Bard News & Events

The talk attempted to discuss issues like: how to recognize a masterpiece? Do journalists actually copy from one another? Do novels retell the same old themes? Under what structural conditions can originality arise - in solitude or in a team? Why do we, on the one hand, strive for "the New," but, on the other, have a hard time recognizing it? The other speakers were Peter Seyferth, who teaches Political Theory at LMU München, and Debora Weber-Wulff, Professor of Media and Computer Studies at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin. More info can be found here (German).

Daniel Mendelsohn, award-winning author, critic, and Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College since 2006, has been named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism for his most recent book, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2384

The Bard College Farm started in 2012 with plenty of enthusiasm and financial assistance from Bard students, staff, and faculty, as well as community members. Last season the farm grew 30 kinds of vegetables and had the largest cranberry bog in the Hudson Valley. The farm sells produce to the campus dining service and at a local farmer's market, and offers opportunities for people on and off campus to learn about sustainable agriculture.
http://www.bard.edu/news/news.php?id=54

The Bard Center for Environmental Policy’s C2C Fellows will host a national screening of the movie The Island President on April 17. The film will be shown on a number of college campuses, and followed by a discussion with award-winning director Jon Shenk, 350.org executive director and cofounder May Boeve, and Bard CEP director Dr. Eban Goodstein.
http://blogs.bard.edu/theislandpresident/

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) will hold its 10th commencement on January 26 at the Eastern NY Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York. BPI will award A.A. and B.A. degrees to 60 students, BPI’s largest graduating class. The students include 56 men and four women earning 47 A.A. degrees and 13 B.A. degrees in social studies, literature and the humanities, and mathematics.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2383

The Landscape and Arboretum Program at Bard College and the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) are offering noncredit continuing education classes at Bard College this winter and spring. Open to the public, these classes feature some of the top names in the horticulture industry and cover a wide array of topics.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2382

Min Kyung Shinn ’14 is the 2012 recipient of the Katherine Lynn Mester Memorial Scholarship at Bard. Mester was a professional actress, Pilates teacher, and the wife of Joseph Luzzi, Bard College associate professor of Italian studies. The scholarship is awarded to students who exhibit Katherine Mester’s spirit of generosity, kindness, and genuine love of learning.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2381

On February 5, ECLA of Bard inaugurated a series of lectures in which faculty members present their research to the public. David Martínez Perucha
Tommaso Campanella's "Conversion":
the Performative (Re)construction of the Self in the Context of the Counter-Reformation Tommaso Campanella (Stilo 1568 - Paris 1639) led a prophetic rebellion movement against the Spanish Monarchy in Calabria in 1599. The plan was discovered by the Spanish authorities, who detained and tortured both the leader and an important number of accomplices. Campanella was able to escape the death penalty by feigning madness, but he still had to face the gloomy perspective of a life sentence for the crimes of lese-majesty and conspiracy. In 1606 he presented in a variety of textual forms (poems, letters, a book) and in person (to conspicuous members of the Church in Naples) his particular path of thought: a narrative of his return to the flock between confession and illumination, a complete reshaping of his own identity that most scholars have described either as an actual conversion or as a case of massive simulation. The presentation tried to offer an alternative account of the process based on the concept of ?scenification' (or staging) the way it has been defined in the scholarship of the performing arts, where it is applied not only to the arts, but also to public events. David Martínez Perucha has been teaching Spanish language and literature at ECLA of Bard since 2002. He has also taught the literature of the Spanish Golden Age at the Free University of Berlin (FU) and has published several translations from German and English into Spanish. He is currently preparing his dissertation on Campanella's political speech at FU.

Bard College senior Maxwell J. McKee ’13 is one of the recipients of the prestigious American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards for 2012. McKee is a double major in biology and music at Bard College. For his Senior Project in music, he will be performing two full-length piano concerts and is writing an orchestral piece for the American Symphony Orchestra, to be premiered at Bard’s commencement concert in May 2014.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2380

The volume, published earlier this month by Palgrave Macmillan, explores the encounter between theatre, performance, and human rights, by looking at a repertoire of plays and performance practices from several countries spread across the globe. The book seeks to understand the extent to which theatre and performance engage or are expected to engage with crucial claims in the realm of human rights, all the more in the context of the transformative aesthetics of the twenty-first century. You can read more about the book here.

