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, 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, digital, 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 UP, 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 UP, 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), Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 1995), and Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word (Stanford UP, 1990). 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.