The American and Indigenous 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.Current Events
Stone Row on Bard College campus. Photo by Karl Rabe
Bard College Receives $25 Million Endowment Gift from Gochman Family Foundation Supporting Renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program
Bard College is excited to announce a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation, which will substantially advance its work deepening diversity and equity in American Studies with a Center for Indigenous Studies, faculty appointments and student scholarships, and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at Center for Curatorial Studies. The College’s American Studies Program will be renamed American and Indigenous Studies to more fully reflect continental history and to place Native American and Indigenous Studies at the heart of curricular innovation and development.
Associate Professor of History and Dean of Graduate Studies Christian Ayne Crouch speaks during a 2018 event dedicating new signage on campus designed to encourage critical reflection on Bard’s history. The installation of these historical markers took place in connection with the course Inclusion at Bard, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering.
Bard College Awarded $1.49 Million Grant from Mellon Foundation for American Studies 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.
Recent Senior Projects
- “Black Oiler,” a narrative of a Black male told through music and the lenses of different African diasporic authors
- “Towards a Celebration of Native Resilience: Interrupting National Myth-Making in the American Classroom”
- “‘A Visit to the Coffee Houses’: How Local News Wrote about the Humoresque Coffeeshop Raids”
Senior Projects
Visit the Bard Digital Commons for a complete archive of Senior Projects in American and Indigenous Studies.
Courses and Requirements
Click below for a complete list of currently offered courses.
Program Faculty
Program Director: Peter L’Official
Phone: 845-758-7556
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7556
E-mail: [email protected]
American Studies News
Wiháŋble S’a Center at Bard College Receives Wagner Foundation Grant
The Wiháŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College has been announced as the recipient of a $93,000 grant from the Wagner Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Boston. The grant will support the project “Cosmologyscape,” a multi-platform, socially engaged public art initiative co-lead by Wiháŋble S’a Center Director Dr. Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence and assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, and artist and producer Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19.
Wiháŋble S’a Center at Bard College Receives Wagner Foundation Grant
“Every Wonder in One Spot,” from the project Cosmologyscape by Kite and Alicia B Wormsley. Courtesy the artists and Creative Time
“Cosmologyscape” will launch its next chapter with an exhibition at Wagner in January 2026, and will include features such as Dream Mosaic tiles visualizing collective dreams installed along long gallery walls, a comfortable Dream Office space in which attendees can gather and rest, digital projections showcasing a localized “Boston Dreaming” webpage, and other installations. The project, which solicits dreams from the public that are translated into quilting patterns generated from 26 Black and Lakota symbols, aims to activate rest and dreaming as liberatory acts through sculpture, digital engagement, and community programming.
“This grant affirms that dreaming is a vital, collective act—and that rest, vision, and story are the seeds of real change,” said Dr. Suzanne Kite, director of the Wiháŋble S’a Center. “With support from the Wagner Foundation, ‘Cosmologyscape’ can continue unfolding as a cosmic quilt—each dream a thread, weaving together Black and Indigenous futures across time, land, and memory.”
The Wagner Foundation was established in Boston in 2005, and over time has expanded its local focus to include grants and support in national and international settings. The foundation seeks to confront the social and historical disparities that perpetuate injustice by partnering with organizations aligned with this goal to serve as both advocates for change and convening thought leaders. It focuses on health equity and economic prosperity, balanced by a holistic approach which aims to develop and strengthen equitable systems throughout the world.
Post Date: 07-01-2025
Kite Profiled in ArtForum
Professor Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, aka Kite, was profiled in ArtForum’s Spotlight series. Writer Christopher Green calls Kite one of the “foremost Indigenous artists exploring the capacity of music, video, installation, and [technology] in combination with performance to examine the embodiment and visualization of contemporary Lakȟóta ways of knowing.”
Kite Profiled in ArtForum
Wichahpih'a (a clear night with a star-filled sky) by Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI.
