Charles Haimoff Fellows in German Studies

Andrea Bernstein

Class of Fall 2026

Journalist, Author, Visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism

Princeton University

The Uses of Memory: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, My Parents and Me

At the Academy, Bernstein will work on “The Uses of Memory: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, My Parents, and Me.” Part memoir, part investigative journalism, part intellectual history, this inquiry will look at her own work covering US politics—from 9/11 through January 6, 2021, to our present moment—as it converged with the work of her parents, Richard J. and Carol L. Bernstein, scholars of Arendt and Benjamin, respectively. “The Uses of Memory” will use Bernstein’s journalistic tools and intellectual inheritance as a lens through which to understand how to hang on to truth and facts and memory and history in an ever more fragmented and hostile post-truth world.

Andrea Bernstein is a Peabody and duPont-Columbia award-winning investigative journalist, and accomplished author, speaker, and Visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. She is also a frequent expert guest on well-known news shows, including Frontline, PBS Newshour, CNN, BBC, and CBC Documentary. Bernstein holds a BA cum laude from Yale University and was a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She is the New York Times bestselling author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, The Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power (W.W. Norton, 2020) and podcast creator and co-host of Trump, Inc. (WNYC and ProPublica), Will Be Wild (Pineapple Street Studios, Amazon, & Wondery), We Don’t Talk About Leonard (ProPublica and On The Media), and The Law According to Trump (Slate). She covered all five trials of Donald J. Trump and his business for NPR.