We are a group of individuals of diverse backgrounds, united by our love of Matthew and our love of learning.
We believe in the ethical value of humanistic study and are committed to building a Center that fulfills Matthew’s dream: a place of deep reading, community, and contemplation, free from institutional pressures.
2026 Program Teams
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Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Chicago. Her first book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (OUP, 2018) argues that the process of value-acquisition is a form of rational agency, and her second book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life defends Socratic intellectualism. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics, and in addition to her academic writing she writes extensively in public venues.
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Leslie Atkins is a professor at Boise State University whose work lives at the intersection of physics, philosophy of science, and education. Trained as a physicist, she studies how scientific concepts—light, time, energy, and information—take shape over time and how these concepts are made legible to nonscientists. Her research follows how encounters with science can reshape the ways people notice, interpret, and inhabit their everyday lives. She designs learning environments that encourage generous attention to others’ ideas, support multiple interpretations and meanings, and engage both the emotional and intellectual dimensions of science. This work has included collaboration with the Dalai Lama’s Science Education Initiative, the North Carolina Governor’s School, One Stone High School, and the Matthew Strother Center.
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Bruce M. King teaches ancients and (some) moderns in a variety of classrooms, of younger students, of college students, and of working adults. His research and writing has focussed especially upon Homer, pre-Socratic philosophy, Athenian tragedy, and comparative studies of epic, including the Sanskrit and Akkadian traditions. He is completing a book entitled Achilleus Unheroic, which explores both the Homeric tradition and the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus. Bruce has a PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago; he has been a Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, DC), the Reid Hall Center for Scholars in Paris, as well as the Blegen Fellow at Vassar College.
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Idil Çakmur is a Philosophy PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, originally from Istanbul, Turkey. Her work explores the role that conversations can play in helping us see the world anew. This aspiration also drives her public writing and teaching—most recently as a Philosopher-in-Residence at a local high school, a Marc Sanders Media Fellow, and a Chief Utopia Officer at a community in NYC. She is also a proud MSC alum, where she discovered the beauty of Rilke’s poetry and met some of her favorite people to have conversations with.
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Michelle Erotas is a Manager of Development at National Geographic, based in New York City. When she's not developing content, she volunteers with her employer's filmmaking mentorship program, travels, and writes. She is interested in the roles of authenticity and artifice in storytelling, and how connection between humans can adapt in an increasingly tech-interrupted world. She was a participant in the Spring 2025 Program at the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life.
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Sophia Fiedler is a writer and graduate student in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Vienna, where she studies aesthetics and philosophies of movement, particularly at the intersection of dance and intellectual pursuit. Working her way through radio stations, galleries, and theaters, Sophia has been seeking moments where experience disseminates or solidifies ideas, where mind and body start talking and a joyful science takes over. Her work as Associate Editor at The Hinternet is a continuation of that pursuit. She was a student in the Summer 2025 program at the Matthew Strother Center.
Advisory Board
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Bill Deresiewicz is an author, essayist, and former professor of English at Yale. His books include “Excellent Sheep”, “The End of Solitude”, “The Death of the Artist”, and “A Jane Austen Education”. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, and many other publications.
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Julian Simcock is a lawyer, diplomat and investor. Most recently he held multiple roles at the White House National Security Council, including Director for Global Criminal Justice and interim head of Multilateral Affairs. During that time, Julian coordinated U.S. engagement at the United Nations, with a focus on Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine. Separate from his diplomatic work, Julian has invested in several early-stage technology companies, including two that became leaders in corporate performance management software. Julian met Matthew when they were four and one, respectively. The specifics are hard to pin down, but rumor has it that they were friends from that point onwards.
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Leonard Nalencz (PhD Yale University, comparative literature, 2017) is an assistant professor in the English department at the College of Mount Saint Vincent and a faculty member with the Bard Prison Initiative. His academic interests include romance languages and the lyric tradition; the languages and literature of the Americas; theories and practices of attention; and the literature and history of global practices of incarceration. His current project is a translation into Spanish and English (with the Quechua Collective of New York) of original stories and poems in Quechua; it is entitled Kuska Purikusun (Let's Walk Together), and it is due out in July with Trident Press. He is also a member of the Friends of Attention and teaches with the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn, NY.
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Aniju is an engineer, real estate developer, and all-around good listener. She grew up in NYC and worked on large- and small-scale development and infrastructure projects in the US and abroad. Aniju wanted to live in a more relaxed environment during the pandemic. She found her new home in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where she founded AVA Community Investment Group. Aniju has an MBA and a Master’s in Engineering from Columbia University, and a Bachelor’s in Engineering from The Cooper Union. She’s a volunteer for Reading Partners, which helps children become lifelong readers, and a volunteer for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, an arts and cultural hub in Florida.
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David Zellnik is the author of numerous plays and musicals, including Yank! which has received productions in New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Brisbane, Chicago, and is now a Portuguese-language graphic novel. Other works include the solo piece O TIME, the plays The Letters and Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl, as well as the podcast musical Loveville High. David’s fiction has been published by Massachusetts Review. David shared with Matt a love of languages, Rilke, the pleasures and sadnesses of time passing, and a good drink. He’s honored to help continue his presence and his legacy.
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Agnes Borinsky (she/they) is a writer and theater-maker based in Los Angeles. Her projects include many plays (The Trees, A Song of Songs, Of Government, Ding Dong It’s the Ocean), experiments in participation (Working Group for a New Spirit, Weird Classrooms), and fiction (Sasha Masha).
