"REAL TALK: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion" October 20-21, 2016

Göran Adamson

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.

Leon Botstein

President, Bard College. Chairman, Central European University. Board member Open Society Foundations. Music Director, American Symphony Orchestra 1992 to present. Artistic director, Summerscape and Bard Music Festivals. Music Director, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (2003 to 2010).

Robert Boyers

ROBERT BOYERS is Editor of the quarterly magazine Salmagundi, Director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute and Professor of English at Skidmore College. He is the author of ten books, including two critical works on the intersection of politics and literature, the first entitled Atrocity and Amnesia, the second The Dictator’s Dictation. His most recent book (2015) is The Fate Of Ideas. A frequent contributor to such publications as The Nation, The New Republic and Harpers, he is the author of an essay entitled  “How ‘Safe Spaces’ Stifle Ideas” published in the March 13, 2016 Chronicle Review (published by The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Alexandra Brodsky

Alexandra Brodsky is a co-founder of Know Your IX, for which she served as co-director for over two years. She got involved with Title IX work as an undergraduate at Yale when she and 15 friends filed a complaint against the university. Now, Alexandra  is a third year student at Yale Law School and an editor at Feministing.com. Alexandra’s writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, POLITICO Magazine,The Nation, the Atlantic, and Dissent. She tweets as @azbrodsky.

William Deresiewicz

Author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press, 2014). A frequent speaker on college campuses, Bill taught English at Yale from 1998-2008. He is a Contributing Writer for The Nation and a Contributing Editor for The American Scholar. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper's, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing of the National Book Critics Circle (2012), and the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture's Hiett Prize in the Humanities (2013).

Jennifer Doyle

Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at UC Riverside. She is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015), Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006). She was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation (2012), in support of her writing on the intersection of art and sport. In 2015, she curated Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for the Vincent Price Art Museum in East Los Angeles; she is currently curator of a feminist performance art series for The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. In 2013-2014, she held a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts, London. 

Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels The Mare, Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To,which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998, and Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a Cullman Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Erica Hunt

Erica Hunt is a  poet, and essayist, author of Local History and Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes and A Day and Its Approximates. Her poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree and Conjunctions. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of an anthology of new writing by Black women, Letters to the Future, forthcoming in 2017 from Kore Press. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Capetown Program in Public Policy. She is now the Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Long Island University. Before assuming her current post, Ms. Hunt worked for more than 25 years in social justice philanthropy, first as a program officer at New World Foundation, and later as president of the Twenty-First Century Foundation, a leading public foundation dedicated to advancing Black community change. Currently, she serves on the board of the Proteus Fund, a philanthropy supporting democracy, human rights and peace. 
 

Janet Halley

Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has taught at Tel Aviv Buckmann School of Law and in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton 2006), and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy (Duke 1999). With Wendy Brown, she coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke 2002), and with Andrew Parker she coedited  After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke 2011). She is the editor of a collection of essays entitled Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law, and the author of “What is Family Law?: A Genealogy,” published last year in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Her current book projects are The Family/Market Distinction: A Genealogy and Critique and Rape in Armed Conflict: Assessing the Feminist Vision and its Law.    VIEW MORE >>

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.

Angus Johnston

Angus Johnston is a historian of American student activism, and of student life and culture more broadly. An advocate of student organizing, he is the founder of the website StudentActivism.net. He teaches history at the City University of New York, where he received his PhD in 2009 with the dissertation “The United States National Student Association: Democracy, Activism, and the Idea of the Student, 1947-1978.” 

Dima Khalidi

Dima Khalidi is the founder and Director of Palestine Legal and Cooperating Counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Her work includes providing legal advice to activists, engaging in advocacy to protect their rights to speak out for Palestinian rights, and educating activists and the public about the repression of Palestine advocates.

