invention of Customary Law in Thirteenth-Century
France," explores the development of a legal literature to describe
custom and the constitution of lay jurists into textual communities.
While her research lies in European legal history, she is interested in
comparative law and law's relationship to other bodies of knowledge.
Dr.
Kuskowski was the Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at New York University Law
School (2011-12), a visiting scholar in the Quebec Research Centre for
Private and Comparative Law at the McGill University Faculty of Law
(2010-11), and she held the Theodor Mommsen Fellowship at Cornell
University (2009-10). She is a member of the American Legal History
Association and the American Historical Association.
Felicity Turner (2011-12)
Felicity Turner, a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia, was selected as the 2011-12 Law and Society Fellow.
Dr. Turner completed her dissertation, “Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America”, at Duke University, from which she graduated in May 2010. In June, 2011, she received Honorable Mention for the Dissertation Prize awarded at the Law and Society Association's annual meeting. Drawing on over two hundred cases of infant death and infanticide from Connecticut, Illinois, and North Carolina, Turner’s dissertation traces how modern ideas about gender and race became embedded in the institutions of law and government between the Revolution and the end of Reconstruction. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Newberry Library, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and an Albert J. Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association. Dr. Turner also was selected to participate in the 2011 Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History, a biennial event hosted by the Institute for Legal Studies and cosponsored by the American Society for Legal History.
Dr. Turner’s broader research and teaching interests include the “long” nineteenth century, women’s and gender history, and the history of sexuality. Her next project will employ a range of legal and cultural sources as a means of examining how conceptions of the human body changed over the course of the nineteenth century. After completion of the fellowship, Dr. Turner will begin a post-doctoral position at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Nancy Buenger (2010-11)
Nancy Buenger, a 2009 University of Chicago history Ph.D., was selected as the 2010-11 Law and Society Fellow. Dr. Buenger is the recipient of a 2009-10 University of Minnesota Law School Alumni Fund Fellowship in Legal History. In 2009 she was named a Fellow of the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at Wisconsin. She is currently completing a publication manuscript of “Extraordinary Remedies: The Court of Chancery and Equitable Justice in Chicago” for the University of Chicago Press, by invitation.
Dr. Buenger’s research and teaching explores the religious, colonial, and urban implications of equitable courts in the Americas from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. She was awarded a University of Chicago Von Holst Prize Lectureship for her course Spirituality and Statecraft in the Americas, which she designed and team-taught with a Latin American historian. A former Chicago History Museum conservator, her historical and museum publications include an academic prize-winning digital project on bioethics and human remains research.
Dr. Buenger’s next project focused on equitable US territorial and extraterritorial courts.
Kelly Kennington (2009-10)
Kelly Kennington, who holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke
University, was selected as the 2009-10 Law and
Society Fellow. Dr. Kennington holds an M.A. in history from Duke
(2004) and a B.A. from Tulane University (2002). Her dissertation is
entitled, "River of Injustice: St. Louis’s Freedom Suits and the
Changing Nature of Legal Slavery in Antebellum America.”
Dr. Kennington has received numerous awards for her work, including the
Anne Firor Scott Research Award, the Price Research Fellowship, and the
Bass Fellowship at Duke, and has presented several papers, including
"'In Contempt and Defiance of the Ordinance': The Nature of Freedom
in a Border Community," at the American Society for Legal History.
She was a co-organizer of the First Annual North Carolina History Thesis
Writers Conference in 2006 and the Duke-UNC Southern Studies Seminar,
2005-06.
Dr. Kennington’s next project examined the complex relationships
between slavery and freedom across the Border States. After completion of
the fellowship, she joined the faculty of at Auburn University as an
assistant professor of history.
Alexei Trochev (2008-09)
Alexei Trochev was selected as the first Law & Society Fellow
at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He
holds doctorate in political science from the University of Toronto and
Masters in Public Administration from the University of Kansas. He
has taught federalism at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and
Russian and comparative constitutional law at Pomor State University
Law School in Arkhangelsk, Russia.
Dr. Trochev is the author of "Judging
Russia: The Constitutional Court in Russian Politics, 1990-2006"
(Cambridge University Press, 2008). In addition to several book
chapters on the informal dimensions of Russian judicial politics, his
articles on post-Soviet courts have appeared in American Journal of
Comparative Law, Law & Society Review, I-CON International Journal
of Constitutional Law, and East European Constitutional Review.
Dr. Trochev's next project explored the interplay between political fragmentation
and judicial disempowerment in post-communist countries.
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