"Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times"

Libby Barringer

Libby Barringer received her doctorate in Political Science from UCLA in 2016. Her work brings ancient and modern political thought and literature into conversation for the sake of rethinking, and recovering democratic ideas and practices. In particular, she is concerned with democratic politics as they emerge in extreme conditions of power and powerlessness. Her current manuscript project reflects this interest, centering on different political accounts of death as they are a part of political life, ancient and modern, and the capacities for these distinct accounts to enable or suppress democratic practices. She is also working on a second project, analyzing the politics of contemporary accounts of (super) heroism in dialogue with the political thought of Greek tragedy. In addition to her doctorate, she also holds an MSc in Political theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA from The College of William and Mary in Government and Fine Arts. She is currently the Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz has been teaching political theory, legal thought, and human rights at Bard College since 2005. He is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.
Professor Berkowitz is an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher, and writer. His interests stretch from Greek and German philosophy to legal history and from the history of science to images of justice in film and literature. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition; coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics; editor of Revenge and Justice, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and a contributing editor to Rechtsgeschichte. His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals. Roger Berkowitz received his B.A. from Amherst College; J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. 

Leon Botstein

Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College since 1975, where he is also Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He is chairman of the board of the Central European University and a board member of the Open Society Foundations. He has been music director of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992. He is coartistic director of the SummerScape and Bard Music Festivals at Bard College, and conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director from 2003 to 2010. Forthcoming publications: a sequel to his Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture;  VIEW MORE >>

Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power. By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it. She expands the definition and range of performance art, sometimes performing solo but more often staging participatory events and interactions that build on her own observations, experiences, and interpretations of the politics of repression and control. Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. For over 25 years Bruguera has created socially-engaged performances and installations that examine the nature of political power structures and their effect on the lives of society's most vulnerable individuals and groups. Her research focuses on ways in which art can be applied to the everyday political life; on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects are intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics. Her works often expose the social effects of political forces and present global issues of power, migration, censorship and repression through participatory works that turn “viewers” into “citizens.”  VIEW MORE >>

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema.
In 1970s Tokyo, he acted in Kara Juro’s Jokyo Gekijo and participated in Maro Akaji’s butoh dancing company Dairakudakan, followed by a career in documentary filmmaking and photography. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career travelling and reporting from all over Asia.
Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian, La Repubblica, NRC Handelsblad.

Teju Cole

Teju Cole is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of four acclaimed books, including Open City (2011), which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and, most recently, Blind Spot (2017), a genre-crossing work of photography and text. His photography has been exhibited in the United States, India, Iceland, and Germany. His essay "A Time for Refusal" was published in the New York Times two days after the 2016 presidential elections.

William Dixon

William Dixon is the Director of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. He is also a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Political Studies Program. He has been at Bard since 2010 and holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He has taught political theory, comparative politics, and political economy at Johns Hopkins, Bard College, and Oberlin College. His research interests include contemporary political theory, ancient political thought, philosophies of nature, cosmopolitanism, and prudential theories of democracy. He is currently working on a project on democracy and the contemporary American presidency.

Galit Eilat

Galit Eilat developed her practice through a variety of platforms and roles as an institute director, curator, educator, writer and editor of books and a magazine. Eilat was a member of curatorial team involved in large-scale events such as São Paulo Bienal 2014, Venice Biennale 2011 (Polish Pavilion) and October Salon 2011, as well as guest curator in contemporary and modern art museums. At the same time, she engaged with grass root, politically acting collectives and research institutes. Her present research is looking at the relations between the principle of sovereignty and the limits of the political act; The intersection between political theology and religious politics, in time of eschatological messianic movements and the increasing declarations of ‘state of emergency’. She is the recipient of the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, at Bard College, 2017-18.

James S. Fishkin

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University, where he is Professor of Communication and (by courtesy) Professor of Political Science. He is also Director of Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy. He is the author of Democracy and Deliberation (Yale 1991), When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford 2009) and other books. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Fishkin is best known for Deliberative Polling, a process that has been conducted in 27 countries. His new book, Democracy When the People Are Thinking will be published in 2018. His new book Democracy When The People Are Thinking will be published by Oxford in the Spring.

Mary Finn

Mary Finn, public school administrator and former Obama campaign organizer (2008), is the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Manager. Mary is studying to be an archivist and librarian and she interned at the Clinton Presidential Archive, where she learned the FOIA process in- depth. Mary runs our robust investigative program, filing and managing numerous open records requests each week, while also communicating with the subscribing papers on local FOIA leads. Mary participated as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Bard’s Hannah Arendt Summer Seminar.

Masha Gessen

Maria Alexandrovna "Masha" Gessen is a Russian and American journalist, author, translator and activist. Gessen writes primarily in English but also in her native Russian, and in addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, she has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report. Her bibliography includes The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot and The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy.

