Freedom – Limitations and Exclusion

On October 10, the ACG and 1014 will host a discussion and reception with Dr. Alexander Görlach, Adjunct Professor at the NYU Gallatin School, and Dr. Aziz Rana, Professor of Law and Government at Boston College.

Dr. Alexander Görlach is an adjunct professor at NYU Gallatin School, where he teaches democratic theory. Before that, he had various positions as a visiting scholar and  fellow at Harvard University in the United States, Cambridge University, and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York and a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. He holds a ThD in comparative religion and a Ph.D. in linguistics. His academic interests include democratic theory, politics and religion, and theories of secularism, pluralism, and cosmopolitanism. In the academic year 2017-18, he was a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and City University Hong Kong. Since then, he has focused on the rise of China and what it means for the democracies in East Asia. Dr. Görlach is an honorary professor of ethics and theology at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. He is the founder of the debate magazine The European, which he also ran as its editor-in-chief from 2009 to 2015. Today, he is an op-ed contributor to the New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the South China Morning Post. He is a columnist for the business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Deutsche Welle, and Focus Online. He is a frequent commentator on German News Channel WeLT TV.

Dr. Aziz Rana is a law professor at Boston College Law School, where his research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. His work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding.

Rana’s first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press), situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His forthcoming book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century — especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority — and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.

He received a B.A. from Harvard College, my J.D. from Yale Law School, and my Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.