In the Realm of Corona Normativities: Analysing a pandemic through the lenses of the law as culture paradigm

Prof. Dr. jur. Dr. h.c. Werner Gephart is a legal scholar, sociologist, and artist. He is Founding Director of the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” and has additionally held numerous visiting professorships around the world, among others the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for German Studies at Washington University, St. Louis, a visiting professorship at the IDC (Herzlyia, Israel) and numerous invitations as professor in Tunis; in addition he has held the Chaire Alfred Grosser at SciencesPo, Paris. In 2019 he was appointed as President of the Jury Senior of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He is the publisher of the series “Law as Culture” (25 vol.) and co-editor of the volume Recht, which is part of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (MWG I/22-3). His further publications are centered on the cultural analysis of law, the sociology of religion, and aesthetics. He is co-editor of the international journal Art and Law, Brill Research Perspectives in Art and Law. In 2014 he, alongside with German artist Amselm Kiefer, was awarded an honorary doctorate in Philosophy by the University of Turin. He has held numerous exhibits in cities including Paris, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, St. Louis, Houston, Bloomington, Minneapolis, Tunis, New Delhi, and London. From 2016 to 2017, Werner Gephart was honorary artist at the Dickson Poon School of Law during his exhibition “Some Colours of the Law” at King's College in London. Currently he is Senior Villey Fellow at Paris II (Panthéon-Assas). By way of his experiences to create the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” and his membership in the Scientific Committee of the Centers for Advanced Study in France (RFIEA) he is particularly convinced of the format of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg as a thematically focused Center for Advanced Study, even under the conditions of the pandemic. The implied position of an artist in residence (latest artist Maria Eichhorn) seems to be most fruitful for creating the “New” and should therefore be preserved as a fundamental element of this format.