Martin Gurri

For many years, Martin Gurri worked as an analyst and manager at the DNI Open Source Center, where he earned many splendid bureaucratic titles but somehow learned a couple of things along the way. He is currently president and chief analyst at Fifth Wave Analytics. Mr. Gurri led a team that designed a methodology for the analysis of visual persuasion in global politics, and is the co-author of “Our Visual Persuasion Gap.” Mr. Gurri’s recently published book, analyzing the impact of the digital revolution on political authority, is The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. 

Samantha Rose Hill

Samantha Rose Hill Assistant Director at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and The Humanities at Bard College. Hill received her Ph.D. in Political Theory from the University of Massachusetts and is working on a book on Hannah Arendt’s poetry.
 

Marc Jongen

Dr. Marc Jongen, born 1968 in Merano / Italy, is a German philosopher, essayist and political activist. He is a lecturer in philosophy and aesthetics at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung), where he also worked as an assistant to Peter Sloterdijk for many years. While his first book was on Indian Vedanta Philosophy, Marc Jongen has further written on the continuation of pre-modern, religious and spiritual worlds of thought in the imaginary and the real of technological civilization. Besides, he has published on cultural and sociopolitical topics in major German newspapers. Current political developments in Germany and Europe, such as the Euro rescue policy and the German immigration policy he considers a threat for democracy. He has therefore joined the new party "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) in 2013 and is currently a candidate for the AfD for the German Bundestag.

Thomas Keenan

Thomas Keenan Associate Professor of Comparative Literature; Director, Human Rights Program at Bard College
 

Seon-Wook Kim

Seon-Wook Kim is a Professor at the Department of Philosophy and the chair of the Center for Ethics Value at Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea. He is the president of the Korean Society for Hannah Arendt Studies. He received his BA and MA from Soongsil University, and Ph.D from SUNY Buffalo. He published 3 books on Hannah Arendt in Korean and translated Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Promise of Politics and The Crises of the Republic into Korean. Currently, he is writing an introductory book on Hannah Arendt which will include interviews of Arendt scholars from various regions.

Artemy Magun

Artemy Magun is a Hannah Arendt Center Teaching Fellow and Visiting Professor in Political Studies at Bard College for fall 2017. He is a Professor at the European University at Saint-Petersburg and Smolny College where he teaches political theory and philosophy. Magun received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan and also holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Strasbourg. In English, he is the author of Negative Revolution (2013), editor of Politics of the One (2013), and currently editor of the international journal Stasis. Magun has also written extensively for Telos, History of Political Thought, Continental Philosophy Review, and Theory and Event. At Bard, he will be teaching a course on “Russian Politics”. 

Walter Russel Mead

Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest. He is the author of several books: Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001, winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize and nominated for the 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award); Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (2004); and God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2008). He is a contributing editor to and writer on international affairs for Los Angeles Times; he also writes articles, book reviews, and op-ed pieces for Harper's, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines and newspapers. Professor Mead was a finalist for the National Magazine Award (essays and criticism), 1997, and was a President's Fellow of the World Policy Institute at The New School, 1987-97. 

Wyatt Mason 

Wyatt Mason Contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His work also appears in The New York Review of Books, GQ, The London Review of Books and The New Yorker. He was named a Senior Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center in 2010.
 

Uday Mehta

Professor Mehta has taught at several universities, including Princeton, Cornell, MIT, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Hull and Amherst College. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke(Cornell University Press, 1992) and Liberalism and Empire, (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Liberalism and Empire was awarded the J. David Greenstone prize for the best book in Political Theory by the American Political Science Association in 2002. In 2003, Mehta was one of ten recipients of the prestigious “Carnegie Scholars” prize given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” He has a forthcoming book titled A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality.

Shany Mor

Shany Mor received a DPhil from Oxford University.  His research focuses on democracy and representation.  He has taught political theory at Oxford and Brown.  He writes and speaks frequently on Israeli and European politics, as well as on the future of parliamentary democracy.  He is currently writing a book on representation in political theory as well as beginning a new research project on reviving and modernizing parliamentarism.
 

Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University, a Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America as well as a Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund. Yascha's first book, Stranger in My Own Country - A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the winter of 2014. It was reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications; a German edition appeared in the fall of 2015.

Melvin Rogers

Rogers has wide-ranging interests located largely within contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political and ethical philosophy. His research is motivated by the political and social present and seeks to illuminate our current condition by directing our attention to undiscovered, underappreciated, or incompletely excavated resources in the history of political, social, and African-American thought. He is drawn to a series of "Big Questions": How ought we to understand the norms of conduct that underwrite political life? How should we talk about political relations and its development outside of electoral politics or juridical procedures? What might that language be and what concepts must we employ? Can we harness the power of self-regulation and self-improvement without resorting to stories or theories about absolute political and moral values?

