Hannah Arendt Center 2024–2025 Senior Fellows
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2018–2025
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Senior FellowThomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a 2019 New America Fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, 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. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. Williams was named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction. He will be a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Bard College, Spring 2023.
2022–2025
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2023–2025
Jana Schmidt
Senior FellowJana 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. MA, English, University of Pennsylvania (2007); PhD, comparative literature, SUNY Buffalo (2015). At Bard since 2022.
2023–2025
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2023–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2024–2025 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Jess Feldman
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowJess Feldman is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. They hold an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University and a B.A. in Economics from Amherst College. Jess's research focuses on ideas of collective action in the history of political thought. Their book manuscript, Democracy and the General-Strike Tradition, draws on 20th-century political thought, contemporary democratic theory, and African-American political thought to develop an account of how the general strike has shaped the democratic imaginary. Jess's work on W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction has been published in Political Theory, and an essay on Hannah Arendt's political theory won the Best Paper Award (2024) from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. For more information about Jess and their work, visit jlfeldman.com.
2024–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2024–2025 Fritz Stern Postdoctoral Fellow, Hannah Arendt Center Fellow
Maxim Botstein
Fritz Stern Postdoctoral Fellow, Hannah Arendt CenterMax Botstein is the Fritz Stern Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He studies the intellectual history of modern Europe, with a focus on the development of higher education and democratic thought. His dissertation, “Democracy and the University: America and the Reconstruction of West German Higher Education, 1945-1966” (Harvard University, 2023), examined the postwar efforts to reform German universities and the debates over the role of education in the new German democracy. His research interests include the transatlantic intellectual exchange between the United States and Europe, the interplay between intellectual debates and bureaucratic institutions, and the relationship between politics, society, and culture.
2023–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2024–2025 Associate Fellows
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2023–2025
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2018–2025
Susan Oberman
Associate FellowSusan Oberman has been a member of the Hannah Arendt Center and the Virtual Reading Group since 2016. In 2021 she initiated the Hannah Arendt Center Dialogue Project which offers HAC members the opportunity to engage in dialogue with other Arendt readers. In 2023 she became an Associate Fellow of HAC. She is a proponent of dialogue as a way to provide space for everyone to be seen and heard, and as a model for addressing conflict. Susan has been practicing mediation since 1987 and established Common Ground Negotiation Services in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999. She developed the Sustainable Knowledge Model of Norm-Educating Mediation which she uses in mediation, group facilitation, and negotiation coaching. She sees conflict as an opportunity--to clarify differences in issues and values, rather than something to be avoided. Susan lives in Hurley, NY, with her oldest son and his family and is the proud grandmother of 6. She is an avid international folk dancer. For more information see www.commongroundnegotiation.com
2023–2025
Michael Weinman
Associate FellowMichael 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.
2023–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2024–2025 Visiting Scholar Fellows
David Kim
Visiting ScholarDavid D. Kim is Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute and Professor in the
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA). He also serves as the Inaugural Community Engagement Advisor for the
Division of Humanities. He is the author of Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the
Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2024) and Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and
Responsibility in Contemporary Germany (Northwestern University Press, 2017). He has also
received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the UCLA Gold Shield Faculty Prize.
2024–2025
Lindsay Macumber
Visiting ScholarLindsay teaches courses in Religious Studies and Holocaust Studies at Saint Mary's and Dalhousie University. Her research interests include theodicy, religion and popular culture, Holocaust representation, mythology and gender. Her most recent publications explore connections between mythology and popular film. Some recurring courses she has offered at Saint Mary's University include, Violence, Myth and Story, God and Evil, Religion and Contemporary Culture, and the Jewish Religious Tradition.
2024–2024
Hannah Arendt Center 2023–2024 Senior Fellows
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2023–2024
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2018–2024
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Senior FellowThomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a 2019 New America Fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, 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. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. Williams was named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction. He will be a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Bard College, Spring 2023.
2022–2025
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2023–2025
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2018–2025
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2023–2025
Jana Schmidt
Senior FellowJana 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. MA, English, University of Pennsylvania (2007); PhD, comparative literature, SUNY Buffalo (2015). At Bard since 2022.
2023–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2023–2024 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow
Marie-Luise Knott
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowMarie 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: Über Produktionsbedingungen theoretischer Texte im 20. Jahrhundert am Beispiel Hannah Arendts. Since 2006 she works as curator, editor, translator and author. She has diverse teaching experiences at Universities (FU Berlin, Universität Greifswald) and other german institutions. Her publications include Unlearning with Hannah Arendt (2011/2015) and Exhaustion of Modernity in 1930 (2017). She edited the letters of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem (2010), co-edited a book on John Cage (Empty Mind, 2012) and translated several works by Anne Carson. Her long essay 370 Riverside Drive, 730 Riverside Drive: Hannah Arendt and Ralph Waldo Ellison (2022), won her the renowned Tractatus Prize for Philisophical Essais at the Philosophicum Lech.
2023–2024
Hannah Arendt Center 2023–2024 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Nicholas Dunn
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowNicholas Dunn is the College Professor of Philosophy at Okanagan College (British Columbia, Canada). From 2022-2024, he was the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he taught courses in Philosophy, Political Studies, and the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). As an Associate Fellow of HAC, he oversees the Quote of the Week Program. He also initiated and coordinates the De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking. His research focuses on the nature of judgment as a capacity of the mind across the various spheres of human life—drawing on Kant and the Kantian tradition, especially the thought of Hannah Arendt. His work has been published in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Kant-Studien, Kantian Review, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. He is the editor of a forthcoming volume on Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (De Gruyter). He received his PhD in Philosophy from McGill University in 2020. To learn more, visit http://nicholasdunn.me.
2023–2024
Hannah Arendt Center 2023–2024 Fritz Stern Postdoctoral Fellow, Hannah Arendt Center Fellow
Maxim Botstein
Fritz Stern Postdoctoral Fellow, Hannah Arendt CenterMax Botstein is the Fritz Stern Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He studies the intellectual history of modern Europe, with a focus on the development of higher education and democratic thought. His dissertation, “Democracy and the University: America and the Reconstruction of West German Higher Education, 1945-1966” (Harvard University, 2023), examined the postwar efforts to reform German universities and the debates over the role of education in the new German democracy. His research interests include the transatlantic intellectual exchange between the United States and Europe, the interplay between intellectual debates and bureaucratic institutions, and the relationship between politics, society, and culture.
2023–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2023–2024 Associate Fellows
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2023–2024
Mark Williams Jr.
Associate FellowMark Williams Jr. is a public health educator and program manager in the Department of Neurology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he develops and tests community-based behavioral interventions for African American populations in NIH-funded randomized control trials. He is also a fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College, and is the former Director of Access, Equity, and Inclusion Programs at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, where he designed and taught social and behavioral sciences courses for high school and college students. His research focuses on the pragmatics of harm reduction and community-based participatory research to address health disparities in urban environments, the bioethics of emerging concepts and technologies in the biomedical sciences, and the relationship between public health, aesthetic philosophy, and critical theory in health communications. He is an award-winning teacher and student mentor having most recently been recognized in 2020 with the Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Chicago, for his commitment to careful educational instruction and student development both inside and outside of the classroom. He graduated from Bard College with a degree in Anthropology and Global Public Health and is currently a M.S. candidate in Community Health Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
2023–2024
Aaron Tugendhaft
Associate FellowAaron Tugendhaft studied history and philosophy at the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Sorbonne. Since receiving his doctorate in ancient Near Eastern Studies from New York University in 2012, he has taught broadly within the humanities on four continents and has become a staunch advocate of traditional liberal education as a corrective to premature professionalization, academic hyperspecialization, and political polarization. His work in comparative political theory has mainly focused on the cultures of the ancient world. In 2018, he published Baal and the Politics of Poetry (Routledge), which studied ancient Ugairitic poetry in the context of Late Bronze Age political ideas. His most recent book, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020), is a philosophical meditation on an Islamic State video of iconoclasm that explores the political power of images and the significance of their destruction. From 2021-23, he served as chair of the history department and director of interdisciplinary programs at the Ramaz School in New York City, where he received the Abraham Pilchik Faculty Award for dedication to his students. His essays and reviews have appeared in Arion, Cabinet, Critical Inquiry, Critical Muslim, and the Jewish Review of Books. He currently lives in Berlin with his cat Bernstein.
2023–2024
Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stepanian
Associate FellowNelly 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. She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world’s first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts;and the founder of the tuition-free, pluralistic and transnational university-University of the Underground-which includes board members and activists like Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot and Prof. Arjun Appadurai, this tuition-free educative and cultural program is supporting plurality of thinking, free and transnational teaching and unconventional practices in the basement of nightclubs since 2017. Her large scale projects have included collaborations with political activists and artists like Massive Attack and Kid Cudi, The Avalanches to name a few. She is known for challenging institutions from within through events, and she has done so at the United Nations, NASA, International Academy of Astronautics, or the International Astronautical Federation amongst many others. Clients and collaborators include BMW, Porsche, MINI, LEGO, Mattel, NIKE, NASA, the United Nations, and many more. In 2020, Dezeen selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. one the world’s best design studios and in 2021 The Dots selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. as one of the “Top 50 companies to work for in 2021”. Nelly has two doppelgangers who work with her to appear at multiple places at the same time, a Barbie doll and a Lego made of herself. In 2023, Design Week awarded Nelly with 'The Hall of Fame' lifetime achievement which 'acknowledges the achievements of designers and industry figures who have made a significant impact and contribution to the industry;have provided inspiration and incisive thinking. It aims to acknowledge key contribution to design today and people who are consistently creating brilliant work.'
2023–2024
Kris McDaniel-Miccio
Associate FellowKris McDaniel-Miccio, JD LLM JS.D is an internationally recognised scholar, attorney and professor with a specialty in sex/gender equality. Her scholarship is cited by US Federal Courts, legislation authored appears in NYS family and criminal procedure law and her successful litigation in Colorado & NY, opened marriage to lesbian and gay couples, provided wage equality to women faculty and opened the courts to women survivors of male intimate violence. McDaniel-Miccio’s work shall utilise Arendt’s theories of totalitarianism in reframing substantive due process, enabling enforcement of 14th A to protect the lives and rights of women and the LGBTQ community.
2023–2024
Jana Bacevic
Associate FellowJana Bacevic is assistant professor at Durham University, UK, and contributing editor at The Philosopher, UK's oldest 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. Jana has also worked as consultant and policy advisor for a range of governments and international organizations in the field of education, inequality/injustice, and minority rights. Her current work is on non-reciprocity, including in contexts such as public health, academic freedom, and personal relationships.
2023–2024
Kenyon Victor Adams
Associate FellowKenyon Victor Adams is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. His recent work explores the notion of fractured epistemologies, and seeks to reclaim or expand various ways of knowing through integrative artistic practices. Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership at Yale School of Drama, Yale ISM Poetry Conference, Live IdeasFestival, the Langston Hughes Project, the National Arts Policy Roundtable, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
2023–2024
Jonas Kunz
Associate FellowAfter finishing his primary education at a Steiner School close to Munich, Germany, Jonas attended Bard College, where he took classes in Ancient Greek, Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Jonas first heard about sortition from his good friend Luke Harrington, who in turn had heard about it from another trusted friend. Searching for a more meaningful democratic process, he quickly recognised: sortition warrants deeper investigation. Upon finishing his thesis for his B.A. in Political Studies on sortition, Jonas invited Hans to co-found B.I.R.D.S. in the Spring of 2018.
