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
Bard College Awarded $1.35 Million Grant in Support of Humanities Curricular Innovation Project
The Mellon Foundation grant will fund Bard’s project, “The Uses and Abuses of History,” which responds to the rise of unreliable digital, social, and other media, heightened by the proliferation of AI-generated content, which not only threatens our ability to discern fact from fiction but confounds our claims to a shared humanity.
Bard College Awarded $1.35 Million Grant in Support of Humanities Curricular Innovation Project
Clockwise from top left: Miles V. Rodríguez, Nabanjan Maitra, Robert Cioffi, and Valentina A. Grasso.
“The Uses and Abuses of History” aims to offer students the tools to exercise judgement, to act, and to guard against the erasure of history in a world that is filled with conflicting and often false narratives. The project has three central curricular goals: first, to provide an institutional structure to unite students, staff, and scholars engaged in humanistic inquiry from across Bard College; second, to strengthen students’ habits of attention and abilities to read and think critically and contextually; and third, to make use of the College’s growing collection of archives to make archival research and praxis central to its curriculum. To accomplish these goals and enhance humanities education at Bard, the project will deploy curricular development, a workshop series, and a regranting program including summer research opportunities. The final year of the grant will culminate in an exhibition featuring a broad range of artifacts underscoring the crucial role played by material culture in the shaping of historical narratives.
The principal investigator team for “The Uses and Abuses of History” includes four Bard faculty members: the principal investigator, Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Iberian Studies Miles V. Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Nabanjan Maitra, Associate Professor of Classics Robert Cioffi, and Assistant Professor of Medieval History Valentina A. Grasso. A wider advisory council of faculty and administrators will help guide the project.
“The project team and I are honored to take part in the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative at Bard College,” said Rodríguez. “We are thrilled to contribute to Bard’s historical commitment to curricular and pedagogical creativity and innovation. While we recognize that the spread of false information is nothing new under the sun, we consider ourselves fortunate to respond to its present permutations with a robust collaborative project in service to our students and intellectual community.”
The Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative was established in 2021 to support the development of new humanities-based curricular and community projects at liberal arts colleges across the United States.
Post Date: 04-23-2026
M. Gessen Produces New Podcast Series, The Idiot, with Serial Team
The Times calls the story “worthy of a Jonathan Franzen novel.”
M. Gessen Produces New Podcast Series, The Idiot, with Serial Team
M. Gessen.
Post Date: 04-22-2026
More News
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Stephen Shore Announced as Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Stephen Shore Announced as Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts at Bard College, has been announced as a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor society founded to foster and sustain excellence in American literature, music, and art. Shore was honored in the department of Art in recognition of notable achievement in his field of photography, and will be inducted along with other new members during the organization’s annual Arts and Letters Ceremonial in May.Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.
The Photography Program at Bard College offers instruction in the medium while providing a historical and aesthetic framework for student development within the context of a broad-based liberal arts education.
Post Date: 04-21-2026
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Jenny Offill Receives Dora Maar House Residency
Jenny Offill Receives Dora Maar House Residency
Jenny Offill, writer in residence at Bard College, has been awarded a residency at Dora Maar House in France. Offill, who will begin her residence in June, has authored three novels, Last Things, Dept. of Speculation (which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award), and Weather (shortlisted for the Women’s Fiction Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine). The residency is awarded to outstanding arts and humanities professionals and provides them with an opportunity to reside at the Dora Maar 18th-century mansion to focus on creative aspects of their work.Jenny Offill, writer in residence.
The Written Arts Program at Bard encourages students to experiment with their writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities. Students are encouraged to consider writing as an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world.
Post Date: 04-15-2026
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Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World Awarded the $100,000 Hayek Prize
Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World Awarded the $100,000 Hayek Prize
A new book by Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture Sean McMeekin has been awarded the Hayek Book Prize by the Manhattan Institute. To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, published by Basic Books, won the $100,000 prize as one of six finalists. McMeekin will deliver the annual Hayek lecture on June 4 in New York City. “I am humbled and grateful to be added to the honor roll of Hayek award winners who are carrying on this vital conversation,” McMeekin said.Professor Sean McMeekin and his book To Overthrow the World.
