De Gruyter–Arendt Center
Lecture in Political Thinking

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.

Free and open to the public, the lecture will take place at Bard College's Bito Lecture Hall, RKC, on April 23rd at 5p EST and will be livestreamed here.

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A conference on Hannah Arendt and Black political thought may be jarring, if not altogether improbable, for some persons to comprehend. Yet it very well might be needed now more than ever. This keynote address examines strivings for the revolutionary spirit and what such strivings reveal about the contours of modern Black political thought and Arendt studies between past and future.

Free and open to the public, Learn More Here.

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The U.S. Supreme Court today faces a crisis of legitimacy. More than half of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Court—the lowest in over three decades. Dr. Birmingham gave the keynote at our 2024 Spring Conference: Between Power and Authority: Arendt on the Constitution and the Courts. 

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The inaugural lecture was delivered by Professor Linda Zerilli, Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College at The University of Chicago. Her lecture, entitled “Arendt and the Problem of Political Persuasion,” took place on Thursday, March 2, 2023. Professor Zerilli’s lecture also served as the keynote address for a two-day interdisciplinary humanities conference, ‘Judgment, Pluralism, and Democracy: On the Desirability of Speaking with Others.’

Read the press release here

The De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking series aims to promote and foster the legacy of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A partnership between the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at Bard College and De Gruyter publishing, the lecture will be delivered annually by a prominent scholar. De Gruyter explicitly intends for the lecture series to be open to a broad approach to Arendt across the disciplines of not only philosophy and political theory but the humanities and social sciences more generally.