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Basak Ertur awarded Julien Mezey Dissertation Award by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture

We are pleased to announce that Basak Ertur has been awarded the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award for ‘the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities’.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Başak Ertür. Lecturer at Birkbeck School of Law, has been awarded the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award for ‘the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities’.

Başak completed her doctoral thesis ‘Spectacles and Spectres: Political Trials, Performativity and Scenes of Sovereignty’ at the School of Law at Birkbeck in January 2015. The award comes from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities – an organisation of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary, humanistically oriented legal scholarship.

Başak says, ‘My thesis is an intervention in the theory of the trial. It draws on the post-Nuremberg critical literature on political trials and on theories of performativity to propose a conceptual framework for studying the relationship between the legal and the political as registers of signification. I focus on a number of political trials, both contemporary and historical, that involve the aftermath of political violence’.

Alluding to a previous recipient of this award, Birkbeck alumna Dr Brenna Bhandar, Başak says: ‘The fact that I am not the first to receive it at Birkbeck testifies to the supportive and intellectually stimulating institutional setting that I found at the School of Law. I was lucky to have the intellectual camaraderie of my fellow PhD researchers in a very lively research culture that we were empowered to shape’.

As well as receipt of the honour, the Association will sponsor Başak’s attendance to its annual meeting in April. The other winner of the award is Anna Lvovksky of Columbia Law School.

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