NEWS

Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center and De Gruyter
announce annual lecture series

De Gruyter is pleased to announce the establishment of a partnership with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, commencing with an annual lecture series: the De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking.

The inaugural lecture will be 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,” will take place on Thursday, March 2, 2023. Prof. Zerilli’s lecture will also serve as the keynote address for a two-day interdisciplinary humanities conference, ‘Judgment, Pluralism, and Democracy: On the Desirability of Speaking with Others.’

The Hannah Arendt Center (HAC), based at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson (NY), was founded in 2006 and is home to the Hannah Arendt Collection, which represents approximately 5,000 volumes, ephemera, and pamphlets that made up Arendt’s personal library. HAC oversees a range of events and programs, including an annual Fall conference and a virtual reading group.

With 270 years of experience, De Gruyter is one of the leading Humanities publishers in Europe, internationally renowned for publishing the critical editions of great philosophers such as Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche, and serving an ever-growing academic community worldwide. Within the framework of this cooperation, De Gruyter will not only sponsor the annual lecture series but will be launching a new book series devoted to the legacy of Hannah Arendt. The book series, which will also be undertaken in conjunction with HAC, aims to establish itself as the premier venue for scholars working on all aspects of Arendt’s thought and its relevance for contemporary problems.

“De Gruyter is passionately committed to facilitating research and offering a forum for scholarly debates on some of the most urgent issues we face today. This cooperation with the Arendt Center is another example of these efforts. I am very enthusiastic about starting this new journey together,” said Dr. Serena Pirrotta, Editorial Director Classical Studies & Philosophy at De Gruyter. “Over the past few years,” Pirrotta added, “we have strengthened our focus both on the history of women philosophers (with the Women Philosophers Heritage Collection, the most comprehensive and significant selection of writings from women in the history of philosophy and science) and on timely topics and issues in philosophy and political theory (with the new series Transforming Political Philosophy). The De Gruyter- Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking, along with the new book series on Hannah Arendt, are further steps in this direction and contribute to our internationalization efforts.”

“The Hannah Arendt Center nurtures an intellectual space for passionate, uncensored, nonpartisan thinking that reframes and deepens the fundamental questions facing our world. We are thrilled to partner with De Gruyter to sponsor talks by leading thinkers about our political and ethical world,” said Dr. Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of HAC. Berkowitz, who is also Professor of Politics and Human Rights at Bard, is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany.

The annual lecture series will be coordinated by Dr. Nicholas Dunn, Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow in the HAC and Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Politics at Bard College. Dunn, who is also organizing the ‘Judgment, Pluralism, and Democracy’ conference, is volume editor of a commentary on Arendt’s Kant Lectures (and editor of the Commentary on Arendt’s Kant Lectures (forthcoming in De Gruyter’s new Works of Philosophy and Their Reception series).

The lecture will be live streamed and recorded, and available on HAC’s Youtube Channel