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American Studies
Main Image for American Studies Program

American Studies Program

Citizens gather at the Civil Rights March on Washington, DC, August 28, 1963.
National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency, Record Group 306 (National Archives Identifier 542044)
American Menu
Apply Now!
The American Studies Program offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States.
Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way. In the introductory courses, students develop the ability to analyze a broad spectrum of materials, including novels, autobiographies, newspapers, photographs, films, songs, and websites. In junior seminars and the Senior Project, students identify and integrate relevant methodologies from at least two disciplines, creating modes of analysis appropriate to their topics. By graduation, students should have developed a base of knowledge about the past and present conditions of the American experience both at home and abroad.

Courses and Requirements

Click below for a complete list of currently offered courses.

Courses and Requirements


  • Moderation Requirements
    In addition to the standard Bard Moderation requirements, American Studies students are required to complete the following three courses in order to moderate:
    • American Studies 101, Introduction to American Studies, or American Studies 102, Introduction to American Culture and Values
    • At least two other courses focusing on the United States
    For Moderation into American Studies, students should submit the two college-wide short Moderation papers (on past and future academic work) as well as a 10-12 page critical essay completed in one of their American Studies courses.

    More on Bard Moderation

  • Graduation Requirements
    Following Moderation, American Studies students must complete five more courses, as well as their Senior Project, in order to graduate:
    • At least two more courses, any level, focusing on the United States (in addition to those taken for Moderation)
    • At least two courses, any level, focusing on non-U.S. cultures and societies
    • A Junior Seminar focusing on the United States (Junior Seminars are 300-level courses with an emphasis on research methods, culminating in a 20–25 page research paper or equivalently substantial final project. It is expected that one or more of these courses will be taken prior to beginning the Senior Project.) A second junior seminar in a different division is strongly encouraged.
    • Senior Project (two semesters)
    At least two of the students’ U.S.-focused courses must emphasize the period before 1900. In order to ensure a variety of perspectives on students’ work, both the Moderation and Senior Project boards must consist of faculty members drawn from more than one division.

Program Faculty

Program Director: Peter L’Official
Phone: 845-758-7556
E-mail: [email protected]
Myra Young Armstead
Thurman Barker
Alex Benson
Christian Crouch
Yuval Elmelech
Jeannette Estruth
Elizabeth Frank
Simon Gilhooley
Donna Ford Grover
Peter L’Official
Christopher Lindner
Allison McKim
Matthew Mutter
Joel Perlmann
Susan Fox Rogers
Julia Rosenbaum
Whitney Slaten
Tom Wolf

Recent Senior Projects

  • “Black Oiler,” a narrative of a Black male told through music and the lenses of different African diasporic authors”
  • “‘The Great Pleasures Don’t Come So Cheap’: Material Objects, Pragmatic Behavior, and Aesthetic Commitments in Willa Cather’s Fiction”
  • “A Hundred Houses: Pauline Leader and the Spatial Poetics of Disability”
Visit the Bard Digital Commons for a complete archive of Senior Projects in American Studies.

American Studies on Digital Commons

American Studies News

The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College Welcomes Seven Writers for Its Inaugural Summer Residency Program

This summer, the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College hosts its inaugural cohort of seven writers, Danielle Elizabeth Chin, Neşe Devenot ’09, Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander, Mona Kareem, Madhu Kaza, Obi Nwizu, and Dianca London Potts for three weeks from June 4 through June 26. During their residency, fellows are residing on Bard’s campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book-length work.

The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College Welcomes Seven Writers for Its Inaugural Summer Residency Program

The new Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College welcomes its inaugural cohort of seven writers, Danielle Elizabeth Chin, Neşe Devenot ’09, Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander, Mona Kareem, Madhu Kaza, Obi Nwizu, and Dianca London Potts, this summer. The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks from June 4 through June 26, 2022. During their residency, fellows reside on Bard’s campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book-length work.

The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works.

“For many adjuncts the path to writing and research is closed. The institutions where they labor do not offer funds or sabbaticals for such work. The Hurston Fellowship is one way to help these women find time for their own work. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first independent scholars—writing on an array of subjects from anthropology to fiction. Like Hurston, our fellows, without institutional support, must make their own way through the world of publication and research,” says Grover.

During their residency, Hurston Fellows may participate in a daily program of workshops and meetings, offered in collaboration with the Bard College Institute of Writing and Thinking. However, fellows may also choose to spend their time working, writing, and researching independently. The residency includes visits by literary agents and editors, as well as readings and lectures by established writers and scholars. This summer, the two guest lecturers include Carolyn Ferrell, author of Miss Metropolitan, which was recently shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and literary agent Charlotte Sheedy of Sheedy Lit in conversation with her client Jive Poetic about the agent-author relationship and how an idea becomes a book. Fellows will also be invited back to Bard College in October of the fellowship year for a weekend-long meeting and workshop. 

Danielle Elizabeth Chin graduated Magna Cum Laude from Marymount Manhattan College in May 2013 with a Bachelor of the Arts degree in English and World Literatures and a minor in Creative Writing before receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree from The New School in Creative Writing with a concentration in creative nonfiction. She has been an Adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at Marymount Manhattan College since 2015, where she has taught Introduction to Creative Writing I, Introduction to Creative Writing II, Intermediate Creative Writing, an Independent Study in Nonfiction, and a Special Topics course. She has also served as a Writing Assistant at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and for the CUNY EDGE program. Her other professional experiences include working as a research assistant for poet David Lehman, a teaching assistant for novelist Sigrid Nunez, and an assistant at a literary agency.  Her work has appeared in The Inquisitive Eater, The Best American Poetry Blog, and Side B Magazine. 

Neşe Devenot ’09 received her PhD in 2015 from the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied psychedelic philosophy, the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (“trip reports”), and radical poetics. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bard College in philosophy and literature. Devenot is a Postdoctoral Associate at Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS), University of Cincinnati, and is a Lecturer and Medical Humanities Program Assistant at Pennsylvania State University. She has held positions as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Medicine, Society, and Culture, in the Bioethics Department at the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University (2018-20) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities in the Humanities Program and English Department at University of Puget Sound (2015-18). Her research explores the function of metaphor and other literary devices in verbal accounts of psychedelic experiences. She was awarded “Best Humanities Publication in Psychedelic Studies” from Breaking Convention in 2016 and received the Article Prize for best publication in Romanticism Studies from European Romantic Review in 2020. She was a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where she participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences. She was a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association, which she moderated during 2011-13, and has presented on psychedelics at conferences in the United States, Mexico, Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander received her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from Saint Joseph’s University in 2005, M.S.W. from University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work in 1995, and B.A. in sociology and history/gender studies from Saint Lawrence University in 1993. Before teaching, she worked as a social worker and counselor. She is a Visiting and Senior Adjunct Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where she teaches in the Haub School of Business, School of Health and Education, and College of Arts and Sciences. She also serves as a diversity consultant at Saint Joseph’s University. Her research interests include anti-racist and social justice pedagogies, womanist and feminist epistemologies, teacher preparation educational programs, and intersectionality within leadership development. She presents on topics including leadership and student advocacy; mentoring and feminist perspectives; global engagement, training, and development; and social work and mental health. She has won several awards and special recognitions including the Certificate of Recognition for Excellence in Teaching for the Gender Studies Program Department at Saint Joseph’s University (2014).

Mona Kareem holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the American University of Kuwait. She is a research fellow at Center for Humanities at Tufts University (2021-2022) and a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts literary grant. She has taught at Princeton, University of Maryland College Park, SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, and Bronx Community College. She was an affiliated research fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin. Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. She has won several awards and honors including a nomination for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 for her English translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within, which was reprinted by English PEN in 2017.

Madhu H. Kaza received her MFA in fiction, M.Phil and MA in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in English from the University of Michigan. She serves as Associate Director of Microcollege Program and Faculty Development at the Bard Prison Initiative and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is a translator of the feminist Telugu writers Volga and Vimala. She is the editor of Kitchen Table Translation and her own writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Guernica, The Yale Review, Two Lines, Gulf Coast, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of grants and awards including a non-fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Yaddo residency. She was the founding director of the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and has taught at New York University, The New School, and at Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, among other institutions. 

Obi Nwizu received her MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom and her BA in Print Journalism from Georgia State University. Born in Anambra State, Nigeria, raised in Atlanta, Georgia, but currently calling Harlem home, Nwizu is a lover of month-long international vacations, vegan food, afrobeat, and rom-coms. When not writing, she teaches creative writing for the City University of New York and composition writing for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Selected publications include “Gathered Pieces of the Sun” in The Almbec, “Grapeseed Fields” in Torch Literary Arts, and “Lust Painted Walls” in Imagine Curve.

Dianca London Potts earned her MFA in fiction from The New School, MA in English and MA in Humanities from Arcadia University, and BA in English from Temple University. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Department at Pratt Institute and teaches writing courses at Eugene Lang Liberal Arts College at The New School and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a VONA Voices alumna, and the former online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. Her words have been featured in Lenny Letter, The Village Voice, Vice, Shondaland, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Planning for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from 37 Ink / Simon and Schuster.

About the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College
The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College is a 3-week residential program designed to enable writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, specifically, those who are without access to sabbaticals or their institution’s research funding. We seek fellows who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book length work. Prospective Fellows should submit a vita, a letter of recommendation by someone familiar with their work, and an abstract of the project they wish to work on during the three-week residency. The abstract should not exceed 2000 words. Applicants need a college or university affiliation and should have a minimum of five years of teaching as an adjunct, lecturer or visiting professor. The application deadline is April 15, 2023. All applicants will be notified of the admission Committee’s decision by May 15, 2023. To submit materials or for questions please email [email protected].
 

Post Date: 06-17-2022

Bard College Awarded $1.49 Million Grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative

The Mellon Foundation grant supports the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project, which asks: What would it look like to truly acknowledge the land beneath us, its history, and to collaborate with its continuing stewards? It affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment by recognizing the need to address historical erasure and make space for marginalized epistemologies. Rethinking Place proposes a Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) approach to a revitalized American Studies curriculum. Through courses, annual conferences, reading groups, and workshops, the project will foster collaboration between faculty and students at Bard and across regional peer liberal arts colleges, engaging with the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians whose homelands these schools are in.

Bard College Awarded $1.49 Million Grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Bard College a $1.49 million grant for its “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project. Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck proposes a Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) approach to a revitalized American Studies curriculum and undertakes an expansive understanding of land acknowledgment that goes beyond addressing a single institution’s history in regards to Native peoples. Through annual conferences, reading groups, workshops, and in fostering collaboration between faculty and students within Bard and across regional peer liberal arts colleges and engaging with the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians whose homelands these schools are in, Rethinking Place emphasizes community-based knowledge, collaboration, and collectives of inquiry. 

“The project team and I are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for this opportunity and for consistently supporting innovation in the arts and humanities, especially at this crucial juncture. Liberal arts colleges by their nature are small, inter-knit communities and this makes them ideal sites to both explore challenging questions and test out long-lasting curricular development in the service of equity,” says Associate Professor of History and Dean of Graduate Studies Christian Ayne Crouch. “Bard College is fortunate to count Vine Deloria Sr. (Yankton Dakota/Standing Rock Sioux) among our distinguished alumni. Being able to honor the interdisciplinary intellectual legacy of Deloria Sr. and his family makes this grant especially meaningful. The Mellon Foundation’s support for developing partnerships in this grant with individuals both inside and outside of higher education enhances an already-exciting opportunity.”

Bard College’s grant is part of the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative created to support newly developed curricula that both instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits. Of the 50 liberal arts colleges invited to submit proposals, 12 institutions were selected to receive a grant of up to $1.5 million to be used over a three-year period to support the envisioned curricular projects and help students to see and experience the applicability of humanities in their real-world social justice objectives. 

Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck asks: What would it look like to truly acknowledge the land beneath us, its history, and to collaborate with its continuing stewards? It affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment by recognizing the need to address historical erasure and make space for marginalized epistemologies. Rethinking Place’s proposed curriculum and programming takes the acknowledgment of the land—and the brutal history which has unfolded on it—and offers a new way to approach this work that emphasizes inclusivity in order to build a future that is fundamentally distinct from this past. 

Each year, Rethinking Place will feature articulated NAIS themes and frames in which faculty, students, and staff can begin thinking in interdisciplinary terms and will engage the following five components: curriculum development, annual conferences, conference workshops, collaborative signage and mapping projects, and post-doctoral program-building. In order to hold Native concerns at the forefront of this work, the project team is in conversation with the Cultural Affairs Office of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and will also be in dialogue around Native arts with the Native-led Forge Project based in Taghkanic, New York.

Led by a diverse, interdisciplinary project team of Black, Latinx, and transgender faculty, as well as Native partners, Rethinking Place is being developed through Bard’s American Studies Program. Core members of Bard’s project team include: Associate Professor of History and Dean of Graduate Studies Christian Ayne Crouch (Principal Investigator), Associate Professor of Literature and Director of American Studies Peter L’Official (Project Coordinator), Associate Professor and Director of Environmental and Urban Studies Elias Dueker, Artist in Residence and Codirector of the Center for Experimental Humanities Krista Caballero, and Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies and master barber Joshua Livingston. Grant projects will also take place in collaboration with Bard’s Center for Experimental Humanities, Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities and with faculty partners at Vassar College and Williams College. 

This generous Mellon grant offers Bard the opportunity to contribute in innovative ways to the field of American Studies and in humanities fields more generally, and therefore increase broad and diverse enrollment in the humanities—particularly among members of communities marginalized by certain disciplines—and to restore humanities as a central component to the future of higher education and social justice. 

“The Humanities for All Times initiative underscores that it’s not only critical to show students that the humanities improve the quality of their everyday lives, but also that they are a crucial tool in efforts to bring about meaningful progressive change in the world,” said Phillip Brian Harper, Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Program Director. “We are thrilled to support this work at liberal arts colleges across the country - given their unequivocal commitment to humanities-based knowledge, and their close ties to the local communities in which such knowledge can be put to immediate productive use, we know that these schools are perfectly positioned to take on this important work.”

More information about the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative can be found here.

Post Date: 01-26-2022
More News
  • “It’s never, never too late.” Joshua P.H. Livingston Profiled by Bloom Season on His Career Path, Commitment to Community, and Pandemic Pivot

    “It’s never, never too late.” Joshua P.H. Livingston Profiled by Bloom Season on His Career Path, Commitment to Community, and Pandemic Pivot

    What lies at the intersection of pedagogy and barbering? For Joshua P.H. Livingston, visiting assistant professor of American studies, the answer is Friend of a Barber: a combination barbershop and studio space where social discourse comes with the cut. Speaking with Bloom Season, Livingston spoke about his professional growth during the pandemic, advocating for a reassessment of one’s values and purpose when considering a shift in career. “What’s interesting is that I picked up a side hustle and then kept up with the first hustle,” Livingston says. “I ended up teaching full-time and going to barber school. I learned that there are interesting ways of being able to find synergies between two things that you care about.” For those considering a change, Livingston has pragmatic advice about finances, but the most important thing, he says, is to not be afraid. “It’s never, never too late,” he says.

    Full Story and Video on Bloom Season

    Read More

    Post Date: 01-18-2022
  • Bard Students Assist Local Government Leaders on Key Projects for a New Course, All Politics Is Local, Taught by Jonathan Becker and Erin Cannan

    Bard Students Assist Local Government Leaders on Key Projects for a New Course, All Politics Is Local, Taught by Jonathan Becker and Erin Cannan

    Bard Executive Vice President and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement Jonathan Becker and Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Civic Engagement Erin Cannan are coteaching a new course on local politics and civic engagement. As part of the course, Bard students have accepted internship positions in local governments, including the offices of Red Hook Village Mayor Karen Smythe, Red Hook Judge Jonah Triebwasser, and Tivoli Deputy Mayor Emily Major. Students are also working at the City of Hudson mayor’s office, and with State Sen. Michelle Hinchey (D-46). 

