De Gruyter–Arendt Center
Lecture in Political Thinking

Neil Roberts is associate dean of the faculty and the John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy professor of Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. Roberts was President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016-19, and he served for several years on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal Political Theory. His publications include the books Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024, with Marilyn Nissim-Sabat), A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018), the collaborative volume Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016), and the award-winning text Freedom as Marronage (2015) as well as numerous articles, book forewords (such as the 2024 foreword to Teodros Kiros's Zara Yacob's Inauguration of Modernity and Cardiocentrism), and chapters on creolizing the canon, Black radicalism, totalitarianism and modern politics, and the bounds of political theory. His work has appeared in periodicals such as Black Perspectives, Caribbean Studies, The C.L.R. James Journal, Contemporary Political Theory, HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Perspectives on Politics, Small Axe, and Theory & Event. How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism is his next monograph, and he's at work both on a study of Haile Selassie I and the Oxford Handbook of Sylvia Wynter.  

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 will give the keynote at our Spring Conference: Between Power and Authority: Arendt on the Constitution and the Courts. 

Watch the lecture 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.

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