Elizabeth Green

My project will examine how writers have engaged with the concept of proportionality, which has always been a part of legal reasoning, but which began to be incorporated into various legal regimes as a more formal test in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

I have had some brilliant teachers who demonstrated how useful interdisciplinary research could be. My academic background is in history, literature, and law, and I am interested in seeing how these three things interact.

In developing my research topic, I was inspired by Aaron Rosenberg’s work on scale and modernity — particularly his central idea that certain phenomena, such as mechanized warfare, industrial production, or ecological destruction, can operate on such a large scale that they disrupt the ‘common basis of comparison’ upon which narratives tend to rely, and that these ‘problems of scale’ shape our responses to crises.