Dr Maryam Mirza and Professor Tom Hamilton explore what happens when we approach law not only as rules, courts and institutions, but through literature, history and human experience — asking whose voices are heard, whose are missing, and how people live with the consequences of legal power.
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Our conversation is about law and the humanities. It asks what happens when we approach law not just as rules and institutions, but through literature, history and human experience — whose voices are heard, whose are missing, and how people live with the consequences of legal power.
GUESTS
Dr Maryam Mirza, Associate Professor of South Asian Literature, Durham University
Staff profile: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/maryam-mirza/
Professor Tom Hamilton, Associate Professor and Director of Research, Department of History, Durham University
Staff profile: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/tom-b-hamilton/
Tom's book: A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-widows-vengeance-after-the-wars-of-religion-9780197929995?lang=en&cc=gb
REFERENCES
Bhattacharya, Santanu. Deviants. Penguin, 2025.
Manto, Saadat Hasan. "The New Law." Translated by Maryam Mirza and T.H. Mirza. Bombay Literary Magazine, 2025.
https://bombaylitmag.com/contribution/maryam-mirza-and-tariq-mirza-issue-61/
Massey, Sujata. The Widows of Malabar Hill. Soho Crime, 2018.
Siddique, Osama. Pakistan's Experience with Formal Law: An Alien Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Sircar, Oishik. "Spectacles of Emancipation: Reading Rights Differently in India's Legal Discourse." Osgoode Hall Law Journal, vol. 49, no. 3, Spring 2012, pp. 527–574.
White, James Boyd. "Telling Stories in the Law and in Ordinary Life: The Oresteia and 'Noon Wine'." Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law. University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 168–91.