Carolyn Lazard

Carolyn Lazard is a writer, film curator, and artist working in media and performance. Her work engages collective practice to address the ethics of care, dependency, and wellness. Lazard has presented work in various spaces including Light Industry, the Poetry Project, Roots and Culture, Anthology Film Archives, the Arnolfini, and the New Museum. She is a founding member of the art collective Canaries and is a 2015 recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award. Lazard holds a B.A. from Bard college and she makes her home in Philadelphia.

Christopher Lebron

Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Philosophy at Yale. He is author of The Color Of Our Shame: Race and Justice In Our Time (2013)and is currently at work on his second book, The Making of ‘Black Lives Matter’: A Brief History of an Idea. Lebronwasawarded First Book Prize by the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory section. His article, “The Agony of a Racial Democracy,” was published in Theory & Event vol 15, no. 3, 2012, a symposium on the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

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Greg Lukianoff

President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom From Speech, and is co-author of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus, as well as The Atlantic's September cover story entitled "The Coddling of the American Mind" written in partnership with Jonathan Haidt. He has testified before both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives about free speech issues on America’s campuses. 

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Kenneth Marcus

Kenneth L. Marcus is President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press: 2015) and Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press: 2010).  Marcus founded the Brandeis Center in 2011 to combat the resurgence of anti-Semitism in American higher education.  The following year, Marcus was named to the Forward 50, the Jewish Daily Forward’s listing of the “American Jews who made the most significant impact on the news in the past year.”  VIEW MORE >>

Wyatt Mason

Wyatt Mason is a 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. Modern Library publishes his translations of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete and I Promise to be Good. A 2003-2004 fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he received the 2005 Nona Balakian Citation from the National Book Critics Circle and, in 2006, a National Magazine Award. He has served as a consulting editor at large for the Margellos World Republic of Letters of Yale University Press, an imprint devoted to world literature in translation, and has taught non-fiction writing in the MFA program of Bennington College. He was named a Senior Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center in 2010.

Uday Mehta

Distinguished professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke and Liberalism and Empire. The American Political Association awarded him the J. David Greenstone Book Award in 2001 for the best book in history and theory. In 2002, Mehta received the prestigious “Carnegie Scholars” prize given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” His forthcoming book is titled, A Different Vision: Ghandi’s Critique of Political Rationality.

Deroy Murdock

New York political commentor Deroy Murdock is a Fox News Contributor; a former Media Fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University; and a Senior Fellow with the Atlas Network, which supports and connects some 462 free-market think tanks in the USA and 94 countries world-wide.

Mr. Murdock’s weekly column — “This Opinion Just In…” — appears in the New York Post, The Washington Times, the Boston Herald, The Orange County Register (CA), and other newspapers across America. He has been a frequent guest on CNBC, CNN, C-Span, MSNBC, and other TV and radio outlets. He has been a contributing editor with National Review Online since June 2000.

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Suzanne Nossel

Suzanne Nossel was named executive director of PEN American Center in January, 2013. Her career has spanned government service and leadership roles in the corporate and non-profit sectors.  VIEW MORE >>

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. For Citizen, Rankine won the Forward Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (Citizen was also nominated in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. A finalist for the National Book Award, Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

Samuel Reed

Sam Reed is an undergraduate at Bard pursuing a B.A. in literature (2017) and a Masters in Teaching degree. He loves to read, run, and work with kids. Also a devoted student of Roger Berkowitz, he is happy to be part of the conference this year.

Annie Seaton

Director of Bard’s Difference and Media Project and conceptual artist with the Yam Collective. Collaborative artworks have recently been featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and more recently at the New Museum’s 2016 Black Women for Black Lives Matter show. Annie works on race and the pastoral aesthetic from the Greco-Roman period today, and she founded and directs the Difference and Media Project at Bard College.

