Dr. Malloy kicked off the UTOPIA500 project with a presentation on Jan. 21, 2016. His paper, Utopia and the Law and Literature Movement, marked the quincentennial of the publication of Thomas More's novel Utopia in 1516. Dr. Malloy explored the meaning and implications of the concepts of utopia and dystopia. He argued, with colorful graphic support, that More's novel was a precursor to post-modernist literature, and that in our own time there has been a linguistic transformation of the concept of utopia to contemporary meanings that are often entirely independent of More's novel. Dr. Malloy concluded that More's novel is a richer and more sophisticated literary achievement than we may realize, but that it has been obscured by the "kidnapping of the concept utopia" by both literary successors and popular culture.