2025

Goethe-Institut Washington
Thomas Mann House Los Angeles
USC Libraries

Hans Rudolf Vaget, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Smith College and Thomas Mann expert, on Thomas Mann's life, work, and relevance.

Reading by Renea S. Brown, actor, writer, and educator

Panel discussion featuring best-selling writer, poet, and scholar Clint Smith and Summer Lopez, Co-CEO and Chief Program Officer at PEN America, and moderated by human rights advocate Kimberly Marteau Emerson.

The conversation will explore the vital importance of the relationship between literature and democratic principles in a comparative and transatlantic perspective. What can writers and literary institutions contribute to societies when democracies come under pressure? The talk examines how the arts can serve as an essential tool for societal reflection and change. 

Sound Performance by Grammy-nominated musician and artist Kokayi.

In a keynote dialogue, author Azar Nafisi and political scientist Daniel Ziblatt will address complex questions, such as a citizen's role in defending and upholding democratic values, the subversive power of literature, and how to bring disenfranchised citizens back into dialogue.

Renea S. Brown is a Helen Hayes Award winning actor in DC. She has appeared at The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Arena Stage, The Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Chesapeake Shakespeare Theatre, and Round House Theatre and more. You can watch her on Law and Order and Godfather of Harlem on MGM+, or see her work in the world premier of The American Five as Coretta Scott King at Fords Theatre this fall.

Kimberly Marteau Emerson is a lawyer, advocate and non-profit leader in human rights, education and foreign policy, especially transatlantic relations. She speaks regularly at conferences and gatherings in Europe and the US. In June 2023, she was appointed by President Biden to serve on the US Holocaust Memorial Council. Ms. Emerson also currently serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Human Rights Watch, Chair of the Board of Governors of Bard College Berlin, and on the Board of Trustees of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. She serves on the Advisory Boards of the Thomas Mann House, foreign and domestic policy retreat center the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the German-American Institutes, and German social impact consultancy PHINEO. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Kokayi is a GRAMMY-nominated musician, improvisational vocalist, producer, author, speaker, and multidisciplinary fine artist. A Guggenheim Fellow for Music Composition—the first emcee to receive the honor—he is also a Halcyon Arts and Nicholson Arts Fellow, and a TEDxWDC presenter. He is author of You Are Ketchup: and Other Fly Music Tales (Globe Pequot). Kokayi is a longtime collaborator and Board member with OneBeat, and has served as a U.S. State Department music emissary. A committed advocate for DC’s indigenous music, Kokayi served in multiple leadership roles within the Recording Academy, including Chapter President and National Trustee, where he helped establish go-go as an official genre within the Regional Roots category—cementing its legacy within music history.

Summer Lopez is PEN America’s Interim Co-CEO and Chief Program Officer, Free Expression. She has been with the organization since November 2017 and has led PEN America's advocacy, research, and programming in defense of free expression in the U.S. and globally. Lopez has worked to advance democracy and human rights in the nonprofit and government sectors, including for eight years with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and three years with The AjA Project. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Washington Post, TIME, The Daily Beast, and the New York Daily News. She has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Nepal, India, and Ghana, and holds a BA from Harvard University and a master's in public affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Azar Nafisi is a lifelong champion and ardent supporter of the importance of Humanities and Liberal Arts and the role they play in the preservation and promotion of democracy. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which has won diverse literary awards. Nafisi was a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, and Director of The Dialogue Project & Cultural Conversations. She has lectured and written extensively on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere.

Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of the New York Times bestselling poetry collection Above Ground and the award-winning poetry collection Counting Descent. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Hans Rudolf Vaget is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts). He received his academic training at the universities of Munich and Tübingen, the University of Wales at Cardiff and at Columbia University in New York. His research focuses on Goethe, Wagner and Thomas Mann, on which he has published extensively. Recently he published Wehvolles Erbe: Richard Wagner in Deutschland. Hitler, Knappertsbusch, Mann (S. Fischer Publishing House, 2017). He is the author of the seminal book Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil, 1938-1952 (S.Fischer Publishing House, 2011).

Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University where he is also the director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He leads a research group at WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany. His current research focuses on the comparative study of democracy and authoritarianism with a focus on Europe and the United States. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die (2018), co-authored with Steven Levitsky. In 2023, he published Tyranny of the Minority (w/ Steve Levitsky), an analysis of American democracy in comparative perspective. He is also the author of the book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a history of democracy in Europe, in addition to Structuring the State (Princeton University Press, 2006). In 2023, Ziblatt was elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.

