7 p.m.
Hasan Piker is not your typical political commentator. Armed with sharp analysis and an irreverent wit, he has built a massive daily audience on Twitch — and become an unlikely but authoritative voice for a generation hungry for honest political engagement. He joins UW’s Daniel Bessner, historian and foreign policy scholar, for a moderated conversation on media, politics, and the future of public discourse.
Biography:
Wielding sharp political insight and a characteristically irreverent sense of humor, Hasan Piker is redefining what political commentary looks like in the digital age. A journalist and wildly popular content creator on the streaming platform Twitch, Piker has become an authoritative voice for millennials and Gen Z. His live-streaming broadcasts reach over 30,000 people daily, where he dissects breaking news, debates policy, and connects with a politically engaged online community in real time.
Moderator:
Daniel Bessner is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. An intellectual historian and journalist, his scholarship spans the history and practice of U.S. foreign relations, the theory of liberalism, and the politics of the entertainment industry — and his public writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Nation, among others. He is the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Cornell, 2018) and Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century, and has twice been featured on the cover of Harper’s Magazine — in July 2022 on the history and future of U.S. foreign relations, and in May 2024 on the history and future of Hollywood, a piece later republished as the cover of the Italian magazine Internazionale. In 2019–2020, he served as a foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
Department Sponsors: Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, The Graduate School