The University of Alberta Faculty of Law is extremely proud to announce that our colleague Professor Annalise Acorn has been elected as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, UK. This is an incredible accomplishment as All Souls College has been described in The New Statesman as: "Oxford's most prestigious college and the only one without students" and in The Telegraph as a place where "the brainiest of brainiacs" go to study. Former Visiting Fellows have called election to All Souls a "crowning achievement" and have noted the intense competition for the handful of Fellowships offered to visiting scholars each year. Professor Acorn will spend her time at All Souls completing her book "Resentment and Responsibility".
When asked how she feels about her appointment Professor Acorn said: "I can't express my gratitude in enough superlatives. I have always viewed All Souls as the intellectual holy of holies, the scholarly inheritance of all inheritances. So, yes, I'm just super-grateful, not to mention astonished and, of course, utterly intimidated. There are so many off-the-scale brilliant people there. But, in my experience, very smart people are very rarely pompous or pretentious. So, I'm just going to try to bracket my feelings of unworthiness, whistle a happy tune, and hope to get by on genuine interest and enthusiasm."
She added, "The real starting point of my book project on responsibility and the reactive emotions is the famous Oxford philosopher Peter Strawson's beautiful essay 'Freedom and Resentment.' That was published in 1961 - the year I was born. All the really interesting philosophical work on responsibility since then has been done in Oxford. Tony Honoré, who has been a Fellow of All Souls for many years, wrote wonderful book called Responsibility and Fault which deals with issues of moral luck that are of intense interest to me. John Gardner who is Professor of Jurisprudence at University College (his predecessors were Ronald Dworkin and H.L.A. Hart) has also done revolutionary work on responsibility in recent years. So it will just be amazing to be in Oxford and to be able to converse with wonderful thinkers like Honoré and Gardner whose ideas are so fascinating to me and so central to what I'm trying to articulate in this book."
Visiting Fellows are elected by the Governing Body of All Souls, which includes all full Fellows of the College, and can be elected for one, two or as in Professor Acorn's case, three terms. All Souls College has to choose every year from among a large number of well-qualified applicants, in widely varied fields of study. In making this choice, they give weight to intellectual quality, to the interest and feasibility of the research project, and to the benefit of carrying it out in Oxford. While at All Souls, Visiting Fellows are encouraged to focus entirely on their research and are fortunate to enjoy the same privileges as ordinary Fellows of the College.
"The Faculty of Law is extremely proud of Professor Acorn's appointment as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls, and my colleagues and I offer her our warmest congratulations." said Dean Philip Bryden. "Her outstanding scholarly accomplishments have been acknowledged internationally before, but this appointment has to rank as the crowning achievement to date in her stellar academic career."
Professor Annalise Acorn is the author of Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). In 2009 she was an H.L.A. Hart Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Ethics and Legal Philosophy, University College, Oxford. She has been a Visiting Professor at University of Michigan Law School, University of Siena Department of Economic Law, and University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law. In 2010 she was appointed an Outstanding Fellow of The Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. She is co-editor with Dr. Rüdiger Zill of Passions in Context: International Journal for the History and Theory of the Emotions www.passionsincontext.de. In 2012, Professor Acorn was presented with the 2012 Honourable Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence award.
Professor Acorn's main area of research interest is in philosophy of the emotions and their relation to responsibility. She has published numerous articles in journals such as The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Valparaiso Law Review, and the UCLA Women's Law Journal. In 1998-99 she was the president of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers. In the same year she was a McCalla Research Professor.
Professor Acorn teaches Jurisprudence: Emotions of Conflict and Justice, The Drama of Justice: Greek and Shakespearean Plays and the Law, Professional Responsibility, and Conflict of Laws, at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law.
Additional Information:
Book: 'Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice' by Professor Annalise Acorn