The Hamptons Institute, a forum for leading figures to discuss the most significant subjects of our time, returns in Summer 2026. Please check back in April for the line-up and dates.
Since 2025, The Hamptons Institute has been curated by Ellen Chesler and Patricia Duff and co-presented by Guild Hall and The Common Good.
About The Hamptons Institute
The Hamptons Institute was established in 2011 by Ellen Chesler and Guild Hall’s late Chairman Mickey Straus. It has featured leaders in their fields discussing ideas that shape the community and the world. Past moderators and panelists have included Ken Auletta, Kahlil Byrd, Robert Caro, Katie Couric, Paul Farmer, Leymah Gbowee, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jonathan Haidt, Kathy Hochul, Glenn Hutchins, Van Jones, Steven Kroft, Ken Miller, Perri Peltz, Cecile Richards, Anthony Romero, Lynn Sherr, Robert Smigel, Alex Soros, George Soros, Gillian Tett, Elizabeth Warren, and Jeff Zucker, among others.
View the full archive HERE.
Principal Sponsor: Lisa Rosenblum
Additional Support: Julie Raynor Gross
THE COMMON GOOD
The Common Good is a leading pro-democracy, nonprofit organization which features important leaders and experts to inform engagement in the political process. Here are just a few of their hundreds of past speakers: Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush; Secretaries John Kerry, Antony Blinken, Henry Kissinger, Leon Panetta, and Jeh Johnson; Majority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer; Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Congressman John Lewis, Senators Lindsey Graham, Elissa Slotkin, and John McCain; Governors Ned Lamont, Kathy Hochul, Tim Kaine, and Larry Hogan; foreign affairs experts such as Richard Haass and Ian Bremmer, U.S. and foreign Ambassadors such as Frank Wisner and Martin Indyk, Ron Prosor (Is), François Delattre (Fr), activists like Gloria Steinem, Jose Antonio Vargas, and Lily Ledbetter, historians like Jon Meacham, Heather Cox Richardson, and H. W. Brands ,journalists, authors and editors such as Marty Baron, Harry Evans, and Jill Abramson, Fareed Zakaria, Carl Bernstein, Lawrence Wright, Steve Coll, and Gillian Tett; entertainment figures such as Denzel Washington, Jane Fonda, Kevin Costner and Chevy Chase; business leaders such as Mike Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, Glenn Hutchins and John Bogle, political strategists like Paul Begala, Tim Miller, and Donna Brazile, commentator/ broadcast journalists like Lesley Stahl, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Ari Melber, Jonathan Capehart, Molly Jong-Fast, and Gayle King, and many others. Thousands of audience members have gained invaluable insights about today’s current events from their distinguished roster of speakers.
PATRICIA DUFF
Patricia Duff founded The Common Good in 2007, with a goal of bringing together major policy leaders in government and authoritative figures in business, media, journalism and academia, to speak candidly on the most important issues of today. These conversations are meant to provide ideas and information, encourage citizen participation, and find common ground. The Common Good is rooted in Show Coalition, an influential, entertainment based organization which she and others started in 1988. Patricia’s work has spanned the entertainment and political worlds. She worked as vice president for two of the country’s leading political strategy and consulting firms in Washington D.C., and has lent her energy and expertise to dozens of political races across the country, including several Presidential election efforts.
Patricia also served on the Congressional investigative committee that reexamined the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. She had her own political talk show on television, has led women’s outreach for political campaign efforts, and has served on a number of boards, including the Library of Congress Board of Trustees, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service Board of Advisors, and the board of the Lincoln Center Film Society. Duff is a member of the Economic Club and the Council on Foreign Relations.
ELLEN CHESLER
Trained as an historian, Ellen Chesler, Ph.D. is author of the critically praised biography, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, which has remained in print for 34 years. She has co-edited two anthologies, Where Human Rights Begin (2005) and Women and Girls Rising (2015), and she has written more than 100 essays and articles in prominent publications. Early in her career she served in government as Chief of Staff to New York City Council President, Carol Bellamy, the first woman ever elected to a citywide office. And she later spent a decade as a senior fellow at the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, overseeing a broad portfolio of grants to organizations and individuals advancing and protecting women’s rights around the world. Long active in progressive politics, she is recognized for both the practical and intellectual perspectives she brings to her work.. With her husband, Matthew Mallow, she has been a Hamptons homeowner since 1983.
