Institutes | The Bard Center

About the Bard Center

The Hudson Valley is a microcosm of the changing American landscape. Its pattern of rapid growth has transformed a once rural area into a kaleidoscope of cities, industrial hubs, suburbs, farms, and wilderness. Its promise, problems, and challenges mirror those of the nation as a whole, and it thus provides the ideal locale for the pioneering programs of The Bard Center.

Established in 1978, The Bard Center develops pacesetting educational and scholarly programs with a recognized nationwide impact. It promotes the study of the liberal arts and sciences as they relate to issues of public planning and decision making in and beyond the Hudson River Valley. These programs enrich the intellectual, cultural, and social experience of Bard undergraduates and establish a network of academic and professional centers beyond the campus.

Fellows of the Bard Center

Bard Center fellows, who serve active terms of varying lengths, present seminars and lectures that are open to the public and teach or direct research by Bard undergraduates. Fellows are chosen on the basis of special achievement in the arts, sciences, literature, philosophy, history, or social studies. The following prominent scholars and artists currently serve as fellows:

Emmanuel Dongala, chemist and novelist. Currently professor of French at Bard and of French and chemistry at Simon's Rock College of Bard, he has been dean of academic affairs and chair of the chemistry department at the University of Brazzaville, Congo, where his research focused on devising a reliable method for the evaluation of toxic cyanogenic glucosides in cassava, the main food staple of the Congo. A former president of the Congolese chapter of PEN, he is the author of Un fusil dans la main, un poème dans la poche (1973), which received the Ladislas Domandi Prize for best French novel by a nonresident; the short story collection Jazz et vin de palme (1982); Le feu des origines (1987), which received the Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire and the Grand Prix de la fondation de France; and Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles (1998).

Gidon Eshel, climatologist, geophysicist, and environmentalist. Currently on the science faculty at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, Dr. Eshel is a recipient of the NOAA/UCAR Global and Climate Change Fellowship and research grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. His technical work focuses on mechanisms of climate variability in the Earth’s subtropics, climate predictability, statistical climatology, and simple numerical modeling of geophysical fluids. With his colleague Pam Martin of the University of Chicago, where he served as an assistant professor of geophysics, he authored “Diet, Energy and Global Warming,” which is on the list of the American Geophysical Union’s most downloaded papers. He is a former member of the scientific staff at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, historian, author, and educator. The Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education at Harvard University and former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she is the author or editor of nine books, most recently An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research. She is cochair of the National Research Council's Committee on Teacher Preparation, and has served as president of the National Research Council and the Spencer Foundation. From 1994 to 2003, she taught at New York University, where she was director of the Center for the Study of American Culture and Education and founding chair of the Department of the Humanities and the Social Sciences in the Steinhardt School of Education.

Bradford Morrow, novelist, poet, critic, and editor. His published work includes the novels Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (a finalist for the 1992 PEN/Faulkner Award), Trinity Fields, Giovanni's Gift, and Ariel's Crossing, and the poetry collections Posthumes: Selected Poems 1977 1982, Danae's Progress, The Preferences, and A Bestiary. He is a founding editor of Conjunctions, the widely respected literary journal published at Bard, where he is professor of literature, and he is the editor of several volumes of the poems and essays of Kenneth Rexroth.

Jacob Neusner, scholar. A prolific writer on Judaic studies and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, he has held academic appointments at universities throughout the world; has been a member of the American Academy of Religion, National Council on the Humanities, and National Council on the Arts; and is the founding editor of the Brown Judaic Studies series, editor in chief of South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Judaism (Brill, 1999). The recipient of numerous academic awards and honorary degrees, he is currently the holder of a newly endowed chair, Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard College.

William Weaver, translator and interpreter of Italian prose, author, music critic and scholar, and professor of literature at Bard College. He has translated works by Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Ignazio Silone, Luigi Pirandello, and other prominent Italian writers. He is an authority on 19th-century Italian opera and is known for his study of Giuseppe Verdi, his biography of Eleonora Duse, and his music criticism and reviews. Among his many honors are a National Book Award, the Galantiere Prize, and a PEN Medal in recognition of his lifework as a translator.

Scholarly Programs

Institute for Writing and Thinking

In August 1981 Bard College's entering students first attended an intensive three-week Workshop in Language and Thinking, aimed at helping them recognize the importance of written language as a tool for learning in all subjects. Its goals were, and continue to be, to teach the ability to think through writing, experiment with many genres, instill a sensitivity to voice, and inculcate a love of writing. Inspired by the largely positive reaction, Bard established the Institute for Writing and Thinking, a place where teachers could imagine and practice new teaching ideas.

In November 1982 the Institute offered its first workshops, taught by faculty drawn from the Workshop in Language and Thinking. That faculty, joined by others and led by then Bard dean Teresa Vilardi and the late Paul Connolly, developed the Institute's continually evolving program. Since its inception, approximately 40,000 teachers from colleges and schools across the nation have participated.

Institute workshops are experiential forums where didactic instruction supports and complements practice. They create a collaborative learning environment in which reading, writing, and thinking are active processes and the pleasure of the classroom is derived from the imaginative way people work in it. More than 125 faculty associates of the Institute have helped develop its practices, drawing on the best techniques for the teaching of writing and on contemporary theories of knowledge and language. The most distinctive feature of Institute workshops is the way these leaders demonstrate teaching practices and participate in writing processes.

In 2006 the Institute received a "Project Teamwork" grant of $15,000 from the Klingenstein Fund for a series of workshops on "Teaching the Academic Paper" at three independent schools: The United Nations International School and Friends Seminar, both in New York, and the Winsor School, in Massachusetts. The Institute offered on-site consulting at schools and colleges including Red Hook High School, Brooklyn Friends School, Fashion Institute of Technology, Marymount Manhattan College, The Island School/P.S. 188 (in connection with Bard High School Early College), Staten Island Academy, Little Red School House, and Mamaroneck High School, all in New York; The Hopkins School and Wilbur Cross High School, both in Connecticut; Millburn High School, in New Jersey; Boston International High School and Salem State College, both in Massachusetts; and Lewis & Clark College (workshop for First-Year Seminar faculty), in Oregon.

Institute projects this past year included workshops for the Bard community and collaborations with Bard faculty. Faculty associates offered workshops in "Writing to Learn," "Writing to Read," and "Revision" to Bard First-Year Seminar faculty. The administrative staff of the Academic Resources Center participated in, as well as taught, weekend and weeklong workshops; the Institute director and associate director led workshops for the tutors in the Bard Prison Initiative; the NEH-funded Faculty Humanities Seminar on "Reading Narratives in Four Religious Traditions" for secondary teachers in the region continued in spring and summer 2006. Seminar presenters included Bard faculty Bruce Chilton, Jacob Neusner, Lawrence Troster, Nerina Rustomji, Daniel Berthold, Nancy Leonard, and Richard Davis. Nancy Leonard also taught an Institute-based workshop for Bard students writing Senior Projects.

The Institute also offered workshops on "Writing to Read Difficult Scientific Texts" (developed in 2001 03 though a grant from the Ira W. DeCamp Foundation and in collaboration with the Teacher Education Program at Rockefeller University). Dr. Valeri Thomson, director, Immediate Science Research Opportunity Program at Bard College and research scientist at Rockefeller University, offered a workshop on "Tracy Kidder's Mountain Beyond Mountains: Dr. Paul Farmer and the Quest to Cure the World of Infectious Disease." Thomson and Ric Campbell, director, Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College, offered "Writing to Read Scientific Texts: Worms, People, and the Life and Death of Cells" in May 2007.

In April 2006, the Institute conference "Great Expectations: Re-Visioning the Academic Paper" featured a panel presentation by Robert Frank, an economist and professor of economics at Cornell University; Mark Lytle, professor of history at Bard College; and Nancy Leonard, professor of English at Bard College. The panel was moderated by Institute associate Frank Cioffi. Associates Alfred Guy, Darlene Forrest, Nicole Wallack, and Irene Papoulis led workshops for the 115 conference participants.

Weekend and weeklong workshops offered by the Institute in 2006 included "Writing and Thinking"; "Writing to Learn"; "Fictions: Memory and Imagination"; "Poetry: Reading, Writing, Teaching"; "Poetry for Today's Classrooms"; "Inquiry into Essay"; "Learning through Listening: An Inquiry"; "Thinking through Narrative"; "Thinking Historically through Writing"; and "Writing to Read Difficult Scientific Texts." One-day "Writer as Reader" workshops included "Ethics of Argument in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma"; "Bringing Voice to Text in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter"; and "Loyalty and Honor: Sophocles' Antigone and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." New workshops included "Teaching the Academic Paper," "Reading Narratives in Four Religious Traditions," "Reading Human Rights," and "Fiction from the Inside Out."