2023–2024
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2018–2025
Susan Oberman
Associate FellowSusan Oberman has been a member of the Hannah Arendt Center and the Virtual Reading Group since 2016. In 2021 she initiated the Hannah Arendt Center Dialogue Project which offers HAC members the opportunity to engage in dialogue with other Arendt readers. In 2023 she became an Associate Fellow of HAC. She is a proponent of dialogue as a way to provide space for everyone to be seen and heard, and as a model for addressing conflict. Susan has been practicing mediation since 1987 and established Common Ground Negotiation Services in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999. She developed the Sustainable Knowledge Model of Norm-Educating Mediation which she uses in mediation, group facilitation, and negotiation coaching. She sees conflict as an opportunity--to clarify differences in issues and values, rather than something to be avoided. Susan lives in Hurley, NY, with her oldest son and his family and is the proud grandmother of 6. She is an avid international folk dancer. For more information see www.commongroundnegotiation.com
2023–2025
Michael Weinman
Associate FellowMichael 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.
2023–2025
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2023–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2023–2024 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Max Klein
Visiting ScholarMax Klein is a lecturer at the Chair of Political Theory at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He is currently finishing his dissertation project in History of Political Thought on property rights in the geneology of democratic rule of law. His interdisciplinary research and teaching interests focuse on critical legal theory, property theory and the History of Political Thought, with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th century. Most recently, he published in the German Political Science Quarterly on the expropriation debate in the Weimar Republic. The current research project follows on from a study he published on the analytical value of Hannah Arendt's concept of the world and aims to demonstrate the capacity of her work for contemporary political and legal challenges in the context of climate change. He is thinking about structurally reinventing of the present liberal property order with the help of Hannah Arendt's concept of Nachwelt. At the Hannah Arendt Center, Max Klein traces the genealogical origins of the Nachwelt and seeks to systematically explore the concept, which has been hitherto overlooked in the Arendt research.
2023–2024
Marion Detjen
Visiting ScholarMarion Detjen teaches migration history and global history at Bard College Berlin and works for Bard College Berlin’s scholarship program for displaced students. She is a graduate of the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, and studied European history and German literature and linguistics in Berlin and Munich, where she received her MA and passed her first state exam. She worked for several years as a freelance curator, teacher, writer, and activist, before receiving her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on rescue helpers after the building of the Berlin Wall. 2009 - 2014 Marion worked and taught at Humboldt University Berlin, 2015 - 2107 on a DFG-position at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She is currently writing a book on the German-American publisher in exile Helen Wolff and her most favorite author Uwe Johnson. She is a regular contributor to the column „10nach8“ at ZEIT-Online as part of its editorial team, and a co-founder and board member of "Wir machen das," a coalition of action focused on the migration crisis, where she recently set up “Helen Wolff grants” to support female writers at risk in Afghanistan and other regions of crisis.
2023–2024
Jacob Boerssema
Visiting ScholarJacob Boersema is a lecturer at New York University and Visiting Assistant Professor at Manhattan College in New York City. He is also a Fellow at the Cultural Sociology Center at Yale University. He is a sociologist and historian who does research on race and racism in the US, Europe and South Africa. Previously he was a postdoc at Rutgers University and a lecturer at Columbia University. In 2022 his first book was published: Can We Unlearn Racism? What South Africa Teaches Us About Whiteness with Stanford University Press.
2023–2024
Lindsay Macumber
Visiting ScholarLindsay teaches courses in Religious Studies and Holocaust Studies at Saint Mary's and Dalhousie University. Her research interests include theodicy, religion and popular culture, Holocaust representation, mythology and gender. Her most recent publications explore connections between mythology and popular film. Some recurring courses she has offered at Saint Mary's University include, Violence, Myth and Story, God and Evil, Religion and Contemporary Culture, and the Jewish Religious Tradition.
2024–2024
Gabriele Parrino
Visiting ScholarGabriele Parrino is a Ph.D student in Political Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore
di Pisa (supervisor Prof. Simona Forti). His doctoral project is focused on the configuration
of Roman political thought within the theoretical framework of Hannah Arendt's work. This
relationship is based on a critical understanding of Arendt's political ontology, through the
reading of Claude Lefort, Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Rancière, in a way of relating a
participatory and instituting conception of freedom, authority with democratic foundations
and their political temporality. An "authoritative" kind of democracy without absolute
foundations, free to create the new, but always balanced between the original event that
produced it and the possibility of establishing itself in an institutional framework in which
temporality and historicity both generate the power of the new and preserve the necessary
character of its powerful and plural narrative. He is also interested in queer critical theory,
especially on the relationship that crosses desire, political action, and monstrous identities.
He is also part of the scientific committee of of FUEL – Feminist and Queer Philosophy
Lab at the University of Milan.
2024–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2022–2023 Senior Fellows
Jacob Burda
Senior FellowJacob Burda wrote his doctoral thesis on the conception of infinity in early German Romanticism at Oxford University. His thesis was translated into German and published with Metzler, here. He has lectured on German literature and philosophy at UCLA, and is particularly interested in cultural history, phenomenology (especially Heidegger) and the philosophy of physics. He is the co-founder of the Alpine Fellowship, an annual symposium centered around aesthetics and ideas.
2020–2023
Samantha Hill
Senior FellowSamantha Rose Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt (Reaktion, 2021) and Hannah Arendt’s Poems forthcoming from Liveright. She is a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. You can find her work in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory and Event. www.samantharosehill.com
2021–2023
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Micah White
Senior FellowMICAH WHITE, PhD is a lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. 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. Micah's book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published by Knopf Canada and has been translated into Greek and German. A sought after activist speaker and educator, Micah has delivered numerous lectures at prestigious universities, cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and beyond. Micah is the co-founder of Activist Graduate School, an online school for activists. The first Activist Graduate School course was taught and filmed at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard. Learn more about Micah at micahmwhite.com
2018–2023
Kenyon Victor Adams
Senior FellowKenyon Victor Adams is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. His recent work explores the notion of fractured epistemologies, and seeks to reclaim or expand various ways of knowing through integrative artistic practices. Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership at Yale School of Drama, Yale ISM Poetry Conference, Live IdeasFestival, the Langston Hughes Project, the National Arts Policy Roundtable, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
2018–2023
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2018–2024
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Senior FellowThomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a 2019 New America Fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, 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. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. Williams was named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction. He will be a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Bard College, Spring 2023.
2022–2025
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2018–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2022–2023 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Nicholas Dunn
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowNicholas Dunn is the College Professor of Philosophy at Okanagan College (British Columbia, Canada). From 2022-2024, he was the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he taught courses in Philosophy, Political Studies, and the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). As an Associate Fellow of HAC, he oversees the Quote of the Week Program. He also initiated and coordinates the De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking. His research focuses on the nature of judgment as a capacity of the mind across the various spheres of human life—drawing on Kant and the Kantian tradition, especially the thought of Hannah Arendt. His work has been published in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Kant-Studien, Kantian Review, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. He is the editor of a forthcoming volume on Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (De Gruyter). He received his PhD in Philosophy from McGill University in 2020. To learn more, visit http://nicholasdunn.me.
2022–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2022–2023 Associate Fellows
Libby Barringer
Associate FellowLibby 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.
2017–2023
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Nelly Ben Hayoun
Associate FellowNelly 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. She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world’s first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts;and the founder of the tuition-free, pluralistic and transnational university-University of the Underground-which includes board members and activists like Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot and Prof. Arjun Appadurai, this tuition-free educative and cultural program is supporting plurality of thinking, free and transnational teaching and unconventional practices in the basement of nightclubs since 2017. Her large scale projects have included collaborations with political activists and artists like Massive Attack and Kid Cudi, The Avalanches to name a few. She is known for challenging institutions from within through events, and she has done so at the United Nations, NASA, International Academy of Astronautics, or the International Astronautical Federation amongst many others. Clients and collaborators include BMW, Porsche, MINI, LEGO, Mattel, NIKE, NASA, the United Nations, and many more. In 2020, Dezeen selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. one the world’s best design studios and in 2021 The Dots selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. as one of the “Top 50 companies to work for in 2021”. Nelly has two doppelgangers who work with her to appear at multiple places at the same time, a Barbie doll and a Lego made of herself. In 2023, Design Week awarded Nelly with 'The Hall of Fame' lifetime achievement which 'acknowledges the achievements of designers and industry figures who have made a significant impact and contribution to the industry;have provided inspiration and incisive thinking. It aims to acknowledge key contribution to design today and people who are consistently creating brilliant work.'
2018–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Jonas Kunz
Associate FellowAfter finishing his primary education at a Steiner School close to Munich, Germany, Jonas attended Bard College, where he took classes in Ancient Greek, Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Jonas first heard about sortition from his good friend Luke Harrington, who in turn had heard about it from another trusted friend. Searching for a more meaningful democratic process, he quickly recognised: sortition warrants deeper investigation. Upon finishing his thesis for his B.A. in Political Studies on sortition, Jonas invited Hans to co-found B.I.R.D.S. in the Spring of 2018.
2018–2023
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2018–2025
Nikita Nelin
Associate FellowNikita Nelin (BA, Bard College; MFA, Brooklyn College) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and immersive journalism. His writing experiments with voice driven narrative in the intersection of memory and imagination, while often referencing the themes of his own emigration experience. His journalism subverts the objective-witness myth and explores ritual, ceremony, alternative community models, and the contemporary culture-at-large through “a perspective from the cultural fringe.” He has written about Standing Rock, Burning Man, education towards individual agency, and socio-cultural sustainability in consumerist and branding practices. His early research focused on the “silenced generations;” Soviet writers and artists rejected by the communist party. He received the 2010 Sean O’Faolain Prize for short fiction, the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars Prize for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2017 Restless Books Immigrant Prize as well as at 2018 Dzanc Books Prize. He has taught independently and at Brooklyn College with special concentration in the Close-Reading Method. An expanded CV, work samples, as well as projects in development can be found at nikitanelin.com
2018–2023
Jana Mader
Associate FellowJana Mader 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
2022–2023
Mark Williams Jr.
Associate FellowMark Williams Jr. is a public health educator and program manager in the Department of Neurology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he develops and tests community-based behavioral interventions for African American populations in NIH-funded randomized control trials. He is also a fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College, and is the former Director of Access, Equity, and Inclusion Programs at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, where he designed and taught social and behavioral sciences courses for high school and college students. His research focuses on the pragmatics of harm reduction and community-based participatory research to address health disparities in urban environments, the bioethics of emerging concepts and technologies in the biomedical sciences, and the relationship between public health, aesthetic philosophy, and critical theory in health communications. He is an award-winning teacher and student mentor having most recently been recognized in 2020 with the Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Chicago, for his commitment to careful educational instruction and student development both inside and outside of the classroom. He graduated from Bard College with a degree in Anthropology and Global Public Health and is currently a M.S. candidate in Community Health Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
2021–2022
Susan Oberman
Associate FellowSusan Oberman has been a member of the Hannah Arendt Center and the Virtual Reading Group since 2016. In 2021 she initiated the Hannah Arendt Center Dialogue Project which offers HAC members the opportunity to engage in dialogue with other Arendt readers. In 2023 she became an Associate Fellow of HAC. She is a proponent of dialogue as a way to provide space for everyone to be seen and heard, and as a model for addressing conflict. Susan has been practicing mediation since 1987 and established Common Ground Negotiation Services in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999. She developed the Sustainable Knowledge Model of Norm-Educating Mediation which she uses in mediation, group facilitation, and negotiation coaching. She sees conflict as an opportunity--to clarify differences in issues and values, rather than something to be avoided. Susan lives in Hurley, NY, with her oldest son and his family and is the proud grandmother of 6. She is an avid international folk dancer. For more information see www.commongroundnegotiation.com
2023–2025
Michael Weinman
Associate FellowMichael 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.
