Past Events
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Thursday, March 14, 2024
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Kalen Goodluck ’16 is a Diné, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Tsimshian journalist and photographer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose work focuses on Indigenous Affairs, near and far. Goodluck is a graduate of the Bard College Human Rights Program, class of 2016. kalengoodluck.com
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Sunday, November 19, 2023
CCS Bard, Classroom 102 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Following presentations of their performance works at Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-determination since 1969 on November 18, Maria Hupfield (Anishnaabek, Wasauksing First Nation/Canada) and Kite (Oglala Sioux Tribe), along with Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc), will discuss their work in relation to the exhibition’s unifying principles of resistance and self-determination.
The show is curated by Indigenous cultural thought leader, Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), who will moderate a conversation focused on self-determination from the perspective of tribal government, and the value of shared experience in the creation and memory of living works of art.
The conversation is presented by the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College.
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Monday, November 13, 2023
Blithewood 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Presented by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck at Bard College
November 13th, 2023, 6:00–7:30 pm, Conference Room, Blithewod
With conversations around land acknowledgments and Indigenous studies growing at Bard College, we aim to develop consistent, respectful, and reciprocal relationships with tribal partners. This conversation, led by Rethinking Place and the Center for Indigenous Studies initiatives, aims to begin discussions around proper protocols for such partnerships for individuals or departments interested in collaborative research or programming.
Specific questions, proposals, or ideas can be submitted via this form.
We strongly encourage anyone considering working with tribal institutions to attend.
Presenters: Christian Ayne Crouch, principal investigator for Rethinking Place, director of the Center for Indigenous Studies, dean of graduate studies at Bard College Brandi Norton, curator of public programs for the Center for Indigenous Studies Melina Roise, administrative coordinator for Rethinking Place, program coordinator for the Center for Indigenous Studies
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Thursday, November 9, 2023
Online Event 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
A conversation with award-winning scholar Dr. Ned Blackhawk (Yale University) discussing his recent book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History, moderated by Dr. Christian Ayne Crouch (Bard College).
Dr. Ned Blackhawk is a finalist for the National Book Award.
Dr. Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is a Professor of History and American Studies at Yale and was on the faculty from 1999 to 2009 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A graduate of McGill University, he holds graduate degrees in History from UCLA and the University of Washington and is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West (Harvard, 2006), a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
In addition to serving in professional associations and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Ethnohistory, Professor Blackhawk has led the establishment of two fellowships, one for American Indian Students to attend the Western History Association’s annual conference, the other for doctoral students working on American Indian Studies dissertations at Yale named after Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago, Class of 1910).
Dr. Christian Ayne Crouch is the Dean of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor of History and American and Indigenous Studies, Director of the Center for Indigenous Studies, and Principal Investigator of Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck at Bard College.
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Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Naiima Khahaifa, Guarini Fellow
Departments of Geography and
African and African-American Studies
Dartmouth College
Olin 102 5:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Mass incarceration, characterized by unprecedented prison population growth in the US and a disproportionately large representation of Black men, has garnered much scholarly attention; however, a parallel increase in the proportion of Black correctional officers (COs) has not yet received the same consideration. During the early 1970s, demands made by the Prisoners’ Rights Movement led to the recruitment of thousands of Black men and women into the US correctional workforce over the following decades. Thus, focusing on New York State, I argue that as correctional workforce integration redefined the state’s prison system and broader carceral geography, the racialized process of mass incarceration came to depend on the labor of Black COs. Based on a qualitative analysis of life/occupational history interviews with Black COs in Buffalo, NY, recruited between the late 1970s and early 1990s, I find that dynamics of race, class, and gender shape relationships between Black COs and incarcerated individuals as their day-to-day encounters cultivated cooperation and consent in an otherwise volatile prison environment. Deriving from notions of community policing and fictive kinship, I developed the concept of carceral kinship, which refers to the formation of familial-like bonds that appeared the strongest between Black women COs and Black incarcerated men. This concept matters because it reveals the intricate dynamics and micro-politics of prison spaces and how carceral geographies rely on intimate, empathetic, and emotional care work that is profoundly raced and gendered.
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Sunday, October 1, 2023
Walk/Hike
Montgomery Place Estate 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Long before there was online shopping, there were print catalogs; before the internet there were journals; before social media there were social circles; and before podcasts there were dinner parties. Meet some of the visitors and residents who made significant contributions to life at Montgomery Place while also shaping a wider worldview of their special field of interest. Highlighted personalities will include: A. J. Downing, landscape designer and founding journalist; A. J. Davis, architect and A-list invitee; Alexander Gilson, descendent of slaves, businessman, and groundbreaking gardener; Violetta White Delafield, scientist, pioneering mycologist, and outdoor wellness advocate. Walk will be postponed until October 8 only if heavy rain is forecast. Wear comfortable walking shoes and long pants. Difficulty: Moderate. Not suitable for children under age 7.
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Sunday, September 17, 2023
Walk/Hike
Montgomery Place Estate 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
From farmland to pleasure ground, from national historic site to college campus, much has changed at Montgomery Place over its most recent 220 year history. We’ll walk the trails, meander through the meadows, and stroll the gardens while observing modernization’s impact on the land and water, and learning about the diverse peoples whose history here really goes back thousands of years. Enjoy a ramble through the remnants of a once romantic morning walk. Take in spectacular views of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains while exploring the wilderness trails in the ravine formed by the Sawkill Creek. Historical highlights include cascading waterfalls and the hydropower station, the allée of the arboretum through the east lawn, the coach house, and the rough and formal gardens. Walk will be postponed until September 24 only if heavy rain is forecast.
