Visiting Speakers

Gary Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. His most recent book, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf), was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Asia Society's Bernard Schwartz Book Award, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize.

Nima Bassiri works on the history and philosophy of the human sciences and medicine, with a particular emphasis on the mind and brain sciences since the eighteenth century.

Michele Battini teaches modern European history and political thought at the University of Pisa.

For twenty-five years, Alison Bechdel wrote, drew, and self-syndicated the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. She gained wider recognition for her work with the publication in 2006 of her graphic memoir about her father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Her second memoir, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, was published in 2012

Ruth K. Beesch is Deputy Director, Program Administration at the Jewish Museum, overseeing the management of education programs, collections, and temporary exhibitions. Prior to joining the Jewish Museum in 1997, Beesch was the Director of the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro from 1989 to 1997 and the Acting Director of the University Gallery at the University of Florida from 1986 to 1989. She serves as a liaison for curatorial matters with the development department and is part of the senior management team at the Museum. Beesch is a member of ArtTable and serves on the AAM’s Accreditation Visiting Committee. She has an MFA in Museum Studies from the University of Florida.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of Italian Studies and History at New York University. She writes and lectures on 20th century Europe, with a specialization in modern Italy.

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics and Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild, and an editor of The Politics of Moralizing and In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment.

Alan Berliner's experimental documentary films, First Cousin Once Removed (2013), Wide Awake (2006), The Sweetest Sound (2001), Nobody’s Business (1996), Intimate Stranger (1991), and The Family Album (1986), have been broadcast all over the world, and received awards, prizes, and retrospectives at many major international film festivals. He’s won three Emmy Awards and received seven Emmy nominations from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In addition to his work in film, Berliner has also produced a substantial body of photographic, audio and video installation works.