The profile also explains Kite’s goal of making art for Native, Lakȟóta audiences. “Her refusal to legibly encode or concretize her scores for the mainstream destabilizes the ethnographic gaze and its desire to document, categorize, and control Indigenous culture, language, and bodies,” Green writes. Her upcoming Wičhíŋčala Šakówiŋ (Seven Little Girls), a scored performance which will be accompanied by a full orchestra, will be presented at MIT later this year.
Post Date: 03-04-2025
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Professor Joshua Glick Writes About AI in Film for the Los Angeles Review of Books
Professor Joshua Glick Writes About AI in Film for the Los Angeles Review of Books
Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick critiqued the movie Here in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He considers the movie through the lens of its use of AI, finding that the film’s dependence on the technology mirrors “an embattled film and television industry in dire need of creative reinvigoration and struggling to find a path forward.” Glick analyzes the film’s machine-learning AI, which lets Here represent thousands of years across time and de-age its two main actors: “while Here aimed to be a proof of concept for how AI could be ethically applied to a project at a moment when labor unions, cinephiles, and a wary public have risen up against it, the film once again exposed its fault lines.”Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick.
Glick has taught at Bard since 2022 and his research focuses on comparative histories of film, television, and radio and the use of emerging technologies. In 2023, he wrote about the emergence of AI in Hollywood for Wired Magazine.
Post Date: 02-17-2025
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Bard College Hosts Third Annual Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Conference on Food & Memory, March 6–8
Bard College Hosts Third Annual Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Conference on Food & Memory, March 6–8
Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times initiative, hosts its final annual conference from March 6 through 8, at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Centered around the theme of the Rethinking Place project’s third year, the conference, “Food & Memory,” will aim to explore food systems, agricultural practices, and culinary histories as a point of entry into place-making past, present, and future.Clockwise from top left: Lucy Grignon, Ancient Roots Homestead (photo by Thatcher Keats); Vivien Sansour, founder and director of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (photo by Samar Hazboun); Misty Cook, author of Medicine Generations, Natural Native American Medicines Traditional to the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Indian Tribe; Jalal Sabur, cofounder of Freedom Food Alliance and Sweet Freedom Farm.
The two prior Rethinking Place conferences, “The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives” and “Refusal, Creation, and Intersectionality,” focused on emergent and disruptive archives and on Indigenous research methods, and engaged themes that continue to apply to “Food & Memory.” Our complex food systems and their many human and non-human players—recipes and seeds, plants and care—can be seen as living archives, locations of research, and sites of knowledge production.
From March 6 through 8, Rethinking Place hosts a multidisciplinary gathering to interrogate questions of food and memory, building on 24 months of work in adjacent areas. This conference brings together agricultural workers including Jalal Sabur of Sweet Freedom Farm and Kenny Perkins (Mohawk) of the Akwesasne Seed Hub, chefs including Farah Momen, food systems scholars including Ozoz Sokoh, and artists, notably Vivien Sansour and Marie Watt (Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians), to create fertile ground for interdisciplinary discussion.
On Thursday, March 6, Lucille Grignon (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican) gives her opening keynote address, titled “In the Kitchen with Our Ancestors,” followed by a presentation by Marie Watt, a community meal with Ozoz Sokoh and BEM Brooklyn, celebrating the release of her new Nigerian cookbook, Chop Chop. A simultaneous exhibition in the Bard Stevenson Library features former Architecture Program Fellow Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee’s work, “Hard Labor, Soft Space: The Making of Radical Farms,” made while in residence at Bard College.
On Friday, March 7, the day’s events feature chef Farah Momen’s talk “Taste the Revolution: The Evolution of Bengali Food Culture,” farmer Jalal Sabur’s workshop “Grow Food Not Prisons: Building a movement towards Liberation and Justice,” and several other concurrent workshops include a medicine walk with Misty Cook (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican), place-based research and zine making, jam making at Montgomery Place Kitchens, and presentations by Rethinking Place Food & Memory Fellows Sage Liotta ’25 and Tatiana Blackhorse ’27. A Stone Soup Community Dinner and Storytelling, cohosted by the Bard Farm, Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group, and Experimental Humanities concludes the day.
