Workshop with Dr. David Kim on Hannah Arendt

Dr. David Kim (UCLA) presented a workshop focused on a close reading of chapter 9 of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” The aim of this workshop was to closely examine Arendt’s differentiation between the rights of man as post-Enlightenment principles and the emerging international human rights through the United Nations during the post-World War II era. The conversation also interrogated her controversial emphasis on national citizenship as the sole guarantor of rights for displaced persons.

Dr. David Kim teaches in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a faculty affiliate in Global Studies at the UCLA International Institute. His scholarly interests range from the age of Enlightenment to the present day with emphases on postcolonial and translation studies, digital humanities, international human rights, and political and cultural theories. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Parables (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of The Postcolonial World (Routledge, 2016) and Imagining Human Rights (De Gruyter, 2015). His current book projects include a co-edited volume on global histories of German literature and an edited volume, titled Reframing Postcolonial Studies and forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. His digital humanities project is WorldLiterature@UCLA.