Reichman, Ravit

Ravit Reichman

Associate Professor of English

Overview

Ravit Reichman's work focuses on modernism, and on the relationship between literature, law, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism & the Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2009), which examines responses to trauma and war in fictional and legal texts. Reichman is currently completing a book about the modern relation to property in literature and law, Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times. Her articles on Holocaust testimony, law & culture, colonial law, and capital punishment, as well as on writers like Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, have been published in such journals as South Atlantic Quarterly, Law, Culture, & the Humanities, ARIEL, American Imago, Critical Analysis of Law, NOVEL, and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Fulbright scholar.

Brown Affiliations

English

Research Areas

Research

Research Overview

Ravit Reichman works on the 20th-century British novel; law and literature; modernism; literary theory; psychoanalysis; literature and the emotions; narrative and memory; and literary responses to war.

Funded Research

Howard Foundation Fellowship (2016-17)

Pembroke Seminar Faculty Fellow (2016-17)

Cogut Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship (2016-17)

Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2009-10)

Faculty Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University (spring 2006)

Copeland Fellowship, Amherst College (spring 2003)

John F. Enders Travel Grant (summer 2002)

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Graduate Summer Fellowship (2001)

Paul Mellon Centre/Yale Center for British Art Traveling Summer Grant (2001)

Fulbright Scholar to Israel (1996-1997)

Scholarly Work

“Law’s Affective Thickets.” New Directions in Law and Literature, eds. Elizabeth Anker and Bernadette Meyler (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017): 109-122.

“Virginia Woolf and the Law.” A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016): 235-48.

“Dead Animals.” Reimagining To Kill a Mockingbird, eds. Austin Sarat and Martha Merrill Umphrey (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013): 151-171.

“The Ethics of an Alternative: Counterfactuals and the Tone of Dissent.” Dissenting Voices in American Society: The Role of Judges, Lawyers, and Citizens, ed. Austin Sarat (Cambridge University Press, 2012): 19-41.

"Neutrality in Law & Literature: Reading the Supreme Court with Joseph Conrad." Forthcoming in Teaching Law and Literature, eds. Austin Sarat, Cathrine O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2011): 366-374.

"No Remorse." Who Deserves to Die: Constructing the Executable Subject, eds. Austin Sarat and Karl Shoemaker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011): 111-127.

"Bonded and Insured: The Cautious Imagination," Subjects of Responsibility: Framing Personhood in Modern Bureaucracies, eds. Andrew Parker, Austin Sarat, and Martha Umphrey (Fordham University Press, 2011): 145-160.

"Narrative and Rhetoric." Law and Humanities: An Introduction, eds. Austin Sarat, Matthew Anderson, and Cathrine Frank (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010): 377-397.

The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2009)

"Open Secrets, or The Postscript of Capital Punishment." South Atlantic Quarterly 107:3 (Summer 2008): 547-570. Republished in States of Violence: War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die, ed. Austin Sarat and Jennifer Culbert (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009): 245-269.

"Mourning, Owning, Owing." American Imago 64:3 (2007) 433-449.

"Committed to Memory: Rebecca West's Nuremberg." Law and Catastrophe, eds. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007): 91-130.

"Guilty Professions: Specters of Sameness in Camus' The Fall." Studies in Law, Politics and Society 36. Special Issue: Toward a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities (2005): 31-50.

"Making a Mess of Things: The Trifles of Legal Pleasure." Law, Culture, and the Humanities 1 (2005): 14-34.

"Undignified Details: The Colonial Subject of Law." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 35.1-2. Special Issue: Law, Literature, Postcoloniality (January-April 2004): 81-100.

"'New forms for our new sensations': Woolf and the Lesson of Torts." Novel 36 (2003): 398-422.

"'I am quite a stranger to the ways of the place': The Strange Character of Law." Studies in Law, Politics and Society 25 (2002): 3-35.

"The Myth of Old Forms: On the Unknowable and Representation." Theory After the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 2001): 27-53.

Background

Education and Training

Year	Degree	Institution
2003	PhD	Yale University
1994	BA	Georgetown University

Honors and Awards

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, 2009-2010

Faculty Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University (spring 2006)

Visiting Fellowship, Birkbeck College School of Law, London (summer 2004)

Copeland Fellowship, Amherst College (spring 2003)

John F. Enders Travel Grant (summer 2002)

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Graduate Summer Fellowship (2001)

Paul Mellon Centre/Yale Center for British Art Traveling Summer Grant (2001)

Fulbright Scholar to Israel (1996-1997)

Georgetown University Timothy S. Healy Scholarship - Covered two years of tuition, fees,
maintenance and travel expenses to St. Cross College, Oxford (1994-1996)

Researchers@Brown