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Roni Mann is Vice-Rector of the Barenboim-Said Akademie and professor of philosophy and political theory. As the founding Director of Humanities she has designed and implemented the Academy’s humanities curriculum and continues to teach core courses.
Born in Haifa in 1977, Roni Mann is a graduate of Cambridge University (LL.B.), where she won the Clive Perry Prize for International Law and the George Long Prize for Jurisprudence, and was awarded the Herchel Smith Scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard. She was a dissertation fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and earned her doctorate at Harvard Law School (S.J.D.). She taught a wide range of subjects at Harvard College and at the Harvard Kennedy School, including political philosophy, social theory and U.S. constitutional history, and received multiple teaching awards for this work. Subsequently, she held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), before joining the founding team of the Barenboim-Said Akademie in 2014. Her research interests are at the intersection of political, social and legal theory, and she has published scholarly work in the fields of law and political economy and constitutional theory. Her current project concerns the power-knowledge relationship in adjudication.
Together with Maestro Daniel Barenboim and guided by the intellectual legacy of Edward Said, Roni Mann articulated the core educational concept for the Barenboim-Said Akademie: music education as humanistic education. Mann developed this concept into a humanities program for musicians, grounded in the study of philosophy, history, and literature and enriched by academic electives and creative workshops. Central to this program, her philosophy courses invite students to grapple with the fundamental questions of human existence, social relations and artistic endeavor, reading texts from antiquity to modernity across diverse intellectual traditions and developing critical thinking.
Roni Mann regularly moderates public conversations with writers and political thinkers at the Akademie. She also works closely with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to curate and moderate theoretical and literary conversations.