While themes may change from semester to semester, all Common Courses are designed to:
(1) 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 and enabling students to fulfill two distribution requirements,
(2) emphasize cohort-building and collaborative learning.
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.
Faculty Team: Heeryoon Shin, Beka Goedde, Simeen Sattar and Thena Tak
This interdisciplinary course explores the history, science, and practice of natural dyes and their relationship to land and mobility. Before the development of synthetic dyes in the second half of the nineteenth century, natural dyestuffs were cultivated, traded, and used across the world not only as highly coveted commodities, but also as sources of scientific knowledge, inspiration for creativity, and social and cultural identities. At once the product of local land and long-distance transactions, natural dyes help us navigate and rethink the boundaries and connections between local and global, indigenous and foreign, and permanent and transitory. Drawing upon dye plants currently growing in and around the Bard campus, including indigo, madder, sumac, goldenrod, safflower, and marigold, we will examine how natural dyes initiated cultural transformations, scientific developments, and human interactions with the natural world in their rooted and mobile states. A special emphasis will be placed on the historical indigenous use of land and native dye plants in the Hudson Valley area in collaboration with Bard Farm and Bard Community Garden, and partially supported by the Rethinking Place Initiative.
Art History: This module will examine the material, cultural, and social history of natural dyes and their use in textiles and painting from the early modern period to the present. The practice of dyeing is deeply tied to local natural environment, materials, and knowledge, yet it also created a desirable global commodity that reshaped visual and sensory culture, social relationships, and the textile industry and economy across the world. We will use specific case studies drawn from Asia, Africa, and the Americas to explore cross-cultural interactions, trade and circulation, ecological impact, and colonialism and labor histories. We will end by examining the development of chemical dyes and new theories of color in the late nineteenth century and its ongoing effect on local communities, the textile industry, and environment.
Studio Arts: Dyeing with natural dyes from Bard campus is the studio practice of this common course. 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. The application of plant dye on fabric and paper is known to artists and practitioners as generally fugitive. In our practice, we consider separable the concepts of value from longevity and lightfastness. We scour, mordant and introduce tannins to our fabric and paper. We also paint, stencil and stamp clay resist onto our fabric. We dye with our plants, such as indigo, madder, sumac, goldenrod, yarrow, and blood root, and several others which we have grown from seed or propagated on campus since 2021. We study the practice of foraging. We overdye our work for further color complexity, modify and shift color with iron, and paint directly to fabric using a mordant with a thickened solution of dye.
Architecture: Whether through intentional trade and commerce, transportation of happenstance, or aesthetic admiration, plants have a long history of spatial flows that are in direct relation to how humans have moved and journeyed around the planet. This course will look at these spatial stories of plants and their relationships to land, more-than-humans, and humans through time and place.With a selection of plants to guide the process, students will first be asked to research about a given plant and its spatial tracings both locally and globally. From there, students will make ‘maps’ of these spatial stories using architectural methods of diagramming, collage, and orthogonal drawing. Mapping as a primarily colonial practice will be reconsidered through the lens of indigenous ways of being and thinking. In this way, space, scale, time, and material may become more elastic in their representations and entanglements with one another.
Science: Dyes, fibers, and their mutual interactions are considered at the molecular level. This microscopic view accounts for the different affinities of dyes for fibers and the role of mordants in binding dyes to fibers. Dyes in paint pigments are also discussed. Lectures alternate with laboratory work: making synthetic indigo, investigating the effect of fiber type and mordants on the colors produced by madder, and making madder lake pigment and paint.
Faculty Team: Sarah Hennies, Cole Heinowitz, and Mara Baldwin
What is ours to take? Can we create authentically while borrowing? What’s the difference between inspiration and theft? What does it mean to own an idea? In instances of familial/cultural ownership, where is the balance between collective responsibility and personal agency? What does it mean for a cultural institution to own something? How must museums and libraries reconsider the legacies and policies of their canons for a modern world? This class will look at case studies from a cross section of artistic disciplines that navigate and scrutinize the line between appropriation and appreciation. The course will also explore the circumstances and fallout when creatives have pushed the line to pirate the property of others with activism, ambivalence, or hedonism at the helm. Through historical analysis, students will be asked to think critically about developing their own personal ethics for creative production, mapping how to responsibly incorporate existing work into their own. What’s more, students will see how their personal ethics intersect with cultural production in ways that equip them to reexamine their consumption of art, music, and literature moving forward. Readings will include Paisley Rekdal’s Appropriate, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, Amir Said’s The Art of Sampling, Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me, Susan Stewart’s On Longing, Alice Procter’s The Whole Picture, and Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. Proficiency in a creative practice and an interest in poetry, music, visual art, and/or performance are strongly encouraged. Priority will be given to second-year students. Transfer students and unmoderated Lower College students will be accommodated.
