In this month's episode, the Hannah Arendt Center's Senior Fellow Thomas Bartscherer hosts a conversation with Nikita Nelin, a West Coast-based somatic therapist, and Bard College alum '09. They discuss the upcoming 17th annual fall conference titled 'Joy Loving the World in Dark Times,' scheduled for October 16-17 at Bard College. Nelin elaborates on his essay 'Defining Joy' (recently published in the Hannah Arendt Center's newsletter, Amor Mundi) and shares insights into his work in somatic therapy, highlighting the relationship between joy, the body, and therapy. The conversation explores how joy can be both a bodily and collective experience, touching on themes that are central to the upcoming conference.
Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and on the study of liberal education and politics. Current projects include the new critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which he coedited for the Complete Works series (which he discussed on a previous episode of For Love of the World on Radio Kingston) and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he is coediting for Cambridge University Press. With composer Dylan Mattingly, he has created Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered at the LA Phil’s Disney Hall in May of 2023. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is coeditor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both from the University of Chicago Press. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich and was a Senior Fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He was director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program from 2010 to 2015.
Nikita Nelin ’09 was born in Moscow, Russia and immigrated to the U.S in 1989. He has lived in Austria and Italy, and has traveled the U.S extensively. He received the Sean O’Faolain prize for short fiction, the Summer Literary Seminars prize for nonfiction, and the Dogwood Literary prize, as well as being chosen as a finalist for the Restless Books Immigrant prize and the Dzanc Books prize. He has conducted research through the Harriman Institute as well as translation through Yale Press, holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, and has been an associate fellow for the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. He now lives in Seattle where he works as a Somatic Therapist, writes poetry, and is trying to figure out what people do in their 40s. His poetry can be found at https://sumizdat.substack.com, as well as some of his other writing at nikitanelin.com.
