Professor Townsend-Gard joined the Tulane Law School faculty in 2007 from the Seattle University School of Law, where she was Visiting Assistant Professor and a Justice Faculty Fellow at Seattle University's Center for the Study of Justice in Society. Previously, she taught Intellectual Property law at the London School of Economics, where she also held a Leverhulme Trust Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was awarded a Collegium University Teaching Fellowship.  She earned her Ph.D. in European History from UCLA in 1998, and then her J.D and LL.M. in International Trade from the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona.

Since 2004, she has also been a Non-Resident Fellow of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, where her projects have included podcasting the traditional classroom, Second Life and virtual property, and copyright duration, unpublished works and the public domain.  Her recent publications on these topics have been published in the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., and the Journal for Internet Law. She was also a guest blogger at Terra Nova, and for three years blogged at Academic Copyright.  Her Tulane Law School blog made its debut in July 2007 and chronicles life in New Orleans.

During law school, she served as a clerk on a number of NAFTA arbitration cases, including the Chapter 20 cross-border trucking case between Mexico and the US.  Just after law school, she directed a two-year multimedia project, "Preparing for Lives in the Law," with Dean Toni Massaro at James E. Rogers College of Law, Univeristy of Arizona.  She has also served as an advisor on academic issues to a San Francisco law firm specializing in copyright and trademark.

Professor Townsend-Gard's doctoral dissertation examined the cultural expression of war in art, literature, memoir, film, drama, and other forms, with a focus on the First World War, focussing on what defines identity and membership within a war generation.  She is currently in the process of turning this project into a book entitled The Making of a War Generation. While enrolled as a student at UCLA, she also worked as a professional actor in film and television.

Professor Townsend-Gard's teaching areas includes Intellectual Property and Property, with wider research interest in interdisciplinary study of culture and the law.  Her current writing projects include a co-authored piece,  "Martin Eden’s Modernist Anxieties, a Socio-Literary Reading of the 1909 Copyright Act" (Paul Saint-Amour, editor, Modernism and Copyright, Oxford University Press, forthcoming);  articles entitled "Towards a Constitutionally Defined Public Domain," "The (Im)Possibilities of a Usable Past, or the Making of the Durationator,"  and "Wresting with the 1909 Copyright Act in Theory and Practice."  She is beginning projects on Social Networking and the Personal Public Domain (a student-based project) and on the Mardi Gras Indians (co-authored).

 

Professor Townsend-Gard's CV 

 

Courses:
Fall 2009 - Intellectual Property; International Intellectual Property
Fall 2010 - Common Law Property