The Divided Society After November 3rd

Speaker Bios

Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, inequality, labor economics, and economics of networks. He is the author of five books, including Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (both with James A. Robinson).

Acemoglu has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, and the Global Economy Prize in 2019. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

Giuliano Amato is a Judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy, since September 2013. He served as Secretary of the Treasury in Italy and was the Italian Prime Minister in 1992-93 and in 2000-01. From 2006 to 2008 he served as the Minister of the Interior. He was the vice-chairman of the Convention for the European Constitution. He has chaired the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani and the Centro Studi Americani (Center for American Studies) in Rome. A Professor of Law in several Italian universities and abroad, he has written books and articles on the economy and public institutions, European antitrust, personal liberties, comparative government, European integration and humanities. He served as the Chair of Reset DOC’s scientific board from 2003 to 2013.

Lisa Anderson is Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Dr. Anderson served as President of the American University in Cairo for five years, from 2011-2016. Prior to her appointment as President, she was the University’s provost, a position she had assumed in 2008. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; prior to her appointment as Dean, she served as Chair of the Political Science Department and Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute; she held the Shotwell Chair in the Political Science Department.  She has also taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and in the Government and Social Studies departments at Harvard University.

Dr. Anderson’s scholarly research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world. Among her books are The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (1986) and Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (2003); she has also published numerous scholarly articles.

Dr. Anderson is a trustee of the Aga Khan University, Tufts University and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is a member emerita of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, served as elected President of the Middle East Studies Association, and as Chair of the Board of the Social Science Research Council.  A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, she has received honorary degrees from Monmouth University and the American University in Paris.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He has taught at the University of Ghana, Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Princeton. Among his books are Cosmopolitanism (2006), The Ethics of Identity (2008), The Honor Code (2010), Lines of Descent (2014), As If: Idealization and Ideals (2017), The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018), and three mystery novels. He is a columnist on ethics for the New York Times. He received his BA and a PhD in philosophy at Cambridge.

Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University (2001-2020) and a Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019.

Benhabib is a distinguished international scholar who is known for her research and teaching on social and political thought, particularly 20th century German thought and Hannah Arendt. Over the past two decades, she has become recognized for her contributions to migration and citizenship studies as well as her work on gender and multiculturalism.

Benhabib has previously taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard University, where she was a professor of government from 1993 to 2000 and chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996 to 2000.

She was the president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association from 2006 to 2007 and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, she has been a research affiliate and senior scholar in many research institutions in the United States and in Europe, such as the Russell Sage Foundation (2000–2001), Berlin’s distinguished Wissenschaftskolleg (2009), NYU’s Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice (2012), the Transatlantic Academy in Washington D.C. (2013), and Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Humboldt University of Berlin (2018).

Benhabib has also delivered the Gauss Seminars in Criticism (Princeton, 1998), the Spinoza Lectures (Amsterdam, 200), The John Robert Seeley Lectures (Cambridge University, 2002), Tanner Lectures (University of California, Berkeley 2004), Catedra Ferrater Mora Lectures (Girona, Spain 2005), and the Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy at the University of Chicago Law School (Spring 2020). In fall 2020, she will deliver the annual human rights lecture at the London School of Economics.

Among her other professional activities, she organized the Istanbul Seminars in her native Istanbul, Turkey from 2008–2015 (with the Italian RESET Foundation, devoted to intercultural cooperation), which focused on enhancing international cooperation with intellectuals from Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Israel, and Palestine, among other countries. She was Chair of RESET’s Scientific Committee from 2013 to 2019.

She established Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory with New School for Social Research Professor Andrew Arato and served as the journal’s co-editor from 1991 to 1997. She also served on the editorial board of Citizenship Studies, Political Theory, Journal of International Political Theory, Human Rights Review, Global Constitutionalism, Blatter fur deutsche und internationale Politik, and Jus Cogens.

Sheri Berman is Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles on European politics and political development, the left, fascism, populism, and the fate of democracy.  Her latest book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (2019).  She has also published in a wide variety of non-scholarly publications, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, VOX, The Guardian and Dissent. She is currently a columnist for Foreign Policy and Social Europe.  She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Giancarlo Bosetti is the editor-in-chief and one of the founder of Reset DOC and Reset, a cultural magazine he founded in 1993. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L’Unità. He is the editor-in-chief of the web-magazine of Resetdoc.org. He is currently a columnist for the Italian daily La Repubblica and he has been teaching sociology of communication at University La Sapienza, and University Roma Tre. He published La lezione di questo secolo, a book-interview with Karl Popper; Cattiva maestra televisione, (ed.) writings by Karl Popper and others Among his books: Spin. Trucchi e Tele-imbrogli della Politica, Marsilio, 2007; Il fallimento dei laici furiosi (2009); La verità degli altri. La scoperta del pluralismo in dieci storie, Bollati Boringhieri, 2020.

Ian Buruma is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the United States.

Much of his writing has focused on the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan. He is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. His latest book is The Churchill Complex: From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin).

Craig Calhoun is a social theorist and historical and comparative sociologist. He is the author of well over a hundred articles and 10 books, including Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China; Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference; Roots of Radicalism; Does Capitalism Have a Future? (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Georgi Derluguian, and Michael Mann) and the forthcoming Degenerations of Democracy (with Charles Taylor and Dilip Gaonkar).

Calhoun is currently University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previously, Calhoun served as Director of the LSE, President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and a professor at NYU (where he founded the Institute for Public Knowledge), Columbia, and UNC-Chapel Hill (where he founded the University Center for International Studies and served as Dean of the Graduate School). He has also been a visiting professor in Oslo, Bristol, Paris, Khartoum, Beijing, and Asmara and an Einstein Fellow in Berlin.

