Remembering Kirstie McClure
12-23-2023Roger Berkowitz
Kirstie McClure has died. A longtime friend of the Hannah Arendt Center, McClure was most recently a beloved professor of Political Theory at UCLA. My own memories of Kirstie are of a truly rare intellectual intensity, always accompanied by a smile. Her writings on Arendt’s social question were some of the earliest and best. Davide Panagia writes about Kirstie:
Kirstie spoke at one of the Hannah Arendt Center’s earliest conferences on Lying and Politics, in 2010. Here is Kirstie McClure’s talk “Nobody’s Facts,” given at the Hannah Arendt Center’s Conference “Lying and Politics”. And here is the Q&A from after her talk.It is with much sadness that I share with you the news that UCLA’s Prof. Kirstie McClure has passed away. Prof. McClure was a formidable colleague and friend to many of us who will no doubt remember her with fond trepidation for her critical energies, her brilliance, her encyclopedic knowledge of the history of political thought, and her refusal to leave a thought unfinished. Her contributions to political theory, the history of political thought, feminist theory, and critical political theory were many, both published, institutional, and as a mentor to innumerable students and scholars currently teaching throughout the world.