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Three Duke history students in international legal history competition

They were selected for the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin

Two current Duke history graduate students, Fahad Bishara
and Mitch Fraas, and former history doctoral student, Felicity Turner, have
been selected for the Hurst
Summer Institute in Legal History
at the University of Wisconsin.

Bishara, Fraas, and Turner were selected in an international
competition open to advanced graduate students, post-doctoral students and
early assistant professors. They will join nine other young legal historians at
the Institute, which involves two weeks of intensive engagement with senior
scholars in the field. 

"The institute gives early
career legal historians the chance to engage intensively with several eminent
scholars in the field, as well as exceptionally talented peers. They have
the opportunity to build intellectual networks that can last for years," said
Edward Balleisan, Duke associate professor of legal history. "The selection of
these three Duke history graduate students underscores the department's
reputation as one of the country's leading graduate programs in legal history,
as well as its impressive geographic and chronological range."

Bishara's dissertation, "A Sea of Debt: Law, Empire and
Commercial Society in the Western Indian Ocean, 1850-1940," explores the relationship
between Islamic contract culture and Anglo-Indian legal regime.

Fraas's work details the legal cultures of Madras, Bombay,
and Calcutta, India during the mid-eighteenth century. He is also interested in
the evolution of legal documents and legal printing.

Turner is a postdoctoral fellow at the United States Studies
Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. She graduated from Duke in May
2010 after completing her dissertation, "Narrating Infanticide: Constructing
the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America."

For a full list of fellows, visit http://law.wisc.edu/ils/hurst_summer_institute/2011fellowsbios.html.