International Conference
‘Legal Diversity and Regional Encounters:
Plural Understandings of Law in Localised Contexts’ 
19-20 October 2020
Aleksanteri Institute and Faculty of Law
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Keynote Presentations

As part of the Faculty of Law in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki annual conference under the Development of Russian Law research project, we are very pleased to welcome Dr. Vanja Hamzić (SOAS), Dr. Nadia E. Brown (Purdue), and Professor Brenda Cossman (University of Toronto)  as our  keynote speakers.

Dr. Nadia E. Brown (Purdue University)

B.A. (Howard University, Magna Cum Laude); Ph.D. Rutgers University

https://cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/nadia-brown.html

Dr. Nadia E. Brown is an Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University, US. She comes to Purdue from St. Louis University where she specialized in American politics with a distinct focus on Black politics as well as Women and politics. She is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Sisters in the Statehouse: Black women and Legislative Decision Making (under contract with Oxford University press) and she is the author of numerous articles focusing on Black women’s politics.

Professor Brown received her PhD in Political Science in 2010 from Rutgers University, with major fields in Women and Politics and American Politics. She also holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her BA, also in political science, is from Howard University in 2004.

Dr. Brown’s research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women’s studies. Current research projects address the politics of appearance for Black women candidates for public office.

Dr. Brown enjoys teaching courses in the fields of African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Political Science.

Dr. Vanja Hamzić (SOAS, University of London)

BFA (Sarajevo), BDes (Sarajevo), LLM (Nottingham), PhD (London)

https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff86662.php

Vanja Hamzić is a Senior Lecturer in Legal History and Legal Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He holds two First Class Honours degrees from the University of Sarajevo, an LLM with Distinction from the University of Nottingham and a PhD from King’s College London. He has worked as an activist and researcher with various international and civil society organisations in South and South East Asia, Europe, the Middle East and West and South Africa. Before coming to SOAS, Dr Hamzić held academic posts at City, University of London and King’s College London.

The bulk of Dr Hamzić’s legal, anthropological and historical research addresses issues in human subjectivity formation—especially those related to gender, sexual, class, linguistic and religious difference—with the principal fieldwork sites in Pakistan, Indonesia, Senegal and Louisiana. While the focus of Dr Hamzić’s work has been, for quite some time, the Islamic legal tradition, both in its historical and present-day diversity, he is also interested in how some of its strands have influenced (and, in some cases, moulded into) other South Asian, South East Asian, West African and circum-Atlantic traditions. Dr Hamzić’s work to date has particularly sought to shed new light on how gender-variant individuals and communities—such as khwajasara in Pakistan, waria and others in Indonesia as well as numerous historical identitary formations across West Africa—have braved the turbulent tides of colonialism, slavery and other legally-sanctioned oppression and how, in turn, they have developed and abided by multiple formations of insurrectionary vernacular knowledge (about themselves and the world at large). It is this knowledge and being-in-the-world—often preserved in oral traditions, rites of passage and rituals of the everyday—that has survived not only the epistemic and literal violence of the nation-state and its legal institutions, but the sustained ‘will to disappear’ in the colonial and post-colonial archive, too.

Dr Hamzić is also interested in, and has contributed to, current transnational debates on legal and social theory, human rights, Marxist and postcolonial studies, the Cold War, feminist legal theory, global law/governance studies, social anthropology and philosophy. In this context, he has written about alegality, legal violence, Third World feminisms, homeliness, touch, Muslim Marxism, the unknowable, the Lacanian Real and other critical concepts.

Dr Hamzić’s current book-length project addresses gender variance and cosmological and legal pluralism in eighteenth-century Senegambia as well as the ways the enslaved gender-variant West Africans have survived the Middle Passage and ‘New World’ gender regimes, in particular that of colonial (i.e. first French and then Spanish) Louisiana. The project seeks to develop an interruptive approach to circum-Atlantic colonial and post-colonial history-making and to critically address the question of archival silences.

Dr Hamzić is a co-founder and former Co-Chair of the Centre for Ottoman Studies at SOAS and a member of a number of other SOAS research centres. He is a Faculty Member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and a Researcher of the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Hamzić is also an Academic Fellow (2016-19) of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. In the academic year 2016-17, he was a residential Member of the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Professor Brenda Cossman (University of Toronto)

Professor & Director, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Brenda Cossman is Professor of Law and the Director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She joined the Faculty of Law in 1999, and became a full professor in 2000. She holds degrees in law from Harvard and the University of Toronto,  and an undergraduate degree from Queen’s.  Prior to joining the University of  Toronto, she was Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York  University.

In 2012,  Professor Cossman was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2009, she was awarded the Mundell Medal for contributions to letters and law. In 2002 and 2003, she was a Visiting  Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Professor Cossman’s teaching and scholarly interests include family law, law and sexuality, and freedom of expression.  Her most recent book on Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging was published by Stanford University Press in 2007.  Her publications include the co-authored Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism and the Butler Decision (University of Toronto Press) and Censorship and the Arts (published by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries).