Berkley Center

Verónica Gago, a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín, is a prominent political theorist and activist working on issues of feminism and the global political economy. Her most recent books, A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021, with Luci Cavallero) and Feminist International (2020), explore gender dynamics at the intersection of local, national, and global political and economic forces. In her widely acclaimed Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (2017), Gago documented the lived experiences of informal workers and their creative strategies of resistance, with a focus on women and marginalized communities. She is a leader in Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos (Not One Women Less) movement as both a theorist and an activist. Gago is a Georgetown Global Dialogues (GGD) fellow. 

Hisham Matar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, explores themes of exile, identity, and belonging. Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return (2016) received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men (2007), shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011); and A Month in Siena (2019). His most recent novel, My Friends (2024), won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into over 30 languages. Matar is a Georgetown Global Dialogues (GGD) fellow. 

Pankaj Mishra is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and sparked an international debate about whether a revolutionary transformation of the global capitalist system is necessary to address the global climate crisis. (It was published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto in January 2024.) Saito’s previous book, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017), which creatively explored the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought and its contemporary relevance, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize. He is also a Georgetown Global Dialogues (GGD) fellow.