On Friday October 1, 2021, Professor Johannes von Moltke gave the presidential address at the German Studies Association’s annual conference, which met at least partially in person again after a one-year Covid hiatus. His talk, “The Metapolitics of Identity: Identitarianism and Its Critics," came out of his ongoing work on the New Right and its Media, but also out of a concern that in Germany, at least, the vocabulary of the “identitarian” right is becoming normalized and turned against those who continue to struggle for equal rights and recognition as underrepresented and/or excluded “others.” 

Professor von Moltke has been pursuing these and similar questions also in an ongoing collaboration with his colleague Susanne Komfort-Hein at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. Together, they have organized an online colloquium series on “Common Sense in the Age of Populism: Between Critique and Resentment”; the series will kick of on Friday, October 15, 2021, with a public keynote by Sophia Rosenfeld from the University of Pennsylvania who will be speaking about “Democracy and Common Sense in the Post-Truth Age.” The event will start at 8:00 AM EDT and will be accessible via zoom here.