Speakers

Mohan Dutta
Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication

Director of Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (C.A.R.E.)
Massey University  

Mohan J Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication. He is the Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), developing culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right. Mohan Dutta’s research examines the role of advocacy and activism in challenging  marginalizing structures, the relationship between poverty and health, political economy of global health policies, the mobilization of cultural tropes for the justification of neo-colonial health development projects, and the ways in which participatory culture-centered processes and strategies of radical democracy serve as axes of global social change. Based on his work on healthcare among indigenous communities, sex workers, migrant workers, farmers, and communities living in extreme poverty, Prof. Dutta has developed an approach called the culture-centered approach that outlines culturally-based participatory strategies of radical democracy for addressing unequal health policies. 

Tori Ekstrand
Associate Professor of Media Law  
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Victoria “Tori” Smith Ekstrand teaches media law courses in the school. Before coming to Carolina, she was an associate professor in the Bowling Green State University Department of Journalism and Public Relations and an affiliate faculty member of BGSU’s American Cultural Studies department. Ekstrand’s research explores conflicts between copyright law and the First Amendment, particularly as they arise in journalism and social media. Her work is often grounded in critical legal theory, in which she examines the impact of law and policy on culture and media production. She has written about legal protections for anonymous speech online. Her book on, Hot News in the Age of Big Data: A Legal History of the Hot News Doctrine and Implications for the Digital Age (LFB Scholarly), looks at the history of the doctrine and its impact on protections for discrete bits of information in the age of Big Data. It will be published in 2016. She has published articles in Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal and Communication Law & Policy. She has worked with the Ohio State Bar Association on the publication of their Media Law Handbook. In 2008, she was awarded BGSU’s Outstanding Young Scholar Award, and in 2009, she was named a Scholar in Residence at BGSU’s Institute for Culture & Society. 

Tonya Evans
Visiting Professor of Law 
Penn State Dickinson Law

Tonya M. Evans is Visiting Full Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law School. Prior to Dickinson Law, Professor Evans served as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, where she created and directed the school’s Blockchain, Cryptocurrency & Law online professional certificate program and developed its world-class instructor pool and curriculum. She is also the former Chair of the Intellectual Property & Technology Online Programs. She writes, speaks, and teaches primarily about the intersections of copyright and new technologies, blockchain and the law, and trusts and estates. Professor Evans is chairperson of the Maker DAO’s Maker Ecosystem Growth Foundation, member of the Consensys Grants Advisory Board, Bermuda Global FinTech Advisory Board, and former member of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Focus Group on Digital Currency including Digital Fiat Currency, and the ITU Focus Group on Application of Distributed Ledger Technology. She also participates as an observing member of the Global Blockchain Business Council. Professor Evans serves on the Intellectual Property Committee of the Advisory Council to the Court of Federal Claims and also received the inaugural Enterprise Blockchain Award in the category of Governance and Policy Leadership during the 2019 Blockchain Revolution Global Conference in Toronto.

Sonia Katyal
Chancellor’s Professor of Law 
Berkeley School of Law

Professor Sonia Katyal is Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law & TechnologyDistinguished Haas Chair. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology, intellectual property, and civil rights (including antidiscrimination, privacy, and freedom of speech). Professor Katyal’s current projects focus on artificial intelligence and intellectual property; the intersection between the right to information and human rights; trademark law and branding; and a variety of projects on the intersection between museums, cultural property and new media. As a member and chair of the university-wide Haas LGBT Cluster, Professor Katyal also works on matters regarding law, gender and sexuality. Professor Katyal’s recent publications include Technoheritage, in the California Law Review; Rethinking Private Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, in the UCLA Law Review; The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy, in the Cornell Law Review; Transparenthood in the Michigan Law Review (with Ilona Turner); Trademarks, Artificial Intelligence, and the Role of the Private Sector, also in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming, with Aniket Kesari); The Gender Panopticon in the UCLA Law Review (forthcoming) (with Jessica Jung); and From Trade Secrecy to Seclusion in Georgetown Law Journal (forthcoming).

Stephanie Mahin
Clinical Assistant Professor of Management and Corporate Communication
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

Stephanie Mahin examines how organizations, for better or worse, use social media and social networks to mobilize stakeholder groups from purchase interest to protest. She teaches public relations, media relations and crisis communication. Dr. Mahin comes to UNC Kenan-Flagler from the University of Indianapolis where she was a communication professor and taught public relations. She began her career as a television reporter and received the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Award in 2014 and 2015. She worked for nearly 15 years in public relations for the UNC Health Care System before she began her academic career. She is a member of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, National Association of Communication and International Association of Communication. Dr. Mahin received her PhD from the UNC School of Media and Journalism, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow. She earned her MS from N.C. State University and her BS from Butler University.

