November 2020

Charmaine A. Nelson is a Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement and the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of 7 books, Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Canadian Studies, and African-Canadian Art History. In 2017-18, she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018).

Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. During his studies, he worked as a journalist for taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and Deutschlandfunk. He has worked as a political reporter for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the Zeit Magazin. Anthropologically and journalistically, he focuses on human rights, equality and upheaval in the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mohamed Amjahid is a 2020 Thomas Mann fellow.

Obi Felten is Head of getting moonshots ready for contact with the real world at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, the team behind self-driving cars, delivery drones, energy storage using molten salt and internet from balloons. Previously she was Director of Consumer Marketing for Google EMEA. Before Google, Obi launched the ecommerce business of a major UK retailer, worked as a strategy consultant and led eToys.com's (unsuccessful) expansion to Germany during the first dotcom boom. Obi serves on various boards, including Springer Nature, a global academic and educational publisher, the Wellcome Trust mental health priority area, and Shift, a charity tackling social problems through the power of design thinking and social ventures.  Obi grew up in Berlin, has a BA in philosophy and psychology from Oxford University, and lives in California with her husband and young children.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht was the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University from 1989 until 2018. He received twelve honorary doctorates from universities in seven countries. In addition, he has been a Visiting Professor and Fellow at numerous academic and cultural institutions worldwide. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a regular contributor to Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, Weltwoche and Estado de São Paulo. Among his recent books are Stimmungen lesen – Über eine Ontologie der Literatur (Hanser Verlag, 2011 – English, Portuguese, and Spanish translations); Unsere breite Gegenwart (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010 – translations into English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish); After 1945 – Latency as Origin of the Present, Stanford University Press 2013 (German translation 2012; Portuguese translation 2014; Polish translation 2015; Russian and Spanish translations 2017, Hungarian translation forthcoming); Der Weltgeist im Silicon Valley (Portuguese and spanish translation forthcoming), Brüchige Gegenwart (2019), and Prose of the World — Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment (German Translation 2020, French, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish translations forthcoming).

Milena Merten is a reporter for ada, Germany’s platform for life in the digital era and the economy of the future. Previously, she was a staff writer for the Innovation and Digitization Department of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany’s leading weekly business magazine. She graduated from Georg von Holtzbrinck School for Business Journalists and wrote for Handelsblatt and Die Zeit. Milena studied politics and communication sciences in Mainz, Düsseldorf and Davis, California. She is passionate about topics at the intersection of technology and society.

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a National Book Critics Circle Award. His second book was the essay collection Listen to This. He  most recently published Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 2020). Ross was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Thomas Mann House.

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).