HAA Alumna Linda Mueller Awarded the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award

Congratulations to Linda Mueller (HAA Ph.D. ’25), who was recently named a co-winner of the 2026 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (LCH) for her dissertation, entitled “Drawings and the Law in Early Modern Southern Europe.” Mueller defended her dissertation in May 2025.

This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that best promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture, and the humanities. The award was presented in June 2026 at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago.

Mueller’s dissertation examines how drawing became an integral part of legal practice in the high courts of Italy, Spain, and the Spanish Americas during the sixteenth-century, where artists, architects, and legal practitioners used drawings, graphic systems, and pictographs as epistemic instruments to investigate disputes and communicate legal claims. By tracing the creation and circulation of these visual forms in contracts, criminal trials, petitions, and other legal contexts, the dissertation argues that drawing functioned as a parallel mode of legal reasoning that helped shape the development of early modern law. It also considers how encounters with divergent pictographic systems prompted debates over their interpretation and evidentiary value, opening a new chapter in the history of drawing in the cross-cultural contact zones of the Spanish Atlantic.

The dissertation will form the basis of her forthcoming book.