Three-time GRAMMY®-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres. Woods’ projects delve deep into our cultural fabric, reimagining traditional works and commissioning new ones to propel classical music into the future. He is an honoree of the 2023 Seattle Symphony’s 25th Anniversary Silver Gala and recipient of the 2022 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award. Woods has served on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California since 2022, and was appointed to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music in 2024.

Steven Walter is an award-winning music curator and cultural manager. He grew up near Stuttgart as part of an American family in Germany, with a few interludes in the USA. He studied cello in Oslo and Detmold and cultural management in Hamburg. In 2009, he founded PODIUM Esslingen and developed it into an award-winning platform for new concert formats. He has been the director of the Beethovenfest Bonn since 2021. Walter is a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Ursula K. Heise holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is co-founder and current Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities; contemporary environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Vietnam; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave.

Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, researchers and makes images, and her work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and critical-creative practice. She is the author of the book Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity, 2025). Darya serves as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), University of Chicago.

Elaine Chen ist Doktorandin der Germanischen Sprachwissenschaft und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft an der Harvard University. Ihren Master in Germanistik erwarb sie an der California State University, Long Beach, und war Fulbright-Stipendiatin in Salzburg. Ihre Forschung bewegt sich an der Schnittstelle von Literatur, Exil und politischem Widerstand, mit besonderem Fokus auf die Werke von Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig und Heinrich von Kleist. Sie hat mehrere wissenschaftliche Sammelbände mit herausgegeben und wurde 2021 mit dem Preis der Kleist-Gesellschaft für den besten studentischen Essay ausgezeichnet.

Jeffrey L. High promovierte an der University of Massachusetts, Amherst, und ist Professor für Germanistik sowie Vergleichende und Weltliteratur an der California State University, Long Beach. Zudem war er Gastprofessor an der German Summer School of the Pacific der Portland State University. Sein Forschungsinteresse gilt den Werken von Schiller, Kleist und Thomas Mann sowie literarischen Auseinandersetzungen mit politischen und gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen. High ist Autor und Herausgeber zahlreicher wissenschaftlicher Publikationen und wurde mehrfach für seine herausragende Lehre, Beratung und akademische Mentorschaft an der CSULB ausgezeichnet.

Kalani Michell ist Assistant Professor im Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies an der UCLA. Zuvor lehrte sie an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt und war Postdoktorandin im Graduiertenkolleg Configurations of Film. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte umfassen Film- und Medientheorie, Sound Studies und Medienhistoriografie. Derzeit arbeitet sie an der Fertigstellung ihrer Monografie Media Among Themselves: Unboxing Audiovisual Media from the 1960s and 1970s. Sie hat unter anderem zu deutschem Kino, Intermedialität und der Materialität künstlerischer Produktion publiziert. Ihre Arbeiten sind in CineAction, New German Critique, liquid blackness und weiteren renommierten Fachzeitschriften erschienen.

Prof. Burçin Becerik-Gerber (USC) is a pioneer in Human-Building Interaction. Her research explores responsive and adaptive environments that center the human experience, advancing how architecture and engineering serve diverse users.

Natalie Fung (USC graduate) is a production manager and data analyst, as well as a wheelchair user and advocate for accessibility. She brings personal and professional insight into how inclusive design directly affects quality of life and agency.

Prof. David Reinkensmeyer (UC Irvine) is a leading researcher in neuro-rehabilitation and robotics. His work focuses on developing "rehabilitators"—mechatronic devices that support recovery after neurological injuries like stroke or spinal cord injury.

Prof. Dr. Robert Riener studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Maryland and received his doctorate from TUM in 1997. After his postdoctoral studies at TUM and the Polytechnic of Milan, Robert Riener habilitated at TUM in 2003. He was subsequently appointed to ETH Zurich, where he was promoted to full professor in 2010. Riener develops therapy and assistance devices for people with restricted mobility. He founded the CYBATHLON to facilitate a social dialogue about inclusion.

Prof. Kelli Sharp (UC Irvine), Chair of the Department of Dance and co-Vice Chair for Research in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, merges dance science with clinical research to improve movement education, therapy, and health across populations.

