 Phone: 404-727-5768
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Martha Grace Duncan Professor of Law criminal law, law and literature, juvenile law, law and the unconscious mind
Martha Grace Duncan brings a rich array of experiences and credentials to her work at Emory Law School. As an undergraduate, she lived for six months in Bogotá, Colombia, where she interviewed and traveled with members of the Alianza Nacional Popular, which was then Colombia’s major opposition party. In graduate school, on a fellowship from the Latin American Institute of Columbia University, she journeyed to remote regions of Brazil to interview leaders of sugar worker unions and peasant movements. For her doctoral thesis in political science, Martha Grace Duncan conducted in-depth interviews with life-long American activists to explore the genesis and meaning of radicalism in their lives. On the strength of this work, she was admitted as a post-doctoral candidate to the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center. She earned her law degree at Yale Law School, where she was elected an Article and Book Review Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following graduation, she clerked for Judge Robert Bork on the United States Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit. Professor Duncan has published articles and essays in a range of fields and genres, including political science, history, memoir, and law. Her latest law review article, “‘So Young and So Untender’: Remorseless Children and the Expectations of the Law,” was published in the Columbia Law Review, and her memoir “So Have I Been A Good Stepmother?” was selected as a “Notable Essay of 2006” in The Best American Essays of 2007. Her book, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment (New York University Press) was reissued in paperback and received numerous favorable reviews. |
Recent Books by Professor Duncan
About Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons by Martha Grace Duncan
Literature... provides Duncan a rich field in which to explore our 'reluctant,' 'rationalized,' and sometimes outright 'admiration' for the 'noble bandit.' ...The real drama of...Duncan's discussion of metaphor, however, comes with the vivid historical pictograph that gives her book a stirring climax....Duncan readily solves the mystery [of the founding of Botany Bay as a penal colony].
--New York Times Book Review
”Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons is a book that merits the interest of psychanalysts for the contribution it offers to our understanding of the realm of guilt and punishment in human psychology...I recommend the book highly."
— The Psychoanalytic Quarterly
Professor Martha Duncan has written an important, creative work. Her book is elegant, and solidly grounded in literature, psychoanalysis and law.
-- Legal Studies Form
A complex book on the subject of incarceration that embraces both the actual experience of prisoners and the projection in literature of positive prison fantasies. Drawing on a very rich reservoir of illustrations, Duncan offers fascinating developments that will affect the readers' views on the timely question of crime and punishment.
--Victor Brombert, author of The Romantic Prison
Learn more or purchase a copy >