The Institute's publications include conference proceedings, in-service teaching materials, and Handbook for Teachers, which contains summary scripts of the "Teaching Writing and Thinking" and "Writing to Learn" workshops.
For more information: http://www.bard.edu/iwt

Bard Fiction Prize

The Bard Fiction Prize was established in 2001 and is awarded annually to an emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to a monetary award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester.

The creation of the prize can be viewed as a continuation of Bard's long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by faculty and students alike. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard literature faculty, past and present, represent some of the most important writers of our time. The prize, awarded each October, is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction in pursuing their creative goals and to provide an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Recipients of the prize are Peter Orner in 2006, Edie Meidav in 2005, Paul LaFarge in 2004, Monique Truong in 2003, Emily Barton in 2002, and Nathan Englander in 2001.
For more information: http://www.bard.edu/bfp

Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series

The Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series originated in 1979 when Nobel laureate physicist Paul Dirac accepted an invitation from Dr. Abe Gelbart and The Bard Center to deliver a lecture titled "The Discovery of Antimatter." The talk presented a view of science rarely seen by the general public|as a record of personal achievement as well as a body of facts and theories.

For anyone interested in science|student, teacher, researcher, professional in scientific industries, or layperson|the series is an opportunity for firsthand contact with the men and women who are shaping modern science and an opportunity to observe how they think, work, view their own achievements, and assess the challenges that they and other scientists face. Since the program began, audiences have heard more than a hundred eminent scientists, including 45 Nobel laureates and four Fields medalists. Recent speakers include Frank Morgan, Atwell Professor of Mathematics at Williams College and author of Calculus Lite and The Math Chat Book; Kenneth R. Miller, professor of biology at Brown University and author of Finding Darwin's God; George F. Pinder, professor of civil and environmental engineering, mathematics, and computer science at the University of Vermont; Jeff Weeks, a mathematician, MacArthur Fellow, and author of The Shape of Space; and Philip Wadler, a researcher at Avaya Labs and a leading designer of computer programming languages.

Intergeneraltional Seminars

A major goal of The Bard Center is to bring undergraduate students out of the generational isolation of the elementary and secondary years to enrich both their college experience and the experience of the community.

Intergenerational seminars are offered in the evening, with Bard students and community members meeting in groups of 15 to 20 to discuss topics of common concern. Students find these informal, occasionally heated exchanges a welcome adjunct to classroom studies. Each seminar, led by a diverse group of scholars including Bard faculty, Bard Center fellows, and visiting lecturers, meets once a week in the evening for three consecutive weeks.

Recent seminar topics have included "Experiencing History|Tingling with the Past," "Corporate Social Responsibility for the Consumer," "Caravaggio and His Myths," "Historical Archaeology of Palatines in the Mid-Hudson Valley," and "Italian Cinema in a Changing Nation."

Leon Levy Endowment Fund

The Leon Levy Endowment Fund was created in 1995 by the Bard College Board of Trustees, in recognition of more than a decade of transformative philanthropy by Leon Levy. Through grants in many areas, the foundation supports Bard College's academic excellence.

The Leon Levy Endowment Fund Scholarships are awarded annually to second- and third-year students who demonstrate exceptional merit in written and oral expression, evidence of independent thinking and intellectual leadership, and interest in a breadth of academic and artistic pursuits.

The Leon Levy Endowment Fund supports the Bard Music Festival and its associated book series and also makes possible many lectures and performances at Bard. The Leon Levy Professorship in the Arts and Humanities is held by Leon Botstein, president of the College.

Cultural Programs

Bard Music Festival

The Bard Music Festival entered its 18th season in 2007. Since 1990 the festival has been presented on the Bard campus each summer over two consecutive weekends in August; in 1993, a third weekend was added, in the fall. In 2003 the festival moved into The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, where it continues to offer an array of programs whose themes are taken from the life, work, and world of a single composer. Concerts presented in the Fisher Center's 900-seat Sosnoff Theater and 200-seat Theater Two, as well as in the 370-seat Olin Hall, offer both the intimate communication of recital and chamber music and the excitement of full orchestral and choral sound. Musicians gather at Bard up to two weeks in advance to prepare. The weeks of the festival are filled with open rehearsals throughout the campus. Orchestral musicians are often invited to perform in chamber groups. Special events are arranged to complement the performances.

