Hannah Arendt Center 2020–2021 Senior Fellows
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.
2018–2021
Peter Baehr
Senior FellowPeter Baehr is Research Professor in Social Theory at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He currently writes on Hong Kong’s slide into dictatorship, the concept of unmasking, and the political liberalism of Rebecca West. His books include The Unmasking Style in Social Theory (Routledge, 2019), Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford University Press, 2010), and Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World (Transaction, 1997). Peter is also the editor of The Portable Hannah Arendt (Penguin, 2000) and, with Philip Walsh, the co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt (Anthem, 2007, and published in Chinese translation by Peking University Press). He can be contacted at: peterbaehr20@gmail.com.
2020–2022
Thomas Bartscherer
Senior FellowThomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He writes on the intersection of literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on tragic drama, aesthetics, and performance. He also writes on contemporary art, new media technology, and the history and practice of liberal education. He is co-editor 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, and he is currently editing, with Wout Cornelissen, The Life of the Mind for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. He is a research associate with the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes in Paris and has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Heidelberg. He has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and PhD from the University of Chicago. https://thomasbartscherer.
2018–2021
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.
2020–2021
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.
2011–2021
John Pang
Senior FellowJohn Pang has worked on policy and strategy in government, business and civil society across East Asia. He has held senior fellowships at Columbia University, NYU Stern and the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore, where he was a lead member of the Center for Multilateralism Studies. As director of a leading investment bank in Southeast Asia, he founded a research institute and later a council of business leaders to support regional economic integration. As a strategy consultant, and later as a senior member of an intelligence-led risk and strategy advisory firm, he advised decision makers in telecommunications and aviation, energy, infrastructure, tourism and financial services. He has also helped advance reform and regional integration by working directly with cabinet-level government leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan and Myanmar, including as special policy advisor to the Minister of Education, Malaysia, where he led key projects on schools reform, and in the Prime Minister's Office, where he assisted with communications and track II diplomacy. He has supported private/public sector coordination in major connectivity and investment projects such as China’s Belt and Road project and worked on the design of special economic zones in Malaysia and Indonesia. He chaired the Global Agenda Council for Southeast Asia of the World Economic Forum and served on the global board of Open Society Foundations. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy and economics from the London School of Economics, and did research in philosophy and religion at Stanford University. He is interested in framing the political theology of international relations discourse, especially as it applies to China, East Asia and the question of global order.
2019–2021
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
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.
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
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
2018–2021
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.
2020–2021
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
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.
2017–2021
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.
2014–2021
Nelly Ben Hayoun
Associate FellowDr. Nelly Ben Hayoun is a designer of extreme experiences that aims to bring the sublime to life. Dubbed the "Willy Wonka of Design," Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun is an award-winning French designer and filmmaker who creates multi-dimensional experiential projects at the intersection of science, theater, politics and Design. Wired awarded her their inaugural Innovation Fellowship in 2014, and Icon magazine recognized Dr. Ben Hayoun as one of the top 50 designers 'shaping the future' for her pioneering "total bombardment" design philosophy.
She is the founder and director of the International Space Orchestra the world's first orchestra of NASA space scientists and astronauts; and most recently she founded the University of the Underground, a subversive tuition free educative and cultural programme that is on course to create disorder in academia.
Her various roles include Chief of Experiences at WeTransfer, Designer of Experiences at the SETI (search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, advisor to the United Nations Virtual Reality Labs, Research Director at Brooklyn based design Institute A/D/O and advisory board member at AIGA (American Institute for Graphic Arts).
Her various roles include Chief of Experiences at WeTransfer, Designer of Experiences at the SETI (search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, advisor to the United Nations Virtual Reality Labs, Research Director at Brooklyn based design Institute A/D/O and advisory board member at AIGA (American Institute for Graphic Arts).
2018–2021
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.
2011–2021
Hans Kern
Associate FellowHans, an American German also from Munich, came to learn about sortition through Jonas and found that it in many ways satisfies his demand for more inclusive decision-making. Hans is a writer, illustrator and self-publisher of environmental manuals, including the [Re]cyclopaedia: global swarming toolbox of all the known strategies for [re]versing global warming and [re]pairing the planet. He believes deliberative sortition is the key to bringing ecologically prudent policy to the political sphere, from the local to the global scale. Hans graduated from Bard College in 2014.
2018–2021
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.
2018–2021
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
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
2018–2021
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
Jana Schmidt
Associate FellowJana V. Schmidt (MA English, University of Pennsylvania; PhD Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo) began reading Hannah Arendt while writing on the question of political community in postwar Germany and its re-imagination through literature and visual art. Her research interests include 20th century American and German literature, poststructuralism and the question of the communal vis-a-vis the aesthetic, Bildwissenschaften (image studies), and theories of memory. She has recently published a book on Arendt’s legacy as a thinker, Hannah Arendt und die Folgen (2018, Metzler Verlag), as well as an essay on reconciliation in Arendt and Ingeborg Bachmann (Philosophy Today). At present, she is a lecturer of literary theory at California State University, Los Angeles while working on her next manuscript, a book of encounters between German-Jewish exiles to America and African American artists and political activists from the 1940s to Black Power. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Arendt Center in 2016/7 and taught at Bard as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities in 2017.
2016–2021
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.
2014–2021
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.
2012–2021
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 Marlene Mader is a Ph.D. candidate at LMU Munich and a scholarship holder of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Her dissertation focuses on national narratives in German and North American literature of the enlightenment and postmodernity. From 2014 until 2018, she was a Lecturer in the German Department at the University of North Carolina. In 2017, her debut novel "Wir alles, wir nichts " was published by Qantor. At the public library in Hannover, Germany, close to Hannah Arendt's birth house, a new permanent exhibition opens in October 2018 portraying Hannah Arendt's life. Jana Marlene Mader developed the concept for it.
2018–2021