2023–2025
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2022–2023 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Tim Wyman-McCarthy
Visiting ScholarTim Wyman-McCarthy is a 6th year PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is completing a dissertation on how the rhetoric of social movements has entered liberal social change projects. The project, "In Search of the Political," aims to theorize the political grammar developed by elite human rights, development, and philanthropic institutions in their engagement with social movements. His research and teaching interests encompass histories of human rights, philanthropy, and development; law and the humanities; postcolonial and settler colonial studies; socio-legal studies; narrative analysis and genre theory; and the intersection of literature and political theory. Before arriving at Berkeley, Tim completed a BA in English Literature and History (Queen's U, Canada), MA in English Literature (Oxford, UK), and an MA in Human Rights Studies (Columbia, USA), and worked in a number of third sector organizations, including CARE USA, Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and Human Rights Watch. For the past two years he has also been the Editorial Assistant for the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory.
2022–2023
Alex Cain
Visiting ScholarAlex Cain is a PhD candidate and Teaching Associate in the philosophy department at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her dissertation focuses on the relation between thinking and friendship in the work of Hannah Arendt. Her article, “Arendt’s Contradictions: ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ in the perspective of Arendt’s practice of Socratic dialogue” is published in Arendt Studies. She has also published on Kant in Critical Horizons and Kant and Arendt in Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique. Alex’s interests include ethical and political theory within the European philosophical tradition, with a special focus on community, solidarity, and friendship. Her research has received funding from Monash University, the Australian government, and the DAAD. At the Hannah Arendt Center Alex is particularly interested in studying the marginalia in the books in Arendt’s personal library and Heinrich Blücher’s lectures on friendship.
2022–2023
Nagehan Yanar
Visiting ScholarPrior to coming to Bard College, Nagehan Yanar received a MA with High Honors in English Language and Literature from Yeditepe University on a full scholarship. She holds a BA with High Honors in English Language and Literature at Kocaeli University, where she graduated the First-ranked in both the department and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She also studied at King's College London and Bogazici University as a visiting student. Her fields of interest are situated at the intersection of the twentieth-century European (mainly British) and American literature, critical theory, twentieth-century Continental theory, as well as modern political thought. Specifically, her recent research has focused on weaving together the insights of Hannah Arendt, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf to critically examine the concepts of freedom, political subjectivity, action, violence, and totalitarianism. She is currently working on her article titled "Seeing Faulkner Through Arendt: The Sound and the Fury.” Nagehan Yanar is the translator of Frederick C. Beiser's Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy 1860-1900 into Turkish (forthcoming, Istanbul: Say Publishing, 2022).
2022–2023
Jennifer Lupu
Visiting ScholarJennifer A. Lupu is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Northwestern University, a former predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and the former archaeology intern for the Washington, DC Historic Preservation Office. Her dissertation analyzes the circulation of medical commodities between 1880-1930 in Washington, DC, analyzing materials from archaeologically excavated household refuse deposits at multiple sites across the city. Drawing together data across multiple scales of analysis, her research examines the interrelationship between legislative action and everyday life, asking "how did large-scale regulatory and social changes, such as the governmental regulation of pharmaceuticals, influence medicine access and consumption practices among the residents of Washington, DC?" Her research has received funding from the Social Sciences Research Council, the Smithsonian Institution, the DC Historic Preservation Office, and the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).
2021–2023
Mirka Muilu
Visiting ScholarMirka Muilu is a PhD candidate in media studies at Tampere University. Her interests lie in the
science and technology studies, new materialism and theories and possibilities of civil activity. In her
research, she interprets Hannah Arendt’s theory of active life from the perspective of material media
theory. The dissertation brings Arendt’s conceptualizations into the discussion with the current debates of
agency and suggests that Arendt’s way to understand the dynamic between the earth and the world offers
a fruitful analytical viewpoint to politicize the material dependencies of virtual media cultures. Mirka has
worked as a doctoral researcher and a teaching assistant at her home university between 2018-2022.
Currently she is funded by Ella & Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation. Before starting her academic research, she
has worked as a journalist. The visiting at the Hannah Arendt Center is a great opportunity to network and
to finalize her thesis.
2022–2023
Jana Bacevic
Visiting ScholarJana Bacevic is assistant professor at Durham University, UK, and contributing editor at The Philosopher, UK's oldest 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. Jana has also worked as consultant and policy advisor for a range of governments and international organizations in the field of education, inequality/injustice, and minority rights. Her current work is on non-reciprocity, including in contexts such as public health, academic freedom, and personal relationships.
2023–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2021–2022 Senior Fellows
Jacob Burda
Senior FellowJacob Burda wrote his doctoral thesis on the conception of infinity in early German Romanticism at Oxford University. His thesis was translated into German and published with Metzler, here. He has lectured on German literature and philosophy at UCLA, and is particularly interested in cultural history, phenomenology (especially Heidegger) and the philosophy of physics. He is the co-founder of the Alpine Fellowship, an annual symposium centered around aesthetics and ideas.
2020–2023
Samantha Hill
Senior FellowSamantha Rose Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt (Reaktion, 2021) and Hannah Arendt’s Poems forthcoming from Liveright. She is a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. You can find her work in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory and Event. www.samantharosehill.com
2021–2023
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Micah White
Senior FellowMICAH WHITE, PhD is a lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. 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. Micah's book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published by Knopf Canada and has been translated into Greek and German. A sought after activist speaker and educator, Micah has delivered numerous lectures at prestigious universities, cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and beyond. Micah is the co-founder of Activist Graduate School, an online school for activists. The first Activist Graduate School course was taught and filmed at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard. Learn more about Micah at micahmwhite.com
2018–2023
Kenyon Victor Adams
Senior FellowKenyon Victor Adams is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. His recent work explores the notion of fractured epistemologies, and seeks to reclaim or expand various ways of knowing through integrative artistic practices. Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership at Yale School of Drama, Yale ISM Poetry Conference, Live IdeasFestival, the Langston Hughes Project, the National Arts Policy Roundtable, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
2018–2023
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2018–2024
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2018–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2021–2022 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow
David van Reybrouck
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowDavid Van Reybrouck is considered 'one of the leading intellectuals in Europe' (Der Tagesspiegel) and is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens' Summit, and his work has led to trials in deliberative democracy throughout Europe. His book Against Elections: The Case for Democracy was translated in over twenty languages and received endorsements from Kofi Annan, J.M. Coetzee and Karen Armstrong. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation, whose most recent book, Congo: The Epic History of a People, won 19 prizes, sold over 500,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. It was described as a 'masterpiece' by the Independent and 'magnificent' by The New York Times. David studied at the Universities of Leuven and Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Leiden and an honorary doctorate from the Université St Louis in Brussels.
2020–2022
Hannah Arendt Center 2021–2022 Associate Fellows
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Libby Barringer
Associate FellowLibby 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.
2017–2023
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Nelly Ben Hayoun
Associate FellowNelly 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. She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world’s first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts;and the founder of the tuition-free, pluralistic and transnational university-University of the Underground-which includes board members and activists like Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot and Prof. Arjun Appadurai, this tuition-free educative and cultural program is supporting plurality of thinking, free and transnational teaching and unconventional practices in the basement of nightclubs since 2017. Her large scale projects have included collaborations with political activists and artists like Massive Attack and Kid Cudi, The Avalanches to name a few. She is known for challenging institutions from within through events, and she has done so at the United Nations, NASA, International Academy of Astronautics, or the International Astronautical Federation amongst many others. Clients and collaborators include BMW, Porsche, MINI, LEGO, Mattel, NIKE, NASA, the United Nations, and many more. In 2020, Dezeen selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. one the world’s best design studios and in 2021 The Dots selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. as one of the “Top 50 companies to work for in 2021”. Nelly has two doppelgangers who work with her to appear at multiple places at the same time, a Barbie doll and a Lego made of herself. In 2023, Design Week awarded Nelly with 'The Hall of Fame' lifetime achievement which 'acknowledges the achievements of designers and industry figures who have made a significant impact and contribution to the industry;have provided inspiration and incisive thinking. It aims to acknowledge key contribution to design today and people who are consistently creating brilliant work.'
2018–2023
Jonas Kunz
Associate FellowAfter finishing his primary education at a Steiner School close to Munich, Germany, Jonas attended Bard College, where he took classes in Ancient Greek, Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Jonas first heard about sortition from his good friend Luke Harrington, who in turn had heard about it from another trusted friend. Searching for a more meaningful democratic process, he quickly recognised: sortition warrants deeper investigation. Upon finishing his thesis for his B.A. in Political Studies on sortition, Jonas invited Hans to co-found B.I.R.D.S. in the Spring of 2018.
2018–2023
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2018–2025
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Nikita Nelin
Associate FellowNikita Nelin (BA, Bard College; MFA, Brooklyn College) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and immersive journalism. His writing experiments with voice driven narrative in the intersection of memory and imagination, while often referencing the themes of his own emigration experience. His journalism subverts the objective-witness myth and explores ritual, ceremony, alternative community models, and the contemporary culture-at-large through “a perspective from the cultural fringe.” He has written about Standing Rock, Burning Man, education towards individual agency, and socio-cultural sustainability in consumerist and branding practices. His early research focused on the “silenced generations;” Soviet writers and artists rejected by the communist party. He received the 2010 Sean O’Faolain Prize for short fiction, the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars Prize for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2017 Restless Books Immigrant Prize as well as at 2018 Dzanc Books Prize. He has taught independently and at Brooklyn College with special concentration in the Close-Reading Method. An expanded CV, work samples, as well as projects in development can be found at nikitanelin.com
2018–2023
Mark Williams Jr.
Associate FellowMark Williams Jr. is a public health educator and program manager in the Department of Neurology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he develops and tests community-based behavioral interventions for African American populations in NIH-funded randomized control trials. He is also a fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College, and is the former Director of Access, Equity, and Inclusion Programs at Bard High School Early College Manhattan, where he designed and taught social and behavioral sciences courses for high school and college students. His research focuses on the pragmatics of harm reduction and community-based participatory research to address health disparities in urban environments, the bioethics of emerging concepts and technologies in the biomedical sciences, and the relationship between public health, aesthetic philosophy, and critical theory in health communications. He is an award-winning teacher and student mentor having most recently been recognized in 2020 with the Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Chicago, for his commitment to careful educational instruction and student development both inside and outside of the classroom. He graduated from Bard College with a degree in Anthropology and Global Public Health and is currently a M.S. candidate in Community Health Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
2021–2022
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2021–2022 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Jana Marlene Mader
Visiting ScholarJana Mader 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
2018–2022
Nicholas Poole
Visiting ScholarNicholas Poole is a PHD candidate in the program for Social and Political Thought at York University. His interests include the history of social and political thought, phenomenology, and political aesthetics. His dissertation, ‘The Normativity of Public Freedom: Towards a Democratic Theory of Exemplarity,’ develops an Arendtian account of exemplarity as a distinctly political source of normativity suited to exercises of public freedom in pluralistic societies. At the Hannah Arendt Center, Nicholas will be focusing his research on Arendt’s theory of language, in particular her views on metaphor and ordinary language philosophy, in an effort to distinguish her interpretation of Kant’s notion of ‘exemplary validity’ from alternatives in contemporary political philosophy. Nicholas’ research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
2021–2022
Magnus Ferguson
Visiting ScholarMagnus Ferguson is a 5th-year PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department at Boston College. He studies political responsibility and moral emotions, and his research draws from a wide range of philosophical traditions including social epistemology, feminist philosophy, hermeneutics, and 20th-century European philosophy (especially that of Hannah Arendt). His dissertation proposes that certain forms of vicarious regret can play important roles in identifying and taking on collective political responsibilities. Magnus was a Visiting Lecturer and Social and Emotional Learning and Civic Engagement Fellow at Tufts University in 2020-21, and is currently a Graduate Fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.
