Bard’s extraordinary faculty are dedicated to the philosophy of teaching. Today and throughout Bard’s history, members of the faculty have effected change in medicine, the arts and letters, international affairs, journalism, scientific research, and education, among other endeavors. These distinguished scholars are advisers as well as instructors: Bard has no graduate teaching assistants. And the average class size of 16 in the Lower College and 12 in the Upper College allows for intimate discussions and one-on-one interaction.
David Bloom ’13 MM ’15. Photo by Bruce Kung
“What brought me to Bard, in a word, was the faculty.”
“To work with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and James Bagwell was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. I had long followed and admired their work, and then I found out that each of them taught here. It’s easy for musicians to focus only on music, whereas I wanted to have a broader education that would prepare me for a world that requires a more well-rounded base of knowledge and experience.”
—David Bloom ’13 MM ’15
—David Bloom ’13 MM ’15
Faculty News
The Orchestra Now Announces 2026-27 Season Featuring Concerts at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan’s El Museo Del Barrio and Bohemian National Hall, the Fisher Center At Bard, and Three Free Performances in New York City
The Orchestra Now (TŌN), the innovative orchestra and master’s degree program founded by Bard College, begins its 12th season on September 18, 2026, and continues through May 21, 2027.
Chronogram Covers Bard Community Science Lab’s New Hudson Valley Community Air Network
“We didn’t want community data to be controlled by private people or entities.”
Chronogram Covers Bard Community Science Lab’s New Hudson Valley Community Air Network
Desirée Lyle installing an air quality monitor. Photo by Julia Beeman
The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities puts Bard’s dedication to the environment, science, and social change into practice to support the fair management of our shared natural resources. The center conducts quantitative research in the natural and social sciences, crafts communication, participates in policy making, and bridges academic inquiry with community needs. The data and insights collected through CESH related projects are applied directly back to communities, with the end goal of addressing and solving environmental problems in real time.
Post Date: 07-28-2026
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Jonathan Becker Explores an Unexpected Family Relationship to Banned Books in the Dublin Review of Books
Jonathan Becker Explores an Unexpected Family Relationship to Banned Books in the Dublin Review of Books
“For years I assumed that literature and politics occupied separate spheres in my uncle’s life,” Acting President Jonathan Becker writes. But in an essay for the Dublin Review of Books, Becker describes how he learned that his uncle Joseph Ronsley, then a graduate student at Northwestern University, brought a lawsuit against officials in Lake County, Illinois who were trying to ban the novel Tropic of Cancer. The ACLU filed suit on behalf of consumers and their right to read; as Ronsley put it at the time, “I don’t think these men should have the right to tell me what I can read and what I cannot read.”Jonathan Becker, acting president of Bard College. Photo by Rachel L. Crittenden
The case was ultimately successful, preventing officials from banning books based on obscenity without following correct legal procedures, and mirrored a later Supreme Court decision that raised the bar for what constitutes obscenity in fiction. Ronsley’s case shows “even those who embrace a more traditional approach to the written word can be political and impactful,” Becker writes.
Post Date: 07-27-2026
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Bard College Announces New Tuition-Free Language and Thinking Program in Kyiv with Support from Nova Ukraine and Ukraine Global Scholars
Bard College Announces New Tuition-Free Language and Thinking Program in Kyiv with Support from Nova Ukraine and Ukraine Global Scholars
Bard College is launching Language and Thinking (L&T) Kyiv, a tuition-free three-week program for Ukrainian high school students, July 27–August 15, 2026. L&T is Bard’s signature program that involves deep engagement with texts and an exploration of the iterative process between writing and thought. It is a core part of the curriculum at Bard College campuses across the United States and the globe and has been at the heart of Bard’s promotion of liberal arts and sciences education. Extending this work to Kyiv, L&T Kyiv focuses on expanding equitable access to rigorous education, strengthening pathways into Ukrainian higher education, and introducing innovative teaching methodologies into Ukrainian schools.Bard undergraduate Yana Lahoda ’27, founder of L&T Kyiv.
The summer program is funded by Nova Ukraine. Additional financial support comes from Ukraine Global Scholars. L&T Kyiv is run in collaboration with Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which is hosting the program, and Ukrainian Leadership Academy (ULA), which is providing housing for those students who join L&T Kyiv from areas across Ukraine, many of whom have come to the program from frontline regions.
