MODERATOR BIOGRAPHY

Bonnie H. Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, and (by courtesy) religious studies (RS) and theater and performance studies (TAPS). She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009), Antigone, Interrupted. (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017). She has twice served as discussant on Tanner Lectures and has two new books forthcoming this spring: A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, 2021) and Shellshocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham 2021). In 2017-18 she served as the Inaugural Cranor Phi Beta Kappa Scholar, and she is currently an affiliate of the Digital Democracy Group at Simon Fraser University and the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Juliet Hooker is professor of political science. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, Latin American political thought, Black political thought, and Afro-descendant and Indigenous politics in Latin America. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford University Press, 2017), which was a recipient of the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She is currently working on a book project entitled, Black Grief/White Grievance, that explores the role of loss in contemporary racial politics in the United States. Prof. Hooker has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Melvin L. Rogers is associate professor of political science, with wide-ranging interests located largely within contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African American political and ethical philosophy. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008), editor of John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Ohio University Press, 2016), co-editor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History forthcoming from the University of Chicago January 2021, and is completing a book for Princeton University Press entitled The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.

Andre C. Willis is an associate professor of religious studies at Brown University. He is a philosopher of religion whose work focuses on Enlightenment reflections on religion, African American religious thought, critical theory, and democratic citizenship as it relates to ‘religious’ notions of hope, recognition, and belonging. Willis earned a B.A. at Yale in philosophy and his M.A. and Ph. D. at Harvard in the Committee on the Study of Religion. He is the author of Towards a Humean True Religion (2015) and is currently working on a manuscript about African American religion and politics, Afro-theisms and post-democracy. He has published articles in international journals such as Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Political Theology, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Radical America.