Post Doctoral Fellowships

Klemens von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellowship

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College offers the Klemens von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, a residential program designed to support outstanding early-career scholars whose work engages meaningfully with the thought of Hannah Arendt and contributes to contemporary debates in political theory, philosophy, and the humanities.

The fellowship provides a year of supported research in residence at the Center. Fellows pursue independent scholarship while participating fully in the Center’s intellectual community, including seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops. They have access to the Center’s research resources, including Arendt’s personal library and the Arendt Digital Archive in New York City.

In addition to research, fellows contribute to academic life at Bard College through teaching. Each fellow teaches at Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson campus and also teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative, bringing rigorous liberal arts education to students enrolled in Bard degree programs within New York State correctional facilities.

Each year, the postdoctoral fellow also organizes the De Gruyter–Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking, which promotes and fosters the legacy of Arendt’s thought. Presented in partnership with De Gruyter Brill, the lecture is delivered annually by a prominent scholar and forms a central part of the Center’s public programming.

The fellowship reflects the Center’s commitment to fostering serious scholarship, public engagement, and the ongoing relevance of Arendt’s work to questions of politics, freedom, responsibility, and the life of the mind.

Shasta Kaul

Shasta is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Her dissertation, “What is Real in Political Realism? Authority in Arendt, Machiavelli, and Kautilya” proposes that political realism is contextually limited and has primarily to do with understanding how authority can be exerted in a given political context. Realists assume the concept of authority to be central to realism, and where people place epistemic authority is crucial to understanding political authority. The dissertation puts Hannah Arendt forward as an effective contemporary realist. Shasta is also interested in understanding what it means to be a citizen, and how the idea of citizenship has changed over time.

She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Oxford.

2026–2027

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