Bard News & Events

This October, Bard College is launching a new path to admission: an online essay examination. The Bard Entrance Examination, open to high school juniors and seniors, will be accessible online through Bard’s admission website and is composed solely of essay questions, offering a new way to apply to Bard that bypasses existing standardized tests and admission processes.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2474

The Hannah Arendt Center will host its sixth annual international conference from Thursday, October 3 to Friday, October 4 in Olin Hall. The two-day conference, “Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis,” will examine the issues surrounding American education and what it means to educate a conscious, democratic citizenry.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2465

Jeremy Denk, esteemed pianist and faculty of The Bard College Conservatory of Music, has been named a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. MacArthur Fellowships are awarded to talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self direction. MacArthur Fellows each receive a $625,000 grant that is bestowed with no conditions—recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and never notified of their candidacy, the recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation days before the public announcement. Denk is the 12th Bard faculty member to be honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2473

The Bard Debate Union opened its 10th season with exceptional student performances at last weekend's Northeast Season Opener Debate Tournament at Binghamton University. Among a number of strong showings from the Bard team, first-year students Eva-Marie Quinones '17 and Jackie Merrill '17 were named tournament champions in the novice parliamentary division. The next event in the team's public debate series, "Resolved: Online Learning Will Save Higher Education," takes place at Bard on Tuesday, October 1 in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis" (October 3–4).
http://debate.bard.edu/?page_id=459

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts presents “Conservatory Sundays: Music Alive!” on Sunday, September 29 at 3 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater. Curated by artistic directors Joan Tower, Grammy Award–winning composer, and Blair McMillen, pianist, this exciting program of 20th- and 21st-century music showcases works performed by students from The Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Music Program.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2469

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College presents the opening concert of the 2013–14 season of the popular American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) series on Friday, October 25 and Saturday, October 26, at 8 p.m. Featured soloists for the ASO’s fall-spring season include Bard College Conservatory of Music students and Concert Competition winners Fanya Wyrick-Flax ’13, Dongfang Ouyang ’14, and Zhi Ma ’15.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2470

The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities in Kingston, which offers a college-level introduction to the humanities to adults living on low incomes, has won grants from two local banks to support student expenses for the 2013–2014 program. The Ulster Savings Bank Charitable Foundation awarded a $2,475 grant and First Niagara Foundation awarded a $2,000 grant to support student expenses such as transportation, books, and childcare.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2467

The Bard Center for Civic Engagement presents a Volunteer Fair and Farmer’s Market on Monday, September 23, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Bard College’s Bertelsmann Campus Center Multipurpose Room. Hudson Valley community agencies, community services, governmental agencies, libraries and non-profits will be recruiting volunteers from the Northern Dutchess and Ulster County region. Students, seniors, and families interested in connecting with organizations seeking volunteers are encouraged to attend.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2468

A book by ECLA of Bard faculty member Irit Dekel was published this summer by Palgrave Macmillan. Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin offers a novel approach to the memorial and its study through a focus on performances. Based on extensive ethnographic research, and drawing on dramaturgic theory, memory studies and theories of the public sphere, the book offers a fresh theorization of memorial experience by analyzing interaction between guides, memorial workers and visitors. Moving away from of postmemory and post trauma approaches, the book recognizes the precariousness and variation of memory work done at the memorial through the ways visitors engages with the act of remembrance rather than with its object, namely the history of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust. This engagement explores how visitors present and perform their 'moral career' at the site, whose codes have been shaped by knowledge about and visits in this and other sites of Holocaust remembrance. For more information, please visit the entry on the publisher's website.

At the beginning of September, several Romanian cities have been the stage for continuous civil manifestations against the largest open-cast gold mine in Europe, planned by the local government and a Canadian mining company around the village of Rosia Montana. Titled Romania's struggle for democracy is encapsulated in a village, Claudia's article describes these protests as an expression of democracy. The piece appeared in the September 5 issue of The Guardian and is available here.