    “Jonathan and I realized that there is very little engagement with local government here, when more engagement of local people and Bard means more civic literacy and a better functioning government,” said Cannan in an article appearing in the Red Hook Daily Catch. “Few people have access to youth voices, the perspective of someone who is current on certain trends that older people don’t have. Students are going to move into the world soon, and this experience gets them ahead of the times and properly engaged in politics.”
    Read the article in the Red Hook Daily Catch

    Post Date: 11-23-2021
  • Joshua P.H. Livingston Joins Faculty of Bard College American Studies Program in Fall 2021

    Joshua P.H. Livingston Joins Faculty of Bard College American Studies Program in Fall 2021

    Bard College is pleased to announce that Joshua P.H. Livingston will join the faculty of the American Studies Program, effective fall 2021. Livingston received his PhD in social welfare from the City of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and holds an MSW and a certificate in human services management from Boston University. Using his current work and experiences as a Licensed Master Barber and the Black American barbershop as an exemplar, Livingston’s work focuses on how social innovation, social enterprise, and “placemaking” can be utilized by young people of color to challenge institutional environments through the use of community forms that hold cultural significance. He is the co-owner of Friend of a Barber in New York City’s East Village and brings nearly twenty years of practice experience in youth-based program development, management, and evaluation to his work. At Bard, Livingston will serve as visiting professor of American Studies focusing on placemaking. He will be teaching a course titled Beyond Black Capitalism in the fall.

    About Bard College
    Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
    # # #
    (8/25/21)

    Post Date: 08-30-2021
  • Juneteenth in Historical and Cultural Context

    Juneteenth in Historical and Cultural Context

    A Collection of Resources from Bard College Faculty and Staff

    Following President Botstein's message declaring Friday, June 18, 2021 an official campus holiday at Bard College, here are further resources for those who wish to read, listen, reflect, and learn more about the historical and cultural significance of Juneteenth as a day of celebration and commemoration (to begin, see “So You Want to Learn About Juneteenth?” from the New York Times).
      
    Please join us in thanking our contributing colleagues for their expertise and generous suggestions.

     

    Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth
    David Blight, A Slave No More
    For children/younger readers:  Patricia C. McKissack and Frederick McKissack, Jr., Days of Jubilee
    —Myra Young Armstead, Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies and Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence

    Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2012)
    Tiya Miles, All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021) 
    Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, Black Futures (2020)
    Alaina Roberts, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021) 
    Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS series “Reconstruction: America after the Civil War”
    —Christian Crouch, Associate Professor of Historical Studies and Director, American Studies Program

    Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published novel titled Juneteenth
    —Tabetha Ewing, Associate Professor of History

    Clint Smith's just-released book of essays, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America does a wonderful job of addressing both the historically specific, and the broader context of how slavery is and has been understood (and, more often than not, how it has been rather intentionally misunderstood). Here's a quick Twitter thread of the author recounting the places in which the book's essays are rooted, one of then being Galveston, Texas.
    —Pete L'Official, Assistant Professor of Literature
      
    A resource I have pulled from often is a place called Learning for Justice, in the past you may have heard of it under their old name Teaching Tolerance. This article, “We Are Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” by Monita K. Bell is one I've found particularly memorable. 
     
    For students younger than Kindergarten age, I often read this book in class and had a discussion about it: Juneteenth for Mazie, by Floyd Cooper.
    —Sam Prince ’14, Regional Admissions Counselor, Pacific Northwest 

    Karen Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (just out)
    Maurice O. Wallace, Shawn Michelle Smith, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity
    John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass
    Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York's Hudson River Valley, 1735-1831
    —Julia Rosenbaum, Associate Professor of Art History
     
    “Let My People Go,” performed by Paul Robeson
    —John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology

    Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
    Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
    —Drew Thompson, Associate Professor, Historical and Africana Studies 

    Post Date: 06-16-2021
  • Bard History Professor Jeannette Estruth Awarded J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship by the American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress

    Bard History Professor Jeannette Estruth Awarded J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship by the American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress

    The American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library Of Congress has awarded Bard College History professor Jeannette Estruth the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History. The annual award is offered annually to support significant scholarly research in the collections of the Library of Congress by scholars at an early stage in their careers in history. The fellowship is named in honor of J. Franklin Jameson, a founder of the American Historical Association, longtime managing editor of the American Historical Review, formerly chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the first incumbent of the library’s chair of American history.

    Jeannette Alden Estruth is an assistant professor of American History at Bard College, and a faculty associate at the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She received her doctorate in history, with honors, from New York University in 2018. In 2019, Estruth’s book project was a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Huntington Library, the University of Virginia Miller Center, and the Berkshire Conference. Estruth’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Business Insider, Public Seminar, and Enterprise and Society, among others. Prior to her doctoral work, she worked at Harvard University Press and the Radical History Review. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States.
    # # #
    (6/2/21)
     

    Post Date: 06-02-2021
  • Women’s History Month Focus: Emerald Rose McKenzie ’52

    Women’s History Month Focus: Emerald Rose McKenzie ’52

    By Myra Young Armstead
    Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies


    We can find clues to the past in the built environment—as examples: a cul de sac, a plaza, a park, a neighborhood of turreted houses, the clustering of certain shops, monuments, and, importantly, the unnoticed, naturalized, familiar names of streets and buildings. These artifacts, constructions, and materialized symbols literally map who and what we value as members of society. This is true on the local level, too. McKenzie House on the south end of Bard’s campus just past the triangle on Annandale Road is so named in honor of Emerald Rose McKenzie ’52, one of the first African American women to graduate from the College. She majored in sociology as an undergraduate here and went on to a long, successful career as a social worker for the Jewish Guild for the Blind after receiving a master’s degree in that field from New York University. McKenzie’s singular presence at Bard in the 1950s prompts interrogations into the intersectionalities of her identity as a woman, a Black person, and a disabled/visually handicapped person in the immediate postwar period. What follows is just a start. 

    Emerald was born in Nassau, the Bahamas, on September 17, 1927, and shortly thereafter emigrated to the United States with her parents and siblings. By 1930, her working-class family lived in Brooklyn in a quadruplex building erected on Sutter Avenue in 1901 near the border of Brownsville and East New York. Her father worked as a clerk that year for a meatpacking company, supporting his wife and their four children, of which Emerald was the youngest at just two years of age. When he passed two years later, his death certificate listed him as a tailor. In some ways, the family’s circumstances seem to have improved since they were now living on Warwick Street—still in Brownsville but in a newer multifamily building constructed in 1930. In the 1930s, Brownsville was still a predominantly Russian Jewish area of Brooklyn, with a recent influx of Southern Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants representing roughly 6 percent of the total population by 1940. In that year, Emerald’s widowed mother, Alma, headed a household that consisted of the same four siblings as before with a younger nine-year-old brother now added to the mix. The Black population grew during Emerald’s childhood, so that by 1950 it had doubled and was concentrated in Brownsville’s least desirable housing. However, the New Deal’s National Youth Administration employment program allowed Emerald’s older sister Hermine to add to the family income as a teacher’s secretary in 1940. Another older sister, Dorit, worked as an “operator” in a dressmaking factory that same year. She probably was a sewing machine operator. Cynthia Dantzic, whose undergraduate years at Bard partially overlapped with Emerald’s, recalls that Hermine was a fine, highly skilled seamstress, too. Before the 1950s, the family moved to a private house with a large rear garden on Bainbridge Street, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. This neighborhood in central Brooklyn, known for its beautiful brownstones, drew “large numbers of eastern European Jews, Italians, and later blacks from the South and the Caribbean” in the 1930s, although by Emerald’s teen years in the 1940s the area was becoming predominantly Black as others moved out.
     
    Emerald Rose McKenzie ’52 at Bard College Commencement. Courtesy Cynthia Dantzic
    Emerald Rose McKenzie ’52 at Bard College Commencement. Courtesy Cynthia Dantzic

    Cynthia explained that Emerald was born with some visual impairment but that some later physical trauma, perhaps an athletic accident , left her completely sightless when she was 16. That would have been in 1948. However, the accident must have occurred earlier because according to Bard College admissions records, Emerald attended the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind (NYIEB) for four years and graduated in 1948. (In 1986 the NYIEB was renamed the New York Institute for Special Education, serving “children with visual impairments but also children with emotional/learning needs and preschool children with developmental disabilities.”) 

    Education was clearly a priority Emerald held for herself with the full support of her family. In the 1940s, there were two high schools for blind students in New York City—the NYIEB on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, and the Lavelle School for the Blind on Paulding Avenue in the Bronx; the latter was Catholic but recognized in 1942 by the New York State Education Department, from which it began receiving funding. Both options for Emerald Rose required either a long daily commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx—a daunting undertaking for a sighted student, so much more so for a blind one—or residential status at the school. It is almost certain that Emerald Rose lived on the campus of the NYIEB from 1944 until her graduation in 1948.
     
    Cynthia Maris Gross ’54 reads to Emerald McKenzie ’52, 1952. McKenzie is seen here with her seeing-eye dog, Karen. Gross acted as McKenzie’s “reader” throughout their shared time at Bard. Photograph by David Brook.
    Cynthia Maris Gross ’54 reads to Emerald McKenzie ’52, 1952. McKenzie is seen here with her seeing-eye dog, Karen. Gross acted as McKenzie’s “reader” throughout their shared time at Bard. Photograph by David Brook.

    McKenzie came to Bard College as a transfer student, having spent her first undergraduate year at Brooklyn College. In the fall of 1949 when she matriculated in Annandale as a sophomore, Brooklyn College was just 13 years old—a progressive educational project of the New Deal era designed as the country’s first coeducational, public liberal arts college and as “a stepping stone for the sons and daughters of immigrants and working-class people toward a better life through a superb—and at the time, free—college education.” The school was in Brooklyn, her home, and free, but one can only imagine the physical challenges she faced as a blind student at a large, urban school built for persons with full visual abilities.

    Somehow, McKenzie learned about Bard. Like Brooklyn College, the College had recently (in 1944) become coeducational, and through a generous scholarship from the American Federation for the Blind her educational costs were completely covered. The coeducational aspect of Bard was a huge draw. In the fall of 1949, 121 women joined 149 men to make up the total student population. By way of contrast, Dantzic recalled that when she, another Brooklynite, graduated high school, she hoped to study art at Yale but was discouraged to learn that the Ivy did not accept women as undergraduates who were coming straight out of high school. (For that reason, Dantzic spent her first two college years at Bard with the intention of transferring to Yale, which she did for her B.F.A.) A second draw for McKenzie was the small size of the College (only 270 students when she entered), the quiet pace of things, and the individualized attention she could receive from her professors. Dantzic recalled the bucolic setting, McKenzie’s well-trained seeing-eye dog, Karen, and the kind of basic academic resources available to Emerald Rose—books in Braille; audiobooks on discs; a paid, personalized course book reader (Dantzic performed this service for McKenzie); and a Braille typewriter.

    With this initial article, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is launching a longer historical project on Emerald Rose McKenzie, the state of higher education for the visually impaired nationally during her lifetime, where Bard stood in relation to national standards then, and where it stands now. We are still researching more precise details of McKenzie’s biography and invite students interested in participating in this project to contact me, Myra Armstead, at [email protected]. In conjunction with the Archives Working Group of the Council for Inclusive Excellence, we are also beginning to research the longer history of disability awareness at Bard and are pleased to have the cooperation of Finn Tait ’22 as president and founder of the Bard Disabled Students Union.
     

    NOTES
    1. U.S. Census, 1930; U.S. Census, 1940; Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 84.
    2. Cynthia Dantzic, Interview with Myra Young Armstead, March 8, 2021.
    3.  “A Brief History of NYISE,” nyise.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=391515&type=d&pREC_ID=922947, accessed March 15, 2021.
    4.  “Brooklyn College: Our History,” brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/about/history/ourhistory.php, accessed March 15, 2021.
     

    Post Date: 03-17-2021
  • Review: Professor Susan Fox Rogers Compiles Dispatches from Contemporary Writers in Her Latest Book, When Birds Are Near

    Review: Professor Susan Fox Rogers Compiles Dispatches from Contemporary Writers in Her Latest Book, When Birds Are Near

    Rogers, a visiting associate professor of writing at Bard College, “assembles an exquisite array of diverse voices united by a shared love of birding” (Publishers Weekly). Each essay explores birding “as an art of wanderlust and extreme patience while highlighting varied species, in habitats from the shoreline of the Sargasso Sea in Bermuda (where Jenn Dean describes how the cahow, a species thought extinct since the 17th century, was rediscovered in the 20th) to the North Dakota prairie (where Richard Bohannon considers the Baird’s sparrow and the Sprague’s pipit, both small, unremarkable-looking species known in the birding world as LBJs, or ‘little brown jobs’).”
    Read the Review in Publisher's Weekly

    Post Date: 02-03-2021

Events Archive

Past Events

  • Thursday, March 10, 2022 
      Reception and dancing follows the lecture
    Olin, Room 102  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    This lecture highlights the representation of tango in global film, television, and nonfiction narratives. While the dance is accorded a superficial treatment in mass media (i.e., tango=sex), the essence of tango is rooted in a deeply human and universal longing for community and connection. The transcendent meaning at the core of tango’s origins remains more relevant than ever within our global pandemic present.

  • Wednesday, February 23, 2022 
    Online Event  10:30 am – 11:30 am EST/GMT-5
    Antonio Orejudo is considered one of the most brilliant contemporary authors from Spain. His narrative is raw and playful with unexpected twists and dark cynical humor for the purpose of entertaining the reader’s interest. Orejudo will discuss with us what it means to be an author today, and he will focus on his Advantages of Travelling by Train, which has also been adapted into a film. There is no greater influence in Orejudo’s Advantages of Travelling by Train than Cervantes’ Don Quixote and his Exemplary Novels.

    This event will be in Spanish. Co-sponsored by LAIS and the Spanish program. Open to the wide Bard Spanish-speaking community. To RSVP and receive Zoom details, please contact Prof. López-Gay at [email protected].

  • Thursday, November 18, 2021 
    Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies.

    Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. 

  • Tuesday, September 21, 2021 
    Hua Hsu, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Vassar College and Staff Writer, The New Yorker
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    A consideration of how various Asian American writers and artists have wrestled with questions of authority and imposture, from thirties Chinatown authors to the first generations of authors who worked under the banner of "Asian American literature" in the sixties, from contemporary manifestations of "impostor syndrome" (wherein individuals doubt their own authority--a condition psychologists have deemed unusually prevalent among Asian American students) to my own work on memoir.  

    Hua Hsu is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Vassar College, and a Staff Writer at the New Yorker. His first book, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, was published in 2015 by Harvard University Press. In 2022, Doubleday will publish Stay True, a memoir. He is currently working on an essay collection about identity and imposture called Impostor Syndrome. He serves on the boards of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and Critical Minded, an initiative to support cultural critics of color.

  • Tuesday, September 14, 2021 
    A Virtual Panel and Discussion with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee
    Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Although white supremacist movements have received renewed public attention since the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they need to be placed in deeper historical context if they are to be understood and combated. In particular, the rise of these movements must be linked to the global war on terror after 9/11, which blinded counterextremism authorities to the increasing threat they posed. In this panel, two prominent sociologists, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee, trace the growth of white supremacist extremism and its expanding reach into cultural and commercial spaces in the U.S. and beyond. They also examine these movements from the perspective of their members’ lived experience. How are people recruited into white supremacist extremism? How do they make sense of their active involvement? And how, in some instances, do they seek to leave? The answers to these questions, Miller-Idriss and Blee suggest, are shaped in part by the gendered and generational relationships that define these movements.
     Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).  
    Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  If you would like to attend, please register here.  Zoom link and code will be emailed the day of the event. 

     

  • Thursday, July 15, 2021 
    Foreign Policy in the Digital Age
    Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Foreign policy is among the things that the Internet has revolutionized. No longer is diplomacy confined to oak-paneled rooms and gilded corridors. This change, as New York Times reporter Mark Landler noted, “happened so fast that it left the foreign policy establishment gasping to catch up.” Author Adam Segal joins us for a conversation about how technology has changed diplomacy, geopolitics, war, and, most of all, power. 

     

  • Thursday, June 24, 2021 
    A conversation about activism and change
    Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    George Floyd's murder in May 2020 shined a brutal light on racism and inequality, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world. It renewed energy into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Today, BLM is widely embraced and conversations about how to end systemic racism have become mainstream. What changed? And how are activists working to build on this momentum and achieve change? Talaya Robinson-Dancy and Cammie Jones join us virtually on Thursday, June 24 at 12pm for the Chace Speaker Hour to discuss. Talaya Dancy was the Founder and President of the Black Body Experience Council at Bard College and was the co-head of the Womxn of Color United club. Cammie Jones is the Executive Director of Community Engagement and Inclusion at Columbia University. Please join us on Zoom. 
     

  • Thursday, May 13, 2021 
    Calvin Cheung-Miaw (Stanford University)
    Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Why did people of Asian descent in the United States begin calling themselves Asian American in the late 1960s, and why did so many young Asian Americans join the movement to demand Asian American Studies on college campuses? This talk explores the activist origins of Asian American identity, with a focus on how Asian Americans thought about multiethnic and multiracial solidarity. It places the founding of Asian American Studies within the context of activist ideas about the transformation of relationships between campus and community, and asks what this history might mean for us today.

