Bard’s Political Studies faculty teaches courses that cover the breadth of the discipline, with a focus on comparative politics, international relations, political theory, and American politics. The faculty also has expertise in a variety of foreign geographic areas, including Latin America, Western Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East, and conducts research in a wide range of subjects, including political activism, terrorism and war, and democratic development. Additional faculty resources are available at Bard's Global and International Affairs Program (BGIA), based in New York City, which allows Bard students to pursue course work in international studies alongside internship opportunities at major international bodies and nongovernmental organizations.
Program Affiliations: Global and International Studies, Human Rights
Michelle Murray began teaching at Bard in 2010. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Chicago, specializing in international relations. Her principal research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of international relations theory, security studies and diplomatic history. Her first book—The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism and Rising Powers—offers a new answer to a perennial question in international relations: how can an established power manage the peaceful rise of new great powers? The book argues that power transitions are principally social phenomena whereby rising powers struggle to obtain recognition of their status as great powers. Through detailed case studies of the United States and Imperial Germany’s rise to world power status at the turn of the twentieth century, the book shows how the desire for recognition shaped the arming decisions of these rising powers. Professor Murray’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Bard Research Fund. During the 2014-2015 academic year was a Deans Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. At Bard she teaches courses on international relations theory, security studies, great power politics, nuclear proliferation and humanitarian military intervention. Before joining the Bard faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the International Studies Program at The University of Chicago.
Teaching and Research Interests: International relations theory, critical security studies, the politics of recognition among states; international history, especially pre-World War I Europe; and global governance and international organization.
Selected Publications · The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism and Rising Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). · “Identity, Insecurity and Great Power Politics: The Tragedy of German Naval Ambition Before the First World War,” Security Studies 19, no. 4 (December 2010): 656-688.
Kellan Anfinson received his doctorate in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2015. He has taught at the University of Mannheim, Sciences Po, Johns Hopkins, and the University of South Florida. His research uses critical theory to analyze contemporary environmental problems. He is currently completing a project entitled The Ethos of the Event: Experimental Ethics under a Changing Climate. This book examines “the event” and its role in political life, with a focus on developing an ethos that could better attune us to an eventful world, which is today urgently marked by climate change. Such an ethos supplements scientific and policy visions of climate change by attending to the diffuse, complex, and momentous character of this event. To compose this ethos, he draws on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Foucault, who address different events ranging from the birth of Christ to the death of God and the rise of a fascist leader. This ethos connects us to a world of surprising and tragic events and enables the existential changes necessary to engage climate change.
Teaching and Research Interests: Political Theory, Critical Theory, Environmental Politics, Climate Change, Political Economy, Complexity Theory, Biopolitics, American Politics
Recent Publications: “How to Tell the Truth about Climate Change,” Environmental Politics (2018) “Risk or Security: Carl Schmitt’s Ethos of the Event,” Telos (2018)
Teaching and Research Interests: Political Economy, Nations and Nationalism, Asian Borderlands and South Asian Politics.
Sanjib Baruah has been at Bard since 1983. His doctoral work was at the University of Chicago. Prior to that he was educated at the University of Delhi in India; and Cotton College, Guwahati, India. His publications include India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2005); Postfrontier Blues: Towards a New Policy Framework for Northeast India (East-West Center, 2007) and the edited volumes Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Ethnonationalism in India: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2010). His opinion pieces appear in the Indian Express and other newspapers.
He serves on the editorial board of the journal Studies in Indian Politics (Sage Publications) and the book series ‘South Asia in Motion’ of the Stanford University Press. He holds a concurrent position as Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway. A number of his books are available in the Oxford India Paperbacks series. For some of his publications visit: https://bard.academia.edu/SanjibBaruah
Jonathan Becker
Vice President and Dean for International Affairs and Civic Engagement and Associate Professor of Political Studies
Teaching and Research Interests: Soviet, Russian, and East European politics and history;US/Russian relations; comparative politics; media and politics; comparative media systems.
B.A., McGill University; D. Phil., St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. Specialization in Soviet, Russian, and Eastern European politics; media and politics. Taught at Central European University, University of Kiev Mohyla Academy, Wesleyan University, Yale University. Author of Soviet and Russian Press Coverage of the United States: Press, Politics and Identity in Transition (1999; new edition, 2002). Articles in European Journal of Communication, Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, Slovo, among others. Director, Global and International Studies Program; Academic Director, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. At Bard since 2001.
Roger Berkowitz
Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities
Teaching and Research Interests: Political theory, law and human rights with an emphasis on the ethical activity of justice.
