Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

This project continues the work of the Making Progress on Death project by supporting a Visiting Fellowship for John Lizza, who served as the keynote speaker at the earlier project's 2021 conference. During his residency Lizza will continue the work that the research team has been doing with the goal of publishing a book on death and helping to complete a manuscript related to the intersection between medical and philosophical aspects of death. He will be on sabbatical leave from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, where he is a Professor of Philosophy, during Spring Term 2023 (January – May 2023). His fellowship at the Neubauer Collegium will coincide with the time of his sabbatical leave. The research team is also aspiring to distill particular points of disagreement from the presentations at the 2021 conference, with the further goal of reconvening participants for discussion of those issues in early 2023. The aim is to see if the group can work towards or achieve consensus on any points.

This interdisciplinary (as well as national and transnational) project seeks to recover a new understanding of the relationship between democracy and capitalism in history from the late 18th century age of revolution to the culmination of late 20th century neoliberalism. The research team asserts that existing accounts of capitalism and democracy feature a problematic over-reliance on liberalism and economism in the literatures on economic history, the history of capitalism, law and economics, law and society, democratic theory, and democratic studies more generally. By foregrounding the priority of democracy and the interdependence and intersectionality of histories of capitalism and democracy, the project aims to construct an alternative to reigning political-economic orthodoxies that have fueled so many contemporary crises. The research team will engage diverse scholars across a range of disciplines for a multi-year collaboration and conversations re-assessing the fundamental relationship of modern democracy and capitalist development and its future possibilities.

Data flows in enormous quantities from individuals to companies, as the use of basic products including search engines, social platforms, health products, entertainment services, and others is conditioned on the surrender of biographical, biometric, behavioral, and experiential data. The accumulation of individual data on such a large scale has given rise to elaborate markets for individual data that generate immense value for firms and platforms but create a complex of risks for the individuals whose data these markets trade. This collaborative project between law and computer science aims to focus for the first time on the advent of parallel public data markets. Federal, state, and local governments, who have privileged access to intimate data at enormous scale and range about their constituents, have followed the template developed in the private sector and learned to expand, aggregate, and increase the value of their data stores by sharing and consolidating data across levels and institutions of government. These intergovernmental data markets are no less sizable or consequential than those established by private-sector firms; and they introduce risks to individuals not always present in private data sharing. This project aims to develop an integrated legal and technical understanding of how data flows between governments; to study the unique risks these data flows pose to individuals in areas ranging from privacy to discrimination to accuracy to power; and to develop and test tools to improve the fairness of intergovernmental data sharing that are alert to both legal and technical realities.

Words and structures change their meaning over time. The text of laws, however, does not. These two facts make it difficult for judges and others, from the U.S. Supreme Court to the American people, to understand and interpret texts such as the Constitution. Current trends in legal interpretation, in particular the originalist insistence on original public meaning as the primary determinant of a law’s interpretation, make an appropriate historical linguistic understanding urgent – e.g., what did “bear arms” or “the recess of the Senate” mean in 1789? Just as important, how can we determine this? While the Supreme Court has relied heavily on eighteenth-century dictionaries in deciding recent constitutional questions, advances in theoretical and computational linguistics, as well as vast new corpora of English, make it possible for us to determine for the first time with precision what lexical shifts have occurred over the past two centuries, how these shifts have affected both the diachronic semantics of words and phrases, and their syntactic distributions. The results of such inquiries can and should have direct application to questions of statutory and constitutional interpretation. Our project aimed to help create a new methodology at the intersection of law and linguistics, yielding results and models that will change the way legal interpretation is conducted. As part of this project, we developed useable online tools and guides for other researchers and judges to conduct such inquires on their own, and to disseminated these insights and to stimulate cross-disciplinary dialogue between leading scholars of linguistic semantics and of legal interpretation.

This project emerges from our participation in volunteer efforts to assist some of the nearly 42,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in Chicago since August 2022. Through ethnographic research, legal case study, and oral history, we seek to record and analyze the experiences of both arriving and receiving communities. We will interview asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants as well as volunteers, city workers, and activists. We will observe the formal and informal contexts where community emerges, or fails to emerge. Interviews and observations will help us identify the intersections of municipal policies such as the “Welcoming City” platform and international law, including asylum and refugee conventions, and investigate the barriers that emerge unexpectedly therein. We will seek to capture a dramatic change in the South Side of Chicago, as it grapples with a large, rapid migration from the Global South. Studying Chicago at this moment of change, we will ask: How do new neighbors and locals define “shelter,” “refuge,” and “asylum”? How do they narrate their positionality in historical and geopolitical contexts? How do they experience barriers and opportunities in the swiftly changing neighborhood? To present our findings, we propose to undertake a collaborative research paper as well as conferences and presentations. A gallery exhibition called Imagining the Sanctuary City will enhance our research with visual and textual primary sources.

This research project will explore the material, ideational, and domestic political changes that enabled the United States to enter into global politics — first as an imperial force, and later as an architect of a liberal international order. Ruth Bloch Rubin’s research will focus on the advocacy infrastructure undergirding America’s hidden empire, exploring congressional efforts to govern the nation’s conquered territories and peoples in the electorate’s blind spot. Austin Carson’s research will focus on the material and knowledge infrastructure of America’s global turn, assessing how leaders developed the geographic knowledge and physical infrastructure necessary for global power projection. By excavating these “infrastructures” of American hegemony, we hope to (1) contribute to the growing literature by scholars of history, political science, sociology, and law on the rise of American imperialism; and (2) inspire new collaborations between scholars of international relations, American politics, history, and other disciplines.