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.   VIEW MORE >>

Judith Shulevitz

Judith Shulevitz is an essayist and editor who has helped found or relaunch several magazines, including Lingua Franca, New York Magazine, and Slate. Currently a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, she has served as editor of Lingua Franca, founding cultural editor and columnist at Slate, deputy editor and columnist for New York Magazine, columnist for The New York Times Book Review, and a senior writer and editor at The New Republic. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and other publications, and she has taught at New York University and Barnard College. She is the author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.

Kenneth Stern

Mr. Stern is the Executive Director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation, which works to combat – and to increase the serious study of – hatred and antisemitism. The Foundation emphasizes projects that impact college students and promote academic freedom, including those that help students engage difficult issues like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and learn how strong passions may influence thinking. Mr. Stern – a Bard alumnus, visiting assistant professor of Human Rights, and a Fellow of Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement – is an award-winning author and attorney, who was director of the division on antisemitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee, where he worked for 25 years.

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Ariana Stokas 

Dean of Inclusive Excellence at Bard College.  Earned her Ph.D in philosophy and education from Columbia University.

Dina Toubasi

Dina (2018) is a an Economics major at Bard College.

Mark Williams Jr. 

Mark Williams Jr. is a Senior at Bard College. 

Thursday, October 20

Friday, October 21

Tuesday, October 18: Public Debate (OPTIONAL)

Resolved: The rapid rise of “safe space” rhetoric on college campuses has done more harm than good. The Bard College debate team will host this public debate in conjunction with the conference – “Real Talk: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion” (October 20-21, 2016). The debate will feature both the Bard and West Point debate teams on mixed teams. Co-sponsored by the Bard Debate Union, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Bard-West Point exchange.

• Free & Open to the Public
• Date: October 18, 2016
• Time: 7:00 pm
• Location: Bard College, Campus Center MPR

Online Registration Is CLOSED.

Due to overwhelming demand, Online Registration Is CLOSED.
If you missed online registration, please do not worry. Visit the On-Site Registration Table 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

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). 

Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building
35 Henderson Cir Dr
Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504

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 early as this is one of the busiest weekends in the Hudson Valley due to the Sheep & Wool Festival.

Parking

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 accross from the Stevenson Gymnasium off Annandale Road. 

Please click HERE to see venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.

Parking is free!

At a time when controversial questions are evacuated from public spaces, we must strive to maintain the idea of university life as a safe space for provocative and even uncomfortable thinking. How can we do this while honoring our unshakable commitment to justice and equality, to opening our academic and political worlds to ever more voices and experiences? This inquiry animates the Hannah Arendt Center’s ninth annual conference, “REAL TALK: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion.” With this in mind, The Hannah Arendt Center challenges students to think through and answer the following question:  How can college be a safe and inclusive space for asking hard and uncomfortable questions that are essential to our democracy?

1. All participants in this year's Thinking Challenge must currently be enrolled in a two- or four-year higher education institution (not open to graduate students). Entries may be submitted individually, or in groups of two [max].

2. Responses can be in the form of an essay (maximum 1,500 words), multimedia blog (maximum 1,500 words), video essays or GoAnimate projects (maximum 5 minutes), xtranormal animations (maximum 5 minutes), digital map, or other related formats. For an example of a video submission, please view the video shown below. You can also view the entries of past Thinking Challenge winners here, here, and here.

 

3. Essays must incorporate quotations, video, or reactions from at least one talk or panel at the Hannah Arendt Center’s 2016 Conference “Real Talk” Students may attend the conference live at Bard College or view the talks via live webcast from the Arendt Center website. The Conference, "REAL TALK" will be held on Thursday and Friday, October 20-21, 2016.

4. Please email your completed entries to [email protected] by no later than noon on Monday, October 30th, 2016. Responses will be judged blindly by a panel of judges from the Arendt Center, including Roger Berkowitz and Samantha Hill. Winning responses should be bold, creative, and persuasive. If you have questions, please email Daniel Fiege, our Media Coordinator, at [email protected]. Thank you, and good luck! 

What Does Privacy Feel Like? from Ava Lindenmaier on Vimeo.