Roger Berkowitz (website: www.vernunft.org) came to Bard in 2005 from stints teaching at Amherst College and Cardozo Law School. He has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence from the University of California Berkeley and a J.D. from Boalt Hall Law School. Berkowitz founded the Hannah Arendt Center in 2006. His teaching ranges from introductory courses in law, political theory, and human rights to seminars on Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics and The Burden of Our Times: The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis. He edits HA: The Journal of the Arendt Center. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers, The American Interest, Ethics and International Affairs, Bookforum, The Paris Review, and other publications. He writes and edits the Arendt Center blog. His TEDx East Hampton talk is "The Next Generation of Human"
Selected Recent Publications:
"The Romance of the Self: Marilynne Robinson’s Existential Humanism," (with Anna Hadfield), The Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson (forthcoming)
"Instituting Freedom: Steven Buckler and Hannah Arendt on an Engaged Political Theory," European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming, 2014)
"Drones Are Everywhere," forthcoming, Ethics and International Affairs (forthcoming, 2014)
"Justice," The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (Wiley, 2014)
"Does the President Matter? Thoughts on Miracles in Politics," in HA. The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities (v. 2, 2014).
"Dostoevsky," The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (Wiley, 2014).
"Melville's War Poetry and the Human Form," in A Political Companion to Herman Melville, ed. by Jason Frank (Kentucky Univ. Press, 2014).
"Should We Justify War?" in Just War in Religion and Politics, ed. by Jacob Neusner and R.E. Tully (2013).
"Human Being in an Inhuman Age," in HA. The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities (v. 1, 2012).
"Hannah Arendts erste Briefe an Karl Jaspers und Martin Heidegger: Freundschaft, Versöhnung und Wiederaufbau einer gemeinsamen Welt," in Nach dem Krieg! - Nach dem Exil? Erste Briefe/First Letters 1945-1950, II, ed. Detlef Garz and David Kettler (2012).
"’The Angry Jew has Gotten His Revenge’: Hannah Arendt on Revenge and Reconciliation," in Philosophical Topics (v. 39 no. 2, 2011).
"Hannah Arendt and Human Rights." Routledge International Handbook of Human Rights. Ed. by Thomas Cushman. (Routlege, 2011).
Program Affiliations: Latin American and Iberian Studies, Global and International Studies, and Human Rights.
Teaching and Research Interests: Comparative politics with a focus on Latin America and Iberia. Special research interests in theories of regime change, democratization politics, and LGBT rights.
Omar G. Encarnación came to Bard in 1998, after completing his Ph.D. in politics at Princeton University. He is the recipient of Princeton University's Presidential Fellowship and research grants from the Council for European Studies, the Fulbright Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Research Council, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture. He has been a Ford Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at Georgetown University's Center of Latin American Studies, a visiting scholar to the Center for the Advanced Study in the Social Sciences of the Juan March Institute in Madrid, a Research Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, and a consultant for the U.S. Department of State, The World Bank, and Freedom House. In 2017, he was elected to a three-year term to the APSA Council, the governing body of the American Political Science Association.
Professor Encarnación is the author, most recently, of Out in the Periphery: Latin America's Gay Rights Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2016). His research has appeared in Comparative Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, International Studies Quarterly, West European Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Human Rights Quarterly, among others. His opinion articles can be found in The New York Times, Current History, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and The New York Review of Books.
Teaching and Research Interests: American Politics and Political Thought, particularly the philosophy and political practice of the Early American Republic; Constitutions in theory and practice; American Political Thought; and Contemporary American politics.
Program Affiliations: American Studies
Simon Gilhooley has been at Bard since 2013. He holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, and specializes in American Politics and Political Thought. His research builds upon insights from American politics and political theory, in order to address issues of constitutionality and authority within the American polity. His dissertation sought to understand the central role of the Constitution's framers within American political life, and the emergence of this centrality within the historical context of the Early American republic. . His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, among others. He teaches courses on contemporary American politics, American political history, American political thought, and constitutional practice. Before joining Bard College, he taught at Ithaca College, NY. His website can be visited at www.simongilhooley.com
Recent Publications:
"The Framers Themselves: Constitutional Authorship during the Ratification," American Political Thought 2:1 (2013)
Samantha Rose Hill
Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies Assistant Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities
Samantha Rose Hill came to Bard in 2015 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. She received her doctorate in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2014. Her research and teaching interests include critical theory, the Frankfurt School, aesthetic theory, and the History of Political Thought. Hill is completing a manuscript of Hannah Arendt's poetry, which has been edited and translated into English: Into the Dark: The Poems of Hannah Arendt. She is currently working on a monograph that explores the ethical dimensions of melancholia. At Bard, she teaches courses on historical political theory, contemporary political theory, radical political thought, affect theory, American political thought, aesthetics and politics. Before coming to Bard, she conducted post-doctoral work at the Institut für Philosophie at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main.
Teaching and Research Interests: critical theory, the Frankfurt School, aesthetic theory, the history of political thought, democratic theory.
