Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 7 p.m.
Paul Creative Arts Center Johnson Theatre
A theatrical exploration of the New York Times best-selling book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The play, devised by UNH students, will delve into the book’s examination of how we have arrived at this moment in our democracy. As stated in the Wall Street Journal’s review; “The authors argue, with good evidence, that democracies aren’t destroyed because of the impulses of a single man; they are, instead, degraded in the course of a partisan tit for tat dynamic that degrades norms over time until one side sees an opening to deliver the death blow.” The result of more than twenty years of studying the breakdown of democracies from the 1930s to the present, the book’s authors have provided an artistic springboard to understand how democracies die, and how ours can not only be saved, but thrive.
Each performance will be immediately followed by an audience discussion with featured panelists.
October 30: Post-Performance discussion led by UNH Professors Jeanie Sowers and Mary Fran Malone of the Department of Political Science and International Affairs.
October 31: Post-Performance discussion led by noted author Steven Hill and UNH Professor David Kaye of the Department of Theatre and Dance.
November 1: Post-Performance discussion led by UNH Professor Scott Smith from the Department of Classics, Humanities and Italian, and UNH Theatre and Dance and Humanities Professor Emeriti, David Richman.
November 2: Post-Performance discussion led by UNH Professors Madhavi Devasher of the Department of Political Science and International Affairs and Ryan Gibson from the Department of Sociology.
November 3: Post-Performance discussion led by UNH Professors Julia Rodriguez from the Department of History and Dante Scala from the Department of Political Science and International Affairs.
The presentation of this play is part of How Democracies Die/Thrive, a semester-long program that will focus on historical and present threats to democracy and what can be done to not only preserve a democracy, but allow it to thrive. The series is supported by a generous grant from the Responsible Governance and Sustainable Citizens Project (RGSCP) and is a partnership with the UNH departments of Theatre and Dance, Political Science and International Affairs, History, and Classics, Humanities and Italian.
October 16 at 7pm in Stratford Room
Katie Fahey; A Crash Course in Making Political Change.
Katie Fahey, who led over 14,000 volunteers across Michigan to pass a ballot proposal that made political gerrymandering illegal, will deliver the keynote address for the UNH Citizen’s Summit.
October 31 at 4pm in room A-218 in the Paul Creative Arts Center
Steven Hill: Failure of America’s Winner-Take-All Politics, and How to Fix It,
Steven Hill, author of 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy, is a widely published columnist whose op-eds, articles and media interview have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, C-SPAN, NPR, Democracy Now, BBC, The Atlantic, Politico, Guardian, Wired, The Nation, American Prospect, Le Monde, Die Zeit and more
How Democracies Die is a work of nonfiction by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Crown, 2018).
