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Rebekah Modrak and Fair Users Team Awarded Rackham Funding

Fairuse

Stamps Professor Rebekah Modrak and her interdisciplinary team of graduate students and faculty were awarded funding to form the Interdisciplinary Workshop, Fair Users: Free Speech in Action. 

Modrak partnered with Melissa Levine (Director of the UM Copyright Office at the University of Michigan Library), Raven Lanier (Copyright Specialist, UM-Library Copyright Office), and Jeremy York (4th Year PhD candidate, School of Information) to create this series of workshops for the 2019/20 academic year.

The workshops are intended to increase knowledge about issues around fair use and free speech for a group of graduate students and faculty across campus. Participants come from Art History, Classical Languages, Communication Studies, Museum Studies, Aerospace Engineering, Music, Theater & Dance, and the Law School.

The first session, which met September 23, 5:30 – 7pm, discussed how fair use relates to visual art and expression as speech. Speakers were:

  • Joan Kee, attorney and Professor, Art History. Author of Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America
  • Cristina del Valle, Senior Associate General Counsel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Rebekah Modrak, Professor, Stamps School of Art & Design