Prof. Dr. Greta Olson
Greta Olson is Professor of American and British Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen and she is Principle Investigator of the research project "Dehumanizing, Victimizing, or Universalizing? How Images of Migration Interact with Human Rights Discourse" which is part of the interdisciplinary research group "Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies" (MeDiMi).
Since 2025 Greta Olson is Director of the Center for Diversity, Media, and Law (DiML) and Co-founder of the Certificate for Gender, Sexuality, Diversity at the University of Giessen (since 2021). She was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” in Bonn (2014, 2016), served as general editor of the European Journal of English Studies (EJES) from 2010 to 2025, and is, with Jeanne Gaakeer, the co-founder of the European Network for Law and Literature. She works and wishes to facilitate projects on the nexus between artistic practice, political activism, and academic analysis and publishes in the areas of critical American studies, law and culture, feminism and sexuality studies, and narrative and politics.
Within the migration and human rights network, she is interested in developing a project on the cultural-political work of photographs of immigration. She has taught a seminar on Migration/Law/Gender in the winter term 2015-2016 to which members of the network such as Janna Wessels contributed. At the conference “(Counter-)Narratives of Punishment and Criminal Justice” (Siegen, 21-23 June, 2018), Greta has presented a paper on “Gendered Narratives of Migration: Criminalization or Pity”.
For further information, see here and here.
Publications on migration and human rights include:
- (forthcoming) The Making of Human Rights Consciousness in Migration Societies: Intersections between Everyday Practices and the Law, Sonderausgabe The International Journal of Law in Context (ed. with Janna Wessels and Laura Goller).
- (forthcoming) “De-gendering and De-racializing Images of Migration as a Human Right,” in: Huckerby, Jayne/Ghadery, Farnush (ed.) Research Handbook on Gender and Human Rights, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
- Organization and opening of the conference “Feelings about Justice/Law: The Relevance of Affect to the Development of Law in Pluralistic Legal Cultures” (13 -14 June 2019) at the University of Giessen
Further publications
- (forthcoming) Law, Narrative, Narratology: Interdisciplinary Essays, New York: New York University Press (ed. with Simon Stern).
- (forthcoming) Law and Critique / Recht und Kritik. Kontrovers. Neue Diskurse zur Gesellschaft, Baden-Baden: Verlag Karl Aber (ed. with Christian Schmidt, Benno Zabel, Jochen Bung, Franziska Martinsen, and Hanna Meißner).
- (2024) Diversity Issues in the U.S.A.: Transnational Perspectives on the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections, Bielefeld: transcript (ed. with Melanie Kreitler).
- (2023) Feelings about Justice/Law: The Relevance of Affect to the Development of Law in Pluralistic Legal Cultures // Rechtsgefühle. Die Relevanz des Affektiven für die Rechtsentwicklung in pluralen Rechtskulturen, Baden-Baden: Nomos (ed. with Thorsten Keiser and Franz Reimer).
- (2022) From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- (2018) “On Narrating and Troping the Law: The Conjoined Use of Narrative and Metaphor in Legal Discourse,” in: Weisberg, Robert/Hanne, Michael (ed.) Narrative and Metaphor in the Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19–36.
- (2018) The Politics of Form, Abingdon: Routledge (ed. with Sarah Copland).