The inaugural cohort of 35 students represents communities from Kyiv, as well as frontline and rural regions, including Sofiivska Borschahivka, Kramatorsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Irpin, Borodianka, Lviv, Vinnytsia, Radyvyliv, Uzhhorod, Ternopil, Cherkasy, Kropyvnytskyi, Berdychiv, and more.
“We believe that the Language and Thinking program in Kyiv will provide an outstanding educational opportunity for young, talented Ukrainian students who will benefit from the opportunity to delve into time-honored texts to help them find their voices at this critical moment in their lives. We are extremely thankful to the Kyiv School of Economics for hosting us and proud that a Bard student, Yana Lahoda, has taken the lead in organizing this transformative educational experience in her homeland, following a great tradition of student civic leaders at Bard,” said Bard Acting President Jonathan Becker, who will also deliver the Commencement Address for the Kyiv School of Economics.
L&T Kyiv was founded by Bard undergraduate Yana Lahoda ’27, through the Trustee Leader Scholar program, which supports students who design and run civic engagement projects based on their own compelling interests. Before attending Bard, Lahoda received support to attend high school in the US from Ukraine Global Scholars, a nonprofit that helps Ukrainian students from modest backgrounds apply to top boarding schools and universities for full scholarships with a commitment to return to Ukraine to contribute knowledge gained during their studies. Since 2024, Lahoda co-led the English Program and Juniors program at UGS and focused on international project coordination with the International Cooperation Team for Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Defense.
Lahoda notes that, “As a student myself, I will always be grateful for my time on the Annandale campus, and for many hours learning from my advisors who made this program possible and challenged me in the best way. I remain amazed at the commitment of my college to support its students to such a strong extent and will continue to remember moments of difficulties and unanswered questions as the greatest drivers of curiosity.”
The L&T Kyiv seminars, taught by the Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking faculty members Philip Pardi and Liliana Tymchenko, are built around an integral anthology titled “Justice” that brings together readings by Lesia Ukrainka, Václav Havel, Martin Luther King Jr., and others to facilitate discussion on freedom, responsibility, and dignity.
Over the past several decades, Bard College has adapted its distinctive approach to teaching and learning through Bard Early Colleges embedded in public high schools, microcolleges, the Bard Prison Initiative, and partnerships with educational institutions around the world. In 2022, Bard launched a sanctuary program for students from Ukraine who had lost access to higher education due to displacement or whose institutions had been forced to close. Currently, 29 Ukrainian sanctuary students attend Bard.
For Bard College and its Ukrainian partners, this program represents a long‑term commitment to work side by side with Ukrainian educators to narrow rural and urban gaps in opportunities, expand access to liberal arts and sciences learning, and cultivate inquiry, reflection, and civic engagement. The program is focused on three key goals: increasing access for students from rural and frontline regions as well as students with subsistence‑level income; strengthening Ukrainian educational frameworks; and facilitating global opportunities for Ukrainian students with an orientation to return home.
Every year, Bard’s distinctive Language and Thinking Program is taught in over 20 Bard sites around the world. By participating in Language and Thinking Kyiv, young people in Ukraine join Bard students around the world in intellectual engagement with questions rooted in our shared humanity, as well as challenges that bring together the academic and the civic. When the inaugural session concludes in August, Bard’s goal is that L&T Kyiv students will leave with robust writing portfolios, experience in seminar-based learning, stronger analytical reading and writing skills, increased confidence participating in scholarly discussion, and an understanding of how writing can serve as a tool for inquiry across disciplines. These outcomes will help inform future adaptations of L&T in Ukraine and contribute to Bard’s ongoing efforts to broaden access to transformative liberal arts and sciences education around the world.
To learn more about L&T Kyiv, please visit bardltkyiv.org.
Post Date: 07-23-2026
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Bard College MBA in Sustainability Receives Top Rankings
Bard College MBA in Sustainability Receives Top Rankings
In recent weeks, Bard’s MBA in Sustainability has received recognition by several prominent ranking and ratings systems. The program has, for the sixth consecutive year, been named the #1 Green MBA by The Princeton Review in the publication’s 2027 business school rankings, and has also earned #1 MBA for Nonprofits ranking by the Review for the third consecutive year, placing Bard ahead of institutions including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley, and Northwestern. Additionally, CEO awarded Bard an AAA rating in its Green MBA Index, which assesses how thoroughly sustainability is integrated into an MBA program’s curriculum, hands-on learning opportunities, research, institutional strategy, and graduate outcomes.Photo by Rachel L. Crittenden
Unlike many business school rankings, The Princeton Review evaluations are based on student experience, and the top Green MBA ranking reflects how well students believe their MBA prepares them to address environmental, sustainability, and social responsibility issues throughout their careers. The top MBA for Nonprofits ranking recognizes programs that prepare graduates for mission-driven leadership.
