Enlightenment in the World

Aziz Al-Azmeh is professor emeritus of history at the Central European University, Vienna. Among his books in English are Islams and Modernities (1993, engl. 2009)  (also available in two German translations), Secularism in the Arab World (1992, engl. 2020), and The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (2014). He is currently completing a book on the universal history of irreligion.

Mithu Sanyal is a German writer, cultural scientist and journalist. She writes in about gender, sexism and identity for The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ZEIT, Missy Magazine, and many more. She studied German and English literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where she completed her doctorate on the cultural history of the female genitalia. She is best known for her novel Identitti (2021), in which she examines the contradictions and absurdities of an ethnically based search for identity and which was awarded the Ernst Bloch Prize and the Ruhr Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize.

Susan Neiman is an American philosopher and writer. She has written extensively on the Enlightenment, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics. Her work shows that philosophy is a living force for contemporary thinking and action.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, during the Civil Rights Movement, Neiman dropped out of high school to join American activists working for peace and justice. Later she studied philosophy at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. in 1986 under the direction of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. In the 80s she spent six years in Berlin, studying at the Free University and working as a freelance writer. She was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. In 2000 she assumed her current position as director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

Neiman has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, and a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is now a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of nine books, translated into 15 languages, which have won prizes from, among others, PEN, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Academy of Religion. Her shorter pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and many other publications.

Neiman is the mother of three grown children; she lives in Berlin.

Bipasha Bhattacharyya is a third-year Phd Student (Department of History) and Trinity College’s Prince of Wales Student. She was a Prize Research Student in the year 2022 at the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, and continues to be an actively engaged in its proceedings. She also co-covened the Faculty of History’s World History Workshop for the academic year 2022–2023.

Bipasha’s thesis aims to develop her interest in constructed languages, language politics and pedagogy through an attempt to historicise Esperanto and the search for an International auxiliary language. Prior to coming to Cambridge, Bipasha read history at Presidency University, Kolkata.

Her research interests include language politics, histories of international movements and of ideas, newspapers as historical sources, critical biographies, social and micro-history.

Amber Carpenter (Visiting Professor, King’s College London) has published widely in ancient Greek philosophy, and Indian Buddhist philosophy, both separately and jointly—most recently leading an international research project on Buddhist-Platonist philosophical inquiries (buddhistplatonistdialogues.com). The resulting volume of studies, Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave, came out with Oxford University press this Spring.

Topically, she pursues questions in metaphysics, epistemology and mind, as they connect to ethical questions. She has held research fellowships at Yale, Melbourne, the University of York, with the Einstein Forum (Potsdam), and the Templeton Religious Trust (Ethical Ambitions and Their Formations of Character, part of the Moral Beacon project). Her monograph, Indian Buddhist Philosophy, appeared in 2014; her co-edited collection, Portraits of Integrity, emerging from the work of The Integrity Project (integrityproject.org), appeared in 2020.

Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty studied history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and taught history in different colleges in West Bengal, India. He retired from Presidency College, Kolkata. He was a guest teacher at the Calcutta University for twenty-five years. He has taught and published on European history in English and Bengali, has written on the history of Darjeeling, and on sports history in South Asia. He was a member of textbook review committee of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in India in the 1990s. After retirement, he worked at the West Bengal State Archives for three years, and organized the shifting to the archives the files of the Intelligence Branch of the West Bengal Police to enable the researchers to use them. He has been a member of the council of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, for nearly two decades and has edited a number of volumes, two of which are Uprisings of 1857: Perspectives and Peripheries (2008) and The Eighteenth Century in South Asia: New Terrains (2010). He is a co-editor of the recently published The Long 2020: Reflections on Epidemiological Times (2024), and has recently published an essay on the journey of the ship Komagata Maru in 1913–14.

El Hadji Ibrahima Diop is Professor of German Literature and its Didactics at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal. He studied German language and literature at the University of Leipzig and habilitated at the University of Essen. In 2015 he published Racialité et Rationalité. De l’altérité de l’Afrique noire en Allemagne au siècle des lumières.