On Saturday, March 8, Kenny Perkins of Akwesasne Seed Hub gives the closing keynote address, followed by Choy Common’s talk “Growing Interdependence—Building a Food Sovereignty Cooperative Within and Against Industrial Food Systems,” workshops on student organizing for food justice and building land-based solidarity networks, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library Traveling Kitchen.
Find the full conference schedule and workshop descriptions here. The conference is free, registration required here.
“We are honored to benefit from the generosity and wisdom of individuals who have long engaged in the hard work of nurturing and defending the flora and fauna vital to a balanced world,” says Christian Ayne Crouch, principal investigator of Rethinking Place and director of the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College. “I can think of no better way, on the cusp of spring and a new growing season, to conclude this grant celebrating deep local learning and myriad forms of intellectual and community engagement.”
We are pleased to have joined our efforts in place-based inquiry with other entities on the Bard campus. For their support over the life of the Rethinking Place project, we thank the Bard Farm, the Center for Environmental Science and Humanities, the Center for Experimental Humanities, the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Rethinking Place would also like to extend gratitude to our supporting partners at Center for Indigenous Studies, American and Indigenous Studies, the Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group on Food, BEM Brooklyn, Forge Project, Sweet Freedom Farm, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. “Food & Memory” is the final conference of the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project grant period.
Post Date: 02-04-2025
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Jeffrey Gibson Reflects on a Standout Year in Artnet
Jeffrey Gibson Reflects on a Standout Year in Artnet
Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, reflects on 2024—a year that started with Gibson being honored as the first Indigenous and openly queer artist to have a solo representation of the US Pavilion in Venice Biennale and continued with MASS MoCA’s commissioning of Power Full Because We’re Different, the largest single museum installation in his career—in an interview with Artnet. Gibson notes the opening events of the Venice Biennale as a personal highlight of 2024 “because of the sheer joy felt by myself and many other Native and Indigenous people who traveled to Venice to celebrate together and bring life to the installation through music, dance, poetry and performance. To see how the images ricocheted through Indian Country in the US was thrilling.” He also mentions Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self Determination since 1969, organized by Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies at Bard Candice Hopkins CCS ’03, at the Hessel Museum of Art, as one of the best exhibitions that he saw in 2024. “It is the kind of exhibition that I have been waiting for and it established a fresh starting point for many when considering the history of Native American Art,” says Gibson.Jeffrey Gibson. Photo by Brian Barlow
Further reading:
Center for Indigenous Studies’ Three-Day Convening at the Venice Biennale Featured in Hyperallergic
Post Date: 01-07-2025
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Professor Kite’s Artistic Residency Featured in I Care If You Listen
Professor Kite’s Artistic Residency Featured in I Care If You Listen
Bard Distinguished Artist in Residence and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies Kite MFA ’18 was profiled in the multimedia hub I Care If You Listen. The piece focuses on Kite’s two-day residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer (EMPAC) where she led seven students through a workshop on dreaming, then let them create and perform their own visual scores based on their dreams. “It’s great to get to work with the students here,” Kite said. “Wrangling crazy ideas, organizing them into something sensible, being sensitive to your audience’s needs, and being careful with time, being self aware—those are all skills I can share.”Kite.
Kite joined Bard in 2023 and has worked in the field of machine learning since 2017. She develops wearable technology and full-body software systems to interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies. She is also the director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard. I Care If You Listen describes her work as “[uniting] scientific and artistic disciplines through custom worn electronic instruments, research, visual scores, and more… rooted in Lakota ways of making knowledge, in which body and mind are always intimately intertwined.”
