Felice Batlan Named Co-Director of IIT Chicago-Kent Institute for Law and the Humanities
Professor Felice Batlan has been named co-director of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Chicago-Kent College of Law's Institute for Law and the Humanities (ILH).
“Professor Batlan brings to the institute organizational skills, wide ranging intellectual interests and infectious enthusiasm,” said Sheldon H. Nahmod, Distinguished Professor of Law, founder and co-director of the Institute of Law and the Humanities.
A member of the IIT Chicago-Kent faculty since 2006, Professor Batlan teaches courses in legal history, feminist legal history, corporate law and securities regulation. Prior to joining IIT Chicago-Kent, Professor Batlan taught at Tulane Law School. She spent nine years in legal practice, first as a corporate and litigation associate in New York and later as head of global compliance and associate general counsel at Greenwich Capital Markets.
A native New Yorker, Professor Batlan served as an adviser to the Securities and Exchange Commission's historical society. She is an associate editor and book review editor of Continuity and Change, an academic journal dedicated to exploring the legal and social structures of past societies, and as an associate editor for the Macmillan-Gale Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States, with responsibility for sections on women, gender and sexuality as well as corporations.
Professor Batlan is also on the board of H-Net, an interdisciplinary Web site for humanities and social sciences. She is a recipient of a 2008 Illinois Institute of Technology Julia Beveridge Award for service to students. In 2003, Professor Batlan was a fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. That year, she received the 2003 CCWH/Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians Dissertation Writing Award.
Professor Batlan graduated summa cum laude from Smith College. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. She served as executive editor of the Harvard Women's Law Journal. She later clerked for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history from New York University.
“I am thrilled to have been named co-director of the institute,” said Professor Batlan. It provides an exciting location to explore the interdisciplinary nature of law. I am also very excited to have the opportunity to work closely with Professor Nahmod, who is a creative and broad thinker.”
IIT Chicago-Kent's Institute for Law and the Humanities was established in 2000 to facilitate, support and encourage symposia, lectures, scholarship, and faculty discussion on the relationship between law and other humanistic disciplines. The institute provides opportunities for faculty and students to integrate humanities-based studies with the study of law and to explore the increasingly rich and diverse scholarship in areas such as legal philosophy, legal history, law and literature, and law and religion.
Chicago-Kent is the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology, a private, Ph.D.-granting institution with programs in engineering, psychology, architecture, business, design and law.
Founded in 1890, IIT is a Ph.D.-granting university with more than 7,300 students in engineering, sciences, architecture, psychology, design, humanities, business and law. IIT's interprofessional, technology-focused curriculum is designed to advance knowledge through research and scholarship, to cultivate invention improving the human condition, and to prepare students from throughout the world for a life of professional achievement, service to society, and individual fulfillment. Visit www.iit.edu.
