Julie Stone Peters

BA Yale, PhD Princeton, JD Columbia

Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and an affiliated Professor at Columbia Law School. She works at the intersection of law and humanities and media history, exploring performance, film, digital, and legal cultures from antiquity to the present.

Her most recent books are Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials (Cambridge UP, 2024) and Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford UP, 2022) (finalist for the Joe A. Callaway Prize, David Bevington Award, and Media Ecologies Association Book Award). Previous books include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford UP, 2000) (winner of the ACLA’s Harry Levin Prize and English Association’s Beatrice White Award, and finalist for the Barnard Hewitt Award from ASTR), and the co-edited Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (Routledge, 1995). She is Co-Editor of the Elements in Legal Humanities book series, published by Cambridge University Press. She is currently writing a book about cameras, videos, and law in the 21st century.

Her more public-facing essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, Public Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Village Voice, and elsewhere.

At Columbia, Peters is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Media, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies, spearheaded the Human Rights graduate certificate and undergraduate major, and serves as Co-Chair of the Theatre and Performance Ph.D. Program. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEH, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, and Humboldt Foundation fellowships, and was most recently a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London School of Law. She has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and NYU Law School, and teaches regularly at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.