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
Katherine Boivin Awarded New Foundation for Art History Fellowship
Boivin's project considers everyday spaces in the medieval city.
Katherine Boivin Awarded New Foundation for Art History Fellowship
Katherine Boivin, associate professor of art history and visual culture.
The fellowship will contribute $50,000 in support of Boivin’s current project, Powers of Projection: Contingent Architecture and Medieval Subjectivity. The book considers everyday spaces in the medieval city, which were constructed and maintained through large-scale collaborative processes but which, through their small scale, addressed individual pedestrians. It asks how medieval people experienced these spaces and whether such fundamentally contingent architecture shaped the understanding of the self in relationship to society. The project guides readers from outside the gates of the medieval city into its very heart through a series of encounters with different projecting architectural features, including bridges, city gates, market stalls, and charnel houses.
Katherine M. Boivin is the author of Riemenschneider in Rothenburg: Sacred Space and Civic Identity in the Late Medieval City (Penn State University Press, 2021) and coeditor of Riemenschneider in Situ (Brepols, 2021) and Gothic Space: Studies in Celebration of Stephen Murray (Brill, 2026). Boivin’s work has been recognized with numerous fellowships and awards, including the Michèle Dominy Award for Teaching Excellence, a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Art History Grant, an NEH Summer Stipends Award, an ICMA Research Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her research focuses on the dynamic interactions between art, architecture, and human activity in late medieval Europe.
About the New Foundation for Art History
Founded in 2019, the New Foundation for Art History strives to serve the field in innovative ways that have been overlooked or underserved by existing institutions of its kind. The goal of the NFAH is to foster the best current research in Art History with a flexible approach to grant-making, and to lead by example towards a more equitable future of the discipline where excellence is promoted and rewarded in the broadest ways possible.
Post Date: 06-24-2026
Human Rights Roadmap Signed by Pavlina Tcherneva Featured in the Guardian and Le Monde
“We are putting concrete options on the table," wrote several signatories for the Guardian.
Human Rights Roadmap Signed by Pavlina Tcherneva Featured in the Guardian and Le Monde
Pavlina Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.
Several economists who are signatories wrote an op-ed for the Guardian that the current economic landscape is precarious and environmentally destructive. “Poverty is manufactured,” they write. “We are putting concrete options on the table [that] spell out evidence, implementation steps and real‑world examples. We call on political leaders at all levels to use them, to listen to those most affected.”
Post Date: 06-23-2026
More News
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Bard College Partners with Ulster County on Ground‑Level Air Quality Monitoring Network
Bard College Partners with Ulster County on Ground‑Level Air Quality Monitoring Network
Bard College’s Hudson Valley Community Air Network (HVCAN) is partnering with Ulster County to install 17 new ground‑level air quality sensors at libraries, town halls, and community centers across the county. The sensors will provide the community with real‑time information about local air pollution and offer free alerts through JustAir, a platform that notifies users when air quality becomes unhealthy and again when conditions improve. The sensors measure fine particulate matter, or tiny particles from sources like soot, smoke, and vehicle exhaust that are small enough to be inhaled and cause serious health impacts. Because the sensors are installed roughly six feet off the ground, they capture the air residents actually breathe, which can differ significantly from rooftop or elevated monitors. “HVCAN demonstrates that science does not belong only in laboratories or universities; it belongs in communities, where people can use knowledge to support healthier futures together,” said Desirée Lyle, program director at Bard’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities. “The data we create encourages curiosity, dialogue, and shared responsibility for environmental health, while offering a model for how science and community engagement can grow together.”Desirée Lyle installs an air quality monitor for the Poughkeepsie Regional Air Quality Station at Adriance Memorial Library. 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: 06-18-2026
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Sara J. Winston Receives Helena Svetla Fund Grant
Sara J. Winston Receives Helena Svetla Fund Grant
Sara J. Winston, associate director of the photography program and artist in residence, has been awarded the inaugural Helena Svetla Fund Grant, administered through the Patient Caregiver Artist Coalition (PCAC). PCAC, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit founded by Bard alum Jordan Rathkopf ’02, is dedicated to elevating the voices of patients and caregivers through art and storytelling, fostering empathy and inclusion in healthcare culture. This first grant from the fund supports artists working at the intersection of art and healthcare, and will support the production of Sara's forthcoming monograph, Infusion, to be published by Saint Lucy Books of Baltimore, MD. The book showcases over a decade of self-portraits made during monthly and biannual intravenous medical treatments for Multiple Sclerosis, alongside episodic creative nonfiction writing and an interview between the author and the artist Moyra Davey. Infusion will launch on January 30, 2027, in conjunction with a solo exhibition at CPW Kingston in Kingston, NY.Sara J. Winston, associate director of the photography program and artist in residence. Photo by Jordan Swartz
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: 06-18-2026
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Jack Ferver Featured in the New York Times
Jack Ferver Featured in the New York Times
Jack Ferver, assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard College, was featured in the New York Times in an article about choreographer Martha Graham, whose work Ferver highlights in what the Times calls an “excellent exhibition” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The exhibition, Martha Graham: The Mother of Psychological Dance, takes place in five acts and addresses Graham’s sense of theatrical timing and structure. Gia Kourlas writes that the work of Graham’s that Ferver “responds to most and considers most necessary now involves Graham’s deep interest in psychology—how dance originating in an inner life was not only different, but radical.”Jack Ferver, assistant professor of theater and performance.
