The Institute for Comparative Modernities is pleased to announce the following lecture by Adrienne Davis (Vice Provost; William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis) as part of the Spring 2012 Lecture Series.

At face value, polygamy, prostitution, and pet inheritance have nothing in common beyond being socially marginal practices. This lecture connects these three as examples of intimate connections and practices that are typically viewed as deviant and dismissed as threats to equality, family, and even democracy. This lecture argues that, taken together, these three practices embody irregular intimacy and all of the challenges it poses for law and culture. The lecture will explore how each of these practices is situated at the intersection of social power and legal regulation and uses them to trace various modes and trajectories of law in post-modernity. In particular, the lecture will explore the crisis that irregular intimacy poses for liberalism and the democratic state.

Adrienne Davis is renowned for her scholarship and teaching on gender and race relations; theories of justice and reparations;feminist legal theory; and law and popular culture. She has written extensively on the gendered and private law dimensions of American slavery and is the co-editor of the book, Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America (NYU Press), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Professor Davis directs the Black Sexual Economies Project at the Washington University in St. Louis law school’s Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital. She also founded and runs the Law & Culture Initiative. Professor Davis is the past recipient of a Bellagio Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and two research grants from the Ford Foundation on such topics as black women and labor, and women, slavery, sexuality, and religion. In addition to her research and teaching, she is past chair of the Law and Humanities Section of the Association of American Law Schools and served on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals. Professor Davis clerked for the Hon. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.