Rana Deep Islam is a management consultant for the public sector. Prior to his consulting career, he held positions in politics and civil society, including project manager at Stiftung Mercator, Bertelsmann Stiftung, and GIZ. Rana Deep Islam began his career at the European Parliament in Brussels and at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

Kai Sina is a professor of modern German literature with a focus on transatlantic literary history at the University of Münster. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago and at Princeton University. He received the Fritz Behrens Foundation’s Science Prize, and in 2020 he was awarded a Lichtenberg Professorship by the Volkswagen Foundation. Together with Hans Rudolf Vaget, he is currently preparing an annotated edition of the essays Thomas Mann wrote during his  exile. He recently published the books "What Is Good and What Is Evil” – Thomas Mann as a Political Activist and TransAtlantik: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gaston Salvatore, and Their Magazine for Western Germany.

Samantha Rose Hill is the author of the critically acclaimed book Hannah Arendt (2021) and the editor and translator of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (2024). She is associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, and the journals Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory & Event.

Susanne Beyer studied German literature, history and journalism in Bamberg and Vienna. After her vocational training at Deutsche Journalistenschule (DJS), she initially worked as a culture editor at SPIEGEL, where she was deputy head of department. She was deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL for four years, then worked as a journalist in SPIEGEL's Berlin office and now writes for the editorial team. Alongside her job, Susanne Beyer is currently training to become a mediator.

David D. Kim is Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA, Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute, and the Community Engagement Advisor for the Division of Humanities at UCLA.

Veronika Fuechtner is Chair of Comparative Literature and Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth. She also teaches in Jewish Studies, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In addition, she occasionally has held an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education at the Geisel School of Medicine. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic (University of California Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia (Camden House, 2013) and A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 (University of California Press, 2017). She recently completed a monograph on Thomas and Heinrich Mann's Brazilian mother, Julia Mann, and the Mann family construction of race and “Germanness." And she is the editor of the forthcoming Norton critical edition of Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Her research interests include the history of psychoanalysis and sexology, the relationship between science and culture, discourses on race and ethnicity, German-language modernism, contemporary culture, German-language film, and global cultural and scientific histories. She has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, The American Academy in Berlin, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Research Council. She is serving on the editorial board of PMLA and she chairs the conduct and anti-harassment committee of the GSA.

Morten Høi Jensen is a Danish-American writer and critic and the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen(2017) and The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (2025). He has contributed to Liberties, the New York Review of Books, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Commonweal.

Sandra Kegel studied literature, theater, film and media studies in Aix-en-Provence, Vienna and Frankfurt. She has been an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1999. She worked in media and literature departments for many years and has been head of the FAZfeatures section since 2019. She also works as a juror and presenter and is a regular critic on the literary program “Buchzeit” (3sat). In 2005, she was awarded the Ravensburg Media Prize. During her 2025 fellowship at the Thomas Mann House, Sandra Kegel is investigating the extent to which the decline of the (local) press is promoting populism and mistrust in democratic structures and what lessons can be learned from the findings for the German newspaper landscape. She will also examine the use of AI in media companies and its implications for the journalistic ecosystem. 

Lorraine Ali is television critic of the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was a senior writer for the Calendar section where she covered culture at large, entertainment and American Muslim issues. Ali is an award-winning journalist and Los Angeles native who has written in publications ranging from the New York Times to Rolling Stone and GQ. She was formerly The Times’ music editor and before that, a senior writer and music critic with Newsweek magazine. Her writing awards include Best Online Feature from the New York Association of Black Journalists in 2007, an Excellence in Journalism Award in 2002 from the National Arab Journalists Association. In 1996, she won Best National Feature Story honors at the Music Journalism Awards.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, covering Southern California everything and a bunch of the West and beyond. He was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and the Mike Royko Award for Commentary and Column Writing and was part of the team that won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News for reporting on a leaked audio recording that upended Los Angeles politics. Arellano previously worked at OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for 15 years and editor for six, wrote a column called ¡Ask a Mexican! and is the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.” He’s the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.