2021–2022
Anna Argiro
Visiting ScholarIn 2016, Anna Argirò obtained a BA in Philosophy from La Sapienza University of Rome, where she also
completed her MA studies in Philosophy (2018). Since September 2020, Anna has been a Ph.D. candidate at
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University London, UK. Her
dissertation, tentatively titled Rethinking Birth and Maternity as Philosophical Categories: Hannah Arendt’s
Notion of Natality in Dialogue with Contemporary Feminist Thought, aims at underlining the limits of the
revival of the question of death in twentieth-century European philosophy by rethinking ‘birth’ and
‘maternity’ as philosophical categories. She proposes to do this by building upon Hannah Arendt’s notion of
‘natality’ with further resources from contemporary feminist thought. For her project, Anna has been
awarded a grant from Sapienza University (2020-2021), and a scholarship from the TECHNE AHRC
Doctoral Training Partnership (2021-2024). Her research period at the Hannah Arendt Center is further
funded by the UK Turing Scheme.
2021–2022
Jennifer Lupu
Visiting ScholarJennifer A. Lupu is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Northwestern University, a former predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and the former archaeology intern for the Washington, DC Historic Preservation Office. Her dissertation analyzes the circulation of medical commodities between 1880-1930 in Washington, DC, analyzing materials from archaeologically excavated household refuse deposits at multiple sites across the city. Drawing together data across multiple scales of analysis, her research examines the interrelationship between legislative action and everyday life, asking "how did large-scale regulatory and social changes, such as the governmental regulation of pharmaceuticals, influence medicine access and consumption practices among the residents of Washington, DC?" Her research has received funding from the Social Sciences Research Council, the Smithsonian Institution, the DC Historic Preservation Office, and the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).
2021–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2020–2021 Senior Fellows
Ann Seaton
Senior FellowDirector of Difference and Media Project; Director of Multicultural Affairs; Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. B.A., Wellesley College; Ph.D., Harvard University. Visiting Scholar, Columbia University; Faculty Publishing Fellow, City University of New York; Du Bois Fellow, Harvard. Assistant professor, English, CUNY. Has lectured at Harvard, Brown University, New York University, SUNY Binghamton, Amherst College. At Bard since 2009.
2018–2021
Zephyr Teachout
Senior FellowZephyr 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.
2017–2021
Jacob Burda
Senior FellowJacob Burda wrote his doctoral thesis on the conception of infinity in early German Romanticism at Oxford University. His thesis was translated into German and published with Metzler, here. He has lectured on German literature and philosophy at UCLA, and is particularly interested in cultural history, phenomenology (especially Heidegger) and the philosophy of physics. He is the co-founder of the Alpine Fellowship, an annual symposium centered around aesthetics and ideas.
2020–2023
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Micah White
Senior FellowMICAH WHITE, PhD is a lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. 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. Micah's book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published by Knopf Canada and has been translated into Greek and German. A sought after activist speaker and educator, Micah has delivered numerous lectures at prestigious universities, cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and beyond. Micah is the co-founder of Activist Graduate School, an online school for activists. The first Activist Graduate School course was taught and filmed at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard. Learn more about Micah at micahmwhite.com
2018–2023
Kenyon Victor Adams
Senior FellowKenyon Victor Adams is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. His recent work explores the notion of fractured epistemologies, and seeks to reclaim or expand various ways of knowing through integrative artistic practices. Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership at Yale School of Drama, Yale ISM Poetry Conference, Live IdeasFestival, the Langston Hughes Project, the National Arts Policy Roundtable, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
2018–2023
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2018–2024
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2018–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2020–2021 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow
David van Reybrouck
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowDavid Van Reybrouck is considered 'one of the leading intellectuals in Europe' (Der Tagesspiegel) and is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens' Summit, and his work has led to trials in deliberative democracy throughout Europe. His book Against Elections: The Case for Democracy was translated in over twenty languages and received endorsements from Kofi Annan, J.M. Coetzee and Karen Armstrong. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation, whose most recent book, Congo: The Epic History of a People, won 19 prizes, sold over 500,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. It was described as a 'masterpiece' by the Independent and 'magnificent' by The New York Times. David studied at the Universities of Leuven and Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Leiden and an honorary doctorate from the Université St Louis in Brussels.
2020–2022
Hannah Arendt Center 2020–2021 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Chiara Ricciardone
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowRaised in Egypt and Turkey, educated at Swarthmore (BA 2005) and Berkeley (PhD 2017), Chiara Ricciardone’s research interests range widely. Most of her work to date has focused on the ancient Greeks and critical theory; she is particularly fascinated by the political and formal problem that difference poses for human beings, and how it might be possible to think of difference without hierarchy. Sometimes she despairs of knowing anything whatsoever, and then she turns to activism and art. Ricciardone is at work on a book of auto-fiction that suggests the self itself is a fiction, and perhaps no longer a useful one. She currently serves as Provost for the Activist Graduate School. Learn more about Chiara at chiararicciardone.net
2018–2021
Hannah Arendt Center 2020–2021 Associate Fellows
Todd Pittinsky
Associate FellowTodd L. Pittinsky is a Professor in Stony Brook University’s Department of Technology & Society (SUNY), and the Faculty Director of its Undergraduate College of Leadership and Service. Before that, he was on the faculty of Harvard University, as an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as the Director of Research for the Harvard Center for Public Leadership (CPL), where he was principal investigator of the multi-year National Leadership Index (a collaborative project with U.S. News and World Report), led the taskforce which developed the Harvard CPL Leadership Development Model and codeveloped the Center’s social entrepreneurship programs. Later, Todd also served on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
2019–2021
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Libby Barringer
Associate FellowLibby 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.
2017–2023
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Jonas Kunz
Associate FellowAfter finishing his primary education at a Steiner School close to Munich, Germany, Jonas attended Bard College, where he took classes in Ancient Greek, Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Jonas first heard about sortition from his good friend Luke Harrington, who in turn had heard about it from another trusted friend. Searching for a more meaningful democratic process, he quickly recognised: sortition warrants deeper investigation. Upon finishing his thesis for his B.A. in Political Studies on sortition, Jonas invited Hans to co-found B.I.R.D.S. in the Spring of 2018.
2018–2023
Nelly Ben Hayoun
Associate FellowNelly 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. She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world’s first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts;and the founder of the tuition-free, pluralistic and transnational university-University of the Underground-which includes board members and activists like Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot and Prof. Arjun Appadurai, this tuition-free educative and cultural program is supporting plurality of thinking, free and transnational teaching and unconventional practices in the basement of nightclubs since 2017. Her large scale projects have included collaborations with political activists and artists like Massive Attack and Kid Cudi, The Avalanches to name a few. She is known for challenging institutions from within through events, and she has done so at the United Nations, NASA, International Academy of Astronautics, or the International Astronautical Federation amongst many others. Clients and collaborators include BMW, Porsche, MINI, LEGO, Mattel, NIKE, NASA, the United Nations, and many more. In 2020, Dezeen selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. one the world’s best design studios and in 2021 The Dots selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. as one of the “Top 50 companies to work for in 2021”. Nelly has two doppelgangers who work with her to appear at multiple places at the same time, a Barbie doll and a Lego made of herself. In 2023, Design Week awarded Nelly with 'The Hall of Fame' lifetime achievement which 'acknowledges the achievements of designers and industry figures who have made a significant impact and contribution to the industry;have provided inspiration and incisive thinking. It aims to acknowledge key contribution to design today and people who are consistently creating brilliant work.'
2018–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Nikita Nelin
Associate FellowNikita Nelin (BA, Bard College; MFA, Brooklyn College) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and immersive journalism. His writing experiments with voice driven narrative in the intersection of memory and imagination, while often referencing the themes of his own emigration experience. His journalism subverts the objective-witness myth and explores ritual, ceremony, alternative community models, and the contemporary culture-at-large through “a perspective from the cultural fringe.” He has written about Standing Rock, Burning Man, education towards individual agency, and socio-cultural sustainability in consumerist and branding practices. His early research focused on the “silenced generations;” Soviet writers and artists rejected by the communist party. He received the 2010 Sean O’Faolain Prize for short fiction, the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars Prize for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2017 Restless Books Immigrant Prize as well as at 2018 Dzanc Books Prize. He has taught independently and at Brooklyn College with special concentration in the Close-Reading Method. An expanded CV, work samples, as well as projects in development can be found at nikitanelin.com
2018–2023
Artemy Magun
Associate FellowArtemy 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 Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University (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”.
2017–2021
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2018–2025
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2020–2021 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Katy Fulfer
Visiting ScholarKaty Fulfer is a feminist philosopher. Her research is animated by questions relating to what Hannah Arendt identified as the “rise of the social,” in which private interests replace the public good and undermine freedom. Her current project, “From Rootlessness to Belonging: An Arendtian Critique of the Family as a Structure of Refugee Assimilation,” reinterprets Arendt’s conceptions of rootlessness and assimilation to shed light on how refugees to Canada may face barriers to political inclusion. It is financially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research of Canada. An American expatriate who calls Ontario home, Katy is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Gender & Social Justice at the University of Waterloo. She lives on the traditional territories of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. You can follow her work at katyfulfer.com.
2019–2020
Jana Marlene Mader
Visiting ScholarJana Mader 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
2018–2022
Hannah Arendt Center 2019–2020 Senior Fellows
Ann Seaton
Senior FellowDirector of Difference and Media Project; Director of Multicultural Affairs; Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. B.A., Wellesley College; Ph.D., Harvard University. Visiting Scholar, Columbia University; Faculty Publishing Fellow, City University of New York; Du Bois Fellow, Harvard. Assistant professor, English, CUNY. Has lectured at Harvard, Brown University, New York University, SUNY Binghamton, Amherst College. At Bard since 2009.
2018–2021
Zephyr Teachout
Senior FellowZephyr 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.
2017–2021
Jacob Burda
Senior FellowJacob Burda wrote his doctoral thesis on the conception of infinity in early German Romanticism at Oxford University. His thesis was translated into German and published with Metzler, here. He has lectured on German literature and philosophy at UCLA, and is particularly interested in cultural history, phenomenology (especially Heidegger) and the philosophy of physics. He is the co-founder of the Alpine Fellowship, an annual symposium centered around aesthetics and ideas.
