How to Live in a Cosmic Vacuum
Explore two alternative accounts of the existential condition & the proper human response to it.
Sundays | Jan. 5–Feb. 2, 2025
Online Seminar
Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of the great poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag after criticizing Stalin. Her memoir, Hope Against Hope (1970), is a brilliant account of the collapse of intellectual life and the terror and bleakness of everyday existence at the height of ideological tyranny. More, it is a morally incandescent epic: the story of a poet doomed by his absolute refusal to let his tongue be cut out, and of his wife’s heroic dedication to the preservation, in the face of isolation, poverty, and official anti-Semitism, of verse that she carried for decades only in her memory.
Of Hope Against Hope, the poet Joseph Brodsky writes: “[Mandelstam’s] memoirs are something more than a testimony to her times; they are a view of history in the light of conscience and culture. In that light, history winces, and an individual realizes his choice: between seeking that light’s source and committing an anthropological crime against himself.” This course will explore the impact of totalitarian regimes on art and the role of intellectual resistance under tyranny.
Image: Pyotr Alekseyevich Belov, Dandelions, 1987 | Image Asset Management / Superstock
Jacob Howland on Hope Against Hope
This course is offered by Humanities at Hertog. It takes place weekly on Sundays, via Zoom, from 6 PM to 8 PM ET. Fellows will receive a $150 stipend contingent upon participation in the course and completion of a brief response paper. All course materials will be provided.
Jacob Howland is Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, history, epic, and tragedy; the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; Kierkegaard; and literary and philosophical responses to the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism.
Jacob Howland is Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, prior to which he was the McFarlin Professor of Philosophy (emeritus) at the University of Tulsa. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, history, epic, and tragedy; the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; Kierkegaard; and literary and philosophical responses to the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism.
His most recent book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic. His other books include Plato and the Talmud and Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith.
He earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Penn State.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visiting Professor of Humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s.
Benjamin Storey
Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He recently co-authored a book with Jenna Silber Storey entitled Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment.
Jacob Howland
Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Tulsa. He has written about Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Kierkegaard, the Talmud, the Holocaust, ideological tyranny, and other subjects. His most recent book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic.
Flagg Taylor
Flagg Taylor is an Associate Professor of Government at Skidmore College, and serves on the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He is editor most recently of The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977–1989. He is currently writing a book on Czech dissent in the 1970s and 1980s and hosts The Enduring Interest podcast.
Vance Serchuk
Vance Serchuk is Executive Director of the KKR Global Institute and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Prior to joining KKR, Mr. Serchuk served for six years as the senior national security advisor to Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut).
Ian Marcus Corbin
Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on faculty in Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative, and is a Faculty Member at the HMS Center for Bioethics. His philosophical work examines the connections between modes of intersubjectivity, community, and cognitive flourishing.
James M. Dubik
LTG James M. Dubik (U.S. Army, Ret.) is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and a Professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. General Dubik has extensive operational experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Bosnia, Haiti, Panama, and in many NATO countries.
Frederick W. Kagan
Frederick W. Kagan is a Senior Instructor with the Hertog War Studies Program at the Institute for the Study of War. The author of the 2007 report “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” he is one of the intellectual architects of the successful “surge” strategy in Iraq. He is the director of AEI’s Critical Threats Project.
Kimberly Kagan
Kimberly Kagan is a Senior Instructor with the Hertog War Studies Program and founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War. She is a military historian who has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Yale, Georgetown, and American University.