Post Date: 01-07-2025
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Suzanne Kite MFA ’18 Interviewed for NBC News
Suzanne Kite MFA ’18 Interviewed for NBC News
Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, aka Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard, was interviewed by News10 NBC for an article about how Indigenous engineers and artists are using artificial intelligence for cultural preservation projects. Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide, it is estimated that one dies every two weeks with its last speaker, according to data from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. AI can be a valuable tool in the initiatives designed to preserve those languages and other aspects of Indigenous culture and creative practices, such as the art which Kite is using machine learning to create. “My question is simple: How do we create ethical art with AI by applying Indigenous ontologies?” Kite said. “I try to resist Western personification of AI and instead dig into the hyperlocal, grounded and practical frameworks of knowledge that American Indigenous communities provide.”Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI.
Post Date: 12-03-2024
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Center for Indigenous Studies’ Three-Day Convening at the Venice Biennale Featured in Hyperallergic
Center for Indigenous Studies’ Three-Day Convening at the Venice Biennale Featured in Hyperallergic
Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies (CfIS) hosted a convening in Venice to consider how Indigenous aesthetics, futurity, and arts intersect with global practices and modernism. The name of the convening, “if I read you/what I wrote bear/in mind I wrote it,” from a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 (Oglala Lakota), gathered Native and non-Native poets, academics, artists, musicians, curators, teachers, and students to address the interdisciplinary, transnational nature of Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson's (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) work in the US Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte.L–R: Christian Ayne Crouch, Abigail Winograd, Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), and Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo). Photo by Federica Carlet
“The convening as a whole felt like an energizing disco, a kaleidoscopic exploration of Native identities in all their rich dualities, contrasts, and dichotomies: familiar and unfamiliar, past and future, joy and sorrow, detailed and monumental,” wrote Sháńdíín Brown (Navajo) for Hyperallergic.
The three-day event hosted luminaries of Native American and Indigenous studies and cutting-edge performers. Panels on beads, materiality, economies of labor and trade, aesthetics, poetry, performance, silhouette, and color also celebrated contemporary Indigenous artists, writers, and activists while examining the continued segregation of Indigenous voices in conversations regarding taste making, trade, modernity, and power. Several Bard College faculty and staff participated including Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies, associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies, and CfIS director; Brandi Norton (Iñupiaq), CfIS curator of public programs; Melina Roise, CfIS program coordinator; and Dinaw Mengetsu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program.
Further reading:
The Art of Jeffrey Gibson Shines in Venice (ICT)
Post Date: 11-07-2024
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Peter L’Official’s Essay “Black Builders” Published in Places Journal
Peter L’Official’s Essay “Black Builders” Published in Places Journal
Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program, has published “Black Builders,” an article exploring the relationship between both writing and architecture, and race and design, for Places Journal. In examining the works of visionary Black architect and urban planner W. Joseph Black (1961–1977), who tragically died of cancer at age 43, novelist Colson Whitehead, and other scholars and writers, L’Official asks: “What do we learn about visions of cities when we consider writing and architecture as mutually defining?” L’Official delves deeply into Black’s archives and grapples with his brilliant unfinished masterpieces including the ambitious Harlem Music Center and Gateway to Harlem complex, as well as two comprehensive volumes Visions of Harlem, intended as an exhibition and catalogue, and Black Builders of America, a compendium focused on the many known and unknown Black builders dating back from 1619 to the contemporary. Inspired by the career and legacy of W. Joseph Black, L’Official proposes a notion: “writing about architecture is also a method of practicing architecture—that is, by thinking it.” In contemplating “how many works by Black architects, planners, builders, and other dreamers lie dormant, still, in archives, or tossed by the wayside in frustration, never to be lauded as great works of even speculative imagination?” L’Official asserts “We should also expand our notions of who and what Black builders and Black building can be—and, indeed, of what it means to ‘build’ in the first place.”Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program. Photo by Liz Munsell
L’Official’s “Black Builders” is the first essay in An Unfinished Atlas, a series funded by the Mellon Foundation and published by Places Journal that brings together scholars, cultural critics, essayists, and novelists of color to enrich the cultural record of place-based narratives across what is now called North America.
Post Date: 11-05-2024