Only a few days after the presidential election, Harvard political scientist and NYTimes bestselling author Daniel Ziblatt ("How Democracies Die" and "The Tyranny of the Minority") will sit down with Alexander Görlach, expert on liberal democracies and Adjunct Professor at NYU, and discuss the pressing challenges deriving from the election result.

This event is in partnership with the American Council on Germany (ACG) and the Goethe-Institut.

This event will be held at the Goethe-Institut:
30 Irving Place
New York, New York, 10003

Biographies

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.

Photo: Hong Kiu Cheng

Alexander Görlach is an adjunct professor to NYU Gallatin School where he teaches democratic theory. Prior to that he had various positions as visiting scholar and as fellow at Harvard University in the United States, and Cambridge University and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He is a senior fellow to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York and a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. Alexander holds a ThD in comparative religion and a PhD 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 Hongkong. Since then he focuses on the rise of China and what it means for the democracies in East Asia. Alexander Görlach is an honorary professor of ethics and theology at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. Alexander Görlach is the founder of the debate-magazine The European, that he also ran as its editor in chief from 2009 to 2015. Today he serves as an op-ed contributor to the New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the South China Morning Post. He is a columnist to the business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Deutsche Welle and Focus Online. He is a frequent commentator on German News Channel WeLT TV.