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Sunday, July 23, 2023
Featuring Arielle Twist (Nehiyaw [Cree]), drumming by Carol Powder of the drum group Chubby Cree, and custom tracks by Kahelelani Mahone (Kanaka Maoli [Hawaiian])
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art 8:15 pm – 9:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Advance free registration required on eventbrite here.
Don’t make me over
Now that I’d do anything for you
Don’t make me over
Now that you know how I adore you
Don’t pick on the things I say, the things I do
Just love me with all my faults, the way I love you
I’m begging you
An original collaborative performance by artist Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee) with artist, author, and educator Arielle Twist (Nehiyaw [Cree]), a two-spirit trans woman, centered around the narratives and lines that course through the song “Don’t Make Me Over.”
Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 1962 and originally recorded by Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over” is titled after a retort the singer made after the songwriters snubbed her for another singer. Her rebuke became the title of her first hit single—a new song, this time written for her—a track about love, devotion, submission, and refusal, all qualities that also register in Twist’s multifaceted work. In this performance, presented alongside the exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, narratives between Gibson’s and Twist’s practices and preoccupations merge and expand through an exploration of the song. It is no surprise that “Don’t Make Me Over” has historically been an anthem for the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
More information from CCS Bard
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Sunday, July 23, 2023
Following performances by Emily Johnson (Yup’ik) / Catalyst and Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee) with Arielle Twist (Cree) on July 22, Johnson and Gibson will join in conversation with chief curator of Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation).
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Free, no registration required.
In partnership with CCS Bard, the Center for Indigenous Studies will present performances by influential artists Emily Johnson/Catalyst and Ya Tseen as well as a series of artist talks that expand the exhibition into new conceptual territory and themes. These initiatives were organized by the Center for Indigenous Studies, in complement with Indian Theater, throughout the duration of the show.
Learn more about Indian Theater: Native Art and Self-determination Since 1969 and collaborative programming here.
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Saturday, July 22, 2023
Featuring Arielle Twist (Nehiyaw [Cree]), drumming by Carol Powder of the drum group Chubby Cree, and custom tracks by Kahelelani Mahone (Kanaka Maoli [Hawaiian])
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art 8:15 pm – 9:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Advance free registration required on eventbrite here.
Don’t make me over
Now that I’d do anything for you
Don’t make me over
Now that you know how I adore you
Don’t pick on the things I say, the things I do
Just love me with all my faults, the way I love you
I’m begging you
An original collaborative performance by artist Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee) with artist, author, and educator Arielle Twist (Nehiyaw [Cree]), a two-spirit trans woman, centered around the narratives and lines that course through the song “Don’t Make Me Over.”
Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 1962 and originally recorded by Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over” is titled after a retort the singer made after the songwriters snubbed her for another singer. Her rebuke became the title of her first hit single—a new song, this time written for her—a track about love, devotion, submission, and refusal, all qualities that also register in Twist’s multifaceted work. In this performance, presented alongside the exhibition Indian Theater, narratives between Gibson’s and Twist’s practices and preoccupations merge and expand through an exploration of the song. It is no surprise that “Don’t Make Me Over” has historically been an anthem for the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
More Information from CCS Bard
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Saturday, July 22, 2023
THE 6:00PM SHOW IS SOLD OUT. 4:00PM SHOW ADDED, REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/679394967637
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
THE 6:00PM SHOW IS SOLD OUT. REGISTER FOR THE 4:00PM SHOW HERE.
About Being Future Being: Land / Celestial
The Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College presents Being Future Being: Land / Celestial by Emily Johnson / Catalyst as part of a series of programming developed in partnership with CCS Bard to surround the exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-determination Since 1969.
Being Future Being is a multi-scalar work, created by Emily Johnson for the stage and beyond. Featuring a newly commissioned score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon and a stellar cast of performers, Being Future Being: Land / Celestial invites you into a series of intimate encounters with our more-than-human kin. As audiences journey to three separate outdoor locations, they form a powerful processional—one with the capacity to reshape the way we relate to ourselves, and to the human and more-than-human cohabitants of our worlds.
The performance is approximately one hour, followed by a reception, and a performance by Jeffrey Gibson and Arielle Twist.
On Sunday, July 23, 2023, at 2:00pm, please join us for Jeffrey Gibson and Emily Johnson in conversation, moderated by Candice Hopkins. This conversation will take place at the Hessel Museum.
For more information on other Being Future Being works and current calls to action, visit www.catalystdance.com.
About Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-determination Since 1969
June 24-November 26, 2023
Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-determination Since 1969 “explores Native North American art through the framework of performance, abstraction, and material experimentation that emerged from the Institute of American Indian Arts’ theatre department in the late 1960s,” (CCS) curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), CCS Bard Class of 2003, Executive Director at Forge Project and Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies at CCS Bard. For more information, please visit the CCS website here.
About Emily Johnson / Catalyst:
EMILY JOHNSON / CATALYST formed in 1998 and is guided by the artistic projects of Emily Johnson and her collaborators. Catalyst's tenet is Land Back. Everything we do is for this purpose. We make dances and performance gatherings, but really, we are re-worlding.
Catalyst does this work with an amazing community of collaborators and we structure our work with the following four branches: Branch of Making, Branch of Action: Speculative Architecture of the Overflow, Branch of Scholarship, and the Branch of Knowledge.