He is currently a member of the Board of the MasterCard Foundation, Chair of the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, Chair of the Board of the American Assembly at Columbia University, and Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute.

Marina Calloni is Professor of Social and Political philosophy at the State University of Milano-Bicocca. Since 2007 she is a member of the Inter-ministerial Committee for Human Rights (CIDU), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome. From 2007 to 2010 she was a member of the management board of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (based in Vienna) as representative for Italy and director of the «International Network for Research in Gender». Among her last books: A. Saarinen & M. Calloni (eds.), Women Immigrants as constructers of a New Europe. Gender Experiences and Perspectives in European Trans-regions (2012), Y.Galligan, S.Clavero, M.Calloni, Gender Politics and Democracy in Post-socialist Europe (2008).

José Casanova is a professor in the Departments of Sociology and Theology at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. He is also President of the advisory board of Reset DOC. He has published works on a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of his life-long achievement in the field of theology.

Jelani Cobb has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2012, and became a staff writer in 2015. He writes frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. His most recent book is “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.” He won the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, for his columns on race, the police, and injustice. He teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Sudipta Kaviraj is a professor at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Prior to joining Columbia University, he taught at the Department of Political Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has also taught Political Science at JNU, and was an Agatha Harrison Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. Kaviraj is a specialist in intellectual history and Indian politics. He works on two fields of intellectual history: Indian social and political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and modern Indian literature and cultural production. His other fields of interest and research include the historical sociology of the Indian state, and some aspects of Western social theory. Kaviraj’s books include The Imaginary Institution of India (2010) Civil Society: History and Possibilities co-edited with Sunil Khilnani (2001), Politics in India (edited) (1999), and The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (1995).

Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016-2017 and she chaired the Council for European Studies from 2006-2009. She is also the recipient of a 1996 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2014 Gutenberg research award, and the 2017 Erasmus prize (for her contributions to the social sciences in Europe and the rest of the world). She is also the recipient of honorary doctorates from five countries (Canada, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK). A cultural and comparative sociologist, Lamont is the author or coauthor of a dozen books and edited volumes and over one hundred articles and chapters on a range of topics including culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and successful societies, and qualitative methods. Her most recent publications include the coauthored book Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel (Princeton University Press 2016); the 2017 ASA Presidential Address “Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality” (American Sociological Review 2018); and a special issue of Daedalus on “Inequality as a Multidimensional Process” (coedited with Paul Pierson; summer 2019). Lamont is Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2019-2021, she spent 2019-2020 on sabbatical at the Russell Sage Foundation. She is working on a book on social change and repertoires of hope, to be published by Simon and Schuster (US) and Penguin (UK).

Maria Latella is a multimedia journalist. Every Sunday she is on SkyTg24 with “L’Intervista” in which she interviews important and current personalities and on Radio 24 she hosts the program “No one is perfect”, a program dedicated to women and the workplace. She is an opinion columnist for “Il Messaggero” and has a blog called “Tendenza Latella” as well as being an assiduous tweeter. She has written numerous books including “Il potere delle donne” [The Power of Women], published by Feltrinelli.

Mark Lilla is an American political scientist, historian of ideas, journalist, and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City.  A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and publications worldwide, he is best known for his books The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, and The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.

Rahsaan Maxwell is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.  His research broadly examines how national boundaries operate and he has explored numerous topics including immigrant integration, political representation, identity and political behavior, primarily in Western Europe.  His recent work focuses on urban-rural divides, cultural diversity, globalization and national culture.

Jedediah Purdy Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School. He teaches and writes on constitutional, environmental, and property law as well as legal theory and law’s intersection with social and political thought.Purdy is the author of six books, including After Nature (2015) and a trilogy on American politics that concluded with A Tolerable Anarchy (2009). His legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and many other journals. He is also a frequent contributor to publications such as The Atlantic, n+1, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Before joining the Law School faculty, Purdy taught at Duke Law School for 14 years. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Georgetown University Law Center. He served as a law clerk for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

Giuseppe Sarcina is an Italian journalist. He worked at Il Mondo and he is currently the Washington Correspondent for the Corriere della Sera, where he has worked since 1995.

Federico Rampini is a writer, a public speaker, and the the US Chief Correspondent of La Repubblica. He has been based in New York since 2009, also covering international summits: G7 and G20, APEC-ASEAN, NATO. He is a White House correspondent, covering the international trips of US presidents. Among his previous assignments, he was the China and Asia bureau chief, based in Beijing, from 2004 to 2009; a foreign correspondent in San Francisco, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt.

Torrey Taussig is a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program’s Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings and a research director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2018-19, she was based in Berlin as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow. Taussig works on U.S. foreign policy, European and Asian security, authoritarian politics, and U.S.-Russia relations. Previously, Taussig was a pre- and post-doctoral fellow at the Brookings Institution. Prior to Brookings, she worked at the U.S. Department of State, the Glover Park Group, and at the Council on Foreign Relations. Taussig’s other research areas include: 21st century revisionist statecraft; great power competition between the United States, Russia, and China; and global trends of democracy and authoritarianism. Her articles and papers have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Diplomat, among other publications. Taussig has a doctorate from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She received a master’s from the Fletcher School and a bachelor’s in political science and economics from Williams College.

Michael Walzer is a Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and editor emeritus of the magazine Dissent. He has written on a wide range of topics, including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also  a member of the editorial board of Philosophy & Public Affairs. He is a member of several philosophical organizations including the American Philosophical Society. Author of Just and Unjust Wars (1977) and Spheres of Justice (1983) his latest publications include In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (2012) and The Paradox of Liberation (2015).