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 in London. She is an expert in law and humanities, performance (medieval to modern), and film and comparative media. Her most recent book is Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022). Previous publications include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford University Press, 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). She has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Metropolitan Detention Center (Brooklyn), and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, Humboldt Foundation, and elsewhere. At Columbia, she created 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. Her monograph, Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (Elements Series). Her more public-facing essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, Village Voice, Slate, Public Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of Cambridge Elements in Legal Humanities series, and is currently working on several projects: a book tentatively titled Genealogies of Global Performance: Early Anthropology, Travel Literature, Ethnographic Spectacle, and World Drama (c.1450-1850); a collaborative project, “Fragments for a History of the Legal Body”; and a set of essays on contemporary law and media.