Julie Stone Peters

Julie Peters
English and Comparative Literature and Columbia Law School
H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Co-Chair, PhD in Theater and Performance
peters@columbia.edu

Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, video, and legal cultures across the longue durée.

Her most recent book is Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022) (longlisted for the Media Ecologies Association Book Award and winner of an honorable mention from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society). Previous scholarly publications include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000) (winner of the ACLA’s Harry Levin Prize, English Association’s Beatrice White Award, and an honorable mention from ASTR for the best book in theatre history), and Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 1995). Her more public-facing essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Public Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Village Voice, and elsewhere.

At Columbia, she spearheaded the creation of the graduate certificate and undergraduate major in Human Rights, and currently serves as Director of Academic Careers Advising for PhD Students and Co-Chair of the Theatre and Performance Ph.D. Program. She has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Metropolitan Detention Center (Brooklyn). She is co-editor of the Cambridge Elements in Legal Humanities book series, and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, Humboldt Foundation, and elsewhere. She has a new book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press: Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials. She is currently working on a collaborative project called “Fragments for a History of the Legal Body” and two books tentatively titled The Video and the Law and The War of the Cameras.

The Video and the Algorithm: Democracy, Antitheatricality, and Paranoia in the Age of Streaming Media, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 35:1 (2024)

Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Theatrocracy Unwired: Legal Performance in the Modern Mediasphere, Law & Literature, Vol. 26(1), 31–64 (2014)

Theatre of the Book 1480-1880 Print, Text and Performance in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, edited with Andrea Wolper (Routledge, 1995)