Matthew Morrison
Assistant Professor of Recorded Music
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts

Matthew D. Morrison is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College, where he studied violin and conducting. Matthew has served as Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed music journal, Current Musicology, where he published a special issue on Race, Sound, and Performance (Spring 2012), featuring an interdisciplinary group of scholars writing about the import of sound and music in society. His published work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, and he has written posts on Iggy Azalea, Julius Eastman, and Gaye vs. Thicke in Oxford University Press’s online music blog. His book in progress, American Popular Sound: From Blackface to Blacksound, considers the implications of posting sound and music as major components in both individual and societal identity formations, particularly the construction of race. Matthew held a Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity through New York University’s Office of the Provost, and is currently a research fellow with the Modern Moves research project at King’s College, London, funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant.

Kali Murray
Professor of Law
Marquette University Law School 

Professor Kali Murray is a Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School. Her research agenda is focused on the “politics of participation” in patent, property and administrative law. Prof. Murray is also a Co-Director of Marquette University Law School’s Intellectual Property Program. As Co-Director of Intellectual Property Program, Prof. Murray, works along with Prof. Bruce Boyden to serve as Faculty Adviser to the Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, to mentor students in moot court activities, and to plan the Intellectual Property Colloquium Speaker Series. Among her works, she has published a book, The Politics of Patent Law: Crafting the Participatory Patent Bargain, as a part of the Routledge Research Series in Intellectual Property Law in 2013. She is a co-author with Alfred Brophy and Alberto Lopez, Integrating Spaces: Cases and Materials on Race and Property Law (1st Ed. 2012), and is currently working with Rose Cuison-Villazor on Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Identity.

Chidi Oguamanam
Professor of Law
University of Ottawa Faculty of Law

Dr. Oguamanam joined the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Common Law Section) in 2011. He is currently affiliated with the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, the Centre for Environmental Law and Global Sustainability, and the International Law Group. Professor Oguamanam belongs to diverse international research and professional networks committed to building bridges and influencing policies across the south-south and north-south geopolitical spheres. He has diverse interdisciplinary research interests in the areas of global knowledge governance in general, especially as manifested in the dynamics of intellectual property and technology law, with emphasis on biodiversity and biotechnology (including agricultural biotechnology). He is interested in the global institutional and regime dynamics for negotiating access and distributional challenges in regard to the optimization of benefits of innovation by stakeholders and the role of intellectual property in development. Widely published in law and interdisciplinary platforms, he is the author or editor of several books, including: International Law and Indigenous Knowledge: Intellectual Property, Plant Biodiversity, and Traditional Medicine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), Intellectual Property in Global Governance: A Development Question (New York: Routledge, 2012).

Janewa Osei-Tutu
Associate Professor of Law
The Florida International University College of Law

Professor Osei-Tutu holds an LL.M., with distinction, in International and Comparative Law from McGill University, one of the premier academic institutions in Canada. She wrote her graduate thesis on trade-related intellectual property as it relates to developing countries, and continues to write in this area. Drawing on her academic and practical experiences, Professor Osei-Tutu’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between trade-related intellectual property, human development, human rights, and culture. She joined academia after several years of intellectual property (IP) practice as Legal Counsel to the Patent & Trademark Office, and the IP Policy Directorate at Industry Canada (USPTO equivalent). In that capacity, Osei-Tutu advised the Canadian government on the IP aspects of certain trade negotiations, as well as IP submissions to international organizations, such as the WIPO and the WTO. She is the current Editor in Chief of the African Journal of Legal Studies, and one of the founding directors of the Center for International Law and Policy in Africa. Current research projects: intellectual property, natural rights, and human rights; intellectual property and culture; intellectual property, human rights & corporations.

Richard Schur
Professor of English
Drury University

Dr. Schur began teaching at Drury in the fall of 2001. He has taken on a number of administrative roles at Drury, including the Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Center (2003-2010), Founding Director of the Law & Society Program (2011-2015), and the Director of the Honors Program (2015-Present). He has won grants to participate in the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) Shared Futures Project, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, and a Fulbright German Studies Seminar. He won the 2006 Faculty Award for Liberal Learning and the 2008 Joel Weixlmann Award from the African American Review. Dr. Schur’s scholarship focuses on racial narratives in American culture, from popular music and literature to law and ethics. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law (2009) and co-editor (with Lovalerie King) of the collection of essays, African American Culture and Legal Discourse.