    Calvin Cheung-Miaw is a PhD candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. He is a historian of race, who works at the intersection of intellectual history and social movement history. His dissertation, “Asian Americans and the Color-Line,” provides the first intellectual history of Asian American Studies and explores the rise and decline of Third Worldism in the United States. His writings have been published in Amerasia Journal, In These Times, and Organizing Upgrade. An article on transnational political murders during the Reagan era is forthcoming from Pacific Historical Review, and another article on Claire Jean Kim’s work is forthcoming from Politics, Groups, and Identities. In the fall he will be joining the history faculty at Duke University.

    Zoom Link:
    https://bard.zoom.us/j/82693205955?pwd=QlE2VTdhd1AzRTJnZkNpTEQrVXgvdz09

    Meeting ID: 993 5090 7519
    Passcode: 1c5EGQ

  • Tuesday, May 11, 2021 
    Screening and Discussion with Hisham Aidi

    Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Hisham Aidi is senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave, 2008), a comparative study of market reform and labor movements in Latin America; coeditor, with the late Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave, 2009); and author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon, 2014). As a cultural reporter, his work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, and the New Yorker. Aidi is the recipient of the Carnegie Scholar Award (2008), the American Book Award (2015), and the Hip Hop Scholar Award (2015. He is currently a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, working on a project titled “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-Arab World.” His most recent documentary short is titled Malcolm X and the Sudanese.

    Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/84087117322

  • Wednesday, April 28, 2021 
    Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Please join the Muslim Student Organization this Wednesday, April 28th at 6 PM in their zoom conversation with Abdur-Rahman Muhammad–a historian who is widely regarded as one of the most respected authorities on the life and legacy of the civil rights-era black leader Malcolm X

  • Tuesday, April 20, 2021 
    Part of the series A Start to Healing Through Land, Forest, and Seed, organized by BardEATS students
    Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Panelists include:  Shaniqua Bowden, Head of Cultural Engagement, Kingston Land Trust Nfamara Badjie, Ever Growing Family Farm, and Alexander Wright, founder of the African Heritage Food Co-Op and Blegacy Farms.This panel will give space for each speaker to discuss the work they are doing in relation to land sovereignty, food sovereignty, cultural resistance/resilience, and land access work for and by Black folks.

    The moderator will ask the speakers questions about their thoughts on different topics surrounding land dispossession, land/food sovereignty, and land access work.

    There will be a 20-minute period at the end of the panel discussion for community members to ask questions.

    Registration link below.

  • Monday, April 19, 2021 
    Part of the series A Start to Healing Through Land, Forest, and Seed, organized by BardEATS students
    Online Event  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Guest speaker Heather Bruegl, the cultural affairs director for the Stockbridge- Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians, will speak about the history of the Mohican people on this land as well as provide a space for action-oriented discussions on what the Bard community can do to be better allies for the Stockbridge-Munsee community while residing on their former homelands.

    The event will include both a lecture and time for an open discussion.

    Registration link below.

  • Sunday, April 18, 2021 
    Part of the series A Start to Healing Through Land, Food, and Seed, organized by BardEATS students
    Online Event  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Kick off Earth week with a screening of Gather, “an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide.”

    Gather follows Nephi Craig, a chef from the White Mountain Apache Nation (Arizona) opening an indigenous café as a nutritional recovery clinic; Elsie Dubray, a young scientist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation (South Dakota) conducting landmark studies on bison; and the Ancestral Guard, a group of environmental activists from the Yurok Nation (Northern California) trying to save the Klamath river.

  • Sunday, April 18, 2021 
      The Otolith Group’s INFINITY minus Infinity
    Online Event  1:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Following a 72-hour online screening of The Otolith Group’s INFINITY minus infinity (2019), join a discussion about the film between Otolith Group members Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun and INFINITY minus Infinity performer Esi Eshun, moderated by Bard College Critic in Residence Ed Halter. Presenters: Anjalika Sagar (artist, The Otolith Group), Kodwo Eshun (artist, The Otolith Group), Esi Eshun (sound artist and performer), Ed Halter (Critic in Residence, Film and Electronic Arts, Bard College).

    This series is presented by the Film and Electronic Arts Program and cosponsored by Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today, Africana Studies, Center for Faculty and Curricular Development, the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Bard Memetics Laboratory, Experimental Humanities, American Studies, and Written Arts. 

  • Friday, April 16, 2021 
      The Black and Crazy Blues
    Online Event  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    A discussion on and between Black filmmakers working in experimental forms, moderated by film historian Michael B. Gillespie. “This program is a gathering of artists, curators, and scholars devoted to thinking about the aesthetic and cultural detail of Black film and media. Through the sharing of clips and ideas, these friends consider the complications and pleasures generated by the art of Blackness” (M. Gillespie).

    Presenters: Michael B. Gillespie (film historian, CUNY; author, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film), Kevin Jerome Everso (filmmaker, artist), Christopher Harris (filmmaker, artist), Greg De Cuir Jr. (independent curator, writer, and translator).

    This series is presented by the Film and Electronic Arts Program and cosponsored by Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today, Africana Studies, Center for Faculty and Curricular Development, the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Bard Memetics Laboratory, Experimental Humanities, American Studies, and Written Arts. 

  • Tuesday, March 16, 2021 
    We'll be in-person in NYC this fall!
    Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Join us to learn more about the BGIA program, our courses, internships and our in-person semester in NYC this fall.



    To apply for  the fall '21 semester, please visit: https://bard.studioabroad.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=41053

  • Tuesday, February 16, 2021 
    Learn more about the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program.
    Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Are you an undergrad eager for a career in international relations or foreign policy? Where do you start? What do you need to be considered? Join us to learn more about the Bard Globalization and International Affairs semester away program for Summer 2021/Fall 2021. We’ll help you get placed at a top organization, while earning academic credit. RSVP required.

  • Tuesday, November 17, 2020 
    Online Event  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    All of us work and study on a large campus and live in a thinly populated rural area. We tend to inhabit virtual bubbles where we are surrounded by people who see things the way we do. And whether we are newcomers to the Mid-Hudson Valley or longtime residents, we do not always understand the “signs” we encounter. What do yard signs in election season or “thin blue line” flags tell us about the landscape in which we live? What do colonial estates-turned-museums reveal about enduring inequalities? What murals and monuments “hide” in plain sight because they do not match our pre-set ideas about the place we may (or may not) feel we belong to? Who harvests the local crops but cannot afford to shop at the farmers’ market?
     
    In an effort to shine some light on systemic racism and anti-racist alternatives in our everyday surroundings, the Division of Social Studies is organizing a “Reading the Signs” roundtable over Zoom as well as an accompanying online archive. The roundtable will also offer Bard community members an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the election on November 3rd, whatever the outcome happens to be.

    Call for Contributions!
    What signs do you think need reading? What is an image, flag, space, mural, monument, memorial, item of clothing, word/phrase, etc. that points to instances of systemic racism in the past or present? What is a sign that points to anti-racist precedents in the past and/or emancipatory possibilities for the future?
     
    In the days leading up to the roundtable, the Social Studies Division invites all Bard community members (students, staff, and faculty) to send photos, videos, audio recordings, and other documents of systemic racism and anti-racism to [email protected].
     
    All contributions must be accompanied by a brief written statement (anything from a few sentences to a substantial paragraph) that provides initial context, explanation, and interpretation.
     
    The roundtable will feature many of these contributions, which can be made anonymous upon request. The Division of Social Studies will also maintain an online archive of signs that will be available to Bard community members before and after the event.

    Join via Zoom 
    Meeting ID: 863 8920 3500
    Passcode: 583480

  • Friday, November 13, 2020 
    by Peter L'Official and Patricial Lopez-Gay
    Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
  • Tuesday, September 29, 2020 
    Resume writing
    Online Event  10:00 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
    The Bard Globalization and International Affairs program will be hosting a professional development series so that you can learn more about the program and get a glimpse of what we offer. Brush up on your cover letter and resume writing and get updated tips on interviewing amid the time of Covid-19. Click on the Event Brite link to sign up and learn more. 

  • Thursday, May 21, 2020 
    Get Learning Commons Tutoring in all Bard subjects, ESL, college writing, learning strategies, and more ...
    Online  Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. 

  • Wednesday, May 20, 2020 
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  • Tuesday, May 19, 2020 
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  • Monday, May 18, 2020 
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  • Sunday, May 17, 2020 
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  • Saturday, May 16, 2020 
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  • Friday, May 15, 2020 
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  • Thursday, May 14, 2020 
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  • Wednesday, May 13, 2020 
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  • Monday, May 11, 2020 
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  • Sunday, May 10, 2020 
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  • Saturday, May 9, 2020 
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  • Friday, May 8, 2020 
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  • Saturday, May 2, 2020 
    Get Learning Commons Tutoring in all Bard subjects, ESL, college writing, learning strategies, and more ...
    Online  Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. 

  • Friday, May 1, 2020 
    Get Learning Commons Tutoring in all Bard subjects, ESL, college writing, learning strategies, and more ...
    Online  Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. 

  • Thursday, April 30, 2020 
    Get Learning Commons Tutoring in all Bard subjects, ESL, college writing, learning strategies, and more ...
    Online  Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. 

  • Wednesday, April 29, 2020 
    Get Learning Commons Tutoring in all Bard subjects, ESL, college writing, learning strategies, and more ...
    Online  Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. 

  • Tuesday, April 28, 2020 
    Get Learning Commons Tutoring in all Bard subjects, ESL, college writing, learning strategies, and more ...
    Online  Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. 

  • Thursday, April 2, 2020 
      Manor House Dining Room  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Please join Experimental Humanities Food Lab and the Human Rights Program for an interactive dinner workshop with Viven Sansour, a Palestinian writer and conservationist dedicated to preserving seed heritage and bringing it to the table in order to “eat our history rather than store it away as a relic of the past.” Sansour uses images, sketches, film, seeds, and soil to tell old stories with a contemporary twist. 

    RSVPs required. Free for students; $10 for faculty and staff.
    annandaleonline.org/eatinghistoriesdinner

  • Thursday, April 2, 2020 
      Manor House Dining Room  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Please join Experimental Humanities, Food Lab, and the Human Rights Program for a free lecture and panel discussion between Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library and the Traveling Kitchen, and Ken Greene, founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Company and Seedshed, a local nonprofit dedicated to seed stewardship literacy that promotes social justice solutions. 

    Free lecture, 4:00–5:30 pm.
    Ticketed dinner workshop, 6:00–8:00 pm.
    RSVPs required.
    annandaleonline.org/eatinghistoriesdinner

  • Thursday, March 19, 2020 
    Chapel of the Holy Innocents  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    A song recital featuring art songs and spirituals by 12 brilliant American composers. Singers Meroe Khalia Adeeb, Taylor-Alexis Dupont, and Elliott Paige along with pianist Michael Lewis will perform the music of H. Leslie Adams, Margaret Bonds, John Carter, Jacqueline Hairston, Colin Lett, Charles Lloyd Jr., Undine Smith Moore, Robert Owens, Florence Price, William Grant Still, and Julius P. Williams.

    This event is cosponsored by the Bard College Chaplaincy and the Bard College Gospel Choir.

  • Monday, March 9, 2020 
    Study Away in NYC! Experience International Affairs First-Hand
    Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Meet with BGIA Director Elmira Bayrasli and Associate Dean of Civic Engagement and Director of Strategic Partnerships Brian Mateo for an overview about the program based in NYC, including:

    - BGIA faculty and course offerings
    - Internships and student projects
    - Our dorms in NYC
    - How to apply to BGIA
    - Q&A

  • Monday, March 2, 2020 
    The 2018 Berlin Prize winner reads from her work
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:30 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    On Monday, March 2, at 2:30 p.m., in Weis Cinema, Carole Maso reads from her work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, and introduced by Bard literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

    A contemporary American novelist and essayist known for her experimental, poetic, and fragmentary narratives, Carole Maso is the award–winning author of ten books, beginning with the novel Ghost Dance, published in 1986. In 1990, Maso published The Art Lover, followed by AVA (1993), The American Woman in the Chinese Hat (1994), and a book a short stories, Aureole: An Erotic Sequence (1996). Defiance, perhaps her best-known work, appeared in 1998, depicting a Harvard professor who is sentenced to death for the murder of her two students. In 2000, Maso published the essay collection Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire and The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth. She is also author of the biographical meditation Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (2002) and the novel Mother and Child (2012). She currently is at work on a novel, The Bay of Angels.

    Carole Maso is a professor of literary arts at Brown University, where she has been teaching since 1995. She has previously held positions at Columbia University, George Washington University, and Illinois State University. She is the recipient of many awards, including an NEA Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award for fiction. She is the recipient of the 2018 Berlin Prize.
     PRAISE FOR CAROLE MASO
    “Maso often seems to be embroidering silk onto water; in the wake of her sensory pull, words thread along forceful yet unfixable patterns. . . . [An] extraordinary level of craft.” —New York Times

    “Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried away with her, far beyond the usual limits of the novel. . . . Maso’s voice is all her own: simultaneously cerebral and sensual, violently romantic, and insistently woman-centered.” —San Francisco Chronicle

    “Carole Maso is a writer who succeeds brilliantly at relaying the fragile notion of life’s enigma. . . . She tries to capture something of life’s true rhythms, to express the extreme, the fleeting, the fugitive states that hover at the outermost boundaries of speech.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

    “Maso is not content to muse on the relationship between life and art; she brings to life a ‘bombardment of images and sounds,’ fashioning a pattern of astonishing complexity and beauty. The tough-mindedness, originality, and wit of her perceptions are intoxicating.” —Publishers Weekly

  • Thursday, February 27, 2020 
      Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Charlene Teters, who received death threats for trying to retire racist sports team mascots at the University of Illinois, will speak following the showing of the award-winning PBS documentary about her—In Whose Honor?

  • Tuesday, February 18, 2020 
    Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    Please join us for the opening reception on Tuesday, February 18, 4:00-5:30pm, Library Lobby. Exhibition on view through March 30.

    Abolition/Resistance offers a chance to view rare and extraordinary works on slavery and racial oppression: first editions of the Narratives of Douglass, Ball, and Equiano, Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, stunning images from William Still’s Underground Rail Road. This exhibit also includes works by women abolitionists, Stowe, Child, and Grimké along with Black Power movement luminaries: Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Curated by Kristin Waters '73.

  • Tuesday, February 18, 2020 – Monday, March 30, 2020 
    Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library  Abolition/Resistance offers a chance to view rare and extraordinary works on slavery and racial oppression: first editions of the Narratives of Douglass, Ball, and Equiano, Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, stunning images from William Still’s Underground Rail Road. This exhibit also includes works by women abolitionists, Stowe, Child, and Grimké along with Black Power movement luminaries: Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Curated by Kristin Waters '73.

    Please join us for the opening reception on Tuesday, February 18, 4:00-5:30pm, Library Lobby

  • Monday, February 10, 2020 
    Presented by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Department of Classics, Princeton University
    Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    This talk will examine the relationship of literacy to the formation of the racial subject by reading a scene in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave against a chapter of Padilla Peralta’s own best-selling memoir,  Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.

    This event is cosponsored by the American Studies Program and the Council for Inclusive Excellence.

  • Tuesday, February 4, 2020 
    Olin Hall  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    A discussion about creative processes and commitments to the humanities that seeks to diversify perspectives on the arts disciplines and offers models for collective and inclusive community dialogues. 

  • Monday, December 16, 2019 
    Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    Featuring 

    Dr. Whitney Slaten
    T.K. Blue Quintet
    Souleymane Badolo / Kongo Ba Téria
    and the art of James Ransome

    1619: A Commemoration in Sound is a remembrance event to mark the 400th anniversary of the first arrival of enslaved people from Africa in the North American British Colonies—the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States of America. 

    African descendants’ virtuosic negotiations with Western tonality and forms, as well as cosmopolitan explorations of different sounds, aesthetics, and cultures, have shaped vital contributions to the art, music, and dance of America. Dr. Whitney Slaten, Assistant Professor of Music, brings together virtuosic jazz artist T.K. Blue, choreographer and Visiting Artist in Dance Souleymane Badolo, and lauded illustrator and Dutchess County resident James Ransome for an exploration of history, memory, legacy, and gestures between the U.S. and Africa. 

    Presented in partnership with the Difference and Media Project, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and the Ethnomusicology Area, with support from The Music Program, Historical Studies, Art History, Africana Studies, American Studies, The Arts Division, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Center for Experimental Humanities.

