Friendship and Politics

Jana Bacevic

Jana Bacevic is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Durham University, UK, and contributing editor of The Philosopher, UK's longest-running public philosophy journal. Jana's work is in social and political theory and the politics of knowledge production; she has published extensively on the relationship between knowledge and social and political dynamics. Her current work is on non-reciprocity, including in contexts such as 'free speech wars', academic freedom, and public health. 
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Claudia Baracchi

Claudia Baracchi is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Università di Milano-Bicocca. Previously she held positions at the University of Oregon (1996-98) and the New School for Social Research (1999-2009). She is the author of, among others: Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic (2002) Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (2008), L’architettura dell’umano (2014), Il cosmo della Bildung (with R. Rizzi, 2016), Filosofia antica e vita effimera: Migrazioni, trasmigrazioni e laboratori della psiche (2020), Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift (2023). She edited The Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle (2014). Her research focuses on ancient philosophy (also in relation to Eastern traditions and archaic thinking), psychoanalysis, philosophy of art, philosophy and theater. She is a practicing analyst in Milano.

Barbara v. Bechtolsheim

Since January 2022, Barbara von Bechtolsheim has been an Associate Research Scholar at Yale's Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her research focus is on German and American creative couples of the 20th century, currently Hannah Arendt and her husband, Heinrich Blücher. She also works on the poetic reception of classical music. She is most recently the author of Hannah Arendt und Heinrich Blücher Biografie eines Paares, Berlin (Insel 2023) and Paare.Von Beziehungskünstlern und ihrer Liebe (Insel 2022)

Nelly Ben Hayoun

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian PhD (she/they) is an award-winning designer of experiences, creative director and director with over a decade of experience working to build platforms that support plurality, the creation of organised communities and 'impossible' productions, public events, expeditions and projects with socio-political impacts. Uncategorisable, she is also a filmmaker, radio host,keynote speaker, amateur boxer and the director and producer of five feature-length movies.  VIEW MORE >>

Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. A 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.  VIEW MORE >>

Leon Botstein

Leon Botstein has been the President of Bard College since 1975, where he is also the Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He is chairperson of the board of the Central European University and chancellor of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), as well as a member of the Global Board of the Open Society Foundation. 

He is also music director and principal conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the American Symphony Orchestra, artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Botstein is editor of The Musical Quarterly and writes on music and culture.  VIEW MORE >>

Thomas Bartscherer

Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He writes on the intersection of literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on tragic drama, aesthetics, and performance. He also writes on contemporary art, new media technology, and the history and practice of liberal education, and is co-editor of the critical edition Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (forthcoming, 2023).
 

Nick Dunn

Nicholas Dunn is the Klemens von Klemperer Fellow in the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where teaches in Philosophy, Politics, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), and the M.A. in Global Studies (MAGS) program. He received his PhD in Philosophy from McGill University in 2020. His research focuses on the nature of judgment as a capacity of the mind across the various spheres of human life. His work draws on both Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt, and addresses issues that lie at the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, and politics. He has published in Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Kant-Studien, and Kantian Review. He is the editor of a forthcoming volume on Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (De Gruyter).   

Marion Detjen

Marie Luise Knott

Marie Luise Knott was born in Cologne. After completing her Master Degree in Political Science and Roman Literature (1978, University of Konstanz) she worked as an editor for 10 years. Later she worked as a literary translator from French and English and as a journalist for various publishing houses, newspapers and radio stations. From 1995 to 2006 she was the founder and editor in chief of the German Le Monde diplomatique. In 2010 she completed her Ph.D. at Humboldt University: Denken im Dialog mit der Dichtung: ÜberProduktionsbedingungen theoretischer Texte im 20. Jahrhundert am Beispiel Hannah Arendts.  VIEW MORE >>

Marisa Franco

An enlightening psychologist, TED speaker, and New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Marisa G Franco is known for digesting and communicating science in ways that resonate deeply enough with people to change their lives. She works as a professor at The University of Maryland and authored the New York Times bestseller Platonic: How The Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends. She writes about friendship for Psychology Today and has been a featured connection expert for major publications like The New York Times, The Telegraph, and Vice. She speaks on belonging at corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and universities. 

For tips on friendship, you can follow her on Instagram (DrMarisaGFranco), or go to her website, www.DrMarisaGFranco.com, where you can take a quiz to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a friend & reach out for speaking engagements. 

 

Daniel Mason

Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded, among others, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a California Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University department of psychiatry. 

Wyatt Mason

Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a Writer in Residence at Bard, where he is a Senior Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center.

Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh collection of poetry, Door, was bublished by Penguin Random House in March 2023. She writes at the intersection of poetics, politics and the visual arts. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993), she is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature (Written Arts) at Bard College.

Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. An internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator, Mendelsohn's notable works include "An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic" (2017), named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus; and "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" (2006), winner of the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey will be published next year.

Esther Perel

Psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Esther Perel is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. Fluent in nine languages, she helms a therapy practice in New York City and serves as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies around the world. Her celebrated TED talks have garnered more than 40 million views and her international bestseller Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence became a global phenomenon translated into more than 30 languages. Her newest book is the New York Times bestseller The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (HarperCollins). Esther is also the host of the hit podcast Where Should We Begin? which is available on Apple Podcasts. Her latest project is Where Should We Begin - A Game of Stories with Esther Perel. Learn more at EstherPerel.com or by following @EstherPerelOfficial on Instagram.