Faculty Team: Robert Cioffi, Nabanjan Maitra, David Ungvary and Marina van Zuylen
Ambition n.: classical Latin ambitiōn-, ambitiō soliciting of votes, canvassing, striving after popularity, desire for advancement, ostentation, pomp < ambit- , past participial stem of ambīre to go round or about. From elections to education, ambition (or its absence) has become for many of us a defining feature of life in the twenty-first century—the quest to do more, better, faster. Where does ambition come from? How should we think about it? And what can we do about it? In 2015, Reese Witherspoon declared “ambition is not a dirty word,” but she is just one of the latest in a long line of thinkers, writers, poets, and scholars who have considered ambition and its discontents. This course brings together authors from ancient Greece, India, Rome, and the more recent world—from Augustine to Spinoza, from the Buddha to Sophocles—who grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of ambition. In the classical Indian tradition, Heroic hymns celebrate the impulse to power, scholastic treatises theorize it in detail, and court poetry adorns it. When fame no longer serves as goad or goal, ambition and power are subsumed within a discourse of duty (dharma). In the ancient Greek Iliad, Achilles wants to be the “best of the Achaeans” and to be celebrated in song. And for the Romans, ambition was always a delicate balance: act with too little, and one risked sinking the family name; too much, and you might be labeled a social parasite, or worse, a sociopathic tyrant. To this equation, the introduction of Christianity to the Roman world only added complicating factors. Gospel mandates to strive for perfect holiness changed the game and raised the stakes of ambition—heaven was now on the line. At the same time, they paradoxically commanded the most ambitious Christians to be utterly meek. But there is also a rich tradition of discordant voices that challenge the dominant, ambitious tone: Buddhist and Jain ascetics standing next to mythic figures from the epics; ordinary devotees amidst the prophets of the past; Romans, who wrote obsessively in efforts to resolve the conflicting social pressures of ambition—to be at once ruthlessly competitive and yet also responsible to hierarchy and decorum; Aristotle and the quiet virtues of being good enough. How might this unlikely chorus displace or denature the ego, the seat of ambition? And how do we envision ethical action in a universe that no longer revolves around the individual agent? Could one be both a humble servant—whether to gods, God, or the State—and a superstar?
Faculty Team: Masha Shpolberg, Maria Sonevytsky and Gregory Moynahan
Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has prompted many to reconsider Ukraine’s relationship to the question of what it means to “decolonize.” This present-day revaluation of Ukraine’s complex imperial inheritances has centered primarily on Ukraine’s historical relationship to the Russian Empire (and the Russocentric Soviet Union), often to the exclusion of Ukraine’s Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and other imperial inheritances. This tragic moment of reflection raises a number of bedeviling questions. How do we narrate a decolonial history of Ukraine? Is it possible, or desirable, to disentangle Ukrainian culture from empires of the past and present? Can we imagine a future political and economic order for Ukraine that is not wholly dependent upon more powerful global and regional actors? This course juxtaposes the arguments of influential decolonial theorists against case studies in Ukrainian history, culture, and political economy. Students will gain exposure to texts written by African, Indian, South American, Middle Eastern, North American Indigenous, and Eastern European thinkers on the subject of decolonization. In parallel, we will study key Ukrainian artistic, political, and social movements from queer decolonial activism to calls to redefine the canon of classical music, art history, literature, and cinema. We consider debates about “decommunization,” the racialized dynamics of migration, and what it means to call oneself Ukrainian after 2022. Students will design and carry out collaborative research projects related to the course themes.
How do we actively acknowledge the land beneath us? The acknowledgment of the land—and the brutal history which has unfolded on it—and offers new ways to reflect and engage in collaborative practice, with an emphasis on inclusivity and an aim to build a future that is fundamentally distinct from this past. This course, through three sections, articulates themes and frames in which students can begin thinking in interdisciplinary terms, valuing different experiences, emphasizing circular–rather than sharp- sided–partnerships that are not true conduits for ideas and supportive exploration. The course centers on two primary texts. One, Philip J. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, explicitly draws attention to Bard’s own relationship with Indigeneity and place with its essay on St. Stephen’s/Bard alumnus Vine Deloria Sr. The other, by Mohican leader Hendrick Aupaumut, foregrounds Muheconneock reflections in their homeland. Through a focus on arts collaboration, community engagement, and grounding in theory, the various sections of Rethinking Place offer practices of re-framing historical moments, archival documents, and cultural production in order to reveal obscured silences, exclusions, anxieties, and subtle forms of violence. Weekly plenary sessions exploring three signature Fall 2023 events (EHCN’s To Be Named exhibition, Rethinking Place’s “Research and Liberal Arts” conference, Indian Theater [working title] at the Hessel Museum) will provide students access to a wide array of media and artistic explorations around place-making, while individual sections support possibilities for explorations of interdisciplinary collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and interdisciplinary methods. Students should choose from one of the three following sections, which will provide targeted entry points into the communal Rethinking Place project.
Alternate Worlds
St. Stephen's College of Magic Arts
A medieval fantasy map of the Sawkill Watershed, including Bard College and the surrounding area.