Claudia shares her motivation behind this piece:
"When the September 1 mobilization for Rosia Montana was called, I understood simply that this would be big, and the following days only confirmed this. The struggle for Rosia Montana is Romania's struggle to defend the commons, it is Romania's Gezi in a way, no wonder people in the streets refer to Turkey. There is, I feel, a sense that if we save Rosia Montana we might begin to rebuild our dignity, our trust in ourselves as a society and people, that we might have a chance after all."

Claudia currently lives in Warsaw and is a freelance reporter, writing for the news agency Inter Press Service and for OpenDemocracy among others.

On October 29 at 19:00, ECLA of Bard hosted the lecture "Spatial Ordering of Exile" by architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. The lecture marked the opening of the workshop "Al-Masha or the Space of the Common," a part of the International Symposium "A Journey of Ideas Across: in Dialog with Edward Said" organised by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. More info about the symposium here. Sandi Hilal is an architect based in Bethlehem. She is consultant with the UNRWA on the camp improvement program, a founding member of DAAR as well as of the initiative "Campus in Camps". She is co-author of several research projects, such as "Stateless Nation" "Border Devices". Alessandro Petti is an architect and researcher in urbanism, based in Bethlehem. He is director of the experimental educational program "Campus in Camps" and of DAAR, an art and architecture collective and residency program which combines discourse, spatial intervention, education, and legal challenges. Venue: ECLA of Bard Main Auditorium
Platanenstr. 98a, Berlin - Pankow (map here)
Admission free

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts presents No Child..., written and performed by Nilaja Sun and directed by Hal Brooks. An award-winning hit play that was performed off-Broadway for more than a year, No Child… is based on Sun’s experiences as a teaching artist in New York City. No Child… will be performed at the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater October 4–6.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2463

Bard alumnus, writer, and director David Cote '92 will direct two plays in New York City this month: Otherland, which he wrote, and Something Something Über Alles, written by late Bard faculty member Assurbanipal Babilla.

The Bard Center for Environmental Policy launches its fifth annual National Climate Seminar series on Wednesday, September 4, with filmmaker Robert Stone. Stone directed Pandora's Promise, a feature documentary on nuclear power. Participants may call in to the seminar or meet in the Campus Center.
http://www.bard.edu/news/events/event.php?eid=118657&year=2013&month=9&day=4

On Tuesday, September 10, at 7 p.m., James Ketterer, director of International Academic Initiatives, CCE (former director of Amideast, Egypt) and Omar Cheta, assistant professor of history, will give a talk focusing on the ongoing events in Egypt and U.S. policy. This event is presented by the Center for Civic Engagement and the Middle Eastern Studies Program, and is free and open to the public.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2464

The essay "Transcendentalism and the Power of Philology: Herder, Schleiermacher, and the Transformation of Biblical Scholarship in New England" written by faculty member Ulrike Wagner was just published in the quarterly journal Amerikastudien / American Studies (Issue 57.3). In this essay, Prof. Wagner points to a number of critical works that have drawn attention to the fundamental impact of Johann Gottfried Herder's and Friedrich Schleiermacher's theological thinking on the formation of the transcendentalist movement. The notion of religious renewal channeled through German biblical scholarship broke new ground, so the argument always goes, by relocating the source for finding divine evidence from the letter into the interior realms to the individual's soul and consciousness. Drawing on rarely discussed and unexamined reviews, writings, and translations by transcendentalist critics such as George Ripley and James Marsh, among others, Prof. Wagner claims that such generalized assessments occlude essential characteristics and functions of the model of spiritual restoration that American critics work out with Herder and Schleiermacher.

Amerikastudien / American Studies is the journal of the German Association for American Studies, founded in 1956. It is dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and embraces the diversity and dynamics of a dialogic and comparatist understanding of American Studies.
The table of contents of the most recent issue is available here.