Lucas G. Pinheiro

Lucas G. Pinheiro is a political theorist and Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard College. He works on the development of global capitalism, empire, and racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century. His current book project is titled Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, and his articles, essays, and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Disability and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Angel Adams Parham

Angel Adams Parham is Associate Professor of Sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) at the University of Virginia.  She works in the area of historical sociology, engaging in research and writing that examine the past in order to better understand how to live well in the present and envision wisely for the future.  She is the author of American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017), which was co-winner of the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial book award (2018)  and co-winner of the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore award in comparative-historical sociology (2018). In addition to this research, she is active in public-facing teaching and scholarship where she provides resources and training for K-12 educators who are looking to better integrate Black writers and Black history into their teaching.  A book related to this work came out in the summer of 2022 and is entitled The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature. Parham’s public-facing work has also led her to become the co-founder and executive director of Nyansa Classical Community, an educational organization which provides history and humanities curricula and programming designed to connect with students from diverse backgrounds. She has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright grant. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and completed her doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Anne Norton

Anne Norton is the inaugural Stacey and Henry Jackson President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science. A scholar of political theory, Norton is the author of seven books, including On the Muslim Question and 95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method. She is Co-Founding Editor of the journal Theory and Event and on the executive board of the journal Political Theory. She also serves on the board of the Bridge Initiative of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Her present work concerns problems of property and democracy. Norton taught at Notre Dame, Princeton, and the University of Texas before coming to Penn in 1993.

Jana Schmidt

Jana Schmidt, assistant professor of German Studies, writes about German and American transatlantic literatures and theory. After completing her PhD in comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, she first came to Bard as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, where she also served as director of academic programs in 2022–23. She has held fellowships at the German Literature Archive Marbach, German Historical Institute Washington, and at Fordham University and the New York Public Library. Her first book, Hannah Arendt und die Folgen (2018), traces the influence of Hannah Arendt’s thought on the work of a variety of postwar thinkers, artists, and activists. She has written essays for publications such as Philosophy Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Narrative Theory, and German Quarterly. Her current writing project deals with the encounter of German-speaking refugees with African American thinkers and politics from the 1940s onward. 

Jana Mader

Jana Mader is Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center. She received her Ph.D. in German Literature from the University of Munich. She taught at UNC-A and at Juilliard and has been at Bard since 2019. Her research focuses on 19th-century literature and art, women writers of the 19th century, nation-building and national narratives, nature in literature, and environmental humanities. Jana works as a writer, scholar, and translator. Her dissertation "Natur und Nation. Landschaft als Ausdruck nationaler Identität. Der Rhein und der Hudson River — ein literaturwissenschaftlicher Vergleich“ (2022) is under contract with Königshausen & Neumann and will get published in the Spring of '23. Her first novel came out in 2018. More about her work can be found here: janamarlene.com

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Prior to that he was a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s. He is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. He is a visiting professor of the humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College and his next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf.

Thomas Wild

Dr. Wild is Professor of German Studies and Literature at Bard, where he works on modern European and German literature and culture. In his research as well as in his teaching he’s particularly interested in the intersections between literature and history, politics, and philosophy. A current focus of his work addresses the poetics and ethics of multilingualism. 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.
 

Niobe Way

Dr. Niobe Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology and the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University (PACH). She is also past President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) and co-director of the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education at NYU. Her work focuses on the intersections of culture, context, and human development, with a particular focus on social and emotional development and how cultural ideologies influence developmental trajectories. The Listening Project, her current project with Joseph Nelson, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, David Kirkland, and Alisha Ali, aims to foster curiosity and connection in and outside of middle school classrooms across New York City. In addition, she created and teaches a core course for undergraduates at NYU called The Science of Human Connection. The course describes her theoretical and empirical framework developed over three decades and discussed in her latest co-edited book The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solution (NYU Press). Dr. Way has also authored nearly a hundred journal articles and books, including Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press) and Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers (NYU Press). Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and numerous foundations including The National Science Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, The Einhorn Family Charitable Trust Foundation, and The Spencer Foundation. She is a contributor to Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and her research is regularly featured in mainstream media outlets (e.g., New York Times, NPR, Today Show, NBC). Examples include Two Cheers for Feminism! and Guys, We Have A Problem: How American Masculinity Creates Lonely Men.

Michael Weinman 

Michael Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin (on leave 2022-23). He is the author or editor of six books, most recently, Hannah Arendt and Politics (Edinburgh UP 2022), with Maria Robaszkiewicz. He is also co-editor, with BCB's Boris Vormann, of The Emergence of Illiberalism (Routledge 2020) and co-author, with BCB's Geoff Lehman, of The Parthenon and Liberal Education (SUNY Press, 2018). His research focuses on political philosophy and the history of political thought, especially the contemporary legacies of classical thought and culture.

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, 50 miles south of Albany, NY, and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Conference takes place in Olin Auditorium in the Olin Humanities Building (C3 on the Bard Map). 

Accomodations

A comprehensive list of nearby hotels, inns, and B & B’s may be found on the Bard webpage, HERE. Please review this list. We recommend booking your accommodations and restaurant dining as soon as possible. We do not offer housing options on campus for guests. There are several Airbnb options in the nearby towns; Red Hook and Tivoli. Please be prepared to use Uber, Lyft, and Taxis to get around. Note: The roads surrounding Bard College are not walkable and due to the rural area, local transport is limited. Please keep this in mind when planning your stay. Still need help? Check out visiting Bard College for more helpful hints, click here.

Local hotel offering a Bard Rate during the conference: 

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 of Annandale Road. Please click HERE to see the venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.

Facebook Group

Looking for a ride? Do you want to organize a get-together outside the conference? Interested in carrying on the conversation? Connect with other conference attendees to plan, discuss, coordinate before the event! Join the Facebook Group.