EMILY JOHNSON is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based in Lenapehoking/NYC and Haudenosaunee lands. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment — interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. She choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018. Her new work Being Future Being, premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022.
Emily’s writing has been published and commissioned by The Open Society University Network’s Center for Human Rights and the Arts, ArtsLink Australia, unMagazine, Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack.
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020, and a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues. She was a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding, was a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and serves as a co-lead consortium member for First Nations Performing Arts.
For more information on Catalyst and its Branches, visit www.catalystdance.com
About the Hessel Museum:
Established in 1990, the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies—a discipline exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform curatorial practice. CCS Bard includes the Hessel Museum of Art, the CCS Bard Library and Archives, and the Graduate Program in Curatorial Studies. Learn more: https://ccs.bard.edu/
Directions:
CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art are located on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, about 90 miles north of New York City. The street address is: 33 Garden Road Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
COVID policy:
The health and safety of our visitors, students, faculty, and staff is our top priority, and we are committed to supporting the efforts of Bard College and New York State to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Bard College requires all visitors to campus buildings, including CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum, to be fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19, or to have received a negative COVID-19 test within the last 24 hours. To be considered fully vaccinated and boosted, visitors must have received at least one booster shot in addition to the full course of a COVID-19 vaccine.
In accordance with this policy, and for the health and safety of everyone, CCS Bard is implementing the following protocols:
Visitors ages 5 and up may be asked to show proof of vaccination upon entering the building.
Masking indoors is optional for visitors who are fully vaccinated and boosted and not experiencing symptoms.
If you are feeling ill, exhibiting symptoms, or have had contact with someone with COVID-19 in the past 14 days, please stay home and seek care. *Individuals who are fully vaccinated but recently tested positive for COVID-19 may visit only after they are no longer experiencing symptoms and it has been at least 5 days since they tested positive. If it has been more than 5 days but less than 10 days since their positive test, they must be masked throughout their time inside or in any kind of group setting.
Access information:
Being Future Being is an outdoor performance that will take place on uneven ground, and audiences journey to three nearby locations. The event is movement-based and includes sound. For specific access needs or questions, please contact the Center for Indigenous Studies at [email protected].
CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art are located in a single-level facility. If you have specific questions or requests about access, please write to [email protected] at least two weeks before your visit or the event you plan to attend and we will make every effort to accommodate you.
During your visit, you may seek the assistance of Visitor Services staff members who are present at the CCS Bard reception desk and throughout the exhibitions. Please don’t hesitate to contact [email protected] with any feedback about your visit.
To see our full access policy, please visit https://ccs.bard.edu/visit/accessinformation.
Land Acknowledgment:
In the spirit of truth and equity, it is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that we gather on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who are the original stewards of the land. Today, due to forced removal, the community resides in Northeast Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. We honor and pay respect to their ancestors past and present, as well as to future generations, and we recognize their continuing presence in their homelands. We understand that our acknowledgment requires those of us who are settlers to recognize our own place in and responsibilities toward addressing inequity, and that this ongoing and challenging work requires that we commit to real engagement with the Munsee and Mohican communities to build an inclusive and equitable space for all.
Financial contributions to Stockbridge Munsee Community Funds are encouraged and can be made here.
Being Future Being: Land / Celestial is presented by the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College.
Being Future Being was commissioned by BroadStage at Santa Monica College (CA), and is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Bunnell Street Arts Center (AK); New York Live Arts (NY); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR) and NPN, with contributions from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional commissioning and development support is provided by Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund, made possible by The Howard Gilman Foundation and Ford Foundation; Abrons Arts Center; University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center; Portland Ovations; Jacob’s Pillow’s Pillow Lab Residency; a Movement Research Residency, funded by the Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund; and New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency with funding from Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Partners for New Performance.
The creation of Being Future Being was made possible in part with support from Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT: Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award, and New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Mellon Foundation.
Image Credit: Emily Johnson / Catalyst’s Being Future Being: Land / Celestial. Performance view, presented by New York Live Arts, 2022. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Press Release: View
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Saturday, July 22, 2023
An outdoor, multi-scalar, movement-based performance work
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Free registration here (required).
About Being Future Being: Land / Celestial
The Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College presents Being Future Being: Land / Celestial by Emily Johnson / Catalyst as part of a series of programming developed in partnership with CCS Bard to surround the exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-determination Since 1969.
Being Future Being is a multi-scalar work, created by Emily Johnson for the stage and beyond. Featuring a newly commissioned score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon and a stellar cast of performers, Being Future Being: Land / Celestial invites you into a series of intimate encounters with our more-than-human kin. As audiences journey to three separate outdoor locations, they form a powerful processional—one with the capacity to reshape the way we relate to ourselves, and to the human and more-than-human cohabitants of our worlds.
The performance is approximately one hour.
On Sunday, July 23, 2023, at 2:00pm, please join us for Jeffrey Gibson and Emily Johnson in conversation, moderated by Candice Hopkins. This conversation will take place at the Hessel Museum.
For more information on other Being Future Being works and current calls to action, visit www.catalystdance.com.
About Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-determination Since 1969
June 24-November 26, 2023
Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-determination Since 1969 “explores Native North American art through the framework of performance, abstraction, and material experimentation that emerged from the Institute of American Indian Arts’ theatre department in the late 1960s,” (CCS) curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), CCS Bard Class of 2003, Executive Director at Forge Project and Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies at CCS Bard. For more information, please visit the CCS website here.