2020–2023
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Micah White
Senior FellowMICAH WHITE, PhD is a lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. 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. Micah's book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published by Knopf Canada and has been translated into Greek and German. A sought after activist speaker and educator, Micah has delivered numerous lectures at prestigious universities, cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and beyond. Micah is the co-founder of Activist Graduate School, an online school for activists. The first Activist Graduate School course was taught and filmed at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard. Learn more about Micah at micahmwhite.com
2018–2023
Kenyon Victor Adams
Senior FellowKenyon Victor Adams is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. His recent work explores the notion of fractured epistemologies, and seeks to reclaim or expand various ways of knowing through integrative artistic practices. Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership at Yale School of Drama, Yale ISM Poetry Conference, Live IdeasFestival, the Langston Hughes Project, the National Arts Policy Roundtable, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
2018–2023
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2018–2024
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2018–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2019–2020 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellows
David van Reybrouck
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowDavid Van Reybrouck is considered 'one of the leading intellectuals in Europe' (Der Tagesspiegel) and is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens' Summit, and his work has led to trials in deliberative democracy throughout Europe. His book Against Elections: The Case for Democracy was translated in over twenty languages and received endorsements from Kofi Annan, J.M. Coetzee and Karen Armstrong. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation, whose most recent book, Congo: The Epic History of a People, won 19 prizes, sold over 500,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. It was described as a 'masterpiece' by the Independent and 'magnificent' by The New York Times. David studied at the Universities of Leuven and Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Leiden and an honorary doctorate from the Université St Louis in Brussels.
2020–2022
Thomas Chatterton Williams
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowThomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a 2019 New America Fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, 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. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. Williams was named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction. He will be a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Bard College, Spring 2023.
2018–2020
Hannah Arendt Center 2019–2020 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Chiara Ricciardone
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowRaised in Egypt and Turkey, educated at Swarthmore (BA 2005) and Berkeley (PhD 2017), Chiara Ricciardone’s research interests range widely. Most of her work to date has focused on the ancient Greeks and critical theory; she is particularly fascinated by the political and formal problem that difference poses for human beings, and how it might be possible to think of difference without hierarchy. Sometimes she despairs of knowing anything whatsoever, and then she turns to activism and art. Ricciardone is at work on a book of auto-fiction that suggests the self itself is a fiction, and perhaps no longer a useful one. She currently serves as Provost for the Activist Graduate School. Learn more about Chiara at chiararicciardone.net
2018–2021
Hannah Arendt Center 2019–2020 Associate Fellows
Shany Mor
Associate FellowShany 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.
2018–2020
Todd Pittinsky
Associate FellowTodd L. Pittinsky is a Professor in Stony Brook University’s Department of Technology & Society (SUNY), and the Faculty Director of its Undergraduate College of Leadership and Service. Before that, he was on the faculty of Harvard University, as an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as the Director of Research for the Harvard Center for Public Leadership (CPL), where he was principal investigator of the multi-year National Leadership Index (a collaborative project with U.S. News and World Report), led the taskforce which developed the Harvard CPL Leadership Development Model and codeveloped the Center’s social entrepreneurship programs. Later, Todd also served on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
2019–2021
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Libby Barringer
Associate FellowLibby 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.
2017–2023
Jonas Kunz
Associate FellowAfter finishing his primary education at a Steiner School close to Munich, Germany, Jonas attended Bard College, where he took classes in Ancient Greek, Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Jonas first heard about sortition from his good friend Luke Harrington, who in turn had heard about it from another trusted friend. Searching for a more meaningful democratic process, he quickly recognised: sortition warrants deeper investigation. Upon finishing his thesis for his B.A. in Political Studies on sortition, Jonas invited Hans to co-found B.I.R.D.S. in the Spring of 2018.
2018–2023
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2018–2025
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Nelly Ben Hayoun
Associate FellowNelly 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. She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world’s first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts;and the founder of the tuition-free, pluralistic and transnational university-University of the Underground-which includes board members and activists like Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot and Prof. Arjun Appadurai, this tuition-free educative and cultural program is supporting plurality of thinking, free and transnational teaching and unconventional practices in the basement of nightclubs since 2017. Her large scale projects have included collaborations with political activists and artists like Massive Attack and Kid Cudi, The Avalanches to name a few. She is known for challenging institutions from within through events, and she has done so at the United Nations, NASA, International Academy of Astronautics, or the International Astronautical Federation amongst many others. Clients and collaborators include BMW, Porsche, MINI, LEGO, Mattel, NIKE, NASA, the United Nations, and many more. In 2020, Dezeen selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. one the world’s best design studios and in 2021 The Dots selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. as one of the “Top 50 companies to work for in 2021”. Nelly has two doppelgangers who work with her to appear at multiple places at the same time, a Barbie doll and a Lego made of herself. In 2023, Design Week awarded Nelly with 'The Hall of Fame' lifetime achievement which 'acknowledges the achievements of designers and industry figures who have made a significant impact and contribution to the industry;have provided inspiration and incisive thinking. It aims to acknowledge key contribution to design today and people who are consistently creating brilliant work.'
2018–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Nikita Nelin
Associate FellowNikita Nelin (BA, Bard College; MFA, Brooklyn College) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and immersive journalism. His writing experiments with voice driven narrative in the intersection of memory and imagination, while often referencing the themes of his own emigration experience. His journalism subverts the objective-witness myth and explores ritual, ceremony, alternative community models, and the contemporary culture-at-large through “a perspective from the cultural fringe.” He has written about Standing Rock, Burning Man, education towards individual agency, and socio-cultural sustainability in consumerist and branding practices. His early research focused on the “silenced generations;” Soviet writers and artists rejected by the communist party. He received the 2010 Sean O’Faolain Prize for short fiction, the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars Prize for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2017 Restless Books Immigrant Prize as well as at 2018 Dzanc Books Prize. He has taught independently and at Brooklyn College with special concentration in the Close-Reading Method. An expanded CV, work samples, as well as projects in development can be found at nikitanelin.com
2018–2023
Artemy Magun
Associate FellowArtemy 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 Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University (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”.
2017–2021
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2019–2020 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Katy Fulfer
Visiting ScholarKaty Fulfer is a feminist philosopher. Her research is animated by questions relating to what Hannah Arendt identified as the “rise of the social,” in which private interests replace the public good and undermine freedom. Her current project, “From Rootlessness to Belonging: An Arendtian Critique of the Family as a Structure of Refugee Assimilation,” reinterprets Arendt’s conceptions of rootlessness and assimilation to shed light on how refugees to Canada may face barriers to political inclusion. It is financially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research of Canada. An American expatriate who calls Ontario home, Katy is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Gender & Social Justice at the University of Waterloo. She lives on the traditional territories of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. You can follow her work at katyfulfer.com.
2019–2020
Jana Marlene Mader
Visiting ScholarJana Mader 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
2018–2022
Hannah Arendt Center 2018–2019 Senior Fellows
Ann Seaton
Senior FellowDirector of Difference and Media Project; Director of Multicultural Affairs; Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. B.A., Wellesley College; Ph.D., Harvard University. Visiting Scholar, Columbia University; Faculty Publishing Fellow, City University of New York; Du Bois Fellow, Harvard. Assistant professor, English, CUNY. Has lectured at Harvard, Brown University, New York University, SUNY Binghamton, Amherst College. At Bard since 2009.
2018–2021
Zephyr Teachout
Senior FellowZephyr 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.
2017–2021
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Micah White
Senior FellowMICAH WHITE, PhD is a lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. 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. Micah's book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published by Knopf Canada and has been translated into Greek and German. A sought after activist speaker and educator, Micah has delivered numerous lectures at prestigious universities, cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and beyond. Micah is the co-founder of Activist Graduate School, an online school for activists. The first Activist Graduate School course was taught and filmed at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard. Learn more about Micah at micahmwhite.com
2018–2023
Kenyon Victor Adams
Senior FellowKenyon Victor Adams is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. His recent work explores the notion of fractured epistemologies, and seeks to reclaim or expand various ways of knowing through integrative artistic practices. Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership at Yale School of Drama, Yale ISM Poetry Conference, Live IdeasFestival, the Langston Hughes Project, the National Arts Policy Roundtable, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
2018–2023
Allison Stanger
Senior FellowAllison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. In 2021, Stanger was named Senior Advisor of the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.
2018–2024
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he is coediting for the Complete Works series, and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
2018–2025
Hannah Arendt Center 2018–2019 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow
Thomas Chatterton Williams
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowThomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a 2019 New America Fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, 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. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. Williams was named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction. He will be a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Bard College, Spring 2023.
2018–2020
Hannah Arendt Center 2018–2019 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Chiara Ricciardone
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowRaised in Egypt and Turkey, educated at Swarthmore (BA 2005) and Berkeley (PhD 2017), Chiara Ricciardone’s research interests range widely. Most of her work to date has focused on the ancient Greeks and critical theory; she is particularly fascinated by the political and formal problem that difference poses for human beings, and how it might be possible to think of difference without hierarchy. Sometimes she despairs of knowing anything whatsoever, and then she turns to activism and art. Ricciardone is at work on a book of auto-fiction that suggests the self itself is a fiction, and perhaps no longer a useful one. She currently serves as Provost for the Activist Graduate School. Learn more about Chiara at chiararicciardone.net
2018–2021
Hannah Arendt Center 2018–2019 Associate Fellows
Shany Mor
Associate FellowShany 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.
2018–2020
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Libby Barringer
Associate FellowLibby 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.
2017–2023
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Nelly Ben Hayoun
Associate FellowNelly 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. She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world’s first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts;and the founder of the tuition-free, pluralistic and transnational university-University of the Underground-which includes board members and activists like Prof. Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot and Prof. Arjun Appadurai, this tuition-free educative and cultural program is supporting plurality of thinking, free and transnational teaching and unconventional practices in the basement of nightclubs since 2017. Her large scale projects have included collaborations with political activists and artists like Massive Attack and Kid Cudi, The Avalanches to name a few. She is known for challenging institutions from within through events, and she has done so at the United Nations, NASA, International Academy of Astronautics, or the International Astronautical Federation amongst many others. Clients and collaborators include BMW, Porsche, MINI, LEGO, Mattel, NIKE, NASA, the United Nations, and many more. In 2020, Dezeen selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. one the world’s best design studios and in 2021 The Dots selected Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios Ltd. as one of the “Top 50 companies to work for in 2021”. Nelly has two doppelgangers who work with her to appear at multiple places at the same time, a Barbie doll and a Lego made of herself. In 2023, Design Week awarded Nelly with 'The Hall of Fame' lifetime achievement which 'acknowledges the achievements of designers and industry figures who have made a significant impact and contribution to the industry;have provided inspiration and incisive thinking. It aims to acknowledge key contribution to design today and people who are consistently creating brilliant work.'
2018–2023
Jonas Kunz
Associate FellowAfter finishing his primary education at a Steiner School close to Munich, Germany, Jonas attended Bard College, where he took classes in Ancient Greek, Economics, Philosophy and Politics. Jonas first heard about sortition from his good friend Luke Harrington, who in turn had heard about it from another trusted friend. Searching for a more meaningful democratic process, he quickly recognised: sortition warrants deeper investigation. Upon finishing his thesis for his B.A. in Political Studies on sortition, Jonas invited Hans to co-found B.I.R.D.S. in the Spring of 2018.
2018–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Nikita Nelin
Associate FellowNikita Nelin (BA, Bard College; MFA, Brooklyn College) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and immersive journalism. His writing experiments with voice driven narrative in the intersection of memory and imagination, while often referencing the themes of his own emigration experience. His journalism subverts the objective-witness myth and explores ritual, ceremony, alternative community models, and the contemporary culture-at-large through “a perspective from the cultural fringe.” He has written about Standing Rock, Burning Man, education towards individual agency, and socio-cultural sustainability in consumerist and branding practices. His early research focused on the “silenced generations;” Soviet writers and artists rejected by the communist party. He received the 2010 Sean O’Faolain Prize for short fiction, the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars Prize for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2017 Restless Books Immigrant Prize as well as at 2018 Dzanc Books Prize. He has taught independently and at Brooklyn College with special concentration in the Close-Reading Method. An expanded CV, work samples, as well as projects in development can be found at nikitanelin.com
2018–2023
Artemy Magun
Associate FellowArtemy 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 Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University (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”.