Recent Publications
--“The Siren Song of Authoritarianism” Forthcoming
--“Home, Homelessness, and the Human Condition”, The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center of Politics and the Humanities, Volume 4/2016.
--“The Need for Despair” review of Robyn Marasco’s The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Theory & Event, 19.3 (2016).
--“The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk”, Contemporary Political Theory, August 2016.
Program Affiliations: Global and International Studies
Christopher McIntosh began teaching at Bard in 2010. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from The University of Chicago, specializing in international relations and has an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown. His principal research and teaching interests revolve around international relations, security studies, temporality, and post-structural theory. His primary research focuses on how the concept of war in contemporary international politics is constituted by sovereignty and the implications it has for the practice of political violence. This research builds on his dissertation, “What Makes a War, a War? Sovereignty, War, and the Subject of International Politics”. At Bard he teaches courses on global ethics, sovereignty and war, terrorism, security, and international relations. Prior to Bard, Professor McIntosh has worked at CSIS and the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Teaching and Research Interests: Security studies, war, sovereignty, temporality, terrorism, international relations, post-structural IR theory, global ethics, gender and security, the United States War on Terrorism, postcolonialism, and nationalism.
Publications:
A Space for Time: Essays on Time, Temporality, and Global Politics (E-international Relations: forthcoming) with Andrew Hom, Alasdair MacKay, and Liam Stockdale.
"Theory Across Time: International Relations' Privileging of Time-less Theory," International Theory 7, no. 3 (2015): 464-500.
"Counterterrorism as War: The Dangers, Risks, and Oppurtunity Costs of War with Al Qaeda and its Affiliates," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 38, no. 1 (2015): 104-118.
"A Different Kind of War: Practices and War in Countering Terrorism," Air and Space Power Journal-AF 6, no. 4 (2015): 36-46.
Ending the War on Al Qaeda” Orbis, December 2014 (58:1): 104-118.
“The US Debate,” in Banning the Bang or the Bomb? Negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Regime I. William Zartman, Mordechai Melamud, and Paul Meerts, eds. (Cambridge University Press: 2014): 131-151.
“Taking Obama’s Offer Seriously: Ending the War on Al Qaeda” Yale Journal of International Affairs, June 1st, 2013.
Walter Russell Mead
James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities
Teaching and Research Interests: U.S. foreign policy; international relations, religion and politics
B.A., Yale University. Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations. Author, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001, winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize and nominated for the 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award); Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (2004); God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2008). Contributing editor to and writer on international affairs for Los Angeles Times; writes articles, book reviews, and op-ed pieces for Harper's, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines and newspapers. Finalist, National Magazine Award (essays and criticism), 1997. President's Fellow, World Policy Institute at The New School (1987-97). At Bard: 2005-08; 2010-
Dr. Pınar Kemerli teaches political theory, comparative political thought and Middle East politics at Bard College. She completed her PhD in the Department of Government at Cornell University, and holds a B.A from Boğaziçi University in Turkey, and M.A degrees from Goldsmiths College of the University of London and Cornell University. Before joining Bard, Professor Kemerli taught at New York University and held postdoctoral positions at Brown University and University of South Florida. Her interdisciplinary research addresses theories and practices of resistance, decolonization, violence/nonviolence, and religion and politics and she offers courses on these topics. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled “Muslim Nonviolence in an Age of Islamism: War-resistance and Decolonization in Turkey.” Her articles and reviews have appeared in a range of journals including International Journal of Middle East Studies,Theory & Event, Political Theory, and Radical Philosophy.
Teaching and Research Interests: comparative political thought, modern political theory, Islamic political thought, theories and practices of resistance, colonialism and decolonization, violence/nonviolence, nationalism, and politics and society in modern Turkey and the Middle East.
Selected Publications
“Violent Pasts and How to Live With Them,” On Charles Hirschkind’s “The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia,” Political Theology (Forthcoming) “Thomas Hobbes and Political Secularism: A Critical Engagement,” Theory & Event (October 2021) Review of Darryl Li, “The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity,” Political Theory 48 (2020) “Thinking Critically with Saba Mahmood: Secularism and Sovereignty, Radical Philosophy (Autumn 2019) “Necropolitics, Martyrdom, and Islamist Conscientious Objection,” ed. Banu Bargu, Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence and Resistance (Edinburgh University Press) (2019) “Refusing to Become Pious Soldiers: Islamist Conscientious Objection in Turkey,” ed. Fatma Müge Göçek, Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey (2018) “Religious Militarism and Islamist Conscientious Objection in Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47:2 (2015): 281-301
“The Islamist Terrorist as the New Universal Enemy: Discourses on Terror at the United Nations”, ed. Claudia Verhoeven and Carola Dietze, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (forthcoming Oxford University Press) (Published online, 2014)