About Emily Johnson / Catalyst:
EMILY JOHNSON / CATALYST formed in 1998 and is guided by the artistic projects of Emily Johnson and her collaborators. Catalyst's tenet is Land Back. Everything we do is for this purpose. We make dances and performance gatherings, but really, we are re-worlding.
Catalyst does this work with an amazing community of collaborators and we structure our work with the following four branches: Branch of Making, Branch of Action: Speculative Architecture of the Overflow, Branch of Scholarship, and the Branch of Knowledge.
EMILY JOHNSON is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based in Lenapehoking/NYC and Haudenosaunee lands. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment — interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. She choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018. Her new work Being Future Being, premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022.
Emily’s writing has been published and commissioned by The Open Society University Network’s Center for Human Rights and the Arts, ArtsLink Australia, unMagazine, Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack.
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020, and a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues. She was a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding, was a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and serves as a co-lead consortium member for First Nations Performing Arts.
For more information on Catalyst and its Branches, visit www.catalystdance.com
About the Hessel Museum:
Established in 1990, the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies—a discipline exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform curatorial practice. CCS Bard includes the Hessel Museum of Art, the CCS Bard Library and Archives, and the Graduate Program in Curatorial Studies. Learn more: https://ccs.bard.edu/
Directions:
CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art are located on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, about 90 miles north of New York City. The street address is: 33 Garden Road Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
COVID policy:
The health and safety of our visitors, students, faculty, and staff is our top priority, and we are committed to supporting the efforts of Bard College and New York State to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Bard College requires all visitors to campus buildings, including CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum, to be fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19, or to have received a negative COVID-19 test within the last 24 hours. To be considered fully vaccinated and boosted, visitors must have received at least one booster shot in addition to the full course of a COVID-19 vaccine.
In accordance with this policy, and for the health and safety of everyone, CCS Bard is implementing the following protocols:
Visitors ages 5 and up may be asked to show proof of vaccination upon entering the building.
Masking indoors is optional for visitors who are fully vaccinated and boosted and not experiencing symptoms.
If you are feeling ill, exhibiting symptoms, or have had contact with someone with COVID-19 in the past 14 days, please stay home and seek care. *Individuals who are fully vaccinated but recently tested positive for COVID-19 may visit only after they are no longer experiencing symptoms and it has been at least 5 days since they tested positive. If it has been more than 5 days but less than 10 days since their positive test, they must be masked throughout their time inside or in any kind of group setting.
Access information:
Being Future Being is an outdoor performance that will take place on uneven ground, and audiences journey to three nearby locations. The event is movement-based and includes sound. For specific access needs or questions, please contact the Center for Indigenous Studies at [email protected].
CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art are located in a single-level facility. If you have specific questions or requests about access, please write to [email protected] at least two weeks before your visit or the event you plan to attend and we will make every effort to accommodate you.
During your visit, you may seek the assistance of Visitor Services staff members who are present at the CCS Bard reception desk and throughout the exhibitions. Please don’t hesitate to contact [email protected] with any feedback about your visit.
To see our full access policy, please visit https://ccs.bard.edu/visit/accessinformation.
Land Acknowledgment:
In the spirit of truth and equity, it is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that we gather on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who are the original stewards of the land. Today, due to forced removal, the community resides in Northeast Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. We honor and pay respect to their ancestors past and present, as well as to future generations, and we recognize their continuing presence in their homelands. We understand that our acknowledgment requires those of us who are settlers to recognize our own place in and responsibilities toward addressing inequity, and that this ongoing and challenging work requires that we commit to real engagement with the Munsee and Mohican communities to build an inclusive and equitable space for all.
Financial contributions to Stockbridge Munsee Community Funds are encouraged and can be made here.
Being Future Being: Land / Celestial is presented by the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College.
Being Future Being was commissioned by BroadStage at Santa Monica College (CA), and is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Bunnell Street Arts Center (AK); New York Live Arts (NY); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR) and NPN, with contributions from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional commissioning and development support is provided by Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund, made possible by The Howard Gilman Foundation and Ford Foundation; Abrons Arts Center; University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center; Portland Ovations; Jacob’s Pillow’s Pillow Lab Residency; a Movement Research Residency, funded by the Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund; and New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency with funding from Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Partners for New Performance.
The creation of Being Future Being was made possible in part with support from Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT: Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award, and New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Mellon Foundation.
Image Credit: Emily Johnson / Catalyst’s Being Future Being: Land / Celestial. Performance view, presented by New York Live Arts, 2022. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Press Release: View
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Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Olin LC 208; Olin Language Center 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The students of AS 315 and Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck present a two-part letter writing night in solidarity with Indigenous political prisoners Maddesyn George and Leonard Peltier:
5/15 - Community letter writing night at Blackbird Infoshop, 587 Abeel Street, Kingston, NY.
5/17 - Olin Languages Center 208; Information and letter writing night with virtual talk by Hupa abolitionist scholar Stephanie Lumsden, Gender Studies, UCLA; Maddesyn George Defense Committee.
Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa) is a scholar and teacher. She received her B.A. in Women's Studies from Portland State University in 2011 and her M.A. in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis in 2014. She earned her second M.A. in Gender Studies from UCLA in 2018. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA . Stephanie is a 2021-2022 Ford Fellow and a recipient of the University of California President's Postdoctoral fellowship
Maddesyn George (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a survivor of domestic and sexual violence who has been incarcerated since July 2020 for defending herself against a white man who raped and threatened her. Facing a murder charge and decades in prison, Maddesyn accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors after being incarcerated and separated from her infant daughter for more than a year. She was sentenced in the Eastern District of Washington Federal Court on November 17, 2021 to serve 6.5 years in prison.
