Bard Common Courses
Photo by Jonathan Asiedu '24

Bard Common Courses

In 2024–25, the College will offer its suite of multidisciplinary Common Courses created specifically for Lower College students. Cohort building and connected liberal arts learning will be integral to all Common Course offerings. Second-year students will be given priority in registration prior to Moderation in their fourth semester and first-year students are invited to register after that for available seats.

Features of the Common Courses

While themes may change from semester to semester, all Common Courses are designed to:
  • Bring together teams of three or more faculty to offer a course that will engage a theme/question of contemporary relevance through the study of transformative humanistic texts while adopting multidisciplinary perspectives.
  • Enable students to fulfill two distribution requirements.
  • Emphasize cohort-building and collaborative learning.
Faculty Teams
Nicholas Alton Lewis

Faculty Teams

Each faculty team designs shared elements of the course and smaller group experiences with the proviso that two distribution areas and different disciplinary approaches will be given equal weight. This allows for innovative curricular development in each course and continuity of instruction across all common course offerings. Common Courses give entering first-year students an opportunity to fulfill two distribution requirements with one four-credit class.

Fall 2025 Courses

Memory as Resistance
Faculty: Victor Apryshchenko, Franco Baldasso, and Zahid Jalali

Why do communities and societies choose to remember or to forget? Who holds the power as lords and managers of memory? How might memory, or its deliberate erasure, be wielded as a tool of resistance? In the 21st century, collective memory has emerged as a ‘leading concept’ within the humanities, profoundly shaping fields such as cultural, historical, and political studies. The course investigates collective memory both as a shared cultural practice and as a rigorous academic discipline. Student will explore the conceptual frameworks of collective consciousness and pivotal research categories such as “trauma,” “nostalgia,” “appropriation of the past,” and “transnational memory,” drawing upon the foundational insights of Maurice Halbwachs’, Aleida Assmann’s, Pierre Nora’s, and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s scholarship. By reading and discussing the transformative texts of Primo Levi, Robert Darnton, and Susan Sontag, students will discuss the gaps and correspondences between history and memory. They will learn how narratives shape collective memory by making distant past visible and emotionally impactful as well as expose the past to the danger of desensitization, complicating the balance between memory’s preservation and emotional engagement. The course will engage with written and visual sources, including films, material culture, and field trips to the Metropolitan Museum, the 9/11 Memorial, and other sites where memory is produced, performed, contested, or forged.
Sensing Climate: Change Together
Faculty: Beate Liepert, Elena Kim, Adriane Colburn, and Tatjana Myoko von Pritwitz und Gaffron

This course will introduce students to core facets of climate change through the lens of interconnected, yet markedly different viewpoints: climate science, behavioral sciences, artistic expression, and spirituality.   In this class, students will gain a depth of understanding through labs, interdisciplinary projects and artworks that are aimed at fostering empowerment, resilience and action. In the laboratory, we will take a hands-on approach to exploring climate, beginning with a primer on climate change as a science that connects natural and human systems such as the carbon cycle. We will explore how climate shifts from seasons to eons and how that shapes our world, from the local environment of Bard Campus to the entire planet. Experiments with the scientific principles of climate change will lead to investigations on how they influence cognition, mental health and human behavior. To complement this robust curriculum in climate science and climate psychology, a series of lectures and creative projects will guide students to consider climate futures and how humans contend with uncertainty as individuals, at a societal level, and as a species. Artworks, activism and mindfulness exercises will spring from this research, giving students new tools to process and contend with our changing world.
 
Sample Past Course: Seeding the Dye Garden at the Bard Farm
Sample Past Course: Seeding the Dye Garden at the Bard Farm
Photo by Aya Rebai HRA ’24

Sample Past Course: Seeding the Dye Garden at the Bard Farm

with Artist-in-Residence Beka Goedde
Dyeing with natural dyes from Bard campus is the studio practice of the common course Rooted and Mobile: The World of Natural Dyes, which was cotaught by the faculty team Heeryoon Shin, Beka Goedde, Simeen Sattar, and Thena Tak in fall 2023.  In late summer and early fall until the first frost in October, we harvest dye plants and mordants from the Bard Farm, Community Garden and from around our campus, to use as fresh colorants to dye cotton fabric and paper. In November and December, we work with preserved and dried plant matter. In 2023, Bard’s Dye Garden at the two sites on campus was funded by the Rethinking Place initiative at Bard as a research site for native and non-native plants, and our research is ongoing with a collaborator from the Stockbridge-Munsee community. 

Academic Resources