  • Tuesday, November 12, 2019 
    Olin, Room 102  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Tootie’s Last Suit is an awarding-winning documentary about the famed Mardi Gras Indian Chief of New Orleans, Allison Montana, a.k.a. Tootie, who died in 2005. The historical and biographical film explores the history and performative culture of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the segregation that ensued around carnival. The film has received recognition from the Society for Visual Anthropology and a special honor from the Margaret Mead Film Foundation at the Tribeca Film Festival. 
     
    Lisa Katzman is highly-accomplished film director, whose films include Flamencos: Here at There (Aquí y Allí), 9/11’s Unsettled Dust and its sequel Hiding BP’s Oil (currently in post-production). She is currently working on a screenplay titled “Rachel and Gerard” with the director Charles Burnett, and an adaptation of Dorien Ross’ novel Returning to A. 

  • Monday, November 11, 2019 
    The National Book Award winner reads from her work
    Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    On Monday, November 11, at 6:30 p.m., in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Sigrid Nunez reads from her work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and the Written Arts Program, and introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books by Sigrid Nunez will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

    Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Panamanian-Chinese father. In 1972, after graduating from Barnard College, Nunez worked as an editorial assistant for Robert B. Silvers at the New York Review of Books. She then received her MFA from Columbia University and returned to NYRB, where she met the late Susan Sontag, who became the subject of her 2011 memoir, Sempre Susan. Nunez chronicled her childhood and adolescence in her first book, a hybrid novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), both a critical and commercial success. Her novel For Rouenna (2001), which tells the story of a woman’s experiences in the Vietnam War, was seen by many as her “breakthrough work.” In her fiction, Nunez has experimented with a vast range of genres and themes, marked by a spare, intimate, confessional tone. While beloved by fellow novelists, Nunez kept a deliberate distance from the literary scene, but with the 2018 publication of “The Friend,” Nunez became an “overnight literary sensation,” winning the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and drawing euphoric reviews that hailed the novel as “a subtle, unassuming masterpiece” (New York Times).

    Sigrid Nunez is the author of eight books. Her work has appeared in anthologies including four Pushcart Prize volumes, four anthologies of Asian-American literature, and The Best American Short Stories 2019. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. Her work has been translated into ten languages and is in the process of being translated into thirteen more. She lives in New York City.
     PRAISE FOR SIGRID NUNEZ
    “Nunez’s prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts—the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence. She addresses important ideas unpretentiously and offers wisdom for any aspiring writer.” —New York Times Book Review

    “Nunez has proved herself a master of psychological acuity.” —New Yorker
     
    “A major talent . . . [Nunez’s] gift is wild and large.” —San Francisco Chronicle

    “Nunez’s piercing intelligence and post-feminist consciousness may well feel that writing the Great American novel is no longer a feasible or worthwhile goal—but damned if she hasn’t gone and done it anyway.” —Salon

    “Nunez’s keen powers of observation make her a natural chronicler.” —New York Review of Books

    “When the apocalypse comes, I want Nunez in my lifeboat.” —Vanity Fair

    “One of the most dizzyingly accomplished of our writers.” —Gary Shteyngart

  • Friday, November 1, 2019 
    Tommy Buser-Clancy
    Staff-attorney, Texas ACLU

    Hegeman 204A  11:30 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Crystal Mason, a Black mother of three from Texas, thought she was performing her civic duty by filling out a provisional ballot in the 2016 election. She didn't know it would land her a five-year prison sentence, upending her family and the life she had built.

    At the time, Crystal was on federal supervised release, a preliminary period of freedom for individuals who have served their full time of incarceration in federal prison. Nobody told her that the state considered her ineligible to vote. Yet the state of Texas contended that somehow, she should have known. Although the state didn’t even count her provisional ballot, it still intends to send her to prison for the crime of voting while the state considered her ineligible.

    Join us for a presentation by Tommy Buser-Clancy, staff-attorney for Texas ACLU who, alongside the Texas Civil Rights Project, are fighting Crystal Mason’s case in the courts.

  • Tuesday, October 29, 2019 
    Presented in association with Oblong Books & Music and Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability
     

    Fisher Center, LUMA Theater  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation, and the founder of the company The Sioux Chef, is committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine. Through his research, he has uncovered and mapped out the foundations of the indigenous food systems through an indigenous perspective. Chef Sean has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods and with an ever-growing team of indigenous minded peers, is leading a movement to completely redefine North American cuisine through the understanding and utilization of indigenous food knowledge. This is an evolution of Native American Foods, taking important educations of the past and applying them to the now.Run time is approximately 50 minutes, followed by a Q&A and book signing.


    Support comes from The Center for the Study of Land, Air and Water, American Studies, Fisher Center, Environmental and Urban Studies, Bard Farm, Bard Office of Sustainability, Experimental Humanities, CCE, ELAS, TLS, and Oblong Books.

  • Monday, October 28, 2019 
    The Bard Fiction Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner reads from Maggie Brown & Others
    Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    On Monday, October 28, at 6:30 p.m., in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Peter Orner reads from his new collection, Maggie Brown & Others. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and the Written Arts Program, and introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books by Peter Orner will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

    An essential voice in American fiction, Peter Orner is the author of acclaimed books such as The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2006), winner of the Bard Fiction Prize; Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge (2013); and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Am I Alone Here? (2016), a memoir. Best known for his short fiction, Orner has been hailed as “a master of his form,” a writer who “doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls” (New York Times). Now, in his sixth book, Maggie Brown & Others (2019), Orner gathers a novella and forty-four stories—many as short as a few paragraphs, none longer than twenty pages—into an orchestral, polyphonic collection, his most sustained achievement yet.

    Peter Orner is the author of two novels, three story collections, and a memoir. His stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Orner has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. Currently, he is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.
     PRAISE FOR PETER ORNER
    “It’s been apparent since his first book, Esther Stories (2001), that Peter Orner was a major talent . . . You know from the second you pick him up that he’s the real deal. His sentences are lit from below, like a swimming pool, with a kind of resonant yearning that’s impossible to fake . . . Orner can do anything.” —New York Times

    “Mr. Orner packs remarkable pathos into his condensed dramas.” ―Wall Street Journal

    “Orner writes with a combination of sincerity and self-awareness. . . . Most vividly reminiscent of Raymond Carver.” ―San Francisco Chronicle

    “Orner is incapable of dishonoring his characters. He treats all of them—even the minor figures—with a fierce humanity.” —Boston Globe
     
    “Peter Orner is that rare find: a young writer who can inhabit any character, traverse any landscape, and yet never stray from the sound of the human heart.” —Washington Post

    “[Orner] is one of our most empathetic writers today. . . His fiction has an intimate feel: we are in conversation with otherwise unknown and forgotten lives. This is what makes Orner’s characters live and breathe beyond the page . . . This is how his clean, simple sentences succeed far beyond the limited space he gives them . . . Let us be thankful for Peter Orner.” ―Los Angeles Review of Books

    “Orner is secretly one of the best contemporary writers working today: his characters are indelible, his focus small and piercing, his insights moving . . . all with his special sense for truth, character, and wistful realism.” ―Literary Hub

  • Wednesday, April 24, 2019 
    Eric Goldfischer, University of Minnesota
    Olin, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
    In the 1990s, the well-known tactic of "broken-windows policing" targeted homeless people by removing them from core areas of New York City and other global mega-cities. Yet today, with a progressive administration and softer policing in place, homeless New Yorkers still find themselves unable to exist comfortably in public space. How should we understand this shift? In this presentation, I argue that the regime of anti-homelessness in New York has shifted to what I call "ecological development," and present evidence from an ethnographic study to show how green spaces, linear parks, and urban plaza areas have taken up the mantle of anti-homelessness, and how homeless activists resist these nefarious tools of urban planning and development.

  • Wednesday, April 24, 2019 
    Event with Marcus Moore, Charmel Lucas, and Nikita Price (Picture the Homeless, USA) and Ayala Dias Ferreira (MST- Landless Workers Movement, Brazil)
    Olin, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    In the US and Brazil alike, the housing crisis sweeps millions into its grasp each year, producing homelessness, destroying public space, and forcing people to migrate long distances. But homeless activists have powerfully resisted this trend through community organizing, collective action, and legislative change. Landless activists have occupied plantations, successfully resettling hundreds of thousands of people on land that used to be controlled by big agriculture. Come hear from housing organizers in New York City and landless organizers in Brazil. Learn more about how we can create new models of land and public space so that all have a right to a home.

  • Tuesday, April 23, 2019 
    2018 American Book Award–winning author Valeria Luiselli reads from her work
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    On Tuesday, April 23, at 6:00 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, Valeria Luiselli reads from her work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and the Written Arts Program, and introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books by Valeria Luiselli will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

    Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and has lived in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, India, Spain, France, and New York City. She is the author of a book of essays, Papeles falsos/Sidewalks (2012, 2014), and the internationally acclaimed novel Los ingravidos / Faces in the Crowd (2013, 2014), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2014, she won the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize, an annual award honoring young and promising fiction writers. Her novel La historia de mis dientes / The Story of My Teeth (2013, 2015) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Impac Prize 2017; and was named one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of the Year. Her recent book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions won the 2018 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

    Luiselli received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. Her latest novel, Lost Children Archive (2019), which was written in English, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Luiselli was recently appointed as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
     PRAISE FOR VALERIA LUISELLI
    “The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli’s hands—electric, elastic, alluring, new. . . . She is a superb chronicler.” —New York Times

    “Riveting, lyrical, virtuosic. . . . Luiselli’s metaphors are wrought with devastating precision. . . . The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity. It humanizes us.” —New York Times Book Review

    “Daring, wholly original, brilliant . . . fascinating. . . . Luiselli is an extraordinary writer [with] a freewheeling novelist’s imagination.” —NPR

    “A comprehensive literary intelligence.” —James Wood, New Yorker

    “A master. . . . Luiselli confronts big picture questions: What does it mean to be American? To what lengths should we go to bear witness? Will history ever stop repeating itself? All the while, her language is so transporting, it stops you time and again.” —Carmen Maria Machado, O Magazine

    “One of the most fascinating and impassioned authors at work today.” —Literary Hub

  • Monday, April 22, 2019 
    Olin, Room 204  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Jessie Morgan-Owens is a photographer, dean of studies at Bard Early College–New Orleans, and author of a very well-received new book called Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement. On Monday, April 22, she will be on campus to read from the book and to join Christian Crouch in conversation about the issues it raises. Please join us for what should be a terrific and far-ranging discussion of racial politics, the abolitionist movement, U.S. history, the history of photography, the power of images, and more.

    To borrow from the publisher’s blurb: “When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family’s freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary’s skin was so light that she ‘passed’ as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audience’s sympathy. During his sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery was not bounded by race. Weaving together long-overlooked primary sources and arresting images, including the daguerreotype that turned Mary into the poster child of a movement, Jessie Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. She follows Mary’s story through the lives of her determined mother and grandmother to her own adulthood, parallel to the story of the antislavery movement and the eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Girl in Black and White restores Mary to her rightful place in history and uncovers a dramatic narrative of travels along the Underground Railroad, relationships tested by oppression, and the struggles of life after emancipation. The result is an exposé of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay―one that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today.”

  • Monday, April 22, 2019 
    Jia Lynn Yang, Deputy National Editor, The New York Times
    Olin, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This talk will trace the current immigration debate back to the Supreme Court fight in 1922 over whether a Japanese-born man could naturalize, and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which established ethnic quotas favoring “Anglo-Saxons.” Because immigration debates have long been predicated on who counts as sufficiently “white,” the current system—in which there are far more Asian and Hispanic immigrants than European—challenges traditional notions of who counts as American. Yang will discuss how the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act set us on this current course, but left much unfinished work around race and national identity that we confront today during the Trump administration. The talk will also address media coverage of Trump’s immigration policies as well as how to infuse journalistic work with a sense of history.

    Jia Lynn Yang is a deputy national editor at the New York Times, where she helps oversee coverage of the country. Previously, she was deputy national security editor at the Washington Post, where she was an editor on the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2018 for its coverage of Trump and Russia. She is writing a book on the history of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, Un-American Elements, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2020.

  • Monday, March 25, 2019 
    Film screening and roundtable discussion
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    If Only I Were That Warrior (2015) is a feature documentary film focusing on the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1935. Following the recent construction of a monument dedicated to Fascist general Rodolfo Graziani, the film addresses the unpunished war crimes he and others committed in the name of Mussolini's imperial ambitions. The stories of three characters, filmed in present-day Ethiopia, Italy, and the United States, take the audience on a journey through the living memories and the tangible remains of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia—a journey that crosses generations and continents to today, where this often overlooked legacy still ties the fates of two nations and their people. 

    The film screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, Valerio Ciriaci and Isaak Liptzin, and Bard faculty member Dinaw Mengestu.

  • Monday, March 4, 2019 
    Joshua Kopin '12
    PhD Candidate, The University of Texas at Austin

    Olin, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    Part of a larger dissertation project, this talk makes a connection between the subjects of early comics, which often included immigrants and their children, like the Irish-American Yellow Kid; and political cartoons about immigration and American imperialism from the periods of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Spanish-American War. Drawing on his long-established connection to yellow journalism and noting that, while explicitly Irish, the Yellow Kid is drawn in the visual idiom of anti-Chinese caricature, this talk posits that caricature is a technology of empire and inclusion that, through ideas about immigrants and expansionism that were often clothed in metaphors of childhood, served to differentiate acceptable, if unruly, white citizen subjects from imperial others. 

  • Tuesday, February 12, 2019 
    Film and discussion with Charlene Teters and Jay Rosenstein
    Olin, Room 102  5:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    Charlene Teters was a graduate art student at the University of Illinois when she started a campaign to retire the school’s racist team mascot and was met with death threats. Emmy and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker Jay Rosenstein—professor of media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois—made In Whose Honor? to chronicle the controversy. It was aired in 1997 on PBS. Rosenstein is still receiving threats over the film.

    The screening of In Whose Honor? (48 minutes) will be followed by a conversation with Teters and Rosenstein moderated by Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.

    Free and Open to the Public
    Questions: Danielle Riou at [email protected]
    Trailer: Watch Now

    Sponsored by the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. Cosponsored by the American Studies Program, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Difference and Media Project, Human Rights Program, and Human Rights Project.
     

  • Monday, December 3, 2018 
    Aspinwall  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    We will tour new campus signage designed to encourage critical reflection on community practices of public memory, recognition, and forgetting through geographical markers.Walk beginning outside Aspinwall Hall, Bard College, on Monday, December 3, at 3:00 pm.

    Reception following in the Campus Center Multipurpose Room will feature student art and performances.

    This is a project of students in Professor Myra Young Armstead's "Inclusion at Bard" course, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course sponsored by Bard's Center for Civic Engagement. This event is part of the Difference and Justice Symposium, and is underwritten by a grant from the Lumina Foundation.
     

  • Wednesday, October 31, 2018 
    Elizabeth Alexander and Amy Sherald in Conversation
    BHSEC Manhattan  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    The poet and Mellon Foundation President Dr. Elizabeth Alexander and painter Amy Sherald will talk to each other about their creative processes and commitment to the humanities. This program diversifies perspectives on the arts disciplines, and offers models for collective and inclusive dialogues. 

    Free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Register here.

    This event will be webcast live on Bard.edu.

    This event is cosponsored by Humanities New York, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Bard Undergraduate Program in Africana Studies, Bard High School Early College, and Bard American Studies Program.

    Watch Live Starting at 6:30 Eastern Time:


  • Tuesday, October 16, 2018 
    Professor Nicholas Junkerman, Skidmore College
    RKC 103  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Captivity narratives are built around the drama of the individual's temporary incapacity: the captive is variously unable to move, speak, or behave in the ways he or she would choose. In early American captivity narratives, this restriction is often contrasted with a vision of God as totally, unchangeably able and unrestrained. In addition, captivity narratives often narrate the event and the effects of disabling violence. This talk will discuss the ways in which the religious content of early American captivity narratives informs these depictions of able and impaired bodies. In so doing, it will consider how contemporary disability studies might (or might not) help us to reconsider the genre of the captivity narrative.

