Friendship and Politics

Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. A Professor of Politics, Philosophy,  and Human Rights, Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.  VIEW MORE >>

Leon Botstein

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

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

Marie Luise Knott

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

Wyatt Mason

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

Uday Mehta

Uday Singh Mehta is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and the 2022 Yehuda Elkana Fellow (awarded by Central European University and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College). Professor Mehta has taught at several universities, including Princeton, Cornell, MIT, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Hull and Amherst College. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke(Cornell University Press, 1992) and Liberalism and Empire, (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Liberalism and Empire was awarded the J. David Greenstone prize for the best book in Political Theory by the American Political Science Association in 2002. In 2003, Mehta was one of ten recipients of the prestigious “Carnegie Scholars” prize given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” His forthcoming book is titled A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality.

Angel Adams Parham

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

Anne Norton

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

Jana Schmidt

Jana Schmidt is Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center. Her first book Hannah Arendt und die Folgen was published in 2018 with Metzler Verlag. She is currently working on a book project on German-speaking exiles and their encounters with Black politics in the US post 1945. As the Director of Academic Programs, Jana works on building the academic community and profile of the Hannah Arendt Center in collaboration with Bard students and faculty; she organizes curricular events such as the “Courage To Be” series and facilitates engagement with Arendt scholarship through programs like the reading group, the Journal, and academic conferences.

Jana Mader

Jana 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

Thomas Chatterton Williams

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

Thomas Wild

Research Director and Associate Professor of German and Director of the German Studies Program M.A., Free University of Berlin; Ph.D., University of Munich. Also studied at University of Rome, La Sapienza. Has taught at institutions of higher learning in Germany, Vanderbilt University, and Oberlin College, and recently served as Alexander von Humboldt / Feodor Lynen Research Fellow at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests include 20th-century German literature and film; the political dimensions of culture, art, and thought; Hannah Arendt; and contemporary developments in German media and society after 1989.

Niobe Way

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

Jill Frank

Jill Frank, Professor of Government and Classics at Cornell University, is author of the award-winning Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s Republic and A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics. She is currently at work on The Beauty of Equality, which explores the capacities of the texts of ancient Greek philosophers, poets, and historians to defamiliarize the contemporary American politics and jurisprudence of equality in radically democratic directions. 
 

Michael Weinman 

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

Getting Here

Bard College's main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City, 50 miles south of Albany, NY, and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Conference takes place in Olin Auditorium in the Olin Humanities Building (C3 on the Bard Map). 

Accomodations

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

Local hotel offering a Bard Rate during the conference: 

Parking is Free

There are two main parking lots; One across from Olin and one south of Olin Hall -- Please park in either lot. Additionally, you may also park in the gravel lot across from the Stevenson Gymnasium off of Annandale Road. Please click HERE to see the venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.

Facebook Group

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