University Honors Program names law professor as faculty fellow

LAWRENCE – Associate Professor of Law Najarian R. Peters has been appointed as an Honors Faculty Fellow. She begins her fellowship with the University of Kansas Honors Program this fall and will serve a three-year term.

“While the University Honors Program serves undergraduate students, we’ve long been interested in partnering with the law school and providing greater mentoring and support for honors students considering careers in law,” said Sarah Crawford-Parker, director of the University Honors Program. “We were very pleased that Professor Peters expressed interest in the honors faculty fellow role.”

As part of its mission to challenge students to launch extraordinary lives, the University Honors Program prioritizes innovative learning experiences and individualized student support. Honors Faculty Fellows commit to extensive involvement in the program by teaching courses, mentoring students and serving as committee members and liaisons for the program.

“I am extremely happy to join this group,” said Peters. “I met several of our honors students and learned about their interests at the honors convocation. They are energized and are accustomed to thinking outside of the box which is what I love about the interdisciplinary approach to the program.”

Prior to becoming an honors faculty fellow, she redesigned and co-taught an honors course called Marginalized Bodies in Literature, Medicine and the Law with Dr. Giselle Anatol. “I learned so much from Dr. Anatol as a junior faculty member about interdisciplinary studies and it helped me to become a better law professor,” said Peters.  

“We ensured our class was cross-listed in the Law School and the English department. Interdisciplinary studies are essential to effective legal analyses,” she added. “My work as a new honors faculty fellow will center interdisciplinary approaches to expanding our understanding of the law by including history and other humanities subjects and behavioral and social sciences. My course in the honors program will focus on personhood, democracy and American law.”

Professor Peters’ body of research focuses on privacy law, child law, home-education, emerging technology and legal history. Since 2019, she has been a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Peters joined the KU Law faculty in 2020 and teaches the following courses: Marginalized Bodies in Literature, Medicine and Law; Torts; Privacy Law; and The Practice of Privacy Law.

She has three books forthcoming: Kansas Personal Injury Law (LexisNexis), Privacy and Racial Marginality (West Law Academic Publishing) and Marronage and Modernity: Privacy, Technology, and Black Liberation (The University of California Press). Her law articles and essays have been published in national and international journals including the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, University of California Law Review, Washington & Lee Law Review, and Seton Hall Law Review, as well as the 5Rights Foundation’s Digital Futures Commission publication Education Data Futures: Critical, Regulator and Practical Reflections.

In 2020, her first year at KU Law, Peters created an annual privacy-focused conference, Privacy Praxis. In collaboration with Professor Patricia Gaston in the School of Journalism and Emily Ryan, director of The Commons, she created the new annual Wellness in Our Democracy series. The series focuses on misinformation and disinformation and will begin its second year of programming in September 2023.