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Roger Berkowitz
Founder & Academic Director

Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Politics, Philosophy,  and Human Rights, Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. His essay "Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics," has helped bring attention to the centrality of reconciliation in Hannah Arendt's work.  The Arendt Center organizes an annual conference every October. Professor Berkowitz edits the Hannah Arendt Center's weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Interest, and many other publications. Berkowitz is the 2019 recipient of the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Bremen, Germany. (Photo Credit: Doug Menuez)

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Jana Mader
Director of Academic Programs

Jana Marlene Mader is a writer, editor, and professor working at the intersection of literature, art, and the environment. Her work explores how places shape artistic and political imagination. She is the author of several books, including Walk Her Way New York City (Hardie Grant, 2025; co-authored), an illustrated walking guide to women’s history in New York. Her first novel appeared in 2018.

Her writing and translations have been published in Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, DIE ZEIT, and brand eins, and she has collaborated with cultural institutions including Lenbachhaus München and Galerie EIGEN + ART. She also writes Fieldnote Fridays, a Substack rooted in walking, landscape, and history.
She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Before joining Bard in 2021, she taught at the University of North Carolina and The Juilliard School. More about her work can be found at janamarlene.com.

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Thomas Wild
Research Director

Thomas Wild has published an introductory book on Hannah Arendt’s life, work, and reception and a monograph on Hannah Arendt’s intellectual relationships with post-war writers. His most recent book on the distinguished poet Ilse Aichinger discusses a contemporary poetics of hospitality. Several editions of letters emerged from Thomas Wild’s ongoing intrigue for correspondences and intellectual networks, including prominent writers such as Uwe Johnson, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Joachim Fest. Poetry is an interlocutor in most of his courses and in many of his publications, among the latter are a collection of poems by Thomas Brasch and translations of contemporary American poets. Thomas Wild serves as general editor on the distinguished international team preparing the first scholarly edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works, which appears in print and digitally, presenting all published and unpublished writings of this eminent thinker in the original English and in the original German – a project providing the foundation for future research on Hannah Arendt, digital humanities, and what it means to think in a plurality of languages.
 
 

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Hillary Harvey
Communications Manager

Prior to joining the Hannah Arendt Center, Hillary was Communications Specialist for Ulster County Executives Jen Metzger and (now-Congressman) Pat Ryan, organizing press events, public hearings, and social media management for the Exec's Office and 20+ governmental departments. She served on Ulster County's first Innovation Team, which built and managed the Ulster County COVID-19 Hotline, where she designed and directed Knowledge Management to enable 100+ call agents to answer 35,000 service requests during the pandemic. Hillary earned her BA degree from Bennington College and built her early career as a freelance photographer, and print and radio journalist.

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Philip Lindsay
Director of Democracy Innovation Program

Before joining the Hannah Arendt Center, Philip helped run a small community health center in NYC for immigrant communities. He has a BA in Latin American Studies from Temple University, where he focused on political economy and social movements. He spent a year in Germany as a Congress-Bundestag (CBYX) Fellow focusing on the politics of climate change. In his free time, he enjoys organizing intimate concerts and building community through the arts. 

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Monice Byrne
Operations Coordinator

She and her wife with their golden retrievers live on a small farm “Farmette Roquette” in nearby Germantown where they grow specialty flowers, and produce events. Currently she is a student in the Bard MBA in Sustainability program, with an interest in heterodox economic models, and leadership in mission driven organizations. At the Hannah Arendt Center Monica works with the Democracy Innovation Hub on Deliberative Democracy and Citizen’s Assemblies and she facilitates thoughtful and nuanced programming on Israel/Palestine with the “It’s Complicated” Project.

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Aleksandar Vitanov
Program Manager, Friends of HAC

He is a research associate at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Strategy and American Statecraft. Aleks holds a BA in politics and music from Bard College. In 2024, he was awarded the Schwarzman Scholarship. He is originally from North Macedonia.