Roger Berkowitz and Kenyon Adams: Freedom and Solitude

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz authored The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Harvard, 2005; Fordham, 2010; Chinese Law Press, 2011). Berkowitz is editor of The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition (forthcoming 2020) and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications. Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany.
Kenyon Adams is the director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, New York, and a multimedia performance artist also known as little ray, a nom d’art inspired by a line in Dante’s Inferno about a little ray of light coming through a window in a prison tower. He previously served as director of the arts initiative at Grace Farms Foundation, an arts and cultural center in New Canaan, Connecticut. Adams studied religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, and theology of contemporary performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where he won the Director’s Prize for his presentation of the blues aesthetic as American lament. He also spent a year as artist in residence at the Institute. His performance work includes Prayers of the People, an interdisciplinary project marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , which was directed by Bill T. Jones and presented at the Fisher Center by New York Live Arts and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He made his feature film debut in Lee Isaac Chung’s 2010 feature Lucky Life, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and was selected for the Moscow International Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, and others.
This video was filmed live at the Alpine Fellowship 2022 Symposium in partnership with Bard College through the Open Society University Network and supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.