The centennial exhibition curated by Ferver traces the arc of Graham’s groundbreaking career, centering her visionary approach to dance as psychological expression. Graham transformed the dancing body into a vessel for inner life, using movement to externalize emotion, memory, and the unconscious. “There was such an ask that Graham had for her audience,” Ferver told Kourlas. “I feel that what Freud gave to modern psychology is what Graham gave to dance.”
Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.
Post Date: 06-17-2026
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Nayland Blake ’82 Profiled in Hyperallergic
Nayland Blake ’82 Profiled in Hyperallergic
Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts at Bard College, was profiled in Hyperallergic. In an interview with Lisa Yin Zhang, Blake spoke about how their art and work affects their understanding of their own identity, what Pride Month means to them, and the movements that informed the work of their peers in queer art. “I think the models were the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Rights movements—the insistence on the importance and centrality of work by women artists or, for lack of a better term, minority artists, all through the ’60s and ’70s,” Blake told Zhang. “To me, the lessons of those movements were: It’s not enough to just make something in your studio. You have to also be a scholar. You have to also be a writer. You have to be a person who champions other work, so that you build the context within which your work can be legible.” Blake’s first large-scale outdoor installation, “Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre, will be on view at Art Omi in Columbia County, NY, on June 27.Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts.
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: 06-17-2026
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Peter L'Official Receives Graham Foundation Grant
Peter L'Official Receives Graham Foundation Grant
Peter L'Official, associate professor of literature and director of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, has been awarded a 2026 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The grant will support his project, Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black’s Black Arts Movement, which uses biography as a method to explore how an unsung Black American architect, W. Joseph Black, navigated the structural impediments that even today confront American architects identifying as Black. The project draws on archival architectural and literary sources to reconstruct not only a life, but the broad, interdisciplinary scope of Black’s unrealized works, which included transformative design plans for Harlem as well as field-altering historical texts chronicling the history of Black builders in America, and which reveal Black’s work as an unacknowledged architectural arm of the multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts bestows project-based grants to support the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.Peter L'Official, associate professor of literature and director of American and Indigenous Studies.
The American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States. Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way.
Post Date: 06-16-2026
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Richard Aldous Reviews Ike and Winston for the Wall Street Journal
Richard Aldous Reviews Ike and Winston for the Wall Street Journal
Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Bard College, has published a review in the Wall Street Journal of historian Jonathan W. Jordan’s book Ike and Winston: World War, Cold War, and an Extraordinary Friendship, a detailed exploration of the relationship between Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill as they shaped world events from WWII through the Cold War era. “Jordan tells the story of Eisenhower and Churchill with great brio,” writes Aldous for the Wall Street Journal. “He is writing for a general rather than a scholarly audience, so he does not much bother with the debates among historians about these two giants. If perhaps he is sometimes a little heavy-handed with the metaphors … he makes up for it with a sense for drama and telling incidental detail that never disrupts the narrative.Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History.
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: 06-16-2026
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