“As sustainability becomes increasingly central to business success, organizations need leaders who can connect financial performance with environmental and social outcomes,” said Dr. Eban Goodstein, director of the Bard MBA in Sustainability. “That's exactly what our students learn to do.”
Rather than offering sustainability as an elective or concentration, Bard’s MBA in Sustainability weaves it throughout the curriculum. Every course—from finance and accounting to marketing, operations, leadership, and strategy—helps students understand how business decisions create both financial and environmental outcomes.
Post Date: 07-22-2026
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Professor Daniel Mendelsohn Reflects On The Odyssey in Several Publications
Professor Daniel Mendelsohn Reflects On The Odyssey in Several Publications
Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities Daniel Mendelsohn, who published a translation of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey in 2025, was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria of CNN about the lasting impact of The Odyssey on the occasion of Christopher Nolan’s new movie adapting the poem. He also wrote two opinion pieces about the movie, one for the New York Review of Books about Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s narrative, and one for the New York Times refuting the idea that the movie is historically inaccurate because of its casting. “[Nolan] is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world,” he writes for the New York Times. Speaking to Zakaria, Mendelsohn said, “Of the two Homeric poems, The Odyssey is the one we can’t let go of. It’s a story that continues to speak to the way we live. [It’s] a modern dilemma: how do you balance home and adventure?”Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities.
Bard’s Classical Studies Program seeks to understand the languages, literatures, histories, and visual and material cultures of the premodern Mediterranean world. The program approaches these ancient societies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including linguistics, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy, while also considering the long and complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome in art, language, politics, and culture from antiquity to the present day.
Post Date: 07-22-2026
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Kenneth Stern Interviewed About Australia’s Definition of Antisemitism
Kenneth Stern Interviewed About Australia’s Definition of Antisemitism
Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and lead drafter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, was interviewed about the weaponization of that definition in contemporary life. Stern spoke to SBS News on their “News in Depth” podcast, discussing the definition’s usefulness for identifying discrimination as well as what he sees as its misuse “[to] regulate speech or shut down debate on university campuses.” Stern says that trying to control antisemitism by controlling speech actually exacerbates it. “[Students] should be able to have a wide lens for looking at the world around them. And you can’t do that when you restrict speech.”Kenneth S. Stern ’75, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.
The Bard Center for the Study of Hate works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. The Center is a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project, and brings scholars from diverse disciplines to Bard to speak about the human capacity to hate and demonize others. The Center also places, mentors, and supports students working at internships with nongovernmental organizations that combat hate.
Post Date: 07-22-2026
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Bard Scholar Julianne Swartz MFA ’03 Awarded Grant from Bobby Anspach Foundation
Bard Scholar Julianne Swartz MFA ’03 Awarded Grant from Bobby Anspach Foundation
Julianne Swartz MFA ’03, associate professor and codirector of the studio arts program at Bard College, has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the Bobby Anspach Foundation, an organization created to support artists, scientists, and researchers whose work advances dialogue on meditation, psychology, creativity, and collective engagement as pathways to global harmony and health. Swartz, whose work focuses on multisensory installations, was one of two artists chosen from over 3,300 applicants for the inaugural flagship grant.Julianne Swartz MFA ’03, associate professor and codirector of the studio arts program.
The grant will support Swartz’s project, Heart Flow Instrument, a large-scale contemplative environment in the form of a deconstructed fountain that functions as a body in itself, where water, sound, light, and human presence circulate through interconnected vessels. Each visitor becomes a component of that body, contributing vital rhythms to a shared sensory field. As visitors engage with sensors, their cardiac and neural rhythms radiate through the installation, affecting the sonic and haptic environment others inhabit.
“This generous funding will allow me to experiment with biomedical sensors to explore new thresholds of interactivity using human biorhythms to shape sound and light,” said Swartz.
The Bobby Anspach Foundation was established to carry forward the vision of artist Bobby Anspach, through the belief that art holds the power to fundamentally transform how we understand ourselves and each other. This year's flagship grants support artists whose work uses immersive technology and sensory experience to open new pathways into consciousness, empathy, and collective transformation. Throughout 2026, the foundation will spotlight the work of all grant recipients across its platforms and through foundation programming such as events, conversations, and gatherings designed to share this research across disciplines and introduce the grant recipients to new audiences.
Post Date: 07-17-2026
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