This event is organized by the Center for European Studies and the Political Economy, Philosophy, and Politics Roundtable with support from the Jack Miller Center. The event is co-sponsored by the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence for Comparative Populism, the Center for German and European Studies, the Center for Early Modern Studies, and the Department of Political Science.
A Zoom panel discussion on Populism and the Future of Liberal Democracy with speakers Jan-Werner Müller, the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences (Princeton University) and Annelien de Dijn, Professor of Modern Political History (Utrecht University).
Annelien de Dijn is a Professor of History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she teaches political and intellectual history. Her research focuses on the history of political thought in Europe and in the United States from 1700 to the present. She has a particular interest in the histories of key political concepts such as freedom, democracy and liberalism, as well as in Enlightenment political thought. She is the author of Freedom: An Unruly History, an intellectual history of freedom from Herodotus to the present, which will appear with Harvard University Press in 2020, as well as of French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society (Cambridge University Press, 2008, paperback edition October 2011). Her articles and essays have appeared in leading scholarly journals, including Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, The Historical Journal, the Review of Politics and the History of Political Thought.
Before joining Utrecht University, De Dijn was a professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam. She has also held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Cambridge University, the Remarque Institute at NYU, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of California at Berkeley. She received her M.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Jan-Werner Müller studied at the Free University, Berlin, University College, London, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Princeton University. From 1996 until 2003 he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; from 2003 until 2005 he was Fellow in Modern European Thought at the European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College. Since 2005 he has been teaching in the Politics Department, Princeton University. He has been a Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and a visiting fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute of Advanced Study, Collegium Helsinki, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Remarque Institute, NYU, the Center for European Studies, Harvard, as well as the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence. He has also taught as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, the Ludwig Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich, the Humboldt Universitaet in Berlin, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris.
Professor Müller is a co-founder of the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA), Berlin, Germany’s first private, English-speaking liberal arts college, for which he served as founding research director. He maintains a strong interest in international teaching and research initiatives centered on the liberal arts.
His history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, Contesting Democracy, was published by Yale University Press in the summer of 2011 (Italian, French, Danish, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, and Serbian translations). His book Was ist Populismus? was published by Suhrkamp in April 2016; the University of Pennsylvania Press brought out an American version in September of 2016. Mueller’s book Furcht und Freiheit: Für einen anderen Liberalismus was published by Suhrkamp in 2019 and won the Bavarian Book Prize. His Christian Democracy: A New Intellectual History, based on his Carlyle Lectures in Oxford, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press; his Democracy Rules will appear with FSG.
His public affairs commentary and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, the New York Times, and Project Syndicate.