  • Tuesday, October 2, 2018 
      Stephen J. Trejo, Department of Economics, University of Texas at Austin
    Olin, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    We document generational patterns of educational attainment and earnings for contemporary immigrant groups. We also discuss some potentially serious measurement issues that arise when attempting to track the socioeconomic progress of the later-generation descendants of U.S. immigrants, and we summarize what recent research has to say about these measurement issues and how they might bias our assessment of the long-term integration of particular groups. Most national origin groups arrive with relatively high educational attainment and/or experience enough improvement between the first and second generations such that they quickly meet or exceed, on average, the schooling level of the typical American. Several large and important Hispanic groups (including Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) are exceptions to this pattern, however, and their prospects for future upward mobility are subject to much debate. Because of measurement issues and data limitations, Mexican Americans in particular and Hispanic Americans in general probably have experienced significantly more socioeconomic progress beyond the second generation than available data indicate. Even so, it may take longer for their descendants to integrate fully into the American mainstream than it did for the descendants of the European immigrants who arrived near the turn of the twentieth century.

  • Tuesday, September 18, 2018 
    Nate Chinen, Writer/Critic/Director of Editorial Content, WBGO
    Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    “Playing changes,” in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes—ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical—that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music. Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters—from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding—who have exerted an important influence on the scene. 

    Nate Chinen has been writing about jazz for more than 20 years. He spent a dozen of them working as a critic for the New York Times and helmed a long-running column for Jazz Times. As the director of editorial content at WBGO, he works with the multiplatform program Jazz Night in America and contributes a range of coverage to NPR Music. An 11-time winner of the Helen Dance – Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in writing presented by the Jazz Journalists Association, Chinen is also coauthor of Myself among Others: A Life in Music, the autobiography of impresario George Wein. He lives in Beacon, New York, with his wife and two daughters.

  • Monday, September 17, 2018 
      Thomas A. Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies, George Washington University
    Olin, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Anyone with a passing knowledge of the World War II–era U.S. military likely knows that it was segregated. Less well known, surprisingly, is who was segregated from whom, exactly, and how the military made these decisions. Neither was simple or straightforward. My talk will explore a long-forgotten chapter of this larger story: the fraught and complex struggle over inductees’ “proper” racial classification and placement in the segregated World War II–era military. Drawing on a variety of federal records from the army, the Selective Service System, and the courts, I trace the stories of an eclectic mix of Americans —Waccamaw Siouans, Chickahomines, Creoles, Puerto Ricans, Cape Verdeans—who fit neatly into neither of the military's catchall categories of “white” and “colored.” In the process, I shed light on the evolving meaning and boundaries of race—from official state policy down to ordinary people’s attitudes and actions.

  • Tuesday, September 11, 2018 
      Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
    Olin, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Based on demographic projections, most Americans believe that their society will transition soon to a majority-minority one. But the projections fail to adequately account for a major social and demographic phenomenon of the early 21st century: the rise of a group of young Americans with mixed minority-white ancestry. In a departure from the one-drop regime of past racism, these individuals appear to be growing up in mixed family settings, but because of the binary, zero-sum rigidities that still guide our thinking, they are mostly classified as minorities in demographic data. Without this classification, however, the emergence of a majority-minority society in the foreseeable future is far from certain. Moreover, the evidence we possess about the characteristics, social affiliations, and identities of mixed individuals contradicts an exclusively minority classification, except for partly black individuals, who suffer from high levels of racism. Taking into account the ambiguous social locations of most mixed minority-white persons, I suggest that, even should a majority-minority society appear, it will not look like we presently imagine it.

  • Monday, March 26, 2018 
    RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    How do we move children’s fantasy beyond the racialized and imperialist norms of the genre? In this interactive presentation, author/educator Zetta Elliott will discuss “the trouble with magic.” After spending her childhood consuming British fantasy fiction, Elliott began to decolonize her imagination, and has dedicated her writing life to reconstituting “Black magic” as a powerful force to be celebrated rather than defeated. Elliott uses the historical fantasy genre to revise, review and reclaim the (often traumatic) histories of Atlantic enslavement and colonization. She is also an advocate for community-based publishing and will reveal how print-on-demand technology transfers power from the industry’s gatekeepers to those excluded from the publishing process.

    Born in Canada, Zetta Elliott moved to the US in 1994 to pursue her Ph.D. in American studies at NYU. Her essays have appeared in the Huffington Post, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. She is the author of over 25 books for young readers, including the award-winning picture books Bird and Melena's Jubilee. Her own imprint, Rosetta Press, generates culturally relevant stories that center children who have been marginalized, misrepresented, and/or rendered invisible in traditional children’s literature. Elliott is an advocate for greater diversity and equity in publishing. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
     

  • Friday, March 2, 2018 
      Finberg Library  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

    Ebony Coletu
    Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Penn State
    “Chief Sam and the Undocumented Origins of African American Migration to Ghana” Carina Ray
    Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University
    “Africa as a Refuge” Abosede George
    Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, Barnard College
    “Death of a Building: Unearthing the Politics of Modernity and Migration Histories in Architectural Conservation Projects in Lagos”

    Please join us for the workshop and lunch. Due to limited space, RSVP is required. RSVP to [email protected]
     
  • Monday, February 26, 2018 
    The Bard Fiction Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Karan Mahajan reads from his work.
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

    On Monday, February 26, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, novelist Karan Mahajan reads from his work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

    Karan Mahajan studied English and economics at Stanford University before earning an M.F.A. in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. His first novel, Family Planning (2012), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and the NYPL Young Lions Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, in addition to being named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and others. In 2017, Mahajan was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
     


    PRAISE FOR KARAN MAHAJAN
     “The Association of Small Bombs is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable, and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. . . . Mahajan is the real deal.” —Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review

    “A voracious approach to fiction-making . . . Mahajan has a cinematic attunement to the spectacle of disaster.” —New Yorker

    “Mahajan is an incredibly assured stylist. . . . Hugely promising.” —Jay McInerney, Daily Beast

    “Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and a clarity of vision.” —London Review of Books

    “Mahajan . . . has already developed an irresistible voice with a rich sense of humor fueled by sorrow.” —Washington Post Book World

  • Thursday, February 22, 2018 
    David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English, Yale University
    RKC 103  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Aesthetic judgment presumes that there is such a thing as bad art, and that it warrants careful description and analysis; with examples from 19th- and 20th-century poetry, didactic criticism and its opponents, and one or two recent Hollywood films.

  • Thursday, November 30, 2017 
    Brian Goldstein, Swarthmore College
    Olin, Room 102  4:40 pm EST/GMT-5
    In the last four decades of the twentieth century, Harlem, New York—America’s most famous neighborhood—transformed from the archetypal symbol of midcentury “urban crisis” to the most celebrated example of “urban renaissance” in the United States. Once a favored subject for sociologists studying profound poverty and physical decline, by the new millennium Harlem found itself increasingly the site of refurbished brownstones, shiny glass and steel shopping centers, and a growing middle-class population. Drawing from Brian Goldstein’s new book, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem (Harvard University Press, 2017), this lecture will trace this arc by focusing on competing visions for Harlem's central block. In doing so, it will reveal the complicated history of social and physical transformation that has changed this and many American urban centers in the last several decades. Gentrification is often described as a process controlled by outsiders, with clear winners and losers, victors and victims. In contrast, this talk will explore the role that Harlemites themselves played in bringing about Harlem’s urban renaissance, an outcome that had both positive and negative effects for their neighborhood. 

  • Monday, November 27, 2017 
    Susan Lepselter
    Associate Professor of Anthropology &
    Associate Adjunct Professor of American Studies,
    Indiana University

    Olin, Room 102  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Americans know their dominant national story centers on ideals of freedom, social mobility, and progress. But those ideals are constantly shadowed by the counter-figures of captivity and immobility. This talk is going to muse on different ways we talk about hard-to-articulate feelings of captivity and containment, from the inner subjective states of neurodivergence, to stories of uncanny captivity in UFO abduction. I will think about how idiosyncratic individual experiences and public narratives of captivity resonate with each other. How do these narratives move from the margins to the center of political discourse – and to what effect? This talk will touch on neurodiversity forums on tumblr, the medicalized idea of the monster, and UFO abduction stories. In the second half of the talk, I will invite members of the audience to tell their own stories of captivity, in both uncanny or ordinary registers.  Come with a story to tell!​

  • Saturday, November 4, 2017 
    Come join the Mid-Hudson Valley Shapenote Singing Community in filling Bard Hall this Saturday with sounds of the Sacred Harp, an early American oblong tunebook arrayed in 4-part dispersed harmony. Lend your voice or your ears and witness a centuries-old living tradition, with the first bi-annual convening of the Mid-Hudson Valley Sacred Harp Association at Bard Hall.
    Bard Hall  10:00 am – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
  • Tuesday, October 17, 2017 
    Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin
    Olin, Room 102  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

    "When I started college in the early 1980s, I really wanted to learn how shoot, light, and, especially, develop 35mm B&W film. I took an evening class, and began to photograph whatever was around me. At that time, I was hanging out with a mobile d.j. crew, based on Long Island, where I lived. So, much of what I shot was of them.

    "Eventually, though, I gave up photography, put my negatives in a bag, and began to write, ultimately growing to be a print and radio journalist with a focus on hip-hop.

    "Those d.j.s, however, went on to become hip-hop legends Public Enemy and, their history-making production arm, the Bomb Squad. My photos—some of the only photo-documents of them during that period—soon were enlisted into the service of documentaries for the BBC, MTV, VH-1, and other productions. As well, a number of them were recently acquired as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture's permanent collection.

    "This year is the 30th anniversary of Public Enemy's debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show. In 2018, it will be three decades since the release of their landmark It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

    "Since I lived through, worked during, and documented the rise of hip-hop culture as a media professional—and this even earlier era with my camera—I’m bringing the entirety of what I've seen to Bard College, doing so in the spirit of openness and learning."

    Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin, publishes the blog Media Assassin at harryallen.info. There he writes about race, politics, and culture, much as he does for VIBE, The Source, The Village Voice, and other publications, and has been doing so for over twenty years.

  • Thursday, October 5, 2017 
    New Media Poetics and the Politics of Childhood: Doing Media Ethnography in School
    RKC 103  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at an elementary school in New England, this talk explores the politics and poetics of children’s everyday performances of mass media texts in school contexts. Elementary schools are places where the expressive environment is tightly regulated. But because schools’ pedagogical emphasis on literacy privileges language and communication as a field of action, expressive repertoires from popular music and entertainment media provide a powerful resource for children to challenge adult authority and claim childhood as a space of opposition, intimacy, and solidarity. An ethnographic perspective on the situated everyday activities in which children engage with poetic, musical, and narrative texts reveals that, in the “wild” of everyday school life, mass media texts circulate in fragmentary and partial forms, as snippets, tropes, half-remembered quotations, puns, improvisations, and momentary performances that are powerful in part because of their ephemerality and incompleteness. In their everyday performances, children put forward a poetics tightly linked to new media forms—drawn from the internet, mobile music devices, video games, and social media—to politicize and complicate the bureaucratic regime of school literacy and adulthood. In doing so, children’s performances point to new ways of thinking about the social structures that organize schools.

  • Monday, September 25, 2017 
    The American Book Award–winning poet, journalist, and Miles Davis biographer reads from his work
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    The founding editor of Confrontation and author of James Baldwin: The Legacy, Miles: The Autobiography, Miles and Me: A Memoir of Miles Davis, and poetry collections including Errançities reads from his work at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, September 25, 2017, in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow and followed by a Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

    In addition to his work as a biographer and essayist, Troupe has published many collections of poems, including The Architecture of Language, Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems, and Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems 1969–1977, which received an American Book Award.

    He has received honors and awards from the National Foundation for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts; and served as poet laureate of the state of California.
    PRAISE FOR QUINCY TROUPE
    "It has been said that Miles Davis was a great poet on his instrument. In a similar vein, it can be said that Quincy Troupe is a great instrument in his poetic delivery. As fate would have it, these two very talented individuals would form a mutual and intriguing bond. Miles and Me, Quincy Troupe's latest book, is an honest, serious and sometimes hilarious memoir of his warm and cherished friendship with Miles Davis." —QBR: The Black Book Review

    "Brilliant, poetic, provocative, Quincy Troupe's Miles and Me reveals the man behind the dark glasses and legend." —Ishmael Reed

    Any supporter who donates $500 or more to Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions receives a BackPage Pass providing VIP access to any Fall 2017 or future event in the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series. Have lunch with a visiting author, attend a seminar on their work, and receive premium seating at their reading. Or you can give your BackPage Pass to a lover of literature on your gift list! To find out more, click here or contact Nicole Nyhan at [email protected] or (845) 758-7054.

  • Monday, September 18, 2017 
    Emily Lordi, Associate Professor of English, 
    University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    RKC 103  6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Often invoked but seldom defined, the word “soul” occupies a central yet slippery place in the African American cultural tradition. Is it a musical genre? A racial essence? A spiritual quality? I believe it is none of the above, exactly, but instead a story about black experience that we can read through generations of musical practice. In the late-1960s, soul emerged as a name for the social and aesthetic grace wrought from racialized pressure—what black people earned by surviving the historical and daily trials of white supremacy. One of the musical manifestations of this concept, I suggest, was the “false ending,” the practice of bringing a song to its close only to strike it back up for another chorus or two. This strategy structurally enacted—and, thanks to its evident roots in gospel music, helped to render sacred— soul’s message of black group resilience. 

    After discussing false endings in the work of Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and Marvin Gaye, I will suggest this device finds its contemporary counterpart in two recent music videos: Flying Lotus (and Kendrick Lamar)’s “Never Catch Me,” which begins with a false ending by staging the death and resurrection of two black children; and Beyoncé’s Lemonade, which likewise begins with a suicidal swan-dive that initiates the visual album’s healing journey. To trace this device through the Black Lives Matter era is to see how what scholars call “post-soul aesthetics” are in fact haunted by the “false ending” that is the supposed death of soul itself—and, more to the point, by the persistent need for the models soul offers for translating black loss into what theorist Fred Moten calls a “will to proceed” against intractable odds.

    Emily Lordi is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of two books: Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (Rutgers UP, 2013) and Donny Hathaway Live (Bloomsbury 33⅓ series, 2016). She has published scholarly articles on topics ranging from literary modernism to Beyoncé, as well as works of cultural criticism in such venues as The Atlantic, Slate, The Root, the Fader, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is writing a book about soul.
  • Thursday, September 7, 2017 
      Katherine Benton-Cohen
    Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University

    Olin, Room 101  4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    “Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Progressive-Era America,” examines the enormous impact of the largest study of immigrants in US History. From 1907 to 1911, a staff of 300—over half of them women--compiled 41 volumes of reports and a potent set of recommendations that shaped immigration policy for generations to come. The talk will discuss the Commission’s surprising origins in US-Asia relations, its enthusiasm for distributing immigrants throughout the United States, and its long-term effect not just on federal policy, but on how Americans think about immigration in general.
     Katherine Benton-Cohen is associate professor of history at Georgetown University. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
    She is the author of Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2009), as well as her forthcoming book on the history of the Dillingham Commission.

  • Wednesday, May 17, 2017 
    Kline, Faculty Dining Room  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Come celebrate the end of the year with fellow MESers. Meet faculty, hear about exciting new courses, study abroad programs, senior projects, and a number of incredible iniatives MES students are working on. Snacks will be served. All are welcome.

  • Monday, May 8, 2017 
      An open event for all students with an interest in American Studies
    Hopson Cottage, Admission  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Come meet the faculty and students of the American Studies program! Enjoy some free food, hear about upcoming fall courses, and celebrate seniors who have just turned in their projects. 

  • Monday, April 10, 2017 
    Gillian Osborne
    Olin, Room 102  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This talk draws from a larger “bioregional biography.” Surveying roughly fifty years and fifty square miles in the middle of Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth-century, In the Vicinity of Amherst draws on environmental history, scientific studies past and present, geography, literature, and the arts, to explore how lives—plant, animal, and human—are connected across time through a shared environmental context. While Emily Dickinson provides the occasion for such close scrutiny of a particular time and place, it’s not Dickinson only I’m seeking here: rather, an understanding of how any text converses with its context. The talk will also feature fossils, paintings of mushrooms,
    mica, and shale.

    Gillian Osborne is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and co-editor of a collection of critical essays, forthcoming from University of Iowa Press, on modern and
    contemporary ecopoetics.

  • Friday, March 31, 2017 
    The author of Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life reads from her poems
    Bard Hall  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    At 5:00 p.m. on Friday, March 31, in Bard Hall, the John Ashbery Poetry Series presents a reading by Dawn Lundy Martin.

    The activist poet and editor, winner of the Cave Canem Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and cofounder of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh is also the author of such books as A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, Discipline, and the forthcoming Good Stock Strange Blood.