This website is organized by Maddesyn George’s defense committee, a grassroots coalition of members of Maddesyn’s family; members of the Colville Confederated Tribes and Spokane nation; survivors of gender violence; and advocates, organizers, and scholars who work on issues of colonial, sexual, and domestic violence; policing and incarceration; and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples. Read the defense committee’s statement on Maddesyn’s sentencing
Leonard Peltier is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota nations who has been imprisoned for 48 years. . Leonard Peltier was wrongly convicted in the 1970s for his organizing with the American Indian Movement in defense of Pine Ridge traditionalists, and is now the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States. “The United States of America has kept me locked up because I am American Indian,” said the ailing Indigenous rights activist who Biden could free, but hasn’t. For more info, see the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
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Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Weis Cinema 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Why did Indigenous peasants support but ultimately resist the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group in highland Peruvian Quechua communities? The different ways rebels and government security forces interacted in each Andean community explain the diverse peasant responses. At first, the politics of pursuing social justice mobilized a large part of the rural population, especially the youths, who often sympathized with the Maoist revolution. The motivating factors in engaging with the insurgency in rural communities include local experiences of state neglect, social inequality, power relation, and fear and intimidation. Shining Path’s mounting authoritarianism, most notably their brutal killing of community authorities and demand that peasants withdraw from the market economy, explains the root of violent peasant uprisings against the rebels. The Indigenous struggle involved making the anti-guerrilla and pro-state coalition called the Pacto de Alianza entre Pueblos. It brought internal security and order, allowing Indigenous peasants to maintain daily life and protect their local affairs in wartime violence. The Pacto de Alianza was not limited to the counterinsurgency goals; its functions extended to the local governance, social cohesion, and post-conflict reconstruction.
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Monday, March 27, 2023
Fantastic Fungi is a consciousness-shifting film about the mycelium network that takes us on an immersive journey through time and scale into the magical earth beneath our feet, an underground network that can heal and save our planet.
Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:45 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
John Michelotti is the founder of Catskill Fungi which empowers people with fungi through outdoor educational classes, cultivation courses, mushroom art, and mushroom health extracts. John is a former President of the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association (MHMA). He serves as Medicinal Mushroom Committee Chair and is a Poison Control Consultant for the North American Mycological Association. He was chosen by the Catskill Center as a "Steward of the Catskills" for his contribution to the environment. John has had the pleasure to engage students from Elementary Schools to Colleges and Universities. He has taught at the New York Botanical Gardens for the past 8 years and regularly presents to Mycological Associations across the country. He served on the Mushroom Advisory Panel for Certified Naturally Grown to develop ecological standards in mushroom production across North America and has taught the Wild Mushroom Food Safety Certification Course to certify foragers to sell wild mushrooms to restaurants and supermarkets in 13 states. His goal is to educate and inspire people to pair with fungi to improve the environment, their health, and communities.
Catskill Fungi
Catskill Fungi produces high integrity, triple-extracted health tinctures from mushrooms that are wild- crafted or grown near our family farm in the Catskill Mountains. We enjoy sharing our love of mushrooms on our guided mushroom walks, medicinal and cultivation workshops, and our fungi retreats. Catskill Fungi has a foundation of permaculture principles. This means the core of our business is about helping people and improving the planet through our work with mushrooms. We practice sustainable harvesting, leave-no-trace principles, and compassion for the environment. We aim to empower people to grow edible mushrooms as a sustainable source of fresh food, to heal themselves through utilizing health properties of fungi, and to explore the historical uses and present day innovations of these essential fungi.
- Monday, March 27, 2023
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Monday, March 6, 2023
Hosted by the Bard Farm
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Bard Farm is hosting a screening of the film Gather, a documentary about Indigenous food traditions and food sovereignty. The screening will feature food provided by Bard’s Test Kitchen and a discussion afterward. Learn more by visiting gather.film!
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Friday, February 10, 2023
Webinar talk by Danielle Purifoy
Online Event 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk examines how the contemporary timber industry reproduces plantation power. It explores the “remote control” of land — such as absentee land ownership, Black family land grabs, new markets for energy, and legal regimes designed to “devalue” common property in favor of individual ownership and profit. Multi-generation Black homeplaces and communities, rooted in alternative modes of land relations, sustain themselves despite the friction between the economic interests of racial capitalism and the ecological interests of long-standing forest interdependence. With the further concentration of forestland ownership and local divestment throughout the Alabama Black Belt and the US South, the reciprocal traditions of Black forest ecologies represent modes of land relation and intervention that are necessary for livable futures.
The CHRA Talk & Book Series celebrates critical voices working at the intersection of Human Rights and the Arts. Each year, we invite inspiring artists and activists from around the globe to share their practice or discuss their research. Each public talk is followed by a moderated discussion, and both are subsequently edited and published in a collected volume.
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Monday, February 6, 2023
Only 30 minutes and there'll be popcorn!
