JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times

Thursday, October 16th

Friday, October 17th

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 writes on philosophy, literature, politics, and contemporary culture. He is co-editor of the critical edition Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (2025) and of When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice. His opera, Stranger Love, created with composer Dylan Mattingly, was commissioned and premiered at the LA Phil in 2023. 
 

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 is president and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts of Bard College. Founder of Bard High School Early College, Dr. Botstein put into practice a vision of high school as a public space where young adults, with the guidance of a college level faculty, explore their intellectual potential.

He has published widely in the fields of education, music, and history and culture and is the author of several books including Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, and editor of The Compleat Brahms and The Musical Quarterly. He is the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now (TŌN), and conductor laureate and principal guest conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director. He is the founder and artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. His work has been acknowledged with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harvard University, government of Austria, and Carnegie Foundation. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.

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.

Alexander Castleton

Alexander Castleton is a sociologist from Uruguay and the Academic Director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics program at the University of Montevideo. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Carleton University (Canada) and has been a Fulbright-Canada scholar at the University of Montana and an Assistant Professor at MacEwan University (Canada). His research explores the intersections of technology, identity, aging, and Indigenous peoples, as well as the sociology of culture and social philosophy, with a focus on José Ortega y Gasset and Hannah Arendt. He is currently completing a second doctoral degree in philosophy at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain).

Matthew Crawford

Matthew B. Crawford earned a degree in physics, then a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. A Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, he writes philosophically-inflected cultural criticism, often with an historical angle. He is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft (a New York Times Bestseller), The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive. His shorter writings have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street journal, First Things, American Affairs, Unherd,The New Atlantis, Compact, Le Monde, Le Figaro, The Sunday Times of London, and many other publications. 

Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Director of the Onassis Foundation. His books include Very Little…Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009) and The Faith of the Faithless (2012). He has also written a novella, Memory Theatre (2015), a book-length essay, Notes on Suicide (2020) and studies of David Bowie, Football and Apply-Degger (Onassis, 2020). More recent books are Tragedy, The Greeks and Us (Pantheon, 2019) and Bald (Yale, 2021). He was series
moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in The New York Times and co-editor of three volumes connected to the series, most recently Question Everything (2022). He is 50% of an obscure musical combo called Critchley & Simmons, whose album, Gone Forever, was released in 2024. Mysticism – The Experience of Ecstasy was published by The New York Review of Books (USA) and Profile (UK) in November 2024. A short book on tragedy called I Want To Die, I Hate My Life will be published in 2025 with ERIS.

Katie Farris

Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her most recent book is Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023), which Publishers Weekly named one of the Top Ten Books of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her earlier collection is boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey.

Robert Harrison

Robert Pogue Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Emeritus.  He is the author of several books, among them The Body of Beatrice (1989); Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992); The Dominion of the Dead (2004), Gardens: The Shadow of Civilization ( 2008); and Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age (2014). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2014 he was knighted “Chevalier” by the French Republic.  Since 2005, he has hosted the radio show and podcast “Entitled Opinions.”  

Bill T. Jones

BILL T. JONES (Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) was the Associate Artist of the 2020 Holland Festival and recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; the 2013 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!; a 2007 Tony Award, 2007 Obie Award, and 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation CALLAWAY Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2007 USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; the 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography forThe Seven; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and the 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 2010, Mr. Jones was recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”  
 
Mr. Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in 1982. He has created more than 140 works for his company. Mr. Jones is the Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating. For more information visit www.newyorklivearts.org.

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the US in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

Anthony Kronman

Anthony T. Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He was appointed to this  position in 2004. Professor Kronman served as dean of the Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004.  He joined the Yale faculty in 1978 after teaching for two years at the University of Chicago  School of Law and for one year at the University of Minnesota Law School. His teaching areas  include constitutional law, contracts, legal philosophy and law and religion. He also teaches  philosophy, literature and history and politics in the Directed Studies Program in Yale College.  

Professor Kronman is the author or co-author of many books and articles on various scholarly  and other subjects. His most recent book, “After Disbelief” (2022) explores the meaning of God  in an age of disenchantment. “The Assault on American Excellence” (2019) decries the ways in  which the consuming passion for diversity and the erosion of free speech undermine educational  values and threatens the standing of our colleges and universities in the country at large. His  2016 book, “Confessions of a Born Again Pagan,” offers a sweeping account of the history of  Western thought and an original diagnosis of our current spiritual predicament. In 2007,  Professor Kronman published “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have  Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” and in 1993, “The Lost Lawyer,” which deals with the  contemporary state of the American legal profession and the movement away from what he calls  the lawyer-statesman ideal of responsible law practice.   VIEW MORE >>

Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh collection of poetry, Door, was bublished by Penguin Random House in March 2023. She writes at the intersection of poetics, politics and the visual arts. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993), she is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature (Written Arts) at Bard College.