John Jeremiah Sullivan

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. He writes for GQ, Harper's Magazine, and Oxford American, and is the author of Blood Horses (2004) and Pulphead (2011). Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Brandon Soderberg

Brandon Soderberg is the Chief Advisor and editor at large for Democracy in Crisis. He helps determine the general direction of the coverage and specific areas of focus and devises the site’s web and social media strategies. An early hip-hop and politics blog led to a job as a contributing writer for Spin Magazine. Since then, Brandon has written for numerous alt-weeklies and other publications. He is currently the editor-in-chief at the Baltimore City Paper.

Ian Storey

Ian Storey Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. Co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s “Denktagebuch”

Zephyr Teachout

Zephyr Teachout is one of America's leading anti-corruption scholars and activists. She is an Associate Law Professor at Fordham Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. She received her BA from Yale, and a JD and MA in political science from Duke University. She has published two books, the edited volume Mousepads, Shoeleather & Hope, about internet organizing, and the award-winning Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United. Her articles and essays have been cited in courts around the country, including the Supreme Court, and she has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Prospect, The Nation, Politico, The Daily Beast, and other newspapers. 
   VIEW MORE >>

Marina van Zuylen

Marina van Zuylen Professor of French and Comparative Literature; Director, French Studies Program at Bard College.
 

Micah White

Micah White, PhD is a public intellectual and lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. His essays and interviews on the future of protest have been published internationally in periodicals including The New York Times, The Guardian, Folha de São Paulo, The Washington Post, Poder (Brazil) and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been a featured guest on major network television shows such as Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, the BBC's Newsnight and The National, Canada’s flagship nightly current affairs broadcast. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, White has been profiled by NPR's Morning Edition, The New Yorker, The Guardian and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. Learn more about him at micahmwhite.com

Baynard Woods

Baynard Woods founded Democracy in Crisis. He is editor at large at the Baltimore City Paper. His work has also appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, Salon, McSweeney's, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. He is the author of the book "Coffin Point: The Strange Cases of Ed McTeer, Witchdoctor Sheriff," about a white sheriff who used hoodoo to govern a largely black county for 37 years. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, focusing on ethics and tyranny and became a reporter in an attempt to live like Socrates. He wrote the libretto for Rhymes with Opera's climate-change opera film "Adam's Run."

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.

Thursday, October 12

Friday, October 13

                                                              Moderator: Wyatt Mason
 

ONLINE REGISTRATION IS CLOSED

If you missed online registration, please do not worry. On Oct. 12th or 13th, please visit the On-Site Registration Table located in the Olin Hall Atrium and our student volunteers will assist you. We will not turn anyone away! However, if you wish to see a certain panel, we strongly recommend you arrive early! 
 

Conference Fees

The admission fee for this two-day conference is a flat rate of $75.00 per person. Admission is FREE for:

• Members of the Hannah Arendt Center (see additional member benefits below)
• Bard College staff and faculty
• Bard College Students (Matriculated Students - does not include LLI)

Members

Members receive complimentary admission for yourself and a guest. If you would like to become a member, or renew a membership, please click HERE. If you are unsure if your membership is current, please contact the Hannah Arendt Center at [email protected]. Memberships are valid for one year.

Lunch 

If you ordered a boxed lunch, your lunch ticket will be in your name tag. Please pick up your name tag at the Registration Table. If you did not pre-order a boxed lunch, here's a list of local food options available and open to all guests:

• Local Eateries
• Kline Commons (Bard Dining Hall)
• Down the Road Cafe (located in the Campus Center)

Getting Here

Bard College's main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Conference takes place in Olin Auditorium in the Olin Humanities Building (C3 on the Bard Map). 
 
If you are driving, take Rt. 9G and enter onto campus using the west entrance with the stone sign for Bard College across from the Anne Cox Chambers Alumni/ae Center at Bard. After turning into Bard College, make a left at the Stop Sign, and Olin Hall will be on your right. Additionally, a security guard will be available at the Main Entrance to Bard College between 8:30 am and 11:00 am to assist drivers. Also, please check out Travel to Bard for more helpful hints.

Accommodations

A comprehensive list of nearby hotels, inns, and B & B’s may be found on the Bard webpage, HERE. We recommend booking your accommodations and restaurant dining as soon as possible. The Best Western Plus in Kingston, NY offers a special discounted rate during the Hannah Arendt Center 2-day Conference. To make reservations using the Bard discount, you must call the hotel direct at 845-338-0400, Monday–Friday from 9AM–5PM and ask for the “Hannah Arendt Bard College Discount.” We recommend booking your accommodations as early as possible.

Parking Is Free

There are two main parking lots; One across from Olin and one south of Olin Hall -- Please park in either lot. Additionally, you may also park in the gravel lot across from the Stevenson Gymnasium off Annandale Road. Please click HERE to see venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.

DATE: October 11, 2017
TIME: 6:00pm
LOCATION: Bard College, Campus Center MPR
MAP

The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: How can we take advantage of this crisis to make democracy stronger? This inquiry animates the Hannah Arendt Center’s tenth annual conference, “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times.” With this in mind, The Hannah Arendt Center challenges students to think through and answer the following question: Has representative democracy failed?