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Thomas Bartscherer

librettist

About this Artist

Thomas Bartscherer works in the humanities and the arts. His previous collaborations with Contemporaneous include Long After Hesiod, a spoken word text written for and performed with Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 3 (Gaia), and narration for Dylan Mattingly’s composition The Bakkhai. Bartscherer and Mattingly are currently developing an evening-length performance titled History of Life, an excerpt of which premiered at Roulette in New York in 2022. His work has been performed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, the Prototype Festival, and the First Take West Coast Opera Workshop.

Current projects also include the forthcoming critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, an edited volume due out from Cambridge University Press in 2023. Previous edited volumes include Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both published by the University of Chicago Press. He studied at the University of Chicago (PhD) and the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and has held fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the University of Heidelberg, and the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities and since 2017 he has been the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College in New York.