Rose Casey, PhD
Associate Professor of English
Rose Casey, PhD, Associate Professor of English, WVU.
The Humanities Center is proud to announce Dr. Rose Casey’s first book is coming out with Fordham University Press. “Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style” is at a history of English law in Africa, Asia, and the Atlantic and a study of how literature is involved in producing legal change—all in one.
Dr. Casey shows how property law regulates all aspects of our lives, including how we treat the environment, our understandings of divorce and inheritance, whether we protect or exploit other people's intellectual or creative work, and how we respond to the legacies of chattel slavery. Dr. Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to show the relationship between literary style and legal ideas.
In this way, she identifies the emergence of new, "improper" ideas about property law. For instance, that Royal Dutch Shell should be responsible for oil spills in the Niger Delta or that oral stories by Indigenous peoples in South Africa deserve protection. Ultimately, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that writers as well as legal actors are involved in producing legal changes—that law and literature both play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.
“Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style” has already won the Helen Tartar award from the American Comparative Literature Association (2024) and has received glowing reviews.
Nicole Rizzuto from Georgetown University shares, "By looking to an impressive array of examples from the arts and literature, Casey shows with elegant argumentation and lucidity how aesthetic objects can circulate discursively to gradually change structures of feeling and habits of mind, and lay the groundwork for actual changes to laws that open on to more egalitarian forms of living in the world."
And Angela Naimou of Clemson University says, "Aesthetic Impropriety reconceives the aesthetic force of literature to theorize justice. Casey’s gorgeous close readings and keen attention to the histories of English-derived property law generate new ways to reckon with collective dispossession."
Congratulations, Dr. Casey!