    Introduced by Ann Lauterbach and followed by a conversation and Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

    "Every time I read Good Stock Strange Blood, a new, deepened book awaits me. Which is to say, it’s got trap doors, trick sleeves; it takes swerves, detours, and dives. Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can't do; how the past is never past; how to stand in the blur, the 'griefmouth' of personal and collective pain and somehow—against all odds—make thought, make fury, make song. We need this resilience, this bloody reckoning, this wit and nuance, now." —Maggie Nelson

    "A relentless pressure placed on the body that is fetishized, shackled, split, strangled, beaten, hated, compressed, trashed, drowned, measured, mirrored, dragged, discarded, disappeared, opened, punctured, displayed, encased. The question of 'what allows the body to survive' is at the heart of Good Stock Strange Blood. If there's an answer in this book to that question, then perhaps it has to do with how we confront and give words and breath and sound and silence to a life of meticulously drawn images that are ghostly, brutal, and vivifying." —Daniel Borzutzky

  • Thursday, March 30, 2017 
    The controversial essayist presents a free public reading
    Bard Hall  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Thursday, March 30, at 6:00 p.m. in Bard Hall, game-changing essayist and editor John D'Agata reads in the Written Arts Series.

    Introduced by Mary Caponegro '78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing, and followed by a Q&A, this event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

    D'Agata is the author of Halls of Fame, The Lifespan of a Fact, About a Mountain, and the three-volume New History of the Essay series.

    “John D'Agata is one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years. His essays combine the innovation and candor of David Shields and William Vollmann with the perception and concinnity and sheer aesthetic weight of Annie Dillard and Lewis Hyde. In nothing else recent is the compresence of shit and light that is America so vividly felt and evoked.” ―David Foster Wallace

    "The Lifespan of a Fact is a Talmudically arranged account of the conflict between Jim Fingal, zealous checker, and John D’Agata, nonfiction fabulist." … "It is less a book than a knock-down, drag-out fight between two tenacious combatants, over questions of truth, belief, history, myth, memory and forgetting." —New York Times Book Review and Magazine

    "In About a Mountain's circuitous, stylish investigation, D'Agata uses the federal government's highly controversial proposal to entomb the U.S.'s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch's The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge. It is testament to D'Agata's skillful organization and his use of a rapid sequences of montages that readers will be pleasurably (and perhaps necessarily) disoriented but never distracted from the themes knitting together the ostensibly unrelated voices of Native American activists, politicians, geologists, Levi's parents, D'Agata's own mother, and a host of zany Las Vegans." —Publishers Weekly

  • Thursday, March 30, 2017 
      Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Tanya Erzen
    Associate Professor, University of Puget Sound
    Director, Freedom Education Project Puget Sound
    In prisons throughout the United States, punitive incarceration and religious revitalization are occurring simultaneously. Faith-based prison ministries operate under the logic that religious conversion and redemption will transform prisoners into new human beings. Why are Christian prison ministries on the rise amidst an increasingly punitive system of mass incarceration? How do people in prison practice religion in a space of coercion and discipline? What are theimplications of the state's promotion of Christianity over other religious traditions in some prisons? And, why have conservative Christians, particularly, embraced criminal justice reform?

  • Monday, March 13, 2017 
    The Pulitzer Prize–winning author reads from his most recent novel, Perfume River
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    On Monday, March 13, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Robert Olen Butler reads from his new novel, Perfume River, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Sponsored by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, this event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

    Butler is the author of sixteen novels, including Mr. Spaceman and Hell, and six fiction collections, including Tabloid Dreams. His stories have appeared widely in such periodicals as Conjunctions, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Paris Review, VQR, and Granta; as well as in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, and elsewhere.
     PRAISE FOR PERFUME RIVER
     “What I so like about Perfume River is its plainly-put elegance. Enough time has passed since Viet Nam that its grave human lessons and heartbreaks can be—with a measure of genius—almost simply stated. Butler’s novel is a model for this heartbreaking simplicity and grace.” —Richard Ford

    “Butler’s Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity. Butler’s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don’t extend just to his characters’ traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he’s addressing.”—New York Times Book Review

    “A deeply meditative reflection on aging and love, as seen through the prism of one family quietly torn asunder by the lingering effects of the Vietnam War. This is thoughtful, introspective fiction of the highest caliber, but it carries a definite edge, thanks to an insistent backbeat that generates suspense with the subtlest of brushstrokes.” —Booklist (starred review)

    Any supporter who donates $500 or more to Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions receives a BackPage Pass providing VIP access to any Spring/Fall 2017 or future event in the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series. Have lunch with a visiting author, attend a seminar on their work, and receive premium seating at their reading. Or you can give your BackPage Pass to a lover of literature on your gift list! To find out more, click here or contact Micaela Morrissette at [email protected] or (845) 758-7054.

  • Monday, March 6, 2017 
    Jessica Pabon 
    Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
    SUNY New Paltz

    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    In cities across the globe, graffiti grrlz (women who write graffiti art) enact the quintessential principles of feminist movement such as collectivity, support, and empowerment. They do so, however, without claiming a feminist identity; some emphatically rejecting a feminist mantle. In her talk, feminist graffiti scholar Dr. Jessica N. Pabón asks: do we need to call ourselves feminists in order to enact feminist change in the world? Incorporating the ethos of “action above words” that defines graffiti subculture, Pabón argues that the question of who is or is not a feminist becomes secondary to how feminism is being enacted through everyday performance.
    Case studies are drawn from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Brazil as well as the United States.
     

  • Wednesday, March 1, 2017 
    Olin, Room 102  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Who gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American
    condescension toward “barbarous” China yielded to a fascination with
    all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented
    public conversation about American–Chinese relations. Hua Hsu will
    discuss his book, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the
    Pacific, and the rivalries which emerged between powerful writers and
    gatekeepers like Pearl Buck, Carl Crow, and Henry Luce and largely
    overlooked immigrant writers like the D.I.Y. oddball H.T. Tsiang. How
    do these conversations about Asian American identity or transpacific
    geopolitics continue into today? What role do market pressures and
    imagined rivalries play in the creative process? How did failure
    inspire one man toward radical dreams of floating away?

    Hua Hsu is an associate professor of English at Vassar College, where
    he also directs the program in American Studies. He is the author of A
    Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, published
    last year by Harvard University Press. He has previously written for
    Artforum, The Atlantic, Grantland, Slate, and The Wire. He is
    currently a contributor to the New Yorker where he reviewed Kanye West's
     “The Life of Pablo'" and Run the Jewels’ “RTJ3.” He serves on the
     executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
    All invited!

  • Monday, February 27, 2017 
    The Rome Prize–winning author reads from her most recent novel, Mister Monkey
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    On Monday, February 27, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Francine Prose reads from her new novel, Mister Monkey. Sponsored by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, this event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

    Bard College's visiting professor of literature and the former president of PEN American Center, Prose is the autor of many books, including Household Saints, Blue Angel, Reading Like a Writer, and Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern.
     PRAISE FOR MISTER MONKEY
     “Expertly constructed, Mister Monkey is so fresh and new it’s almost giddy, almost impudent with originality. Tender and artful, a sophisticated satire, a gently spiritual celebration of life, a dark and thoroughly grim depiction of despair, a screwball comedy, a screwball tragedy, it’s gorgeous and bright and fun and multifaceted, carrying within it the geological force of the ages. It’s a book to be treasured. It’s that good. It’s that funny. It’s that sad. It’s that deceptive and deep.” —New York Times Book Review

    “How does Prose do it? With precision, intelligence and wicked jocularity. She measures art in monkeys. She demands an evolution. This book hilariously swings through a backstage rank with hormones, ambition and an unforgettable cast of characters.” —Samantha Hunt, former Bard Fiction Prize winner

    Any supporter who donates $500 or more to Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions receives a BackPage Pass providing VIP access to any Spring 2017 event in the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series. Have lunch with one of the three spring readers, attend a seminar on their work, and receive premium seating at their reading. Or you can give your BackPage Pass to a lover of literature on your holiday gift list! To find out more, click here or contact Micaela Morrissette at [email protected] or (845) 758-7054.

  • Tuesday, November 15, 2016 
    Siobhan Phillips, Associate Professor of English
    Dickinson College

    RKC 103  6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    In the crucial years of the early 1960s, both Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin identified the problems of U.S. history as, in part, problems of kinship—affiliations created and distorted when the exigencies of human vulnerability must be satisfied in a liberal society structured by race slavery. Both distrusted the model of family they saw around them; both used the specific problems of that model to imagine different and more democratic relationships. The results challenge current conceptions of both Arendt and Baldwin by uncovering how their psychological acuity supports their historical/ethical vision. This talk aims to recognize the resources of that vision, then and now.

  • Monday, November 14, 2016 
      Rockwell Stensrud
    Olin, Room 202  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
    In his long life, during one of the most dynamic periods in English history, Roger Williams (1603-1683) altered the values and the direction of the New World, and he did it with flair. After being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 for sedition, Williams founded Providence with the help of Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians. He insisted that Rhode Island break with the past and honor freedom of conscience for all inhabitants, and that church and state remain separate. By the early 1640s, those dangerous tenets had become a legislative possibility; two decades later they were a reality. The nation that emerged a century and a half later as the United States of America was a direct descendant of Roger Williams’s Rhode Island revolution.

    Rockwell Stensrud is the author of Newport: A Lively Experiment 1639-1969 and Inventing Rhode Island: Six Lives. He wrote and co-produced the ABC News series The History of the Eighties; James Cagney for A&E “Biography”; and the series American Women of Achievement.

  • Monday, October 24, 2016 
    A Lecture by Farah Jasmine Griffin
    Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University

    "Her body in the air looked like an abstract sculpture," Griffin writes of Pearl Primus's dance in the 1840s.  

    "In her book “Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II,[2013]” Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor at Columbia University, delves into a largely underexplored aspect of Harlem’s rich history: the years just before, during and immediately after World War II, a period of optimism, creativity and turmoil. Moreover, Griffin uses the lives of three female artists — the choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, the writer Ann Petry and the composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams — as signposts through an era, in a work that paints the “greatest generation” in a much less flattering light than do the usual jingoistic accounts."  ~The New York Times

  • Thursday, October 20, 2016 
      Anjuli Raza Kolb, Williams College
    Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This talk posits zombi as an immanent theory of labor, consumption, and the material itinerary of what we call taste. Beginning with an account of Marx’s special commodity, Professor Raza Kolb will explore how production and consumption crystallize into a set of signs pointing beyond allegories of monstrosity, and beyond a West Indian aesthetics bounded by capital in the age of empire and today.

  • Wednesday, October 19, 2016 
    Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
     

    Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4
  • Sunday, October 9, 2016 
    Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
     

    Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4
  • Thursday, October 6, 2016 
    Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, Professor & Chair of Germanic Languages & Literatures, Duke Divinity School
    RKC 103  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This lecture will explore three case studies of visual attention and its ethical dimensions: a photograph by Sebastião Salgado; two paintings by Cézanne discussed by R. M. Rilke, and the harvesting scene opening Part III of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. In each instance, Thomas Pfau's focus will be on how the response elicited by a specific image triggers a distinctive ethical insight, a type of knowledge impossible to capture in propositional terms and achievable only through the medium of the image. The ethics of attention solicited by the image and subsequently articulated in writing involves empathy and, ultimately, demands a kind of participatory action on the part of the beholder. The lecture's overriding aim is to present attention as a form of knowledge neither "owned" nor "controlled" by the beholding subject but, on the contrary, transformative of the beholder.

  • Monday, September 26, 2016 
    Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
     

    Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4
  • Monday, September 26, 2016 
    Aaron A. Fox, Columbia University
    Olin, Room 102  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    In this paper I examine the documentary trail of legal agreements, memoranda, correspondence, and contracts that mark the history of the “Laura Boulton Collection’s” acquisition by Columbia University as intellectual property, and the subsequent distribution and management of the associated rights by Columbia, Indiana University, and the Library of Congress. My argument is that this hidden "archive of the archive” provides the necessary context for understanding what “the archive” is. While the ostensible motivation for this construction was scientific and scholarly, I show that every actor in the story had a covert economic interest in the fiction that the collection was a unitary object that could be owned, sold, or transferred in the name of science.

  • Thursday, May 5, 2016 
      student curated short-film screenings inspired by PEEP cinema
    Preston  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Students Grace Calderly and Lian Ladia curate a selection of short films focused on "the insider looking or in" and the return of the gaze in the idea of peep cinema. This film program is the students final project for Curating Cinema at CCS Bard.

  • Tuesday, May 3, 2016 
    Henderson 106  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Experimental Humanities Workshop Series
    On Mapping
    Spring 2016
    This workshop series will offer participants introductions to a range of tools for mapping projects in the classroom and in research. All workshops will begin at 3:00 pm in Henderson Annex 106. Experimental Humanities Open Labs follow immediately after in this space where you are welcome to stay to continue working on the mapping tutorials.Sign up for one or all of the workshops at http://goo.gl/forms/9BlZfDpyWj


    April 5
    Designing a Mapping AssignmentThe first workshop will introduce strategies for planning a mapping project in your course. Introduction to a few web-based platforms that are user-friendly, intuitive, and great for short-term assignments. Hands-on training for using StoryMap JS (including using Gigapixel), ThingLink, and Timescape.


    April 19
    Neatline (Omeka)Introduction to Neatline, a mapping and annotation tool available via the Omeka web publishing platform. Hands-on training for creating a Neatline exhibit including adding records, creating waypoints, incorporating a timeline and working with image layers.


    May 3
    Historic MappingHands-on training for georeferencing historic maps, using Map Warper, adding historic data, and instruction for different publishing outputs, including CartoDB and DH Press (a WordPress plugin).

  • Thursday, April 21, 2016 
    Karen Ordahl Kupperman
    Olin, Room 102  3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    As Europeans moved into the Atlantic, they faced the problem of communicating with people in Africa and in the Americas without any language in common.  The Europeans' solution was to sing and play musical instruments, and they were delighted to find that the people they encountered did the same.  A musical approach was taken to be welcoming, but both sides found the other could also use music to deceive.  Ultimately, stories of these encounters led Europeans to ponder the nature of language itself.  
     

  • Tuesday, April 19, 2016 
    Henderson 106  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Introduction to Neatline, a mapping and annotation tool available via the Omeka web publishing platform. Hands-on training for creating a Neatline exhibit including adding waypoints, incorporating a timeline and working with image layers.
     Experimental Humanities Workshop Series
    On Mapping
    Spring 2016
    This workshop series will offer participants introductions to a range of tools for mapping projects in the classroom and in research. All workshops will begin at 3:00 pm in Henderson Annex 106. Experimental Humanities Open Labs follow immediately after in this space where you are welcome to stay to continue working on the mapping tutorials.Sign up for one or all of the workshops at http://goo.gl/forms/9BlZfDpyWj
    Upcoming Workshop
    May 3
    Historic MappingHands-on training for georeferencing historic maps, using Map Warper, adding historic data, and instruction for different publishing outputs, including CartoDB and DH Press (a WordPress plugin).

  • Thursday, April 14, 2016 
      Malick W. Ghachem
    Associate Professor of History, MIT

    Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Malick W. Ghachem is a historian and lawyer. His primary areas of concentration are slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He is the author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a history of the law of slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) between 1685 and 1804. The book received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize for the best work in English on French history and was co-winner of the Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book published in the field of Caribbean studies over the past three years. He teaches courses on the Age of Revolution, Slavery and Abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics.

    Professor Ghachem earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University and his doctorate in history from Stanford. He clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Miami, FL in 2004. A member of the Massachusetts bar, Professor Ghachem practiced law in Boston from 2005 to 2010 for two law firms: Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. For part of that period (2006-2007) he served as a lecturer in MIT’s Political Science Department. Between 2010 and 2013, he taught at the University of Maine School of Law in Portland, ME, where he is now a Senior Scholar.

  • Monday, April 11, 2016 
    Katherine Zoepf
    Olin, Room 202  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur’anic schools—and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring.  In Syria, before its civil war, Zoepf documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who’ve found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising.  This reading will illuminate some of the voices Zoepf showcases in her book.  Katherine Zoepf lived in Syria and Lebanon from 2004 to 2007 while working as a stringer for The New York Times; she also worked in the Times's Baghdad bureau in 2008. Since 2010, she has been a fellow at New America. Her work has appeared in The New York Observer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the London School of Economics. 

