News & Announcements
July 30, 2025
Virtual Working Group: Consent—A Global Legal History
This reading group will gather to discuss the global history of consent. Its focus is on historicizing liberal notions of consent and understanding other regimes of assent and refusal in the past. We encourage applications from all scholars, including graduate students, early career scholars, and internationally based scholars. Participants’ expertise might reside in a range of periods, regions, and legal historical subfields, including, but not limited to, the histories of sex; marriage; medicine; healing and the body; crime and punishment; religious conversion; and political participation.
The kinds of questions we aim to address with a curated reading list include: What have been the different norms through which different social sectors across different societies have conceived of their willing or forced participation in historical processes? How do we, as legal historians, account for and identify their refusal to participate in the activities that generated the archive? What forms of legal personhood distinct from liberal individualism can we find historically, and how did they inform understandings of consent? How did consent itself become consolidated as a category within Euro-American practices and thought? How has liberal individualism has shaped key aspects of historical practice and narrative (e.g., categories such as “agency” or “voice” or “silences of the archive”)? And how might we change our historical practice once we identify the ways in which liberal notions of consent have infiltrated it?
Format:
- We seek a diverse slate of 8 additional participants (for a total of 10 with organizers); the minimum number of participants, including organizers, will be 5 participants.
- The organizers will collaborate with participants to establish the full reading list—to be comprised of short, published works that balance topics of interest– in advance of the first meeting in mid to late September. We may also consider including a small number of works authored or in progress by members of the group, if appropriate. The readings will not be heavy; we will not include entire published books, but rather, illustrative excerpts and articles (well under 75 pages per meeting) that will serve as a starting point for a vibrant exchange, which is the chief aim of the group.
Schedule:
We will meet virtually for 1-1.5 hours per session for six sessions throughout the academic year (Sept-May), roughly every six to eight weeks. Meetings are provisionally set to take place on Fridays (EST), but we will try to ensure the schedule suits participants’ availability.
To apply:
By 5 pm August 22, please send the following to premob@fiu.edu; and achira@emory.edu:
- A brief bio (200 words max)
- A short statement explaining your interest in law, consent and refusal, and whether you have specific ideas for readings you’d like to discuss communally (150 words max)
- Indication of your availability on Fridays (EST) and any other scheduling issues we should know about (we can be flexible)
Selection of participants will take place approximately one week after the application deadline and will be broadly inclusive, aiming to create a group of diverse ranks and varied expertise by region, period, topic, and approaches.
Workshop Coordinator Bios
Bianca Premo is Distinguished University Professor of Latin American History at Florida International University in Miami. She has published on the history of childhood and legal history, and has devoted special attention to Indigenous, women and enslaved litigants in Peru, Mexico and Spain. Her books include Children of the Father King (UNC, 2005), The Enlightenment on Trial (Oxford 2017) and articles and book chapters on legal institutions and law, including one in The American Historical Review on Indigenous jurisdiction with Yanna Yannakakis which won the Jane Burbank Prize from the ASLH in 2020. Her current research on the history of child mothers in 20th– century Peru and the ethics of history has been supported by several fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has served on the ASLH’s Gonville Stein and Surrency prize committees. Premo is a member of the organization. Email: premob@fiu.edu.
Adriana Chira is, starting with September 1, the Winship Distinguished associate professor in the History Department at Emory University, where she has been teaching Atlantic world history since 2016. Across her different projects, her work addresses the role of debt, credit, and ownership in the lives of working people in Cuba, with an emphasis on people of African descent. Her first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge University Press, 2022), explored enslaved and free Afro-descendants’ efforts to own landed property and to attain free legal status through claims to ownership filed inside first instance and appellate courts in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The book traces the political implications of these processes arguing for a history of emancipation that pays attention to vernacular legalism and modes of claiming property. Patchwork Freedoms received the Gonville Stein prize from the ASLH in 2023. Parts of this project have also been published as articles in The Law and History Review and in The American Historical Review. In her next project, she will explore the impact of debt and credit on the urban popular economy and on legal personhood and enslavement in seventeenth-century Havana. Chira is a member of the organization. Email: achira@emory.edu.