The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.
Post Date: 04-14-2026
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Parami University Founder and Simon's Rock Alumnus Kyaw Moe Tun Featured in Forbes
Parami University Founder and Simon's Rock Alumnus Kyaw Moe Tun Featured in Forbes
Parami University, part of the Bard Global Degree Program, was covered in Forbes magazine. Forbes interviewed Kyaw Moe Tun SR ’05, founder and president of Parami University, about his educational background and his decision to move back to Myanmar to found the school in 2021 after earning his PhD in chemistry. In 2021, just before Parami was established, a military coup threatened its construction. Tun believed “liberal arts and sciences education that encourages critical thinking was the best form of resistance,” and continued despite these challenges.Kyaw Moe Tun of Parami University. Photo by East-West Center
Tun said that "the academic credibility that Bard [lent] to Parami" was one of the biggest contributions to the university's founding. Bard assisted Parami with setting up a registrar and managing student affairs, from the perspective that “higher education institutions are not supposed to be standing on an Ivy League tower.” For Parami students still facing barriers to their education, Tun believes “these liberal arts approaches, discussions, and readings help them find meaning and purpose.”
Parami is part of the Global Higher Education Network for the 21st Century (GHEA21), an organization that prepares students from diverse geographies and backgrounds to address global challenges through rigorous liberal arts and sciences education. Underlying its work is a commitment to academic freedom and a belief in the fundamental link between higher education and democracy.
Post Date: 04-14-2026
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Bard Faculty Member Julia Weist Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship
Bard Faculty Member Julia Weist Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship
Julia Weist, visiting artist in residence in studio arts at Bard College, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to the MacDowell Residency Program in the Visual Arts category for spring/summer 2026. While in residence from August 6–20, Julia will complete postproduction work on her project, Questioning, to be presented as a live work of theater debuting at New Theater Hollywood in July 2026. Located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, MacDowell is one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious artist residency programs, and fellowships are distributed by seven discipline-specific admissions panels that make their selections solely based on the excellence of the applicant's work.Julia Weist, visiting artist in residence in studio arts. Photo by Adam T. Deen.
Questioning re-enacts an exchange that occurred between Weist and New York's Department of State, which investigated her artistic use of a private investigator license. After leveraging her research-based artistic practice to earn PI credentials in 2022, Weist had gained access to restricted tools that aggregate sensitive, non-public data about American citizens. She used the data to create photographs that arranged and obscured information she purchased about herself, her spouse, and neighbors. When the work was exhibited, New York's Department of State opened an inquiry into her licensure, raising fundamental questions about artistic authority, investigative methodology, and the financial systems that value artistic labor. The state ultimately determined that none of Weist's work violated the rules of the credential, and dropped its case. In residence at MacDowell, she will edit video documentation of Questioning, which restages her interrogation with NY's deputy chief investigator, thereby closing the case on her own terms.
The Studio Arts Program at Bard provides a breadth of expanded offerings while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles, in an era when much contemporary art cannot be contained within the traditional categories and technology is transforming the production of visual images.
Post Date: 04-07-2026
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Daniel Mendelsohn Reviews Son of Nobody for the New York Times
Daniel Mendelsohn Reviews Son of Nobody for the New York Times
Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities Daniel Mendelsohn reviewed Son of Nobody by Yann Martel for the New York Times. Interest in the period has grown, he writes, and historical fiction being published today is an extension of the Classical tradition of rewriting stories. Son of Nobody participates in this tradition by focusing on a professor translating a fictional epic about a foot soldier, whose “downmarket and decidedly un-Homeric casting allows the tale, and Martel’s novel, to ask: ‘What is it that makes a hero a hero?’” Mendelsohn concludes that Son of Nobody has “genuine charm at times, with ingenious touches throughout,” though “the book’s central device — the twinning of the lost ancient epic and the modern story of its discoverer’s life challenges, each meant to ennoble a ‘son of nobody’ and make you feel for him — is wholly unpersuasive.”Professor Daniel Mendelsohn.
Mendelsohn teaches in Bard’s Classical Studies Program, which 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: 04-06-2026
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