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David Ravensbergen is a reader, writer and erstwhile bohemian striving to make time for the life of the mind amid his political commitments as a trade unionist, climate activist, and community organizer. He holds advanced degrees in literature and politics, and maintains intellectual interests in a range of fields including historical materialism, political economy, and degrowth. David is interested in the history and contemporary application of mindfulness and other forms of contemplative practice, and is a recent student of Indonesian gamelan.
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Sam Kozan Haddix is an educator, musician and chaplain. His work is deeply informed by Sōtō Zen Buddhist practice and rooted in community at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. He serves as a chaplain on the Palliative Care Unit at Mount Sinai, accompanying patients and their families at the end of life. Sam earned his MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design, where he is adjunct faculty and a thesis supervisor. He is currently completing his Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree in Buddhism and Interreligious Engagement at Union Theological Seminary. A lifelong musician, Sam is recording his first album as part of his thesis research on the intersection of sound, ritual and healing practices.
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Diana Mellon is an art historian, educator and bodyworker. She teaches art history at Columbia University, where her academic research focuses on human relationships to the environment in early modern southern Italy. Diana earned her B.A. from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her lifelong interest in embodied therapeutic modalities led her to become a licensed massage therapist (LMT) and to pursue training in Zero Balancing, Reiki, and other modalities. Diana studies traditional Maya culture, including the sacred calendar, cacao, and ceremonial fire, with Guatemala-based Maya Tz'utujil elder Nana Marina Cruz.
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Alex runs The Great Northern Team, a top-ranked financial advisory firm in Minnesota. He is a lover of the outdoors and an endurance athlete. He and his wife are raising two adventurous and enthusiastic young boys. Alex and Matthew were good friends from 5th to 12th grade while they attended Minnehaha Academy together in Minneapolis. They traveled together extensively through their participation in Nordic ski racing, cross country running and orchestra and post high school through their mutual love of adventure. In their last conversation, they’d agreed to compete in New Zealand’s Coast-to-Coast race around the time of their 40th birthdays, an event Alex hopes to complete in 2026.
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Joe Alessi is a writer and Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose documentaries and short films have appeared on AllArts, PBS, and Anthology Film. He met Matthew the last week of college, and henceforth the two became dear friends and frequent late-night raconteurs. He resides in Jersey City with his wife and son.
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Brian D. Earp, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics and, by courtesy, Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Psychology at the National University of Singapore (NUS). At NUS, in collaboration with the Uehiro Oxford Institute of the University of Oxford, where Brian is a Research Associate, Brian directs the international Oxford-NUS Centre for Neuroethics and Society. Brian’s academic background includes a PhD in philosophy and psychology from Yale, a master’s degree from Oxford in experimental psychology, and a second master’s from Cambridge in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, technology, and medicine. Before becoming an academic, Brian was a professional actor and singer for many years, and was lucky to meet Matthew Strother during a theater production at Yale, where they did their undergraduate degrees together and became lifelong close friends. Brian is the co-author of Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality (Routledge, 2022).
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Hannelore Van Dijck is a visual artist and teacher at Sint-Lucas School of Arts Antwerpen. She makes drawings that often cover the entirety of a surface; a sheet of paper, a piece of textile, the floor or the walls of a room. In these, Van Dijck seeks and finds rhythm and underlying structures. The motor for her drawing is a meticulous search for the relationships between detail and overview. Her drawings are, as it were, constantly in motion, through which she explores the possibilities of the medium. Matthew and Hannelore met in 2011. When she first saw Matthew he was reading a collection of short stories by Franz Kafka. They shared a deep love for books. This meeting was the start of a close friendship in which they both inspired and motivated each other to keep searching.
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Bob Vanden Broeck is a poet and lecturer in Art and Cultural History at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. He loves books and birds. He has already collaborated on numerous artist publications at home and abroad. In 2023, his collection of poetry 'the direction is direction diversions' was published in which he search for a space where language and environment can set each other in motion. In his poetry, he gropes for cracks and fissures, for the layers in the surface. He gathers so that something may be missing: 'Again and again, reality escapes from itself into itself'.
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Becca Rothfeld is the non-fiction book critic at the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a contributing editor at The Boston Review. Her first essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, was published by Metropolitan Books in 2024, and her essays and criticism and essays have appeared in a range of publications, including The New Yorker, The TLS, Bookforum, and The Yale Review. In her former life as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, she studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy and aesthetics.
MSCEL’s Team
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Berta was Matthew Strother’s wife. She is an award-winning architect, a real estate developer, and the founder of the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life. Hers is a classic tale of the modern search for meaning in success and prestige. Meeting Matthew was a fateful detour that re-enchanted the world for her and introduced ideas and knowledge as the path to self-actualization. Matthew changed Berta’s life and she is committed to bringing others together under the radiance of his spirit.
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Miriam Atkin is a Catskills-based poet. She has written three chapbooks, most recently, Inclination Drawing, published in 2024 by Beautiful Days Press. She is cofounder of Pinsapo, an international publishing collective, as well as Verbatim Text Sound Expo, an annual small press and record label fair in the mountains. She teaches writing around the Hudson Valley region, at Bard College and the Otisville Correctional Facility. Her podcast, Specific Objects: Talks on Art in the Catskills, airs quarterly on WGXC 90.7.
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Kelsey Murphy is a content and campaign strategist with an expertise in translating research into measurable action. Her experience spans multi-channel fundraising at the Clinton Foundation, global digital advocacy at 350.org, and service design within the NYC Mayor’s Office. She holds an MA from NYU Gallatin.