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Join us for a film screening about the Wooden Funeral Sculpture Program, an initiative supported by OSUN's Center for Human Rights and the Arts. This program aims to preserve the culturally significant Tomb House Statues in Kon Tum, Vietnam, and to introduce the value of this folk art to younger Indigenous people and the public. The program is currently seeking submissions from young artists for its Wooden Funeral Sculpture Exhibition in Vietnam in 2023.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2022
A film by Sky Hopinka
Preston 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm EST/GMT-5
maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, a film by Bard Professor Sky Hopinka, follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier's wanderings through each of their worlds as they wonder through and contemplate the afterlife, rebirth, and the place in-between. Spoken mostly in chinuk wawa, their stories are departures from the Chinookan origin of death myth, with its distant beginning and circular shape.
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Tuesday, November 22, 2022
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EST/GMT-5
A reading and conversation with Nicole Wallace on Diane Burns and Lineages of Anishinaabe Poetics.
AS 222, Indigenous Feminisms, Tuesday November 22
1:30pm, Weis Cinema, Bard College
Diane Burns, Riding the One Eyed Ford: https://digitalcollections.poetshouse.org/digital-collection/chapbook-collection/riding-the-one-eyed-ford
Nicole Wallace’s first chapbook, WAASAMOWIN, was published by IMP in 2019. Most recently, Nicole was the June/July 2020 poetry micro-resident at Running Dog and a 2019 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. Recent work can be read in print in Survivance: Indigenous Poesis Vol. IV Zine and online at Running Dog, A Perfect Vacuum, and LitHub. They have also contributed to programs and publications celebrating the work and life of the late poet, Diane Burns, author of Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II, 1981).
Through their ongoing participation in language classes and through their work as a writer and poet, Nicole is dedicated to reconnecting with and carrying forward the Ojibwe language (Ojibwemowin / Anishinaabemowin). They have participated in remote language classes with Dr. Wendy Makoons Geniusz through UW-Eau Claire, and most recently with Memegwesi Sutherland through the Minneapolis American Indian Center/Culture Language And Arts Network.
Nicole received a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study (2008) and a Masters of Library Science in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials from Queens College, CUNY (2012). They have lived and made work as a guest on occupied Canarsee and Lenape territory (NYC) since 2005 and are currently the Managing Director of The Poetry Project. Nicole is of mixed settler/European ancestry and is a patrilineal descendent of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe).
On Diane Burns' Legacy:
Diane Burns (1957–2006) was born in Lawrence, Kansas to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother. She moved to New York in the 1970s to attend Barnard College, and after dropping out her senior year, she became active in the poetry scene of the Lower East Side, where she lived. She was a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Café, a frequent performer at the Bowery Poetry Club and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, and published a book of poems entitled Riding the One-Eyed Ford (1981), illustrated with her pen and ink drawings. Along with Allen Ginsberg, Joy Harjo, and Pedro Pietri, she was invited by the Sandinista government to visit Nicaragua for the Ruben Dario Poetry Festival.
In her direct, wry poems, Burns engages themes of Native American identity and stereotypes. She published a single volume of poems during her life, Riding the One-Eyed Ford (1981). She lived in New York City until her death at the age of 49 from liver and kidney failure. On the occasion of Diane Burns’s inclusion in Moma' PS1's Greater New York exhibit, poet Nicole Wallace organized a day of reflection on Burns’s work and legacy featuring Lou Cornum, Sky Hopinka, Maria Hupfield and Justin Mejias.
This conversation is part of the American and Indigenous Studies Course, Indigenous Feminist Critiques and Geographies, and is sponsored by the Mellon Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Initiative.
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Wednesday, November 16, 2022
A Lunch Talk with Lucille Grignon
Kline Commons 11:30 am – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In person at Old Kline or via Zoom.
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Monday, November 14, 2022
Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Bard’s new Carceral Studies speaker series launches with a visit from the NYU Prison Education Project. Their recently published book Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality explores how the car, despite its association with American freedom and mobility, functions at the crossroads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility– the American debt economy and the carceral state. We will be joined by four of the Lab members, a group representing formerly incarcerated scholars and non-formerly incarcerated NYU faculty.
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Tuesday, November 1, 2022
Emily Lim Rogers, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of American Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk explores the double binds that are created when debilitating chronic symptoms remain unverifiable in Western biomedicine. Chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME/CFS) is a disabling condition that has no treatments. Its unrelentingness means suicide is the leading cause of death. Drawing on four years of online and in-person fieldwork with American ME/CFS activists, I show how vital social groupings bind patients together despite the significant isolation ME/CFS causes. Yet at the same time, the bureaucratic and biomedical systems they aim to navigate are inherently exhausting and repeatedly exclude them, creating double-binds for patients with already-limited energy: the systems they rely on are also the systems that wear them out. Debility blocks the very means through which debility might end.
ME/CFS patient activists “believe in science.” They take pains to note the treatments they want are biomedical in nature, and they emphasize that a definitive biological marker is needed for their disease to be taken seriously. While medical anthropologists have long critiqued such narrow ways of seeing the world, this talk departs from the model of the “dupe.” Instead, it argues for the central importance of the psychic, phenomenological, and material aspects of investments in biomedicine, in what I term “attachments to science.” I look at how—in a context with a deficit of hope—science’s futurity animates a way of inhabiting a present without prognosis, as they must live on despite the often-devastating loss that comes from living in immense and unending pain. This project insists these losses are both psychic and material: they create a need for hope, and they also make it difficult to eke out a livelihood when biomedicine is the arbiter of legitimacy for disability insurance, paid sick leave, and Social Security in the context of a gutted American social safety net and cultural imaginaries of the disability fraud. Patient activists who appeal to such institutions did not choose to do so. Like a family, biomedicine is something their lives are dependent upon yet ones they cannot pick. In the last portion of the talk, however, I suggest queer studies has something to add about interdependencies and forms of care that might untie the knot of biomedicine’s binds—and the material limits of such alternative imaginaries as people with ME/CFS have little choice but to persist in an exhausting present.
