The ACG and the Goethe Institut will host a discussion with Dr. Susan. Neiman and Dr. Keidrick Roy.
What unites individuals to engage in political struggles across geographical, social, religious, and political divides and perceived boundaries? How do solidarity movements challenge the interests and positions of powerful states and systems, both past and present? Solidarity work between minority groups and communities has fluctuated throughout history with common efforts and transnational solidarity has been integral to change and progress. However, international solidarities and their ideological differences have evolved overtime. Join moral philosopher Susan Neiman and scholar Keidrick Roy for a discussion on the intersection of politics, ethnicity, race, and solidarity in today’s complex world. What is political solidarity? How is political solidarity shaped by race, religion, and ethnicity? If there is no shared vision for the future, is collective solidarity hopeless? Together, they will explore how collective memory and history influences our political landscape and the challenges of encouraging solidarity across racial, ethnic, and ideological divides.
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, Dr. 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.
Dr. 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.
Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a scholar of American history, literature, and political thought since the Revolutionary era. In 2025, he will be Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His research brings the ideas of prominent and lesser-known African American figures across U.S. history to bear on urgent social and political concerns, including the place of race, religion, and optimism in modern society. Dr. Roy’s forthcoming book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, reveals how a Black liberal tradition that developed in the years leading up to the Civil War holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups threaten U.S. democracy.
Dr. Roy has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books and appears in the HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches. He has also curated two major exhibitions on Black American figures at the American Writers Museum in Chicago, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Ralph Ellison. Before joining academia, Dr. Roy served as a nuclear operations officer in the military and has since been an award-winning educator at the United States Air Force Academy and Harvard.