2017–2021
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans is a writer, illustrator, and self-publisher of ecological manuals, as well as an advocate of deliberative democratic processes. Originally from Munich, Germany, Hans attended Bard from 2010 to 2014, where he posited and investigated critiques of representative democracy. In 2017, Jonas Kunz and Hans co-founded the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center. Sortition is the academic term for randomness, the process by which citizens’ assemblies, aka citizen panels, are picked. Hans now seeks to apply insights gained from this research to develop curricula and apply deliberative practices in edifying ways, through board games and community-scale engagements.
2018–2025
Charles Snyder
Associate FellowCharles Snyder studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research (PhD, 2014). His current writing addresses the relation between philosophy and political life in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with particular interest in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period.
2015–2019
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2018–2019 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Katy Fulfer
Visiting ScholarKaty Fulfer is a feminist philosopher. Her research is animated by questions relating to what Hannah Arendt identified as the “rise of the social,” in which private interests replace the public good and undermine freedom. Her current project, “From Rootlessness to Belonging: An Arendtian Critique of the Family as a Structure of Refugee Assimilation,” reinterprets Arendt’s conceptions of rootlessness and assimilation to shed light on how refugees to Canada may face barriers to political inclusion. It is financially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research of Canada. An American expatriate who calls Ontario home, Katy is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Gender & Social Justice at the University of Waterloo. She lives on the traditional territories of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. You can follow her work at katyfulfer.com.
2019–2020
Jana Marlene Mader
Visiting ScholarJana Mader 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
2018–2022
Hannah Arendt Center 2017–2018 Senior Fellows
Zephyr Teachout
Senior FellowZephyr 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.
2017–2021
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2017–2018 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow
Tania Bruguera
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowTania 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. Bruguera has explored both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution in performances that provoke viewers to consider the political realities masked by government propaganda and mass-media interpretation. Advancing the concept of arte útil (literally, useful art; art as a benefit and a tool), she proposes solutions to sociopolitical problems through the implementation of art, and has developed long-term projects that include a community center and a political party for immigrants, and a school for behavior art. (art21.org)
2017–2018
Hannah Arendt Center 2017–2018 Associate Fellows
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Libby Barringer
Associate FellowLibby 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.
2017–2023
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Artemy Magun
Associate FellowArtemy 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 Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University (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”.
2017–2021
Charles Snyder
Associate FellowCharles Snyder studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research (PhD, 2014). His current writing addresses the relation between philosophy and political life in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with particular interest in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period.
2015–2019
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2017–2018 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Manu Samnotra
Visiting ScholarManu Samnotra is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida. His areas of interest include the political thought of Hannah Arendt, affect theory, and post-colonial theory. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript that uses an Arendtian reading of the affect of shame, and its role in fostering a sense of dignity, responsibility, and openness to dialogue. He is also concurrently working on projects that incorporate Gandhian political thought into discourses on human rights and dignity.
2017–2018
Ned Curthoys
Visiting ScholarNed Curthoys is a senior lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, in Perth, Australia. His book The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation (2013) explores Hannah Arendt’s complex affinities with German Jewish philosophical idealism and conceptions of diaspora. He is currently exploring Hannah Arendt’s contribution to ethical practices of care of the self and writing a book on the creative legacy of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil.
2017–2018
Katharine Holt
Visiting ScholarKatharine Holt is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Russian at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Currently on research leave, she is at work on a book about Russian representations of, and environmental interventions in, the Karakum Desert of Central Asia. While at the Center, Holt will be exploring how Arendt’s thought can illuminate the obfuscation of environmental degradation by official representatives of various nations. At the same time, she will be considering the relationship between humanities scholarship and activism. Holt holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Columbia University (2013) and an A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard University (2002). She has published articles on the writers Andrei Platonov, Dzhambul Dzhabaev, Abulqasim Lahuti, and others.
2017–2018
Hannah Arendt Center 2016–2017 Senior Fellow
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2016–2017 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow
William Deresiewicz
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowAuthor 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).
Website: https://hac.bard.edu/fellows/neh/
2016–2017
Hannah Arendt Center 2016–2017 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Samantha Hill
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowSamantha Rose Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt (Reaktion, 2021) and Hannah Arendt’s Poems forthcoming from Liveright. She is a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. You can find her work in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory and Event. www.samantharosehill.com
2016–2017
Hannah Arendt Center 2016–2017 Postdoctoral Fellow
Stephen Haswell Todd
Postdoctoral FellowStephen 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.
2016–2017
Hannah Arendt Center 2016–2017 Associate Fellows
Jeffery Champlin
Associate FellowJeffrey Champlin received his BA from Middlebury College and Ph. D. from New York University. His teaching and research focuses on connections between literature, philosophy, and political theory. Recent publications examine questions of power and aesthetics in Kleist, Goethe, Hegel, Rilke, and Arendt. He can be reached at [email protected].
2012–2017
Jennifer M. Hudson
Associate FellowJennifer M. Hudson holds a PhD in political science (political theory) from Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Bureaucratic Mentality: The Technocratization of Democratic Theory” addresses affinities and tensions between bureaucracy and democracy. She critically engages with a current trend within democratic theory that aims to reconcile these two logics. In her postdoctoral research, she will focus on the future of democratic legitimacy beyond the nation state, especially within Europe, with the goal of elaborating a post-national theory of democracy in opposition to technocratic governance projects. Hudson has taught at Columbia College, Barnard College, Long Island University, the Columbia Summer High School Program, and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She will be teaching in the BPI Program.
2014–2017
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Charles Snyder
Associate FellowCharles Snyder studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research (PhD, 2014). His current writing addresses the relation between philosophy and political life in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with particular interest in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period.
2015–2019
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2016–2017 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Kei Hiruta
Visiting ScholarKei Hiruta is Research Fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford, and non-residential Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York City. Trained in both analytic and continental traditions of political philosophy, he received his D.Phil. from Oxford and has held visiting research positions at Columbia University and the University of Tokyo. He served as the Chair of the Hannah Arendt Circle in 2014–15 and is one of the founding Associate Editors of Arendt Studies and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Practical Ethics. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Berlin’s Bête Noire: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin on Freedom, Politics and Humanity, and working on an edited volume on Arendt for Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Philosophers in Depth’ series.
2015–2017
Agustina Varela Manograsso
Visiting ScholarAgustina Varela Manograsso is currently a PhD student and research assistant in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her doctoral research focuses on Hannah Arendt`s concepts of violence, power and individual/collective identity, and her scholarly interests revolve around social inclusion, disposable life, identity, intersectionality, symbolic and physical violence, body, memory and solidarity.
Her current work builds on a previous research project, which was concentrated on contemporary interpretations of totalitarianism. Within the framework of this project she had the opportunity to delve into Horkheimer´s, Adorno´s and Arendt´s political and philosophical thoughts. This was followed by a MA in Contemporary Philosophy and its Historical Postulates, which was finished with a dissertation on “The concept of ‘Mass’ in Hannah Arendt`s thought”. She also worked as a research assistant in a European Union funded project called MISEAL, which aimed to improve social inclusion and equal opportunities in the participant higher education institutions in Latin-America.
2016–2017
Dana Mills
Visiting ScholarDana Mills wrote her DPhil thesis, focusing on the relationship between dance and politics at Oxford, where she teaches political theory and feminist political theory. Her first book Dance and Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries: is out in May with Manchester University Press. She has held research fellowships in Northwestern and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. She will be a Visiting Fellow at NYU Center for Ballet and Related Arts in the fall of 2016. Dana also campaigns widely on human rights and feminist issues.
2016–2017
Davide Brugnaro
Visiting ScholarPh.D. student from the University of Padua, Italy (Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Educational Science and Applied Psychology). I graduated (Master’s Degree) in 2013 in Philosophical Sciences at University of Padua with a dissertation on the moral question in Hannah Arendt. Between 2014 and 2015 I worked in a Municipality (in social work) thanks to “Servizio Civile Nazionale” and this is the reason why I started my Ph.D. period six months later than my colleagues. My research interests concern Hannah Arendt and, in particular, my research project intends to investigate the relationship between action and thought, politics and philosophy (but also ethics), plurality and singularity as it is sketched by Hannah Arendt, primarily through the examination of the faculty of judgment. The main interpretative hypothesis, that the research proposes, is that the faculty of judgment seems to be a special key of reading in order to recompose the tension between the vita activa and the ‘life of the mind’: its particular feature, indeed, is to hold together different dimensions of human life.
2016–2017
Joy Harris
Visiting ScholarJoy Harris completed her MscR in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh College of Art where her research focused on the intersection between performance art and politics. Her thesis investigated the way contemporary theatre directors are using performance to imagine new legal spaces for the rendering of justice for crimes against humanity in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This case study is considered in light of Hannah Arendt’s reporting in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her research also includes ways in which performance artists, like Adrian Piper and Regina Jose Galindo, are redefining how artists contribute to political discourse. Joy is also an artist and her work has been recently shown in The Netherlands, Venice, Miami, and Los Angeles. “Vanishing Discotecas,” a photography and video installation, focused on gentrification in East Downtown Houston, was shown as a solo-exhibition at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, in conjunction with the FotoFest biennial. It was also presented at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Science and Humanities at University of Cambridge. Joy also regularly publishes for art publications.
2016–2017
Julian Robert Shaw
Visiting ScholarI am an ESRC Funded PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. I am currently exploring everyday politics and community tensions inhabiting public spaces in the UK context of Luton, Bedfordshire. Much of my work is grounded in the theoretical insights of Hannah Arendt and Henri Lefebvre, with more than the occasional dose of Marx. Some broad themes of my interest include: public space, ‘communities’, everyday life, action, plurality, disruption, violence, and political economy. In 2011 I received a distinction for my MSc. in ‘Disasters, Adaptation, and Development’ from King’s College London. In 2008 I graduated from Durham University with a BSc. (Hons) in Natural Sciences (Human Geography and Anthropology). My range of academic interests can be seen on my website: espressobookworm.wordpress.com. I can also be followed on Twitter: @BookwormShaw
2016–2017
Hannah Arendt Center 2016–2017 Student Fellow
Courage to Be Fellowships
Student FellowStudent Fellowships for Bard scholars working in philosophy, theology, and psychology are offered through the Courage To Be Program at the Hannah Arendt Center. The call for applications is sent annually in August/September. We love hearing from students who are interested in being part of the Hannah Arendt Center. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you would like to learn more about fellowships, or, if you would like to become a HAC student volunteer, email: [email protected]
Website: https://hac.bard.edu/ctb/
2016–2017
Hannah Arendt Center 2015–2016 Senior Fellow
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2015–2016 National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow
David Brin
National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting FellowAmerican scientist and award-winning author of science fiction. He has served as visiting scholar at NASA in Exobiology. Brin is the winner of the Obeler Freedom of Speech award, McGannon Communication Policy Research Award. His science fiction books include but are not limited to Earth and The Postman.