Emily Lim Rogers is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Her work has been published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly and appears in the forthcoming anthology Crip Authorship (NYU Press, 2023), among others. Her current book project is Biomedicine’s Binds: ME/CFS, Patient Activism, and the Work of Debility. The project examines how American ME/CFS patients create vital social groupings through their debility, yet debility blocks the means through which debility might end, as they navigate societal disbelief and exhausting institutions that limit the the success of activist movements.
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Friday, October 21, 2022
An evening of tango, music, and laughter.
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Free for Bard students!
Did you come to La Voz Harvest Moon and had a great time? Did you miss it?
Don't miss this last opportunity to celebrate the 18th anniversary of La Voz. Enjoy Argentine tango and folklore with Eduardo Parra, who will give a concert and will also teach us how to dance tango. We will also have the traditional Veracruz music Son Jarocho in the hands of the group Ameyal with Maria and Mateo. Of course, there will be food, and karaoke! Participate if you dare.
And most importantly, we will publicly recognize several members of the community who have been nominated by their peers for their dedicated service to the Hispanic immigrant communityof the Hudson Valley: Claudette Aldebot, Maria Cabrera, Víctor Cueva, Adelio Ramírez, Felipe Santos, and Joan Ruiz Werkema. It will be an unforgettable night.
Thank you to the sponsors of our anniversary celebrations.
Major sponsors: Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union, Radio Kingston, Ulster Savings Bank, St. Catherine Center for Children
Patron sponsors: M&T Bank, Nuvance, Sun River, SUNY Ulster
Community-level sponsors: Hudson Valley Hospice, RUPCO
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¿Viniste a La Luna de la Cosecha de La Voz y la pasaste genial? ¿Te la perdiste?
No te pierdas esta última oportunidad de celebrar el 18 aniversario de La Voz. Disfruta del tango y folclore argentino con Eduardo Parra, quien dará un concierto y también nos enseñará a bailar tango. También tendremos la música tradicional veracruzana Son Jarocho en manos del grupo Ameyal de Maria y Mateo. Por supuesto, habrá comida, ¡y karaoke! Participa si te animas.
Y lo más importante: reconoceremos públicamente a varios miembros de la comunidad que han sido nominados por sus pares por su dedicado servicio a la comunidad inmigrante hispana del Valle del Hudson: Claudette Aldebot, Maria Cabrera, Víctor Cueva, Adelio Ramírez, Felipe Santos y Joan Ruiz Werkema. Será una noche inolvidable.
Gracias a los patrocinadores de la celebración de nuestro aniversario:
Nivel Luna Llena: Hudson Valley Credit Union, Radio Kingston, Ulster Savings Bank, St. Catherine Center for Children
Nivel Cosecha: M&T Bank, Nuvance, Sun River, SUNY Ulster
Nivel Comunidad: Hudson Valley Hospice, RUPCO
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Friday, October 21, 2022 – Saturday, October 22, 2022
A Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Conference
RSVP Here
Please join us for the inaugural fall conference of Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times project. This conference considers the topic of archives from a range of humanistic perspectives, with keynotes showcasing methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies and African and African American Studies, as well as offering the viewpoints of contemporary artists on these topics. Multimedia Northern Cheyenne artist Bently Spang will be opening the conference with a screening and talk on Thursday evening in Weis Cinema, followed by an opening reception at the Center for Experimental Humanities (New Annandale House). Keynotes by award-winning scholars Dr. Marisa J. Fuentes, presidential term chair in African American history, Rutgers University, and Dr. Elizabeth Ellis, assistant professor of history, Princeton University, and citizen, Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, bracket a day of smaller sessions exploring and modeling ethical practices in the archive, open to students, faculty, and staff on Friday. Recipients of Rethinking Place student research funding will present on their work on Saturday morning, and the conference concludes with a talk open to the public by Oglala Lakota scholar and multimedia artist Kite (MFA ’15) at LUMA Theater at 2 pm on Saturday. The DRE is the first of three annual conferences supported by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck.
Schedule
Thursday, October 20, 2022 (Weis Cinema)
5pm: Screening and presentation with Bently Spang with reception directly following at the Center for Experimental Humanities
Friday, October 21, 2022 (RKC)
8:30 am: Coffee
9:00 am: Welcome and introductions
9:30 am: Opening keynote with Dr. Marisa J. Fuentes, “Buried ‘Without Care’: Social Death, Discarded Lives, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade”
10:30 am: Break
11:00 am: Concurrent workshops / screenings / presentations Talaya Robinson-Dancy: “Finding Your Place in the Archives: Black Women and Research” Wikipedia “Edit-a-Thon” Williams College Student-led Session12:45 pm: Lunch
2:00–3:45 pm: Concurrent workshops / screenings / presentations Olivia Tencer: “On Research, Life, and Archives: a Conversation” Wikipedia “Edit-a-Thon” Film Screening3:45 pm: Break
4:00–5:00 pm: Closing keynote with Dr. Elizabeth Ellis, “Recovering Indigenous Histories of Survival: Enduring Louisiana Nations”
Saturday, October 22, 2022
11:00 am: Student Presentations with Vivian Hoyden and Nine Reed-Meera at the Center for Experimental Humanities (New Annandale House)
2:00 pm: Closing lecture and reception with Suzanne Kite MFA ’15, “Makȟóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ (Fifteen Maps).” (LUMA Theater)Conference InformationRSVP Here
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Friday, October 7, 2022
Olin Humanities, Room 204 10:00 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
RSVP Now
In advance of Indigenous Peoples Day 2022, join Mohican veteran and retired Army Major Jo Ann Schedler for an informal conversation with students, staff, and faculty at Bard on unceded Mohican homeland on Mohican nationhood today, Mohican history in the Mahicantuck (Hudson Valley) and in Stockbridge, and Mohican political and military histories.