This April, Bard College is launching a yearlong 10th anniversary celebration of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts with a month of music, theater, and dance. Highlights include an all-Wagner concert performed by the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO); a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 performed by members of the ASO and the Bard Conservatory Orchestra; a production of Euripides’ The Bacchae; comic works by Jack Ferver and QWAN Company; Sō Percussion’s Student Concert; the 2013 Bard Faculty Dance Concert; and an evening with author Neil Gaiman and singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2379

From January 31 to February 2, the Bard Center for Environmental Policy (Bard CEP) will host a three-day conference on improving the opportunities to link the study of Asia with its natural environment. With support of the Henry Luce Foundation, Bard College is exploring opportunities for intensive research, experiential education, service learning, and student and faculty exchange partnerships in China, Japan, and South Korea. Faculty, students and staff from neighboring institutions are invited to participate.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2370

Gilles Peress, Bard College visiting professor of human rights and photography and internationally renowned photojournalist, is exhibiting work in Art or Evidence: The Power of Photojournalism, on view from January 3 through March 10 at the Mandeville Gallery, Union College in Schenectady, New York.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2378

The Bard Graduate Center has received one of 832 Art Works grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The $20,000 grant will support the BGC’s presentation of Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a remarkable but little-known collection of medieval and 18th-century French objects that was the foundation of The Met’s decorative arts collection. The exhibition will open on April 4, 2013.
http://www.bgc.bard.edu/news/bgc-press-room/nea-grant.html

Devotees of American Public Media’s Marketplace will be pleased to know that the show’s Africa correspondent is Bard’s very own Gretchen Wilson ’97. During the last eight years, Wilson has established herself as a political reporter who tackles serious labor, economic, and social justice issues.
http://www.bard.edu/news/news.php?id=53

What does it mean to be human? How can we consider freedom and constraint in the year 2013? Bard's Center for Civic Engagement invites students from the Bard network of institutions to examine these questions in a written essay or multimedia piece for its annual contest. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2013.
http://www.bard.edu/civicengagement/essaycontest/

"All those jokes about Bard students always talking about Hannah Arendt or Foucault or Derrida are pretty true," says junior Julia DeFabo. Read Julia's story and other student stories:
http://www.bard.edu/admission/discover/students/

The Raptors pulled out a last-minute 47–43 victory against the Brewers on Tuesday night.
http://www.bardathletics.com/news/2013/1/8/MBB_0108131939.aspx

Millions around the world consider basic water and sewerage systems a far-off luxury. Fortunately, people such as Christophe Chung ’06, a water supply and sanitation consultant at the World Bank, are helping to bring the life-sustaining liquid to some of the world’s most water-scarce places, North Africa and the Middle East.
http://www.bard.edu/news/news.php?id=52

A handwritten inscription in a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, gifted from publisher Kurt Wolff to Hannah Arendt, stands as a symbol of survival on many levels: from the survival of the names mentioned to the survival of friendship, to the implications of the date. Bard College senior Kerk Soursourian investigates.
http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=8575

The Association for Social Economics (ASE) has awarded Pavlina R. Tcherneva, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and assistant professor of economics at Bard, the 2013 Helen Potter Prize. The prize was created and endowed by the ASE in 1975 and is awarded each year to a promising scholar of social economics for authoring the best article in The Review of Social Economy.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2376

In its recently released report, Putting Students First, Governor Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission recommends the expansion and funding of early college programs in New York State. Bard College, which has run public early college high schools in New York City since 2001, and has been a leading champion of the model, applauds the Commission’s recognition of the importance of early colleges in increasing college access and success, particularly for underserved students.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2377