Susanne Beyer studied German literature, history and journalism in Bamberg and Vienna. After her vocational training at Deutsche Journalistenschule (DJS), she initially worked as a culture editor at SPIEGEL, a German weekly news magazine and one of the largest such publications in Europe, where she was deputy head of department. She was deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL for four years, then worked as a journalist in SPIEGEL's Berlin office and now writes for the editorial team. Alongside her job, Susanne Beyer is currently training to become a mediator. Beyer is a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Cordula Meyer, born in 1971, has been deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL, Germanys leading political website und magazin, since 2024. She studied political science and communication in Hamburg and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, graduating with an M.A. She has worked at SPIEGEL since 1999, initially as a reporter at the National Desk and later as a correspondent in Washington, covering the election and presidency of Barack Obama. She became the head of the National Desk in 2015. In 2023, she became a member of SPIEGEL's editorial desk. As a reporter she has covered how 9/11 was planned in Hamburg and the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. She has been involved in volunteer work with Netzwerk Recherche, an organization promoting investigative reporting, for many years.

Heinrich Wefing is a multi-award-winning journalist, architecture critic and book author. After many years at the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) as cultural correspondent in Berlin, and West Coast correspondent in San Francisco, he moved to DIE ZEIT in 2008, a major German national weekly newspaper. Since 2018, he has headed the politics department there. Wefing is one of the initiators of the Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights of the European Union, which was published at the end of November 2016.

Sandra Kegel studied literature, theater, film and media studies in Aix-en-Provence, Vienna and Frankfurt. She has been an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1999. She worked in the media and literature departments for many years and has been head of the FAZ features section since 2019. She also works as a juror and presenter and is a regular critic on the literary program “Buchzeit” (3sat). In 2005, she was awarded the Ravensburg Media Prize.

Sandra Kegel studied literature, theater, film and media studies in Aix-en-Provence, Vienna and Frankfurt. She has been an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1999. She worked in the media and literature departments for many years and has been head of the FAZ features section since 2019. She also works as a juror and presenter and is a regular critic on the literary program “Buchzeit” (3sat). In 2005, she was awarded the Ravensburg Media Prize.

Sonja Hegasy is Deputy Director of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. She studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at Columbia University and completed her doctorate in political science at FU Berlin. In 2019–2021, she held the professorship for Postcolonial Studies at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin. In 2023, she was a Senior Fellow at the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies “Metamorphoses of the Political” in Delhi.

Omar M. Dajani is the Carol Olson Professor of International Law at McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific in California. He is also the immediate past co-chair of the joint board of A Land for All, on which he continues to serve. Previously, Omar served as a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with Israel from 1999 to 2001, participating in the summits at Camp David and Taba.  He received his B.A. from Northwestern University and his J.D. from Yale Law School.

Chaim Seidler-Feller has been associated with Hillel for over 50 years and has celebrated forty years of working with students and faculty as the Executive Director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. He is currently Director Emeritus. He is currently a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute, North America and is an organizer for "A Land for All" in the U.S. He was a founding member of Americans for Peace Now. Chaim is the author most recently of “The God of Possibilities: From Being to Becoming,”  "'Twas the Best of Times, ‘Twas the Worst of Times: Antisemitism, Israel and the Politics of Resentment on the Campus Today,” and “A Return to a Zionism for the Future.”    

Susanne Beyer studied German literature, history and journalism in Bamberg and Vienna. After her vocational training at Deutsche Journalistenschule (DJS), she initially worked as a culture editor at SPIEGEL, a German weekly news magazine and one of the largest such publications in Europe, where she was deputy head of department. She was deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL for four years, then worked as a journalist in SPIEGEL's Berlin office and now writes for the editorial team. Alongside her job, Susanne Beyer is currently training to become a mediator. Beyer is a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Bjorn Krondorfer has worked with different groups in interactive settings exploring sensitive issues, including memory and trauma relating to the Holocaust, racial diversity on university campuses, and Palestinian/Israeli encounter groups (pre-October 5). He is Regents’ Professor and Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northen Arizona University in Flagstaff.

Los Angeles Poverty Department, founded in 1985 by director, performer, and activist John Malpede, is the first arts organization in the nation created by and with people experiencing homelessness, and the first cultural program of any kind for Skid Row, Los Angeles. Rooted in the conviction that the imagination and creativity of Skid Row residents are vital forces for change, LAPD uses theater and other arts to challenge stereotypes, amplify community voices, and address pressing social issues such as housing, drug policy, mass incarceration, and displacement. Through performances, festivals, parades, exhibitions, and its Skid Row History Museum & Archive, LAPD celebrates the resilience and achievements of neighborhood residents while shaping broader policy conversations around poverty and urban development. Its pioneering work has inspired service providers, informed public policy, and created a model for grassroots, arts-based civic engagement recognized nationally and internationally.