Kent Law School is delighted to welcome two new Honorary Fellows – Dr Tatiana Flessas (LSE) and Dr Anton Schütz (Doctor juris, Vienna).
Dr Flessas and Dr Schütz, hosted by Dr Thanos Zartaloudis, will be contributing to both the Law School’s vibrant research culture and its postgraduate research programme over the next three years.
Dr Flessas is a lawyer and prominent scholar with research interests in cultural property and heritage law, art law, property law, and legal, literary and social theory. Her work focuses on the emergence of cultural property regulation and heritage legislation as discourses of modernity. She will be attached to the Law School’s Centre for Heritage where she will be co-hosted by the Centre’s co-director Dr Sophie Vigneron. She has written on the problems of defining cultural property, the controversy surrounding the ownership of the Parthenon Marbles, Sotheby’s case against Greece, and the issues that arise when requests to repatriate ancient objects or skeletons are made of museums and governments. Amongst numerous publications, she is the co-author of Understanding Property Law, 4th edition (Sweet & Maxwell, 2003), with Tim Murphy and Simon Roberts.
Her current central research project is titled ‘Dark Heritage’. Dr Flessas said: ‘Heritage is usually made out of the material of “history” for economic and political purposes. It generates lucrative sites for the nation, group, or society that deploys “heritisation” technologies. “Dark” heritage, also known as “thanatourism” or “the heritage of atrocity”, forms part of the heritage narrative, but also undercuts many of the purposes and investments that give it meaning.’
Dr Schütz is a prominent Legal and Social Theorist and Historian. From 1994-2018, he taught jurisprudence, legal theory, slavery, legal history, evidence, punishment and justice at Birkbeck Law School. He will be attached (as Honorary co-director with Dr Zartaloudis) to the Law School’s Research Group on Political Theologies of Juridification.
His previous positions include: Chair for the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, Paris with Michel Foucault from 1980 to 1994; Associate Director of Studies (medieval law) at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (with Pierre Legendre); Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History; teaching at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales on Legal aspects of medieval politics (with Jean-Claude Schmitt); and Jean-Monnet-Fellow at the European University Institute in Italy (with Gunther Teubner).
Dr Schütz is the founder and co-director of the Centre of Research in Political Theology (CRIPT) at Birkbeck Law in affiliation with Kent Law School and Universities in Trento, Geneva and Paris. Together with Dr Zartaloudis, he is the co-director of the book series Encounters in Law and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press).
Dr Schütz is editor of Law, Text, Terror with Peter Goodrich and Lior Barshak, (Routledge-Cavendish, 2006) and a contributing author to many works on legal theory including: The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). His forthcoming book Yan Thomas – Legal Artifices: Ten Essays on Roman Law in the Present Tense (co-edited and co-translated with F Cooper and T Zartaloudis) will be published by Edinburgh University Press later this year.
Both Dr Flessas and Dr Schütz will also be attached to the Law School’s postgraduate research programme. They encourage any colleagues and research students who may be interested in working with them to email Dr Flessas via: t.flessas@lse.ac.uk and/or email Dr Schütz via a.schutz4@orange.fr