Jonathan Keir teaches International Literatures at the University of Tübingen and works as a project consultant for the Karl Schlecht Foundation. His recent books include The House that Fromm Built (2022), Four Humanisms in One Day (2021), and Peking Eulogy (2020). In 2018/19 he held an Associate Researcher position at Peking University’s Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies. His current book project, Ends of Europe, explores the work of 50 world authors in the context of debates on ‘European’ identity.

Sankar Muthu is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests in political theory and the history of political thought focus especially upon Enlightenment ideas and their legacies. He is the author of Enlightenment Against Empire (2003) (Princeton UP) and the editor of (and contributor to) Empire and Modern Political Thought (2012) (Cambridge UP). He is currently researching and writing two books on Enlightenment political thought: (1)Global Oppression and Enlightenment Resistance, which concerns Enlightenment-era philosophical analyses of global connections (such as travel, trade, communication, and exchange), cosmopolitan society, transnational oppression, and transcontinental institutions (including networks of slavery and joint stock trading companies); and (2) Inhuman Humanity in Enlightenment Political Thought, which investigates the manner in which humanity and inhumanity (or de-humanization) are related to one another across an array of French, German, Scottish, and English texts of the mid to late eighteenth century.

Carlos Peña is a bachelor’s in law, lawyer and Phd in Philosophy (U of Chile), with post grade studies in sociology. At the present he is rector in Diego Portales University (Santiago- Chile) and columnist in the main chilean newspaper. He has published–among other books–Studies on Rawls (2014); Why does philosophy matters? (2017); Thinking the malaise (2021) Politics of Identity. Hell are the others? (2022), Sons without fathers (2023).

Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism ( 2024). In 2025, he will be Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His dissertation (2022), Jefferson’s Map, Douglass’s Territory: The Black Reconstruction of Enlightenment in America, 1773-1865, won Harvard’s DeLancey K. Jay Prize for the best work across the University “upon any subject relating to the history or development of constitutional government and free institutions in the United States or Great Britain or any other part of the English-speaking world at any period of history.” His interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History, New Literary History, English Literary History, and American Political Thought.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. His research interests include philosophy of law, social and political philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana philosophy. Táíwò is the author of Legal Naturalism: A Marxist Theory of Law (1996), How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (2010), Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto (2012), Can a Liberal Be a Chief? Can a Chief Be a Liberal? On an Unfinished Business of Colonialism (2021), and Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (2022). He was joint editor with Olutoyin Mejiuni and Patricia Cranton of Measuring and Analyzing Informal Learning in the Digital Age (2015). His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Chinese. He has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria, Germany, South Korea, and Jamaica.

Anna Winckelmann (Vinkelman) holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Cultural Studies from Cologne University. She was a lecturer in Philosophy at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She is currently a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Radboud University in Nijmegen.

Raef Zreik is a jurist and political philosopher, graduate of Hebrew University, Columbia University and Harvard law school where he earned his doctorate that dealt with Kant’s concept of right titled Rereading Kant’s metaphysics of morals (2008).  Now he teaches Jurisprudence at Ono academic college and moral and political philosophy at Tel Aviv college. His recent book is Kant’s struggle for Autonomy was published in 2023. His fields of interest include legal and political philosophy, Palestine-Israel, Zionism, politics of identity and citizenship.

Benjamin Zachariah is a member of the Einstein Forum research staff. He studied history, philosophy and literature. He completed his undergrad-
uate degree from Presidency College, Calcutta, and his PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught for many years at Sheffield University, was
Professor of History in Calcutta and Halle, and has held previous senior research fellowships at the University of Trier, the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Trans-
cultural Studies at Heidelberg University, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, among other places. His research interests include the politics of historical knowledge, historical theory and historiography, global fascism, transnational revolutionary networks, na-
tionalisms, and memory. Zachariah is the author of Nehru (2004), Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (2005), Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (2011; revised edition Nation Games 2020), and After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography (2019; South Asia edition 2023). He is co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–1939 (2015), and of What’s Left of Marxism: Historiography and the Possibility of Thinking with Marxian Themes and Concepts (2020).