Website: https://hac.bard.edu/fellows/neh/
2015–2016
Hannah Arendt Center 2015–2016 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Jana Schmidt
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowJana 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. MA, English, University of Pennsylvania (2007); PhD, comparative literature, SUNY Buffalo (2015). At Bard since 2022.
2015–2016
Hannah Arendt Center 2015–2016 Postdoctoral Fellows
Natalia Mendoza Rockwell
Postdoctoral FellowNatalia Mendoza Rockwell received a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research interests include the ethnography of the State and political institutions, democracy and its discontents, informality, organized crime, political mendacity, speech act theory, and pragmatism. She has conducted fieldwork in northern Mexico and southern Mali.
2015–2016
Samantha Hill
Postdoctoral FellowSamantha Rose Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt (Reaktion, 2021) and Hannah Arendt’s Poems forthcoming from Liveright. She is a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. You can find her work in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory and Event. www.samantharosehill.com
2015–2016
Hannah Arendt Center 2015–2016 Associate Fellows
Jeffery Champlin
Associate FellowJeffrey Champlin received his BA from Middlebury College and Ph. D. from New York University. His teaching and research focuses on connections between literature, philosophy, and political theory. Recent publications examine questions of power and aesthetics in Kleist, Goethe, Hegel, Rilke, and Arendt. He can be reached at [email protected].
2012–2017
Jennifer M. Hudson
Associate FellowJennifer M. Hudson holds a PhD in political science (political theory) from Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Bureaucratic Mentality: The Technocratization of Democratic Theory” addresses affinities and tensions between bureaucracy and democracy. She critically engages with a current trend within democratic theory that aims to reconcile these two logics. In her postdoctoral research, she will focus on the future of democratic legitimacy beyond the nation state, especially within Europe, with the goal of elaborating a post-national theory of democracy in opposition to technocratic governance projects. Hudson has taught at Columbia College, Barnard College, Long Island University, the Columbia Summer High School Program, and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She will be teaching in the BPI Program.
2014–2017
Angela Maione
Associate FellowAngela Maione holds a Ph.D. in Political Science/Political Theory from Northwestern University. Her research draws on resources from the history of political thought in order to answer, unsettle and deepen debates in democratic theory. She explores questions raised by liberalism, human rights, and language politics.
2015–2016
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Charles Snyder
Associate FellowCharles Snyder studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research (PhD, 2014). His current writing addresses the relation between philosophy and political life in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with particular interest in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period.
2015–2019
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2015–2016 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Kei Hiruta
Visiting ScholarKei Hiruta is Research Fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford, and non-residential Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York City. Trained in both analytic and continental traditions of political philosophy, he received his D.Phil. from Oxford and has held visiting research positions at Columbia University and the University of Tokyo. He served as the Chair of the Hannah Arendt Circle in 2014–15 and is one of the founding Associate Editors of Arendt Studies and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Practical Ethics. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Berlin’s Bête Noire: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin on Freedom, Politics and Humanity, and working on an edited volume on Arendt for Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Philosophers in Depth’ series.
2015–2017
Irene Haslund
Visiting ScholarIrene Haslund is a PhD candidate in educational philosophy at NTNU, Norway. In her masters program, she wrote about Heidegger 's view on self-awareness and understanding of time. For the past four years she has been working at the Teacher Education at Sør-Trøndelag University College. At the Department of Education, NTNU, she teaches Philosophy of Education, Practical Knowledge and Liberal Education.
2015–2016
Jana Lozanoska
Visiting ScholarCurrently a PhD student at the University for Peace, San Jose Costa Rica. Her doctoral research focuses on the work Hannah Arendt and her “politics on human dignity” in relation to human rights. The research pursues interdisciplinary approach in giving new perspectives in overall human dignity and human rights related discourse.
2015–2016
Rosanil Nava Lara
Visiting ScholarRosanil Nava Lara is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Sciences of King Juan Carlos University, at Madrid, Spain. Her dissertation, “The Concept of the Other in Hannah Arendt," main purpose is to understand the alterity or otherness from an Arendtian perspective. That is, the way social identities are constructed by a dichotomy of gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, political ideology, etc. that could be summarize in an “Us vs Them dynamic” which is the breeding ground of the dehumanization process that allows the violation of human rights.
2015–2016
Ulrich v. Bülow
Visiting ScholarDr. Ulrich von Bülow is head of the archival department at the German Literary Archive in Marbach/Germany, one of the most significant literary archives in Europe. Important papers of Hannah Arendt’s estate are located in the Marbach archive. Among them are, “Thinking Notebooks,” which Dr. Bülow will be editing for an upcoming Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt Complete Works. During his stay at Bard College, he’ll be conducting research in the special collection of Hannah Arendt’s personal library, located in Stevenson Library.
2015–2016
Geir Aaserud
Visiting ScholarPh.D. student from Bergen University College. Aaserud's has many years experience from teaching kindergarten. He has a Master Degree in Early childhood education and studies the relationship between different terms of kindergarten teachers’ culture formation. His research project seeks to answer the following research question: How could kindergarten teachers’ cultural formation processes and conditions be described and understood?
2015–2016
Shmuel Lederman
Visiting ScholarShmuel Lederman holds a Ph.D from the University of Haifa in Israel. His research interests include Hannah Arendt's political thought; democratic theory; genocide; and the Israeli-Arab conflict.
2015–2016
N.A.J. Taylor
Visiting ScholarN.A.J. Taylor has taught at La Trobe University and the University of Queensland, and has held or will hold honorary or visiting appointments at Linkoping University, Roskilde University, Bard College, La Trobe University and The New School, where he was an Australia Awards fellow.
2014–2016
John Douglas Macready
Visiting ScholarJohn Douglas Macready is a Ph.D. candidate and adjunct instructor in philosophy at the University of Dallas where he is writing his dissertation on the problem and meaning of human dignity in Hannah Arendt's political philosophy.
2015–2016
Hannah Arendt Center 2014–2015 Senior Fellows
Wilmot James
Senior FellowWilmot James is a noted South African academic-turned-politician who currently is an MP for the Democratic Alliance (DA). He serves as the country’s Shadow Minister of Basic Education and is the Federal Chairperson of the Democratic Alliance. James is an Honorary Professor of Sociology (University of Pretoria) and in the Division of Human Genetics (University of Cape Town). He is chairperson of the board of the Africa Genome Education Institute. James has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1982) and a B.A. cum laude from the University of the Western Cape (1977). He has held visiting positions at Yale University, Indiana University, American Bar Foundation (Chicago), the California Institute of Technology, and Edinburgh University. And he has served as chairperson of the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra and the Immigration Advisory Board of South Africa. He is also a former trustee of the New York–based Ford Foundation.
2014–2015
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2014–2015 Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow
Angela Maione
Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral FellowAngela Maione holds a Ph.D. in Political Science/Political Theory from Northwestern University. Her research draws on resources from the history of political thought in order to answer, unsettle and deepen debates in democratic theory. She explores questions raised by liberalism, human rights, and language politics.
2014–2015
Hannah Arendt Center 2014–2015 Postdoctoral Fellow
Charles Snyder
Postdoctoral FellowCharles Snyder studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research (PhD, 2014). His current writing addresses the relation between philosophy and political life in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with particular interest in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period.
2014–2015
Hannah Arendt Center 2014–2015 Associate Fellows
Jeffery Champlin
Associate FellowJeffrey Champlin received his BA from Middlebury College and Ph. D. from New York University. His teaching and research focuses on connections between literature, philosophy, and political theory. Recent publications examine questions of power and aesthetics in Kleist, Goethe, Hegel, Rilke, and Arendt. He can be reached at [email protected].
2012–2017
Jennifer M. Hudson
Associate FellowJennifer M. Hudson holds a PhD in political science (political theory) from Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Bureaucratic Mentality: The Technocratization of Democratic Theory” addresses affinities and tensions between bureaucracy and democracy. She critically engages with a current trend within democratic theory that aims to reconcile these two logics. In her postdoctoral research, she will focus on the future of democratic legitimacy beyond the nation state, especially within Europe, with the goal of elaborating a post-national theory of democracy in opposition to technocratic governance projects. Hudson has taught at Columbia College, Barnard College, Long Island University, the Columbia Summer High School Program, and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She will be teaching in the BPI Program.
2014–2017
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Aliza Becker
Associate FellowAliza Becker is the Director of the American Jewish Peace Archive and Meanings of October 27th, oral history projects affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The American Jewish Peace Archive is an oral history archive of interviews with American Jewish peace activists who had been involved in Jewishly identified organizations from 1967 through 2017. The Meanings of October 27th documents the life histories and reflections on the 2018 deadly synagogue shooting of diverse Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers. Becker has degrees in History and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
2014–2023
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Alexander Soros
Associate FellowAlexander Soros is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2012, he established the Alexander Soros Foundation, which supports human rights, social justice, and educational causes.
2014–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2014–2015 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen
Visiting ScholarAri-Elmeri Hyvönen is a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He received his Master of Social Sciences from the University of Tampere, Finland (2012). From 2012-2014, he worked as a visiting researcher at Tampere Peace Research Institute. His current research focuses on the worldly and temporal aspects of Arendt's thought as well as its relevance in the contemporary context-both political and theoretical.
2014–2015
N.A.J. Taylor
Visiting ScholarN.A.J. Taylor has taught at La Trobe University and the University of Queensland, and has held or will hold honorary or visiting appointments at Linkoping University, Roskilde University, Bard College, La Trobe University and The New School, where he was an Australia Awards fellow.
2014–2016
Hannah Arendt Center 2013–2014 Senior Fellows
Robert Woodruff
Senior FellowRobert Woodruff is one of the leading theater directors in the United States. He has directed over 60 productions across the U.S. at theatres including Lincoln Center Theater, Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Conservatory Theater, Guthrie Theater and Mark Taper Forum, among others. He will be a Senior Fellow at the Center for the fall 2013 semester, teaching a course entitled "Performing Arendt."
2013–2014
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2013–2014 Research Associate Fellow
Thomas Wild
Research AssociateThomas Wild a premiere Hannah Arendt scholar, is an Assistant Professor of German at Bard College. Dr. Wild studied German literature and culture as well as political science in Berlin, and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. He has taught at institutions of higher learning in Germany, at Vanderbilt University, and at Oberlin College.
2012–2014
Hannah Arendt Center 2013–2014 Postdoctoral Fellows
Jennifer M. Hudson
Postdoctoral FellowJennifer M. Hudson holds a PhD in political science (political theory) from Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Bureaucratic Mentality: The Technocratization of Democratic Theory” addresses affinities and tensions between bureaucracy and democracy. She critically engages with a current trend within democratic theory that aims to reconcile these two logics. In her postdoctoral research, she will focus on the future of democratic legitimacy beyond the nation state, especially within Europe, with the goal of elaborating a post-national theory of democracy in opposition to technocratic governance projects. Hudson has taught at Columbia College, Barnard College, Long Island University, the Columbia Summer High School Program, and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She will be teaching in the BPI Program.
2013–2014
Wout Cornelissen
Postdoctoral FellowWout Cornelissen studied Philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, after which he earned his PhD in Political Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy of Leiden University, the Netherlands. He spent the fall term of 2007 as a Visiting Scholar at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. From 2009 onwards, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Law at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. During the past few years, he taught, developed, and coordinated many different courses in the fields of Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law. In his dissertation, titled “Politics between Philosophy and Polemics”, he develops an account of the conditions for political thinking and thoughtful politics through a comparative reading of the work of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and literature. He is specifically interested in the relationship between philosophy and politics and between thinking and writing, as well as in the reception of ancient philosophy (especially Plato) in twentieth-century political thought. In June 2012, he participated in the conference on Arendt’s Denktagebuch organized by the Hannah Arendt Center. As a fellow of the Center, he plans to expand and deepen his research on Arendt’s political thinking by focusing especially on her last work, The Life of the Mind. He will be teaching in the Common Course program at Bard.
