Is the Private Political? A Colloquium on Natality, Laboring, and the Body

Roger Berkowitz 

Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. Author of Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.

Dawn Herrera Helphand

Dawn Herrera Helphand is a Doctoral Candidate with the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Her current research considers conceptions of freedom in the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Her essays have been published in HA: the Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and The Point magazine. 

Drucilla Cornell

Drucilla Cornell is a professor of Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at
Rutgers University. She is a playwright and also launched The uBuntu Project in South Africa in 2003
and has been working with the project ever since. Professor Cornell’s theoretical and political writings
span a tremendous range of both topics and disciplines. From her early work in Critical Legal Studies
and Feminist Theory to her more recent work on South Africa, transitional justice, and the
jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin, Professor Cornell continues to think through new and evolving
issues in philosophy and politics of global significance. Her latest title, coauthored with Stephen Seely,
is called The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man.

Samantha Hill 

Samantha Rose Hill received her doctorate in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2014. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and The Humanities at Bard College. Her research and teaching interests include critical theory, the Frankfurt School, aesthetic theory, and the History of Political Thought. Hill is currently finishing a manuscript of Hannah Arendt’s poetry, which has been edited and translated into English: Into the Dark: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Previously Hill conducted post-doctoral work at the Institut für Philosophie at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main and served as a visiting lecturer at Amherst College.

Morris B. Kaplan

Morris B. Kaplan teaches philosophy and gender studies at Purchase College SUNY.  Previously, he worked for several years as a trial attorney with the Legal Aid Society of New York. Kaplen is the author of Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire (Routledge 1997) and Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (Cornell University Press, 2005). "Refiguring the Jewish Question: Arendt, Proust and the Politics of Sexuality" appeared in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig (Pennsylvania University  Press, 1995). He has published widely in political philosophy and gender theory. His current research focuses on intersections of law, sovereignty and violence in Arendt, Foucault, Derrida and Butler.
 

Lori Marso

Lori Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies and Professor of Political Science at Union College.  Her latest book is Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (Duke, 2017).  She has written, edited, or co-edited six other books including two in 2016: 51 Key Feminist Thinkers (Routledge), and (with Bonnie Honig) Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford).  She has won the Susan Okin and Iris Marion Young Prize (2013) for Feminist Theory, and the Contemporary Political Theory Prize for best article published (2014).    With Jill Frank, (Cornell), she is Consulting Editor to Lawrie Balfour (UVA) for the journal Political Theory, and she is chair of the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association.  Marso is currently writing on a book on encounters between objects and bodies in feminist film.   

Jana Schmidt

Jana V. Schmidt's research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including "continental" philosophy and critical theory), and literature's relation to violence. 

Stephen Haswell Todd

Stephen Haswell Todd’s dissertation, “The Turn to the Self” (Chicago, 2015), sets out an account of how the concept “autism” functioned in a broad, philosophical context in German-speaking Europe in the early twentieth century, and was then gradually translated and narrowed into the clinical category we know today. In doing so it proposes major revisions to our understanding of the history of autism and also opens up the archive of early autism discourse as a field of inquiries into the nature of private, inner experience. At the Arendt Center he has plans to investigate the transformations of Goethe’s science of morphology into twentieth-century figurations of aesthetics, personality, psychology, and race. In addition to a PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago, he holds a BA in literature from Bard College.

Robert Weston

B.A., University of Florida; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University. Publications in Social Text, Rethinking Marxism, n/or; Invited Lecturer, Guggenheim Museum, NY (2009); Günther-Findel Research Fellow, Herzog August Bibliothek (2004–05); Research Fellowship, DAAD (2000–01). Presidential Teaching Award, Columbia University (2005). Ottaway International Fellow, Director of Faculty and Curricular Development, Bard Honor's College, Al-Quds University, West Bank. At Bard since 2005.

Ewa Ziarek

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Buffalo. In January 2016, she was awarded the Honorary Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, University of Maine. She is the author of  Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of  Modernism (Columbia 2012); An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford 2001); The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995);  the editor of Gombrowicz’s Grimaces and co-editor, among others, of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (SUNY 2005);  Time for the Humanities (Fordam, 2008) and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (Rowman &Littlefield 2010). Her interdisciplinary research interests include feminist political theory, modernism, feminist philosophy, ethics, and critical race theory. She is currently working on the book devoted to Hannah Arendt.

Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli

Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She is the Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2016), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow. Professor Zerilli has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and is currently serving on the editorial or advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture,Theory and Critique. Professor Zerilli spoke at Simone de Beauvoir Today: A Symposium to Mark the 25th Anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir's death in October, 2011.

1 pm          Introduction by Roger Berkowitz

1:15 pm     Opening Keynote by Ewa Ziarek

2:30 pm     Break

2:45 pm     Panel Discussion: The Body, Labor, and Natality 
                  Panelists: Drucilla Cornell, Lori Marso, Morris Kaplan
                  Commentator: Dawn Herrera Helphand

4:45 pm      Keynote by Linda Zerilli

6:00 pm     Roundtable with participants moderated by Robert Weston. Final Questions     

6:30 pm     End