Bard Common Courses

Faculty: Jack Ferver, Dumaine Williams, Jaime Alves, Erin Braselmann, and Corey Sullivan

Disability and Difference is a Common Course that utilizes close readings of canonical and contemporary texts; critical and creative writing assignments; films; movement explorations; and  guest lectures to deepen students’ understanding of disability and difference. Students will work with the cohort of professors in different contexts throughout the course, as well as collaboratively with their classmates on analytic and creative projects. Professor Alves will offer a set of literary-critical tools for analyzing how texts featuring disability represent the experience of living with a nonconforming body and/or mind. Students will explore various literary forms---including short fiction, poetry, and the essay---and consider how such texts operate in the creation of disability as a category of identity. Professor Braselmann will help students engage with first-person narratives describing the lived experience of disability. Students will examine the importance of personal narrative to create societal change and challenge ableism. Professor Ferver will open the semester with body/mind centered physical practices. Through somatic experiencing, students will learn to connect to their own body and strengthen their subjective kinetic relationship. Prof. Sullivan will explore representations of identity and difference through a survey of self-portraiture in media history. Through this multidisciplinary study of the creative process, students will consider how each artist’s practice navigates and impacts perceptions of disability, while also reflecting on our own understandings and presentations of self. Professor Williams will examine how intersectional disability experiences and systems of disadvantage and exclusion impact the formation of disability identity and influence our cultural understanding of disability.

Faculty: Thomas Bartscherer

In 2001, Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the sole member of the United States Congress to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force that formed the legal foundation for military action in Afghanistan, and subsequently, many additional deployments of the U.S. military. Her vote was praised by many as courageous, and condemned by many others. Lee was celebrated in a poem by Fred Moten as “the unacknowledged legislator.” What is courage? In this course, we shall approach this question both directly and obliquely. We begin with Homer’s Iliad and with philosophical accounts from 5th century Athens. Should courage be understood the same way in all contexts? Is a warrior’s courage the same as that of a philosopher or a legislator? Who is truly courageous, the one who defends the regime, the one who critiques it, or both? Is the courage of Hektor or Achilles the same as that of Socrates or Antigone? Our discussion will proceed through close readings of philosophical texts and essays, both ancient and modern (Plato, Aristotle, Tillich, Arendt, Baldwin, Abani) and imaginative representations in literature and film (Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Fugard’s The Island, Bergman’s Shame). We will be asking, among other things, whether and in what way it makes sense to speak of a single virtue, courage, being manifest in varying circumstances and in different times and places; whether and in what sense courage brings people together or sets them apart; and what we may mean today when we characterize people or acts as courageous. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Joshua Boettiger

The classical period of Hebrew prophecy (8th century to 5th century BCE) yielded/inspired an extraordinary range of literature. While these prophetic works differ in many respects, much of it is consistent in terms of depicting the prophet as someone who embodies courage – especially in bringing their understanding of God to bear as a social and political critique. This course will explore some of these startling and powerful prophetic accounts – especially the books of Amos, Jeremiah, and the earlier saga of Elijah detailed in 1 Kings – in their historical contexts. Reading the prophets through the lens of courage, we will examine the phenomena of calling and covenant, the theology and philosophy of pathos, and look together at conflicting definitions of justice. Our core text will be Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets, though as the semester progresses we will expand outward to think about the prophetic impulse in modern contexts, including in the subsequent development of Judaism and Christianity, and also in the contemporary poetry of Ilya Kaminsky, C. D. Wright, and Chris Abani. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Maxim Botstein

What are the responsibilities of educational institutions and their members in times of political or social crisis? What are the forms that spiritual or intellectual courage (and cowardice, opportunism, and human frailty) take in such a context, and what relationships do thought and action, intellectual rigor and moral virtue, have to each other? This course will explore these questions, and others like them, by examining the history of German and American universities from the 1930s to the 1960s. We will look at the response of German academics to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and of Americans to McCarthyism and the Student Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. We will read the works of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, William F. Buckley Jr., and Sidney Hook with an eye towards the context which shaped their thought and philosophy, as well the writings of less well-known students and scholars who grappled with the same difficult questions, and helped shape modern higher education. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Jana Mader