Jana Mader

Jana Mader is the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies and the Humanities at Bard College. She has published four books, including a novel and a comparative analysis of 19th-century literature from the Hudson Valley and the Rhine. Her latest book, Walk Her Way New York City. A Walking Guide to Women's History, was released in spring 2025. More about her work can be found at janamarlene.com.

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.

Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is the author of ten books of poetry, including New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a book-length poem; The Many Hundreds of the Scent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); Cain Named the Animal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), a finalist for the Forward Prize; Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Rilke Prize; In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. Read his work here.

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.

Marilyn Simon

Marilyn Simon earned her PhD on Shakespeare from the University of Toronto. She is known for her writing on sex and women, but she also writes more broadly on culture and joy. She's working on her first book titled Submission: How Falling in Love with Shakespeare Made Me a More Joyful Woman, Wife, and Lover. Her writing appears regularly in Unherd and Quillette, and more recently in The Hedgehog Review.

Allison Stanger

Allison Stanger is Middlebury Distinguished Endowed Professor; Co-Director (with Danielle Allen), GETTING-Plurality Research Network, Harvard University; Distinguished Senior Fellow at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center; founding member of the Digital Humanism Initiative (Vienna); and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Stanger’s next book, Who Elected Big Tech? is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
 
Stanger’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wired. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale University Press, 2019) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2009). She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Stanger is the co-editor (with Hannes Werthner et. al.) of Introduction to Digital Humanism: A Textbook (Springer, 2024), which is open access, and co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press, 2020).
 
Stanger has been called to testify before Congress on six occasions (by both Republicans and Democrats). She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. She majored in Mathematics as an undergraduate and also has graduate degrees in Soviet Studies and Economics.

Robin Wang

Robin R. Wang is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles and The Berggruen fellow (2016-17) at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Stanford University. Her teaching and research focus on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy, particularly Daoist philosophy, as well as the intersections of women and gender in Chinese thought and culture. She has published a wide range of essays, that bridge classical Daoist philosophy with modern philosophical discourse, offering critical insights into their relevance in addressing contemporary global challenges. She is the author of the acclaimed book, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and the editor of Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, (SUNY Press, 2004) and Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period to the Song Dynasty (Hackett, 2003). She is the member of the Steering Committee member for Fédération Internationaledes Sociétés de Philosophie (International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP 2018 to present) where she actively engages in shaping the future of philosophical inquiry on a global stage. She has regularly given presentations in North America, Europe, and Asia, and has also served as a peer reviewer for academic journals and publishers, contributing to academic excellence across multiple disciplines. She was President of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, 2016-18.

Jill Stauffer

Jill Stauffer is an Associate Professor at Haverford College. Her book Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, was published by Columbia University Press in 2015. The book was used as a model for the series of dialogues amongst Indigenous nations that lead to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a cooperative request to the Australian government for indigenous voice in Parliament. Stauffer is also on the editorial board of the human rights oral history book series Voice of Witness. Her edited volume (with Bettina Bergo), Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God, was published by Columbia University Press in 2009. Her next book, Temporal Privilege, about the relation between time and law and also the urgent need for all of us to learn to tell a wider range of stories about temporal experience, is forthcoming in 2026.

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).  VIEW MORE >>

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool, Self-Portrait in Black and White, and Summer of Our Discontent. He is a staff 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.

The Taconic State Parkway and the New York State Thruway provide the most direct routes to our campus. Click the Google link above or get directions by entering the following address into your GPS: 51 Ravine Road, Red Hook, NY 12571. 

From the East: If you are traveling from east of the Hudson River in New York State, take the Taconic State Parkway to the Red Hook / Route 199 exit, drive west on Route 199 through the village of Red Hook to Route 9G, turn right onto Route 9G, drive north 1.6 miles, turn left at the traffic light and continue on Annandale Road through our campus.

From the West: If you are traveling from west of the Hudson River, take the New York State Thruway (I-87) to exit 19 (Kingston), take Route 209 (changes to Route 199 at the Hudson River) over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge to Route 9G, turn left onto Route 9G, drive north 3.5 miles, turn left at the traffic light and continue on Annandale Road through our campus.

There are two train stations close to Bard College: one in Poughkeepsie (Metro North), New York, and the other in Rhinecliff (Amtrak), New York. Taxi service is available from either station to bring you to campus.  

Amtrak provides service from Albany and from Pennsylvania Station in New York City to Rhinecliff, about 9 miles south of Annandale. Taxi service is available at the station. Travel Time: Approximately two hours (one hour and 40 minutes by train and 15–20 minutes by taxi). Contact Information: Rhinecliff station can be reached at 845-876-3364. Reservations and schedule information at wwe.Amtrak.com

Metro-North commuter railroad provides service from Grand Central Station in New York City to Poughkeepsie, about 26 miles south of campus. Taxi service is available at the station. Travel Time: Approximately one hour and 30 minutes (40–50 minutes by train and 40 minutes by taxi).

Olin Hall

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 through Dutchess County Tourism and through Ulster County Tourism. Please review these lists. 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 Air BnB 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.