Ludmila Franca-Lipke

Born in Brazil and currently living in Germany, I've been studying Hannah Arendt and her work since I was a graduate student in Law in my hometown, Salvador da Bahia, back at the end of the 90s. The reception of Arendt in Brazil began through the Faculties of Law, with translations of her books and the development of several studies about totalitarianism and its relations to the problem of Human Rights. This is very peculiar and influences until today the way we read Arendt in Brazil, with many arendtians with juridical backgrounds. So it was at the Faculty of Law that I had my first contact with Arendt's thoughts, in a course called Introduction to the Study of Law.

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After graduation, I started teaching Theory of Law, Hermeneutics, and International Law at some private institutions in Salvador while writing my Master's (LLM) at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). The decision to pursue a Master's Degree was the moment when I also decided I would do research on subjects related to justice, politics, human rights, and hermeneutics, having then Hannah Arendt as my preferred companion.

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// Hannah Arendt /Brasil | Blog and Newsletter

In 2006, after finishing my Master's dissertation about the dignity of politics and its importance for the theory of justice, I moved to São Paulo, where I intensified my studies on and about Arendt after joining the Hannah Arendt Group at the Núcleo de Estudos da Violência of the University of São Paulo (NEV), a program developed as part of the CEPID (Centros de Pesquisa Inovação e Difusão) by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), in the research line "Democracy, State of Law and Humans Rights".  It was during this time that I developed a blog and newsletter to collect news from the press about Hannah Arendt and to publicize the work of arendtians, artists, researchers, and intellectuals dedicated to the main themes of her work. 

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// Centro de Estudos Hannah Arendt

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In 2013 I was one of the people involved in the foundation of the Centro de Estudos Hannah Arendt, which hosted my Newsletter from 2013 until 2021. From July 2020 until March 2021, I coordinated the Centro de Estudos, designing its website, doing translations, and creating a podcast and a YouTube Channel for hosting its live streamings. I was also responsible for creating and managing all its social media. This work got the attention of the local media: Brazil's most prominent journal, Folha de São Paulo, recommended the live streamings I was hosting, and one of the conversations, with Prof. André Duarte from the Federal University of Paraná, was also recommended by the Cyberflâneur from The Syllabus.

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// The Hannah Arendt Network

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By the end of 2020, I decided I wanted to develop some projects by myself, as an independent researcher and intellectual. I could then exercise some fundamental values such as academic honesty and freedom. I hosted events, promoted reading groups and online courses, started a podcast, and also made some live streamings. Everything was made by me. This gave me the chance to grow some new skills and woke my old desire to do something related to my first idea of the Hannah Arendt Brasil Newsletter. That was when I decided to create The Hannah Arendt Network, a project to connect people and diffuse knowledge on and about Hannah Arendt.