  • Friday, April 8, 2016 
    April 7-8, 2016 at Bard College
    a two day symposium exploring the place of sound in the arts, sciences, and humanities

    Blum  9:00 am EDT/GMT-4
    Friday, April 8 @Blum

    9am Prelude
    Georgian Polyphony Workshop with Carl Linich

    10am  Aurality
    A panel discussion with Tomie Hahn (RPI), Brian Hochman (Georgetown University), Julianne Swartz (Bard College), & Amanda Weidman (Bryn Mawr College)
    Chaired by Alex Benson (Bard College0

    11:30am  Interlude
    Physics of Sound with Matthew Deady
    Soundwalk with Todd Shalom

    1:00pm  Transmission
    A panal discussion with Masha Godovannaya (Smolny College), Tom Porcello (Vassar College), Drew Thompson (Bard College0, and Olga Touloumi (Bard College0
    Chaired by Danielle Riou (Bard College)

    2:30pm Interlude
    Oral History Workshop with Suzanne Snider
    Soundwalk with Todd Shalom

    3:30pm  Resonance
    A panel discussion with Marie Abe (Boston University), Emilio Distretti (Al-Quds), Erica Robles-Anderson (NYU), Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College), & David Suisman (University of Delaware)
    Chaired by Laura Kunreuther

    5:00pm  Deep Listening Workshop
    with Pauline Oliveros

    6:00pm  Closing Remarks
     **This event is free and open to the public. 
    Registration is required for all interludes**

     

  • Thursday, April 7, 2016 
      April 7-8, 2016 at Bard College
    a two day symposium exploring the place of sound in the arts, sciences, and humanities

    Bitó Conservatory Building  2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Thursday, April 7 @Bito

    2:30pm Opening Lecture
    Emily Thompson (Princeton University)
    Sound Theory as Sound Practice

    4pm  Exhinition Opening
    Featuring work by Lesley Flanigan, Tristan Perich, Natalia Fedorova, and Bard College faculty and students

    5:30pm Keynote Lecture
    Jonathan Sterne
    Professor and James McGill Chair in
    Culture & Technology, McGill University
    Audile Scarification:
    Notes on the Normalization of Hearing Damage
     **This event is free and open to the public. 
    Registration is required for all interludes**

     

  • Tuesday, April 5, 2016 
    Henderson 106  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Experimental Humanities Workshop Series
    On Mapping
    Spring 2016
    This workshop series will offer participants introductions to a range of tools for mapping projects in the classroom and in research. All workshops will begin at 3:00 pm in Henderson Annex 106. Experimental Humanities Open Labs follow immediately after in this space where you are welcome to stay to continue working on the mapping tutorials.Sign up for one or all of the workshops at http://goo.gl/forms/9BlZfDpyWj


    April 5
    Designing a Mapping AssignmentThe first workshop will introduce strategies for planning a mapping project in your course. Introduction to a few web-based platforms that are user-friendly, intuitive, and great for short-term assignments. Hands-on training for using StoryMap JS (including using Gigapixel), ThingLink, and Timescape.


    April 19
    Neatline (Omeka)Introduction to Neatline, a mapping and annotation tool available via the Omeka web publishing platform. Hands-on training for creating a Neatline exhibit including adding records, creating waypoints, incorporating a timeline and working with image layers.


    May 3
    Historic MappingHands-on training for georeferencing historic maps, using Map Warper, adding historic data, and instruction for different publishing outputs, including CartoDB and DH Press (a WordPress plugin).

  • Thursday, March 31, 2016 
    Olin, Room 202  6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
    What is it about the work of a playwright who crafted his last drama in 1611 that appeals so widely to Native Peoples in America today? Is it the colonial connection? The flexibility of the language? The need for a voice in the western world? Or something more? 

    Director Madeline Sayet, having recently launched Amerinda (American Indian Artists) Inc.'s new Shakespeare Ensemble, interrogates the recent surge in Native Shakespeare productions and adaptations and why these stories keep calling to us. We will explore which of Shakespeare's plays most facilitate these interrogations and how we can all make space for ourselves in history and in the world through these words. 400 years after Shakespeare's death, his texts may be more relevant than ever.

  • Tuesday, March 15, 2016 
    Alexandra T. Vazquez, Associate Professor,
    Department of Performance Studies, New York University

    RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This talk involves a willful submerging into the performance ecologies of Miami, Florida. The city, too often made mere fulcrum for many a geopolitical before and after, holds rich and established resources for creative practices. Far beyond a cultural wasteland or cold war terminus, Miami's artists have long made things from vast distances, inside precarious currents, outside of their families. “Immersing Miami” is and isn’t about the city; it is an exercise on how to write through the intimacies of the local and out towards parallel gatherings. The talk specifically works with the 1998 “Speed Split” series by the Cuban born, Miami-based artist Consuelo Castañeda (b. 1958) as an opportunity to transpose an artist’s visual mode into a musical response to displacement and dispossession. Castañeda extends a call to listen on the insides of the alienating narratives that drown Miami and in doing so enables us to hear robust aesthetic histories everywhere else.

    Alexandra T. Vazquez was born in Miami, Florida. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Her book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize in 2014. Vazquez’s work has been featured in the journals American Quarterly, Social Text, women and performance, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and in the edited volumes Reggaeton and Pop When the World Falls Apart.

  • Thursday, March 10, 2016 
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    The celebrated and award-winning author of books including Annotations and, most recently, Counternarratives reads from his work at 6:00 p.m. in  Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, on Thursday, March 10th. Introduced by Mary Caponegro and followed by a Q&A, this event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books will be available for sale and signing from Oblong Books & Music.

    John R. Keene's Counternarratives, a collection of stories and novellas, draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. "An Outtake" chronicles an escaped slave's take on liberty and the American Revolution. "The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows" presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent. "The Aeronauts" soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U.S. Civil War. In "Acrobatique," the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back. And the hotly debated, widely praised story "Rivers" presents a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn.
     *
    PRAISE FOR Counternarratives—

    "Keene exerts superb control over his stories, costuming them in the style of Jorge Luis Borges …Yet he preserves the undercurrent of excitement and pathos that accompanies his characters' persecution and their groping toward freedom." —Wall Street Journal

    "An extraordinary work of literature. John Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer. " —Harper's

    "Suspenseful, thought provoking, mystical, and haunting. Keene's confident writing doesn't aim for easy description or evaluation; it approaches (and defies) literature on its own terms." —Publishers Weekly

    "Only a few, John Keene among them, in our age, authentically test the physics of fiction as both provocation and mastery. Continuing what reads like the story collection as freedom project, in Counternarratives, Keene opens swaths of history for readers to more than imagine but to manifest and live in the passionate language of conjure and ritual." —Major Jackson

    "Keene finds inspiration in newspaper clippings, memoirs, and history, and anchors them in the eternal, universal, and mystical." —Vanity Fair

    "John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes 'real' or 'accurate' history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolano, Calvino or Kiš, but at the same time it is a deeply American, resolutely contemporary book, that asks us to reconsider our own perspectives on the past―and the future." —Jess Row

    "Of the scope of William T. Vollmann or Samuel R. Delany, but with a kaleidoscopic intuition all its own, Counternarratives is very easily one of the most vividly imagined and vitally timed books of the year. I haven't felt so refreshed in quite a while as a reader." —VICE

    "Keene opens up the spaces between words and their objects, to create room where fresh meanings can play." —The Nation

    "Queering the script, defying the imperative to be silent, does not require confidence or a vision of what progress means. It is, rather, in all its uncertainty and risk, the most basic stuff of―the very matter of―life. It is also the crowning achievement of one of the year's very best books." —The Quarterly Conversation

    "Keene's collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mold-breaking, and deeply political. He's a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year's U.S. fiction should start here." —Vulture

    "A series of stories in which religion and spirituality, art and language, violence and subjugation, homosexuality and eroticism, may shine through a panoply of voices." —Full Stop

    "Practically every sentence in the book perforates, stretches out, or pries open literary modes designed to be airtight, restrictive, and racially exclusionary … An expert generator of suspense, Keene also turns out to be a skilled humorist, a mischievous ironist, a deft, seductive storyteller and a studied historian." —Bookforum

    PRAISE FOR ANNOTATIONS—

    "A dense, lyrically beautiful and highly experimental debut. Composed of short passages open to multiple interpretations, it defies easy description. Annotations could be described as a bildungsroman, as a collection of short recits by unnamed and undetermined narrators, an elegy to the rise and fall of Keene's native St. Louis, a meditation on the African American influence there and much, much more. Keene's masterful prose smoothly transgresses traditional lines of representation and description without ever seeming like an exercise in multi-thematic chaos. Annotations is an experimental work that pinpoints a new direction for literary fiction in the 21st century." —Publishers Weekly

    "Keene's slim first novel appears to be a disguised autobiographical narrative whose power resides in formidable imagery and the virtuoso use of language. The plot, if there is one, concerns a young black man's coming of age from birth to college years. Along the way while commenting aphoristically, he encounters many characters with unique personal outlooks and participates in gay and straight sexual experiences that he seems to avoid as often as not. But one does not read this book for its story. In fact, it should be read twice: once to get an idea of events and a second time to savor its language and pounding images. Keene's artistry makes him a writer to watch." —​Library Journal

  • Thursday, February 25, 2016 
    Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    We will screen the Black in Latin America film about the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Dinner and discussion will be part of the event. Co-hosted by Spanish Studies Program, BEOP Club, LASO, BSO and La Voz

  • Thursday, February 11, 2016 
    Miriam Posner,
    Program Coordinator & Core Faculty,
    Center for Digital Humanities, UCLA

    RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    Between 1936 and 1967, Walter Freeman, a prominent neurologist, lobotomized as many as 3,500 Americans. Freeman was also an obsessive photographer, taking patients’ photographs before their operations and tracking them down years — even decades — later. In this presentation, Miriam Posner details her efforts to understand why Freeman was so devoted to this practice, using computer-assisted image-mining and -analysis techniques to show how these images fit into the larger visual culture of 20th-century psychiatry.

  • Thursday, November 19, 2015 
      Arendt Center  4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Monthly meeting of faculty interested in the practice or critical analysis of sound, sound technologies, soundscapes, listening.

  • Monday, November 16, 2015 
      Glenna Gordon
    Olin, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
  • Wednesday, October 28, 2015 
    Trans-Pacific Visions in Asian American Art
    Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This talk focuses on the Asia Pacific region and selected works by contemporary U.S.-based Asian American artists that engage themes of trans-Pacific circulation and global systems of cross-cultural exchange. Based on Dr. Machida’s current research in Hawai’i, this talk draws attention to islands as a generative framework to analyze and to compare art in the Asia Pacific region and the Americas. The Pacific, with more islands than the world’s other oceans combined, is above all an island realm. Accordingly Islands and associated oceanic imaginaries exert a powerful hold on works by artists who trace their ancestral origins to coastal East and Southeast Asia and Oceania.  All are invited to this talk about these exciting contemporary artists.


  • Thursday, October 15, 2015 
    The OBIE Award-winning playwright, novelist, and poet reads from The Exalted
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Carl Hancock Rux is the author of the novel Asphalt, the OBIE Award-winning play Talk, and the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta.His work, which crosses the disciplines of poetry, theater, music, and literary fiction in order to achieve what one critic describes as a "dizzying oral artistry ... unleashing a torrent of paper bag poetry and post modern Hip-Bop music; the ritualistic blues of self awakening," is the subject of the Voices of America television documentary Carl Hancock Rux, Coming of Age. 

    Introduced by Gideon Lester, the reading takes place October 15th at 7:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema and will be followed by a Q&A. The event is free and open to all; no tickets or advance reservations are required.

    Rux is in residence with Live Arts Bard to rehearse a stage version of The Exalted, directed by Anne Bogart ‘74, which will have preview performances at the Fisher Center on October 16th and 17th at 7:30 p.m; find more details at fishercenter.bard.edu. 

  • Friday, October 2, 2015 
      Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  Call prospective voters in the Dutchess County area and let them know about Bernie Sanders!

  • Friday, September 4, 2015 
      Olin 102  Interested in applying for a Fulbright Scholarship, a Watson fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of the  two information sessions!

  • Thursday, September 3, 2015 
      RKC 103  Interested in applying for a Fulbright Grant, a Watson Fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of these two sessions!

  • Monday, May 4, 2015 
      Emily Brissette, PhD
    SUNY Oneonta

    RKC 102B   The movement against the Vietnam War began modestly, but grew in both size and intensity as the years and the war dragged on. The movement against the Iraq War, in contrast, came together quickly and massively in the space of months and then largely receded from public view. Although the presence (and then absence) of the draft is often invoked as an explanation for the different trajectories of these movements, military recruitment practices are not the most important thing to have changed since the Vietnam era. Drawing on original archival work, this talk will trace how basic understandings of the nature of the state and citizenship (what I call “state imaginaries”) have also changed, and argue that this had profound consequences for antiwar activism in each moment by shaping how and where activists located responsibility for war.

  • Monday, April 27, 2015 
    Kristen Block
    Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee

    Olin, Room 201  In the early decades of the eighteenth century, a supposed outbreak of leprosy in Guadeloupe spurred a flurry of activity and many pages of manuscript reports.  Leprosy itself had become a very rare condition in 18th century Europe, and so medical professionals resident in Guadeloupe and Martinique debated the patterns of its transmission (cohabitation, heredity, wet-nursing, or even prolonged contact through daily interaction [conversation]), its cure, and even its very definition. But all were certain that the disease had spread from Africa via the Atlantic slave trade, which led to fears of its communicability across racial lines.  Colonists’ libertine attitude towards interracial social and sexual contact were already seen as leading to dangerous contagions (like syphilis, which was seen by many to be more prevalent in Africa, where yaws, another leprosy-like disease, was endemic).  This paper discusses how the uncertainty surrounding this disease, as well as the fact that leprosy caused so little pain, brought up fears of the “sensibility” involved in the colonial project.  

    Kristen Block is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose first book, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean (Georgia 2012), examines the entangled histories of Spain and England in the Caribbean during the long seventeenth century as both colonial powers searched for profit and attempted to assert their own version of religious dominance.  Her second book project is exploring how Caribbean residents defined disease, contagion, and how conflict and hybridity affected their attempts at healing. 


  • Tuesday, April 21, 2015 
    Nixon and Kissinger: Transatlantic Relations, the Nixon Doctrine, and Detente
    Preston  Eminent historian Professor Mark Lytle, who retires from Bard at the end of the 2014/15 academic year after forty years of distinguished service, delivers the 2015 Eugene Meyer Annual Lecture. He will speak on President Nixon, Henry Kissinger and their influence on America in the world.
    Professor Lytle is the author of The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (2007); America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (2006); After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (6th ed., 2009); Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past (9th ed., 2013); United States: A Narrative History (3rd ed., 2014); The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1940-1953 (1987). 
    Eugene Meyer (1875-1959), for whom the annual lecture and the Eugene Meyer Chair are named, was the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first president of the World Bank. Previous Eugene Meyer speakers include Sir David Cannadine, Andrew Roberts, Fintan O'Toole and Colm Tóibín. The Eugene Meyer Chair was endowed at Bard in 2010. 

  • Monday, April 20, 2015 
    A private film screening with Dena Seidel '88
    Preston  Antarctic Edge: 70° South is a thrilling journey to the bottom of the Earth alongside a team of dedicated scientists. In the wake of devastating climate events like Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, oceanographer Oscar Schofield teams up with a group of world-class researchers in a race to understand climate change in the fastest winter-warming place on earth: the West Antarctic Peninsula. For more than 20 years, these scientists have dedicated their lives to studying the Peninsula's rapid change as part of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research Project.

    Filmed in the world's most perilous environment, Antarctic Edge brings to us the stunning landscapes and seascapes of Earth's southern polar region, revealing the harsh conditions and substantial challenges that scientists must endure for months at a time. While navigating through 60-foot waves and dangerous icebergs, the film follows them as they voyage south to the rugged, inhospitable Charcot Island, where they plan to study the fragile and rapidly declining Adelie Penguin. For Schofield and his crew, these birds are the greatest indicator of climate change and a harbinger of what is to come.

    Antarctic Edge: 70° South was made in a collaboration between the Rutgers University Film Bureau and the Rutgers Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences. A unique inter-disciplinary educational project bridging art, science and storytelling, Antarctic Edge was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

    Followed by a short reception 630-7 and a lecture at 7 PM: Bridging Humanities, Art and Science Through Digital Filmmaking

  • Monday, April 20, 2015 
      The State of Labor, New Models of Organizing, and the Future of Work
    Blithewood  This daylong workshop will address three primary themes: the state of the American labor movement, the future of work, and new models of organizing and worker power. An expert panel will address each topic, followed by a Q&A session.
    The workshop is free and open to the public. 