In this course, we will explore the theme of courage in artistic encounters with nature. Through the lens of artists like Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Werner Herzog, we will examine how creative expression can serve as a powerful tool for environmental activism and cultural transformation. Literary works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring will illustrate the profound impact of courageous writing on ecological consciousness and conservation efforts. The course will delve into the ephemeral art of Andy Goldsworthy, whose creations, formed from natural materials, emphasize the transient beauty of nature and the impermanence of human interventions. We’ll also explore the bold and innovative approaches of filmmakers like Terrence Malick, whose films invite a spiritual contemplation of nature, and composers such as John Luther Adams, whose music evokes the vastness and power of the natural world. Throughout the semester, we will engage with various forms of creative expression, e.g. literature, visual arts, photography, film, music, and poetry, to examine how these artists and thinkers courageously confront the complexities of nature, whether by challenging societal norms, revealing uncomfortable truths about human impact on the environment, or inspiring a deeper, more mindful connection to the Earth. By the end of the course, we’ll have gained a deeper understanding of how art can both reflect and shape our perceptions of the natural world, and how courage in the arts can lead to profound environmental and social change. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Thomas Williams

Though many racists and anti-racists engage and portray “black” thinking and sensibility as homogeneous, for as long as there has been a tradition of black thought in America there has also been a robust and formidable thread of contrarianism and heterodoxy to defy it—even to deny there is such a thing as “blackness” (or whiteness, for that matter) to begin with. It has become a cliché to pay lip service to the notion that "blackness is not a monolith," and yet so many of us continue to speak and act as if it were.  In this common course, which will be comprised of shared texts as well as the work of iconoclastic and independent black thinkers—from Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison to Barbara Fields, James Baldwin and Adrian Piper—we will examine the question of what it means to create and define the self in a shared world that too often imprisons us all in ready-made categories. We will explore the tension between the courage-to-be-with and the courage-to-be-apart, specifically focusing on the idea of acting in common and the intellectual and moral courage it takes to stand alone and the price of prioritizing self-authenticity over consensus and group cohesion. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Maria Sonevytsky Iuliia Skubytska

This course’s core text will be Internationalism or Russification? by Ivan Dzyuba, a vital and understudied book from the tradition of mid-century Soviet Ukrainian anti-colonial and dissident thought. Our aim will be to juxtapose arguments from Dzyuba and other Ukrainian theorists against anti-, post-, and de-colonial thinkers from around the world, including Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Gerald Vizenor, Glen Coulthard, Sheryl Lightfoot, Walter Mignolo, and Madina Tlostanova. Theoretical debates will then be paired with case studies in Ukrainian culture, history, and political economy. Russia’s 21st century war of aggression against Ukraine has prompted many to reconsider Ukraine’s relationship to the question of what it means to “decolonize.” This course asserts that the study of Ukraine enriches and, at times, challenges the critical insights of theorists of decolonization. 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. Can 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? Students will gain exposure to texts written by African, Indian, South American, North American Indigenous, and Eastern European thinkers on the subject of decolonization. In parallel, we will study key Ukrainian artistic, political, and social movements with an emphasis on music: from queer decolonial activist marching bands, 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 Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Students will design and carry out an independent research project related to the course themes. This course is designated as Difference & Justice because it is critically oriented towards questions of justice, survival, genocide, nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty, and will touch on themes related to race, queer politics, and religious diversity.

Faculty: Betsy Clifton, Alex Kitnick, Julia Weist, and Nabanjan Maitra

Rules and regulations shape our lives, structuring everything from architecture to religion to sexuality to behavior on Bard’s campus. Even realms of thought typically imagined to be free from constraint, such as art and spirituality, are governed by sets of implicit and explicit guidelines. While we might associate rules and regulations with authority, and subscribe to them out of a sense of duty, or in fear of reprisal, they also create operating manuals that allow things to function (everything from games to societies). While we may capitulate to norms out of anxiety, shame, or fear–or defy them because they conflict with a deeply ingrained sense of self–they also create feelings of commonality and forms of communication. Sometimes, too, we must break–or bend–rules for the sake of novelty or out of a sense of injustice. In this course, we will seek to better understand these forces, and consider the differences between them. We will survey rules and regulations that have been implemented in the past and discuss which ones we would like to see in the future–that is, if we want to see any at all. We will also consider adjacent terms such as laws and norms. Our investigations will take a variety of forms: we will analyze theoretical texts, pursue case studies, and embark on creative projects that explore everything from the rules of the US postal system to the aesthetics of the DMV. Our “transformative” text will be Lorraine Daston’s Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, 2022).

Faculty: Johnny Brennan, Theresa Law, and Sarah Dunphy-Lelii

Trust is incredibly important for social life. It is the foundation of enriching personal relationships, it enables us to accomplish things we could not do on our own, it builds communities, and it expands knowledge. A single conceptualization of trust is elusive: what is trust; how is it developed, lost, and regained; how does it scale; and how does it adapt to constantly evolving social structures? Doing the hard work of theorizing trust is necessary, if we are to trust wisely. Through philosophy, students will investigate the abstract concept of interpersonal trust; through psychology, students will investigate the roles of intimate attachments and perspective-taking in children’s development of trust; through computer science, students will investigate questions of trust in technology, focusing on trust in robots.