Senior Fellows

Thomas Bartscherer

Thomas 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.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, 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.

Wyatt Mason

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

Jana Schmidt

Jana Schmidt, assistant professor of German Studies, writes about German and American transatlantic literatures and theory. After completing her PhD in comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, she first came to Bard as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, where she also served as director of academic programs in 2022–23. She has held fellowships at the German Literature Archive Marbach, German Historical Institute Washington, and at Fordham University and the New York Public Library. Her first book, Hannah Arendt und die Folgen (2018), traces the influence of Hannah Arendt’s thought on the work of a variety of postwar thinkers, artists, and activists. She has written essays for publications such as Philosophy Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Narrative Theory, and German Quarterly. Her current writing project deals with the encounter of German-speaking refugees with African American thinkers and politics from the 1940s onward.  MA, English, University of Pennsylvania (2007); PhD, comparative literature, SUNY Buffalo (2015). At Bard since 2022.

Allison Stanger

Allison 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.