Jo Ann Schedler is an enrolled member of the Mohican Nation Stockbridge-Munsee Band born in 1946 on the Stockbridge-Munsee reservation in Wisconsin. She is a former member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Council. She is a direct descendent of Captain John Konkapot, who was the sachem when the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe accepted a mission in what is now Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Schedler received a degree in nursing (BSN) from Marquette University and masters of science in management (MSM) from Cardinal Stretch in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is an Army veteran with over 20 years of service. She has a great passion for Mohican and Munsee tribal history, especially military and Civil War histories. She is the author of a chapter in The Official National Park Service Handbook, American Indians and the Civil War entitled Wisconsin "American Indians in the Civil War."
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Thursday, September 22, 2022
Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for a reception to celebrate journalist Alvin Patrick's exhibit of selected first editions and rare books from his private collection. This exhibit, Faces of the Struggle: Frontispiece Portraits in African American Literature (1834 to 1949), features the portraits of some of the greatest civil rights activists of the 19th and 20th centuries including, Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Download: APatrick-digital.pdf -
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Reception and dancing follows the lecture
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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].
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
- Wednesday, May 20, 2020
- Tuesday, May 19, 2020
- Monday, May 18, 2020
- Sunday, May 17, 2020
- Saturday, May 16, 2020
- Friday, May 15, 2020
- Thursday, May 14, 2020
- Wednesday, May 13, 2020
- Tuesday, May 12, 2020
- Monday, May 11, 2020
- Sunday, May 10, 2020
- Saturday, May 9, 2020
- Friday, May 8, 2020
- Thursday, May 7, 2020
- Wednesday, May 6, 2020
- Tuesday, May 5, 2020
- Monday, May 4, 2020
- Sunday, May 3, 2020
- Saturday, May 2, 2020
- Friday, May 1, 2020
- Thursday, April 30, 2020
- Wednesday, April 29, 2020
- Tuesday, April 28, 2020
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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?
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Eric Goldfischer, University of Minnesota
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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 Humanities, 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.
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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
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Monday, April 22, 2019
Olin Humanities, 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.”
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Monday, April 22, 2019
Jia Lynn Yang, Deputy National Editor, The New York Times
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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Monday, March 4, 2019
Joshua Kopin '12
PhD Candidate, The University of Texas at Austin
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Tuesday, February 12, 2019
Film and discussion with Charlene Teters and Jay Rosenstein
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Stephen J. Trejo, Department of Economics, University of Texas at Austin
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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Monday, September 17, 2018
Thomas A. Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies, George Washington University
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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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].
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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
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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.
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Thursday, November 30, 2017
Brian Goldstein, Swarthmore College
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Monday, November 27, 2017
Susan Lepselter
Associate Professor of Anthropology &
Associate Adjunct Professor of American Studies,
Indiana University
Olin Humanities, 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!
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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
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Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thursday, September 7, 2017
Katherine Benton-Cohen
Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University
Olin Humanities, 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
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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.
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Monday, April 10, 2017
Gillian Osborne
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Wednesday, March 1, 2017
Olin Humanities, 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!
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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.
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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.
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Monday, November 14, 2016
Rockwell Stensrud
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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
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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
- Sunday, October 9, 2016
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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
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Monday, September 26, 2016
Aaron A. Fox, Columbia University
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Henderson 106 (Mac Lab) 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).
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Thursday, April 21, 2016
Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Henderson 106 (Mac Lab) 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).
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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.
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Monday, April 11, 2016
Katherine Zoepf
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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**
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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**
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Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Henderson 106 (Mac Lab) 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).
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Thursday, March 31, 2016
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Monday, November 16, 2015
Glenna Gordon
Olin Humanities, Room 102 4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
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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.
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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.
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Friday, October 2, 2015
Reem-Kayden Center Room 102 Call prospective voters in the Dutchess County area and let them know about Bernie Sanders!
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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!
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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!
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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.
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Monday, April 27, 2015
Kristen Block
Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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Thursday, February 19, 2015
Peter L'Official, Harvard University
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Thursday, February 12, 2015
Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Alex W. Black, Rutgers University
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Thursday, November 13, 2014
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Matt Sakakeeny
Assistant Professor of Music, Tulane University
Olin Humanities, 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]
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Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Olin Humanities, 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."
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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?
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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
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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.
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Thursday, October 23, 2014
A Talk By Keith Reeves, Swarthmore College
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Friday, September 26, 2014
Kelly Wisecup
Olin Humanities, 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.
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Wednesday, September 24, 2014
"Two Cheers for Corporate Social Responsibility"
A Talk in the Social Studies Divisional Colloquium
Olin Humanities, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Tuesday, April 9, 2013
MAT Faculty and Friends Reading Series
Olin Humanities, Room 205 Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy Smith reads from her book Life on Mars.
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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.
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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