Fifty years after its inception, the current position on the Neurological Standard for Declaration of Death (NSDD) is subject to a number of persistent concerns and novel criticisms. There remains considerable public confusion both about the meaning of the term “brain dead” and about its relation to the death of a human being. There is persistent dissent by some clinicians, philosophers, and other critical observers who have never been convinced that “brain death” is, indeed, the death of the human being. There are, as well, pressures against insisting that declaring death, or at least “organ donation eligibility,” requires the irreversible loss of function in the whole brain. And, perhaps most important, there are critics who have published evidence of ongoing integrated bodily activities in some patients meeting the criteria of “whole brain death” and who have claimed that this evidence invalidates the rationale for today’s consensus position. These challenges invite—indeed, necessitate—a reexamination of the neurological standard enshrined in law and medical practice. This research project will undertake such a reexamination.

The problem of archaeological looting has long vexed policymakers. But the opacity of the market for illicit antiquities makes it difficult for them to bring looting under control. Even as global demand rises and archaeological sites in war-torn regions are pillaged by terrorist groups, the search for effective policy responses remains hampered by longstanding disagreements. In particular, are legal and illegal market practices mutually dependent or largely unrelated? The Past for Sale project (2014–2017) intervened in this debate by bringing together an unprecedented constellation of researchers, policy leaders, museum curators, buyers and sellers of antiquities—including representatives of the major auction houses—and law-enforcement officials. The group worked to assemble the available empirical research in order to formulate realistic solutions for policymakers across the world.

The three-year project focused initially on clarifying the general features of the illicit antiquities market as well as local variations. Highlights from the first year included a presentation by DePaul University anthropologist Morag Kersel, who is pioneering the use of aerial drone technology to capture real-time observations of archaeological sites in the Middle East before, during, and after looting. A two-day conference brought together a group of ten leading international scholars to compare case studies on looting networks. A workshop followed at the University’s Center in Delhi that focused on the looting of idols from temples and other culturally significant sites in India.

In its second year, the project incorporated input from industry professionals, a rare intervention among scholars working on this issue. The “Dealing with Heritage” conference invited art dealers, collectors, museum directors, and top officials from Christie’s and Sotheby’s to share their views with archaeologists, anthropologists, economists, and legal scholars. Panel discussions on industry perspectives, the legal and regulatory environment, and prospects for policy collaboration sparked heated discussions among participants. The keynote address by Maxwell Anderson, former chair of the Association of Art Museum Directors, reviewed promising approaches to curbing and preventing trafficking. Anderson considered, in particular, the need for transparency, public access, due diligence, and prompt responses to claims of wrongdoing. One outcome of the event was an invitation from the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property to the Past for Sale research team to guest-edit a special issue devoted to research from the project, forthcoming in 2018.

The project generated new tools to measure illicit markets and new modes of analysis that are scalable and replicable. The concurrent rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) brought archaeological looting to the attention of legislators who had not previously focused on the problem. Addressing the wide variation in estimates of how much ISIS was earning through the sale of looted antiquities, Fiona Greenland convened a group to model the antiquities trade in Iraq and Syria. The resultant MANTIS project, based at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, used satellite images, archaeological records, and market data to delineate ISIS’s antiquities trade network and estimate the total market value of the objects buried at ISIS-controlled sites. MANTIS research, widely cited in policy circles, served as a corrective to prior estimates and generated a new evidence-based method for determining market values.

The final year of the project focused on synthesizing its conceptual and empirical contributions and articulating new best practices for policy-makers. In the spring of 2017, Kersel and Greenland co-curated a Neubauer Collegium gallery exhibition titled The Past Sold: Case Studies in the Movement of Archaeological Objects. A multimedia display featuring aerial drone footage, photography, maps, archival documents, and Early Bronze Age pots, the exhibition added new dimension and a visual vocabulary to the research project. The exhibition also introduced the project’s findings to a broader public. The opening reception coincided with a capstone conference that included a keynote address by Richard Kurin, a longstanding government leader currently serving as the Smithsonian Institution’s Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large.

Although it is too soon to report on the overall impact on cultural policy, the knowledge generated by the Past for Sale project is circulating broadly in academic journals and beginning to influence discussions in Washington. Larry Rothfield and Kurin are exploring the feasibility of lease programs for museums, an important innovation in dealing with black markets. And the Antiquities Coalition, a major advocacy group, has adopted tax recommendations Rothfield detailed in a briefing paper.

“All in all, the Neubauer support—both financial and logistical—has been spectacularly helpful in permitting us to think bigger and evolve our research agenda more easily than has ever been possible with any group grant I’ve been involved with,” Rothfield said.

This project will produce the first comprehensive, accurate and freely available edition of all surviving inscribed legislation from classical Rome. While there have been many editions of some of these texts, there has been only one with translation and commentary, which was produced by a team of 23 international researchers between 1983 and 1996. Their publication was immediately recognized as deeply problematic, with very significant strengths but also signal failings. It also omitted a number of essential and very substantial documents, and others have been discovered since then. The project will produce a new print edition and an open-access repository of the material, with introductions, translation, and commentary designed to appeal to students and experts alike, across multiple disciplines, from classicists to historians of constitutional law, and from scholars of empire to students of legal language. The material will make possible the study of the material basis of ancient legal knowledge and the practice of law, the evidence of which is extraordinarily difficult to access. Roman Statutes will amount to a revolution in the fields of Roman history and the history of law, and all areas of study and theory informed by those fields.