Dr Laura Petersen

Dr Laura Petersen

IILAH Visiting Scholar

lpetersen@unimelb.edu.au | Melbourne Law School

Laura’s research interests are cross-disciplinary, integrating approaches to jurisprudence with literature and visual art. She has a particular interest in Germany in the 20th Century. Her recently completed PhD focused on the jurisprudence of restitution or Wiedergutmachung in Germany after WWII, arguing that legal, literary, artistic and memorial works are practices of restitution.

Laura won the inaugural international 2021 Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice run by the University of Texas (Austin). Her paper was based on her research into a German lawyer, Dr Walter Schwarz, and his glossatorial writings.

She is currently Vice-President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia and has taught at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University.
She has edited special issues of the Griffith Law Review and PĆ³lemos: Journal of Law, Literature and Culture (forthcoming) and has given guest and public lectures at the Universities of Melbourne, La Trobe, ANU, Wollongong and Lucerne. Recently, she was invited to be a guest speaker at the M-Pavilion in Melbourne, a leading community arts space and cultural laboratory.

Laura was awarded an international collaborative grant by Universitas 21 in 2018 to support a cross-disciplinary workshop and art exhibition on themes of art, conflict and justice. She was also awarded a research grant in 2020 from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) which enabled her to do site-specific work in Germany and be a Visiting Fellow at both the Faculties of Law and Art History at LMU Munich. Laura has also been selected to be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Law at the University of Lucerne and at the University of Wollongong.

She is a qualified lawyer in Australia and is a graduate of the University of Melbourne (LLB, 1st Hons) (BA) (PhD) and FU Berlin (MA) where she undertook her Masters in German.