2013–2014
Michiel Bot
Postdoctoral FellowMichiel Bot studied Law, Philosophy, and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at New York University.
2013–2014
Hannah Arendt Center 2013–2014 Associate Fellows
Jeffery Champlin
Associate FellowJeffrey Champlin received his BA from Middlebury College and Ph. D. from New York University. His teaching and research focuses on connections between literature, philosophy, and political theory. Recent publications examine questions of power and aesthetics in Kleist, Goethe, Hegel, Rilke, and Arendt. He can be reached at [email protected].
2012–2017
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2013–2014 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Cristiana Grigore
Visiting ScholarCristiana Grigore will be a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2013. She is s a Fulbright scholar from Romania who recently finished her Masters in International Education Policies and Management at Vanderbilt University. During her Masters she used a multidisciplinary approach that included Business and Film Studies. Her thesis was about low status groups (such as minority ethnic groups, women, gay people and others) and what kind of contribution they can make to the globalized society of the 21st century. She herself belongs to such a group - the largest ethnic minority in Europe - the Roma people, commonly called Gypsies. She frequently writes or speaks about modern Roma. Her experiences has been featured in International Herald Tribune’s, CNN and Voice of America. Her latest article, “The Gypsy in Me” was published in the International Herald Tribune Global Agenda Magazine. Cristiana’s current work is exploring issues of modernity, the politics of identity, and the dynamics between low status groups and mainstream society.
2012–2014
Marc Holzenbecher
Visiting ScholarMarc Holzenbecher is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin and Fulbright visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2014. His research focuses the role of literature, particularly poetry, in Arendt’s political thought and examines the significance and function of the poetic element in regards to Arendt’s theory of political action. Marc Holzenbecher studied at Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and graduated in Political Science and Philosophy at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He is co-founder and publisher of the biannual journal S T I L L, Magazine for New Literature & Photography. It features the work of established as well as up-and-coming authors and artists particularly from Germany and North America and promotes transatlantic exchange through readings and translation projects.
2013–2014
Melanie Challenger
Visiting ScholarMelanie Challenger is a writer of poetry and non-fiction prose from the UK. Her first collection of poems, “Galatea”, received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award and nomination for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She was a Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London until 2009 and Arts Council International Fellow for the British Antarctic Survey from 2007-8, for which she researched and wrote her non-fiction book, “On Extinction”, a meditation on the loss of biological and cultural diversity, which was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best nonfiction books of 2012. Her research received a British Council Darwin Now Award. Previously, she co-authored “Stolen Voices” with Bosnian writer Zlata Filipovic, an epistolary history of twentieth-century conflict. Her current writing projects will explore questions of morality in a post-Darwinian world.
2013–2014
Stefania Maffeis
Visiting ScholarStefania Maffeis is a postdoctoral researcher currently working on the habilitation project "The Transnational Circulation of Knowledge in the Work and Reception of Hannah Arendt. USA/Germany 1951-2006" at the Department of Philosophy of the Freien Universitaet Berlin. In Parma, Italy, Stefania Maffeis studied Philosophy and the Humanities, graduating with a work on the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the social hermeneutics of Pierre Bourdieu. She moved to Berlin 2001 where she achieved a PhD in philosophy with a study on the history and the social conditions of philosophy in the former GDR, focusing the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche ("Zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik. Transformationen der DDR-Philosophie 1945-1993", Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2007).
2013–2014
Carlos A. Garduño Comparán
Visiting ScholarCarlos A. Garduño Comparán is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT), currently working on a project about different philosophical concepts of representation, from Hume and Kant, to Benjamin, Ricœur, Arendt, Foucault and Psychoanalysis. He received his Bachelor of Philosophy at the Iberoamerican University of Mexico City (UIA), graduating in 2004. He received his Master in Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), graduating in 2009; and his Ph. D. in Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), graduating in 2011. He has taught Philosophy of Communication, Ethics and Theory of Knowledge at Iberoamerican University, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Sociopolitical Ideas and Institutions at Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology. During the academic year 2012-2013, he visited the School of Graduate Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) of Paris as a postdoctoral researcher.
2013–2014
Hannah Arendt Center 2012–2013 Senior Fellow
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2012–2013 Research Associate Fellow
Thomas Wild
Research AssociateThomas Wild a premiere Hannah Arendt scholar, is an Assistant Professor of German at Bard College. Dr. Wild studied German literature and culture as well as political science in Berlin, and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. He has taught at institutions of higher learning in Germany, at Vanderbilt University, and at Oberlin College.
2012–2014
Hannah Arendt Center 2012–2013 Postdoctoral Fellow
Grace Hunt
Postdoctoral FellowGrace Hunt completed her Ph.D in Philosophy from the New School of Social Research in New York in 2012. Her work focuses on Feminist Theory, 20th Century Continental Thought, Social and Political Philosophy. Her dissertation, "Affirmative Reactions: A Theory of Embodied Dignity" examines how the negative and reactive emotions so prevalent in testimonies of survivors can contribute to state-authorized reconciliation in a way that is morally empowering and politically productive for those survivors. Hunt is the author of an article entitled "Re-Enacting Dignity" published in the April, 2011 edition of Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers.
2012–2013
Hannah Arendt Center 2012–2013 Associate Fellows
Jeffery Champlin
Associate FellowJeffrey Champlin received his BA from Middlebury College and Ph. D. from New York University. His teaching and research focuses on connections between literature, philosophy, and political theory. Recent publications examine questions of power and aesthetics in Kleist, Goethe, Hegel, Rilke, and Arendt. He can be reached at [email protected].
2012–2017
Ian Storey
Associate FellowIan Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.
2012–2022
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2012–2013 Junior Fellow
John LeJeune
Junior FellowJohn LeJeune will complete his Ph.D in Political Science from the University of California-San Diego in 2012. His work focuses on Political Theory and Comparative Politics. His dissertation, "Rise and Fall of the Councils: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Revolution" looks at Arendt's ideas of the political in both a normative and a sociological perspective and applies those ideas to the concept of modern day revolution. LeJeune has two entries in the forthcoming 2012 Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Political Thought, and is the co-author of a 2009 article entitled, “Social Dynamics of Abandonment of Harmful Practices: A new look at the theory.”
2012–2013
Hannah Arendt Center 2012–2013 Visiting Scholar Fellow
Cristiana Grigore
Visiting ScholarCristiana Grigore will be a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2013. She is s a Fulbright scholar from Romania who recently finished her Masters in International Education Policies and Management at Vanderbilt University. During her Masters she used a multidisciplinary approach that included Business and Film Studies. Her thesis was about low status groups (such as minority ethnic groups, women, gay people and others) and what kind of contribution they can make to the globalized society of the 21st century. She herself belongs to such a group - the largest ethnic minority in Europe - the Roma people, commonly called Gypsies. She frequently writes or speaks about modern Roma. Her experiences has been featured in International Herald Tribune’s, CNN and Voice of America. Her latest article, “The Gypsy in Me” was published in the International Herald Tribune Global Agenda Magazine. Cristiana’s current work is exploring issues of modernity, the politics of identity, and the dynamics between low status groups and mainstream society.
2012–2014
Hannah Arendt Center 2011–2012 Senior Fellow
Wyatt Mason
Senior FellowWyatt 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.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2011–2012 Postdoctoral Fellows
Jeffery Champlin
Postdoctoral FellowJeffrey Champlin received his BA from Middlebury College and Ph. D. from New York University. His teaching and research focuses on connections between literature, philosophy, and political theory. Recent publications examine questions of power and aesthetics in Kleist, Goethe, Hegel, Rilke, and Arendt. He can be reached at [email protected].
2011–2012
Jennie Han
Postdoctoral FellowJennie Han expects to complete her PhD. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in July, 2011. Her dissertation—“The Phenomenology of Responsibility”—turns to Hannah Arendt to develop a language for individual moral responsibility in modern bureaucratic institutions. Jennie Han is a graduate of Yale University, Yale Law School, and Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She will be teaching in the Bard Prison Initiative.
2011–2012
Hannah Arendt Center 2011–2012 Associate Fellow
Jeffery Jurgens
Associate FellowJeffrey Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is Fellow for Anthropology and Social Theory at the Bard Prison Initiative as well as Academic Co-Director of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. His scholarly interests revolve around themes of migration, citizenship, youth culture, public memory, and the cultural politics of incarceration.
2011–2023
Hannah Arendt Center 2011–2012 Visiting Scholar Fellows
Jacob Dahl Rendtorff
Visiting ScholarJacob Dahl Rendtorff (born 1965) is Associate Professor of Business Ethics at Roskilde University, Denmark. Rendtorff is Head of Studies and Head of Research for the research group on business, leadership and change of his department. Rendtorff has a background in ethics, business ethics, bioethics, political theory and philosophy of law. Rendtorff has written seven books on issues concerning existentialism and hermeneutics, French philosophy, ethics, bioethics and business ethics, philosophy of law and business, and he has been co-author and editor on more than ten other books.
2011–2012
Kieran Bonner
Visiting ScholarKieran Bonner is Professor of Sociology, Chair of Sociology and Legal Studies and Director of the Human Sciences minor at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, and Associate Chair Graduate Studies, Sociology at the University of Waterloo. He was a co-investigator on the Culture of Cities: Montreal Toronto Berlin Dublin SSHRC project and Chair of its Executive Committee from 2000 - 2005. He is currently a co-investigator on the interdisciplinary research project, City Life and Well-Being: the Grey Zone of Health and Illness, funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research, 2006 – 2011.
2011–2012
Laura Ephraim
Visiting ScholarLaura Ephraim recently finished her PhD in Political Science at Northwestern University. Her research scrutinizes several iconic texts from the origins of modern science in order to reopen a question that Hannah Arendt posed in The Human Condition, among other works: namely, what is the role of science in a democratic society? While at the Arendt Center, Laura will begin work on a book manuscript to extend the themes of her dissertation and will teach in the Language & Thinking Program and the First Year Seminar.
2011–2012
Solvieg Botnen Eide
Visiting ScholarSolveig Botnen Eide is a postdoctoral fellow in ethics at the University of Agder, Norway. Her education is in social work and theology, with a doctorate in ethics. As well as teaching and research, she is interested in ethics with special regards to professional ethics and ethical challenges in the welfare sectors. She is working with a phenomenological approach to moral philosophy, with a new and increased interest for the work of Hannah Arendt.
2011–2012
Hannah Arendt Center 2011–2012 In-Residence Visiting Scholar Fellow
Victor Granado Almena
In-Residence Visiting ScholarVictor Granado Almena (born 1983) expects to complete his Ph.D in Political and contemporary Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he is teaching as Pre-doctoral Fellow. His dissertation, called Out of place: a philosophical reflection about displacement and the displaced people in the global age, turns to Hannah Arendt to develop a new perspective in order to understand better the notion of citizenship in a global age. He is the recipient of a research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education. With the help of that grant he will study in a few places other than the Arendt Center during his research: the first, at the Freie Universität Berlin under the direction of Dr. Wolfgang Heuer in 2009, and the second, at the Univertité Paris 7 – Denis Diderot under the direction of Dr. Etienne Tassin in 2010.
2011–2012