    Cosponsored by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and SEIU 775





  • Thursday, April 2, 2015 
    "Concert Spirituals, Black Sopranos and the Politics of Racial Inequality"
    Bard Hall  Through a recital and post-performance discussion, Concert Spirituals, Black Sopranos and the Politics of Racial Inequality enacts a reconsideration of the role of singing concert spirituals among black sopranos in relation to political resistance, musical virtuosity, sexuality and the sacred. Concert spirituals merge the experiences of enslaved Africans in the United States with the expressive and political moves of western classical arrangers and musicians. While performed in many forms, the performances and recordings of black sopranos’ concert spiritual singing signifies the labor of the feminine and the role of black sacred experiences in the enduring legacy of the repertoire. Drawing on her fieldwork with the contemporary Fisk Jubilee Singers, the choral ensemble that concertized and popularized spirituals in the late nineteenth century, and the careers of professional black operatic sopranos, Newland foregrounds the particularity of performing this body of art songs in the current climate of racial inequality in the United States. 

  • Thursday, February 19, 2015 
      Peter L'Official, Harvard University
    Olin, Room 102  In the 1970s and 1980s, images of the Bronx’s burned and abandoned buildings and the open expanses of rubble surrounding them dominated the iconography of urban ruin—so much so that the words “South Bronx” became, for a time, synonymous with urbanism’s failures. Such images served to further alienate an American public that was already estranged from many of its urban centers, and transformed the South Bronx into a trope for urban decay. To many Americans, the Bronx may well have been another country. Yet the literal place called the South Bronx was also home to 600,000 residents, largely African American and Latino, even during its worst days. This lecture discusses some of the many representations of the Bronx before settling upon a set of photographic representations, one the product of professional photographers and the other the product of the municipal government—New York City’s tax department—that, when examined together, help reclaim the narratives of Bronx residents from the realm of myth and stand as testament to the life that endured among the ruins. These photographic representations form an essential and understudied bridge between the era’s African American vernacular and literary traditions—which themselves are inherently interdisciplinary—and more literary representations of urban ruin writ large.

  • Thursday, February 12, 2015 
      Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts


    Olin, Room 102  In 1859, a series of fictional sketches, unprecedented in the history of African American literature, appeared in the pages of the Anglo-African Magazine. Written under the pen name “Ethiop,” William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” offered readers a textual tour of a fictional gallery of art on various subjects related to black life in America. Drawn from real-life paintings, works imagined by the author, and portraits that appeared in the antebellum print sphere, Wilson’s Picture Gallery effectively imagines the first gallery of black art in the United States. In addition to offering an introduction to this fascinating, yet virtually unknown text, this talk will explore the relationship between fantasy and the archive in the Picture Gallery, and how, more specifically, fantasy allows Wilson to critically reflect on the problem of the archive in the contexts of slavery and nominal freedom. I will also discuss a collaborative project, currently underway, to create a digital edition and virtual installation of the Picture Gallery.

  • Tuesday, February 10, 2015 
      Alex W. Black, Rutgers University
    Olin, Room 102  Scholars increasingly look to Frederick Douglass’s 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom to trace his changing politics and artistry. Though numerous studies have now taken up Douglass’s “Life as a Slave” and “Life as a Freeman”—the titles of the autobiography’s two parts—none have treated at any length the appendix that closes the volume, even though it is as long as, if not longer than, “Life as a Freeman.” The appendix, which collects extracts from his writings (most of them speeches), is not merely meant to provide a retrospective of his work. Douglass used the appendix to continue, rather than just catalog, that work. This talk will relate Douglass's autobiographical writing to his other work (e.g., editorial, oratorical) from the 1840s and 1850s. In the process, it will show that he participated in what scholars of nineteenth-century America have called a "culture of reprinting," as well as reenacting.


  • Thursday, November 13, 2014 
    Olin, Room 205  Guest lecturer Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009).

    This lecture surveys the development of the police court in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Police courts were tribunals where mayors or court recorders resolved disputes and punished misdemeanants (including vagrants, prostitutes, and petty thieves) without recourse to formal jurisprudence. They were also sources of popular entertainment that attracted spectators who were engrossed not only by conflicts and confessions but also by the mechanics of the justice system. In this lecture, I am interested in the legal education that audiences took away from these tribunals, or in how they came to know law as theater, as prerogative, and as process. The municipal records produced by the police courts were sparse, when they were kept at all, but we have access to a rich secondary archive of sources -- satirical newspaper columns and cartoons, mock-epic poems and theatrical set-pieces, vaudeville recordings and sheet music, radio transcriptions, and courtroom anecdotes collected as folklore -- that permit us to reconstruct these proceedings in substantial and lurid detail.

    Free and open to the public.


  • Wednesday, November 12, 2014 
    Matt Sakakeeny
    Assistant Professor of Music, Tulane University

    Olin, Room 102  In New Orleans, the instruments of the brass band are sound technologies utilized to communicate particular messages to a community of listeners. In the local tradition of the jazz funeral, musicians determine the emotional register of the procession: mournful hymns regulate the slow march to the gravesite and upbeat popular songs signal the transition to celebratory dancing after burial. The musicians not only organize the memorial by changing tempo and repertoire, they communicate to the living and the dead through the material sound of their instruments. Black New Orleanians occupying public spaces where lynchings, race riots, segregation, and gentrification have taken place “give voice” to these submerged histories by marching and dancing to the beat of the brass band. And the most recent generation of musicians has drawn upon hip-hop, integrating the direct language of rap into a polyphony of voices that includes horns, drums, and group singing. In this case study of the brass bands of New Orleans, a holistic approach to sonic materiality integrates the spoken, the sung, and instrumental sound in a densely layered soundscape that creates meaning and value for racialized subjects of power. *Childcare available*
    Contact Laura Kunreuther for more information
    [email protected]


  • Tuesday, November 11, 2014 
      Olin, Room 201  Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, conceptualist, director, writer, and installation artist. He describes his talk as "about my work (art experiments) with Walter Carter (1907-2009), my centenarian collaborator from Little Yazoo City, Mississippi. Purportedly the oldest man in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Fifty years or so shy of being a full-time slave. But he was an ex-sharecropper, carpenter, gardener... his longest job was planting cedar trees. We had an 8 year "discussion" about our whereabouts, our bodies (and race of course), our belief systems, and mortality, through the most ineffable of languages, his and mine. It ultimately became speculative fiction. A complete collapse of past, present and future time. Something like that."


  • Thursday, October 30, 2014 
    Postwar Systems Theory, Cybernetic Gurus, and Postmodern Stories of the Worlds to Come
    Reem-Kayden Center Room 103  Guest lecturer R. John Williams (Yale)

    From the mid-1940s to the late-1950s, a new mode of ostensibly secular prophecy emerged from within the authoritative sphere of the American military-industrial-academic complex, spreading quickly throughout the world in technocratic and managerial organizations. This new mode of projecting forward was marked by assumptions about the inherent multiplicity of possible futures as distinct from more powerfully singular visions of “the” future. This presentation tracks the development of this  transformation in two phases: the first computational, secular, and  cybernetic, and the second, narratological, quasi-religious, and generally committed to various "oriental" philosophies.  Questions addressed will include: Is the postmodern era, as some have described it, an “end of  temporality”? Or is the postmodern narrative condition, rather, an intense multiplication of temporal experience? Is it possible that the sheer number of stories we tell ourselves about the future may not be as progressive a practice as we tend to assume it is? How did we arrive at a present with so many possible futures?

  • Wednesday, October 29, 2014 
    Written and Directed by Matt and Erica Hinton
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Come learn about one of the oldest forms of American music, shapenote singing, which is still practiced in many parts of the United States and abroad.  This documentary features interviews with longtime singers in this tradition, as well as many minutes of sound and footage of the songs themselves.

    The screening will be followed by a brief Q & A period.

    Sponsored by Bard Ethnomusicology

  • Thursday, October 23, 2014 
      Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Join us for a panel discussion of incarceration in the United States with guest speakers Keith Reeves, Richard Smith, and Jed Tucker.
    Part of the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement series of events.


  • Thursday, October 23, 2014 
      A Talk By Keith Reeves, Swarthmore College
    Olin, Room 102  Professor Reeves will present work from his current project examining the effects of incarceration on Black males, followed by a Q&A session.

    Part of the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement series of events.

  • Wednesday, October 22, 2014 
      Olin, Room 205  This panel has been canceled and will be rescheduled for next semester.

    Join a panel of researchers and representatives for a discussion of money in politics. 

  • Friday, September 26, 2014 
    Kelly Wisecup
    Olin, Room 205  This talk examines stories told by New England Natives about comets that appeared throughout the seventeenth century and that, according to Natives’ testimony, signaled the impending arrival of European colonists, the diseases they carried with them, and the resulting social, environmental, and spiritual changes. I depart from the scholarly commonplace that the epidemics that devastated New England and its Native communities between 1616-1619 were so destructive that no Native accounts of the epidemics survived. Instead, I bring together Native studies, the history of medicine, and early American literary history to shift our focus from the epidemics and their destruction to the stories that Natives employed to critique colonization and outline paths for survival. By drawing on colonial reports of conversations with Native military and spiritual leaders, indigenous origin stories, and nineteenth-century vocabularies of the Abenaki language, I show that Natives used these “comet narratives” as theoretical and practical resources for responding to physical, social and spiritual upheaval.

  • Wednesday, September 24, 2014 
      "Two Cheers for Corporate Social Responsibility"
    A Talk in the Social Studies Divisional Colloquium

    Olin, Room 102  As “corporate social responsibility” enters the mainstream, itsinitials "CSR" have become a dirty word for a broad segment of the
    engaged public.  The voluntariness, vagueness, and uncertainty of
    enforcement  – not to mention blatant propaganda by companies –
    overwhelm any positive value, they argue.  At the other end of the
    spectrum, CSR enthusiasts insist that it is leading to a new paradigm,
    even challenging traditional forms of corporate governance. Oft
    overlooked in the debate over CSR is the way in which public campaigns
    have driven change and, even more importantly, shaped the mechanisms
    that emerge. CSR continues to be as much the story of savvy activists
    leveraging global networks as it is the monitoring mechanisms and
    codes of conduct -- maybe more so.  Peter Rosenblum will explore the
    current debate, drawing on his recently completed research on Indian
    Tea plantations and a soon-to-published chapter addressing advocates
    and critics of CSR.

  • Wednesday, May 7, 2014 
      Interested in a sociology class?
    Kline, President's Room  Come and meet current and returning faculty to learn about courses in the Sociology Program this fall.

    All are welcome—whether you are considering majoring or interested in a particular class.

    Refreshments will be served.


  • Thursday, February 20, 2014 
    Thoughts on Artistic Decision-Making in the Early 21st Century
    Olin Hall  A contemplation and contemporary contextualization of processes and impact of selection in music as revealed in the moral dilemma of contemporary African-American commercial music.

    ANTHONY M. KELLEY BIOGRAPHYAnthony Kelley joined the Duke University music faculty in 2000 after serving as Composer-in-Residence with the Richmond Symphony for three years under a grant from Meet the Composer. His recent work (like his soundtracks for the H. Lee Waters/Tom Whiteside film "Conjuring Bearden" [2006] Dante James's film, "The Doll" [2007], Josh Gibson's "Kudzu Vine" [2011]) explores music as linked with other media, arts, and sociological phenomena. 
    In 2011, Kelley was the winner of Duke's Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. 
    He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Duke's Department of Music since his appointment to the post in Fall, 2012.


  • Sunday, February 16, 2014 
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Please join the Human Rights Project on Sunday, February 16 at 5:30pm in Weis Cinema for a screening of Academy Award Nominated film Trouble the Water (2008) and a conversation with the film’s editor and co-producer, Todd Woody Richman.

    Trouble the Water is a documentary which follows an aspiring rap artist and her husband during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis called it “superb,” and Rogert Ebert commended the film for conveying the reality of New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane while exposing the outrageous behavior of government agencies. The film received tremendous acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Award, The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights, and the Working Films Award at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as receiving an Oscar Nomination.Todd Woody Richman is a veteran documentary film editor whose past work includes How to Survive a Plague (2012), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Bowling for Columbine (2002).The film will be followed by a Q&A with editor and co-producer of the film, T. Woody Richman. More information about the movie can be found hereOrganized by the Human Rights Project.  
    *Childcare provided

  • Monday, October 21, 2013 
      RKC 103  Richmond Virginia, erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, is a city that memorialized in its built landscape the ideology of the “Lost Cause.” This lecture will provide a preliminary sketch for the ways that local history and art museums with national stature have responded and continue to respond to this troubling heritage as they try to create a more salutary urban imagined community. These museums are leaders in a wider movement among US cities of a certain size to explicitly link cultural development to urban renewal. As such they must attract a national audience while not alienating local communities which, for their part, are often polarized along all too familiar racial and ideological lines.


    Eric Gable is a professor of anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. He is a managing editor for the journal Museum and Society and the associate editor for book reviews for American Ethnologist.



  • Tuesday, October 1, 2013 
      RKC103  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Please join us for an exciting public debate inspired by the topic of this year's Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis." The debate will feature both Bard Debate Union members as well as Bard College faculty on the topic, "Resolved: online education will save higher education." Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, the Bard Debate Union, the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, and the International Debate Education Association.


  • Thursday, September 26, 2013 
      A Discussion Led by Roger Berkowitz Based Upon Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez
    RKC 103  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Join us for an active-learning program of community conversation that uses Richard Rodriguez's autobiography Hunger of Memory as a jumping-off point for discussion.

    "I became a man by becoming a public man."
    —Richard Rodriguez

    The evening's discussion will address the tensions between cultural identity and U.S. citizenship, the responsibilities inherent in citizenship, and what it means to live a "public life."

    Free copies of Hunger of Memory are available but supplies are limited. E-mail [email protected] for your copy.

    Made possible by the New York Council for the Humanities


  • Wednesday, September 18, 2013 – Friday, September 20, 2013 
      Bard College Campus  Bard's Hannah Arendt Center and Center for Civic Engagement in collaboration with the Roosevelt Institute and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, announce Annalia 1933—a three-day festival including 20 short talks and a student-led cabaret exploring major events from the historically transformative year of 1933. 

  • Monday, September 16, 2013 
      Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  The Levy Institute of Economics is starting it's Master of Science in Economic Theory and Policy program from the Fall of 2014. The program emphasizes theoretical and empirical aspects of policy analysis through specialization in one of four Levy Institute research areas: macroeconomic theory, policy, and modeling; monetary policy and financial structure; distribution of income, wealth, and well-being, including gender equality and time poverty; and employment and labor markets.

    The Master of Science program draws on the expertise of an extensive network of scholars at the Levy Economics Institute, a policy research think tank with more than 25 years of economic theory and public policy research. During the two-year M.S. program, students are required to participate in a graduate research assistantship carried out by Levy Institute scholars and faculty. Undergraduates in economics or related fields have an opportunity, through a 3+2 program, to earn both a B.A. and the M.S. in five years.

  • Tuesday, April 9, 2013 
      MAT Faculty and Friends Reading Series
    Olin, Room 205  Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy Smith reads from her book Life on Mars.

  • Monday, March 4, 2013 
    Campus Center, Weis Cinema  The Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series presents a discussion with Otto Penzler, founder of The Mysterious Press, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop, and editor of The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Crime Writing, and The Best American Noir of the Century. Moderated by Bradford Morrow, the event will be followed by a Q&A and is open to the public; no tickets required.

  • Monday, February 25, 2013 
    Q & A to follow with the filmaker, Deborah Koons Garcia, and lead scientist in the film, Dr. Ignacio Chapela 
    Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center  The latest film from Deborah Koons Garcia, “SYMPHONY OF THE SOIL” will be shown at Bard College, followed by a Q & A with the filmmaker and lead scientist in the film. The screening is free and open to the public. Doors open at 4:35pm. (Read Huff Post Review)  We hope you will join us!

    SYMPHONY OF THE SOIL is a feature length film that explores the complexity and mystery of soil. Filmed on four continents and sharing the voices of some of the world’s most highly esteemed soil scientists, farmers, and activists, the film portrays soil as a protagonist of our planetary story. In a skillful mix of art and science, soil is revealed to be a living organism, the foundation of life on earth. Most people are soil-blind and “treat soil like dirt.” With the knowledge and wisdom revealed in this film, we can come to respect, even revere, this miraculous substance. The film inspires the understanding that treating the soil right can help solve some of our most pressing environmental problems, from climate change, to dead zones, to feeding an ever increasing world population.

    For the last ten years, Deborah Koons Garcia has created films that bring deep awareness to food and farming issues.  For more information on Symphony of the Soil, please see www.symphonyofthesoil.com

    Location: Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center in the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center on Blithewood Avenue at Bard College. (https://www.bard.edu/campus/facilities/facilities.php?id=6) 


    Download: SOS Poster Web.pdf
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