First Witteveen Memorial Fellowship awarded to Michiel
The first Witteveen Memorial Fellowship on Law and Humanities, for which Tilburg University received more than 60 applications, has been awarded to Michiel Bot.
(Media-Newswire.com) - The first Witteveen Memorial Fellowship on Law and Humanities, for which Tilburg University received more than 60 applications, has been awarded to Michiel Bot. Bot, who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and master’s degrees in Law, Philosophy, and Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and who currently is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Bard College ( US ).
Bot will visit Tilburg University for three months between late May and late August 2015. He will be hosted by the Department of Public Law, Jurisprudence and Legal History at Tilburg Law School. Bot’s research interests are in law and literature, critical theory, rhetoric, political philosophy, legal theory, literary theory and postcolonial literature and theory.
His PhD thesis challenged existing paradigms for adjudicating competing claims about “offensive” speech in contemporary jurisprudence and legal, political, and critical theory, through rhetorical analysis and by investigating the aesthetic dimension of offense. Although Bot strongly criticized offensive expressions such as the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, he ultimately argued that the right to offend is central to the intimately connected practices of criticism and democracy. But his research also defended the “right to take offense”, which can be invoked against attempts to invalidate all expressions of indignation as illegitimate interferences of moral or religious feeling in a public sphere that ought to be kept strictly "rational", "amoral", and "secular". During the fellowship Michiel Bot will write an article on the right to literature and participate in various academic events with Tilburg staff and students.
About the Witteveen Memorial Fellowship on Law and HumanitiesTilburg University has established the annual Witteveen Memorial Fellowship on Law and Humanities in order to commemorate the life and work of Professor Willem Witteveen, who died in the MH17 disaster in Ukraine in July 2014. The fellowship aims to enable a junior scholar ( PhD or postdoc level ) to further develop his or her research in the area of law and humanities during a visit to Tilburg University.
Willem Witteveen was an early representative of the interdisciplinary and contextual approach to legal scholarship in The Netherlands and Tilburg Law School. Whereas the emphasis often is on social sciences, Witteveen’s focus was on law and humanities. Rhetoric, literature, political philosophy and ( intellectual and cultural ) history in particular were breeding grounds for Witteveen’s many contributions to academia, politics and society. Witteveen attached a lot of importance to student formation in the sense of the classic Bildungsideal to which expression ( rhetoric, language ) and contact with classical texts are central. He was the founding father of the interdisciplinary BA Liberal arts and Sciences at this university, in his teaching and in this program he combined classics with new texts and he employed current teaching methods. Much of his work was progressive; yet his attachment to traditional forms of academic life, with their opportunities for direct exchange of ideas was strong.
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