Let’s Talk Democracy: Quo Vadis, America?

Join 1014, the American Council on Germany, and the Goethe Institut for a discussion with Dr. Alexander Görlach Adjunct Professor, NYU Gallatin School and Dr. Daniel Ziblatt, Director, Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and Professor of Government, Harvard University.

Dr. Alexander Görlach is an adjunct professor at NYU Gallatin School, where he teaches democratic theory. Before that, he held various positions as a visiting scholar and fellow at Harvard University, as well as Cambridge and Oxford Universities 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 doctorate in Comparative Religion and a doctorate 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 magazines Wirtschaftswoche, Deutsche Welle, and Focus Online. He is a frequent commentator on German News Channel WELT TV.

Dr. Daniel Ziblatt is the director of Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies where he is also Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University. He leads a research group based in Germany at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. His research focuses on Europe and the comparative study of democracy. He is the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (2018), co-authored with Steven Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller and described by The Economist magazine as “the most important book of the Trump era.” The book has been translated into thirty languages. In 2023, he published Tyranny of the Minority (w/ Steve Levitsky), an analysis of American democracy in comparative perspective, also a New York Times bestseller. Prior to this, he was the author of the prize-winning book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a history of democracy in Europe, in addition to a book on European state-building entitled Structuring the State (Princeton University Press, 2006). In 2023, Ziblatt was elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.