Through a series of preconcert talks and panel discussions by eminent music scholars, composers are examined within the cultural and political contexts of their careers. In 2007, Edward Elgar was the featured composer. Ludwig van Beethoven, Béla Bartók, Charles Ives, Joseph Haydn, Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Leožs Janážcek, Dmitrii Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, and Franz Liszt are among the other recent subjects. Related articles and essays are published by Princeton University Press in a companion book edited by a major music scholar; the series was honored with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award in 2006. The combination of innovative programs built around a specific theme and an outstanding level of professional musicianship has brought the festival international critical acclaim from publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times.
For more information: http://www.fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf

Bard Center Evenings

Bard Center Evenings give trustees and friends of the College opportunities to meet distinguished experts during a series of thought-provoking panel discussions. These evenings are held at least three times a year and explore issues of intellectual, cultural, and social concern. Recent topics have included "Global Warming, Peak Oil, and the Future of U.S. Energy Policy"; "Nuclear Proliferation: Approaches to the New Nuclear Arms Race"; and "We Are What We Eat: Delights and Dangers in Food, Nutrition, and Health."

Lecture and Performance Series

The Bard Center brings to campus outstanding women and men in many fields to present public lectures, readings, and performances. Center programs complement the many lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, and performances presented by the College's academic programs.

The Colorado Quartet continued in residence during the 2007 08 academic year. The residency affords Bard students the opportunity to study in private lessons with the quartet's individual members as well as with the group as a whole for both quartet and other chamber music coaching. The quartet also conducts seminars on a variety of musical topics and offers two public performances, one in each semester. Quartet members are also on the faculty of The Bard College Conservatory of Music.

This year marked the third season of the Bard College Conservatory Concerts and Lectures, showcasing Conservatory faculty and presenting lectures on topics that connect music with other fields. There were three performances by the Conservatory Chamber Orchestra, under the respective batons of Xian Zhang, associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic; Leon Botstein, president of the College and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra; and Melvin Chen, associate director of the Conservatory. The series also included concerts by the Shanghai Quartet, with guest artists Michael Tree, viola, and Robert Martin, cello; the Da Capo Players; and violinist Laurie Smukler and pianist Jeremy Denk; as well as recitals by pianists Claude Frank and Melvin Chen, and a "Meet the Artists" event with soprano Dawn Upshaw and composer Osvaldo Golijov.

The Bard Center's fall concert series featured concerts by violinist Laura Hamilton and pianist Warren Jones, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and the Colorado Quartet, and a program titled "What's Your Era? A ‘Hitchiker's Guide' to Western Music," performed by the Capital Trio. The spring concert series presented cellist Diane Chaplin and pianist Sharon Bjorndal in a program titled "A Mad Empress Remembers"; a performance by a duo of flutists, Patricia Spencer and Tara Helen O'Connor; a concert by violist Marka Gustavsson and pianist Carmel Lowenthal; and concerts by the Da Capo Chamber Players and the Colorado Quartet.

The John Ashbery Poetry Series continues to bring leading contemporary poets to campus for readings and discussion in an intimate setting. In spring 2007, the series presented readings by Ashbery, Bard's Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature and one of America's most honored poets; Stephen Ratcliffe, author of Portraits & Repetition and more than a dozen other collections; Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, a Beijing-born poet whose I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems was published by the University of California Press in 2006; Sawako Nakayasu, Bard's Capstone Scholar in Japanese; and Tracie Morris, a multidisciplinary poet whose literary work incorporates dance, music, and film.

Aston Magna

The Aston Magna Foundation for Music and the Humanities is dedicated to the performance and study of 17th- and 18th-century music. Founded in 1972, the Aston Magna Festival|the oldest summer festival in America devoted to music performed on period instruments|has been held in the Berkshires every year since its inception and at Bard since 1984.

Under the artistic direction of Daniel Stepner, Aston Magna's performances aim to interpret as accurately as possible the music of the past as the composer imagined it. The performance style for these concerts has been developed through interpretation by internationally recognized specialists, and the instruments played are originals from the period or historically accurate reproductions. Among the highlights of Aston Magna's pioneering history are the first performances on original instruments of the complete Bach Brandenburg Concertos and the first such performance of Mozart symphonies in the United States.

Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle

Each June, The Bard Center presents a series of chamber music concerts by world-recognized professional musicians. Founded in 1950, the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle was under the artistic guidance of the late Margaret Creal Shafer from 1980 to 2000. She was succeeded by the present codirectors, Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson|violinist and cellist, respectively, of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. Over the years the Chamber Music Circle has attracted a large and loyal regional following that has enjoyed performances by such artists as the Emerson, Juilliard,
Pacifica, St. Lawrence, and Tokyo string quartets; the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio; the Claremont Trio; cellist Brandon Vamos; pianists Todd Crow, Jeremy Denk, Rudolph Firkusny, Rachelle Jonck, Ursula Oppens, and Blanca Uribe; violinists Sibbi Bernhardsson, Ani and Ida Kavafian, Jennifer Koh, Joan Kwuon, Simin Ganatra, and Hiroko Yajima; flutist Eugenia Zukerman; clarinetist David Shifrin; violists Masumi Per Rostad and Walter Trampler; soprano Arianna Zukerman; and the Tango Project.

Conjunctions

Now celebrating a landmark 25th year of continuous contributions to the literary world, Bard's widely respected and influential literary journal Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, translations, essays, and interviews by established and emerging writers from the United States and around the world. Edited by Bard professor and noted novelist Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions is published semiannually, in the spring and fall. The spring 2006 issue, Conjunctions:46, Selected Subversions, featured 25 new essays on topics ranging from memory and travel to history, religion, music, war, and peace by authors including Joanna Scott, William H. Gass, Shelley Jackson, Rick Moody, John Crowley, Ned Rorem, David Shields, Fanny Howe, Rosamond Purcell, Sven Birkerts, Eliot Weinberger, and others. The issue also featured a special portfolio, "Ten Unproduced Scenarios," by world-renowned filmmakers The Quay Brothers. The fall 2006 issue, Conjunctions:47, 25th Anniversary Issue, celebrated the quarter century since the journal's founding by publishing 45 new works of fiction and poetry by authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathem Lethem, Jim Crace, Ann Lauterbach, John Barth, William H. Gass, Rikki Ducornet, Can Xue, John Ashbery, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, C. D. Wright, Robert Kelly, Edie Meidav, Lydia Davis, Edmund White, Rae Armantrout, Peter Gizzi, Valerie Martin, Rick Moody, Elizabeth Robinson, and many others. The journal's website (www.conjunctions.com) continued to grow and complement the print version, with nearly 300,000 visitors.
For more information: http://www.conjunctions.org

The Conductors Institute

This internationally acclaimed, premier teaching institute, founded and directed by Harold Farberman, is now in its third decade and its ninth year at Bard College. The Institute's goals are to promote technical clarity and precision in baton movement; disarm the competitive learning process so that conductors assist and support one another; and encourage American conductors to become advocates of American composers.

The six-week program, held during the summer, offers a variety of combinations of study that allow students to tailor their own programs. The weeklong prelude to the Institute, Visual Score Study/Baton Placement and Body Movement Technique, unites the study of Institute repertoire with instruction in the Alexander Technique as it relates directly to the enhancement of performance skills and expression. The Conducting Program for Fellows and Colleagues is offered in four- or two-week sessions, during which participants work with the Institute orchestra on repertoire ranging from Beethoven's First Symphony to new works by visiting guest composers. The two-week Discovery Program is designed for conductors with limited experience who desire to improve their skills. The two-week Composer-Conductor Program offers the opportunity for composers to learn conducting techniques that apply to their own works, and for conductors to work with composers as they prepare the work for public performance.

Maestro Farberman anchors a faculty of distinguished guest conductors and composers. Institute participants are exposed to a variety of expert opinions; lectures by scholars, composers, and conductors provide additional program enhancement.

For information about the Institute's M.F.A. program, see the Graduate Programs section of this website.
For more information: http://www.bard.edu/ci

Summer Programs

The Bard Center's tradition of offering summer learning opportunities dates to 1977 and includes the Dutchess County Regional High School of Excellence. Each summer the DCRHSE provides young people from Dutchess County an opportunity to participate in challenging educational programs in a collegiate setting. Admission is competitive and based on students' demonstrated ability and potential. The program is held at Bard, Vassar, and Marist Colleges and focuses on a different theme at each location. The theme of the summer 2007 program at Bard was "It's Alive: Mary Shelley's Novel Frankenstein and Its Hideous Progeny."

The Institute for Writing and Thinking, established by the Bard Center in 1982, offers challenging, engaging, and effective teacher development programs seeking to improve student's writing abilities.