Donna Ford Grover, visiting associate professor of literature and American studies.
Photo by Chris Kayden
Bard’s extraordinary faculty are dedicated to the philosophy of teaching. Today and throughout Bard’s history, members of the faculty have effected change in medicine, the arts and letters, international affairs, journalism, scientific research, and education, among other endeavors. These distinguished scholars are advisers as well as instructors: Bard has no graduate teaching assistants. And the average class size of 16 in the Lower College and 12 in the Upper College allows for intimate discussions and one-on-one interaction.
David Bloom. Photo by Bruce Kung
“What brought me to Bard, in a word, was the faculty.”
“To work with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and James Bagwell was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. I had long followed and admired their work, and then I found out that each of them taught here. It’s easy for musicians to focus only on music, whereas I wanted to have a broader education that would prepare me for a world that requires a more well-rounded base of knowledge and experience.”
—David Bloom ’13, BA in music with a concentration in composition and conducting, and MMus ’15 in conducting
Faculty News
Bard’s Kenneth Stern Interviewed in the New Yorker on the Problem with Defining Anti-Semitism
Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, was interviewed by the New Yorker about the complexities surrounding a definition of anti-Semitism he helped write, which was adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus,” he said. More >
Times Union Profiles Bard Professor and Alumna Kite: “The upstate artist exploring Indigenous truth and technology”
“I’m very interested in how truth and belief are created,” Kite, aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, told the Times Union. In a profile of Kite, published in conjunction with her inclusion in the 81st Whitney Biennial, Times reporter Michelle Falkenstein asked Kite about her artistic practice and pedagogy, including her embrace of AI in the creation of art. “We’re making art with dreams and AI,” Kite said. More >
Since receiving her doctorate in history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, Kathryn Tabb has earned a master’s degree in bioethics and health law and served as assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her interests include philosophy of science and medicine, bioethics, psychopathology, American pragmatism, and the history of philosophy, especially early modern philosophy. At Columbia, she taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including Science and Values, The Normal and the Pathological, Darwin, and Contemporary Civilization. Professor Tabb is currently working on a monograph on John Locke, Agents and Patients: Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, that explores his theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. Recent peer-reviewed publications include the articles “Behavioral Genetics and Attributions of Moral Responsibility,” Behavioral Genetics; “Philosophy of Psychiatry after Diagnostic Kinds,” Synthese; “Locke on Enthusiasm and the Association of Ideas,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Vol. 9; and “Darwin at Orchis Bank: Selection after the Origin,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2016). Her published work also includes reviews and commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Medicine, and Evolutionary Education and Outreach; and book chapters in Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry IV: Psychiatric Nosology; Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry III: The Nature and Sources of Historical Change; and Brain, Mind, and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. She is an investigator for the National Endowment for the Humanities grant project, “Humanities Connections Curriculum for Medicine, Literature, and Society” (2017–20); and was coprincipal investigator for the Genetics and Human Agency Project, “Intuitions about Genetics and Virtuous Behavior.” BA, University of Chicago; MPhil, University of Cambridge; MA, PhD, University of Pittsburgh. At Bard since 2019.
Ashley Tata is a director and artist who makes multimedia works of theater, contemporary opera, performance, cyberformance, live music, and immersive experiences. Her work, described in the New York Times as “fervently inventive,” has been presented at venues and festivals throughout the United States and internationally, including the MIT Playwrights Lab, Theatre for a New Audience, Los Angeles Opera, Austin Opera, Miller Theater, Crossing the Line Festival, Holland Festival, Prelude Festival, National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and the Fisher Center at Bard. In 2020, she directed Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music, a series of streamcast concerts for the Bard Music festival; a live online production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, a piece created with Bard undergraduates and a professional design team that subsequently transferred to the Theatre for a New Audience with student performers; and the live multicam streamcast of the four ceremonies that made up the College’s 160th Commencement weekend. She has served as a guest artist or guest teacher at the American Conservatory Theater, Columbia University, Mannes School of Music at The New School, and Harvard University, among others. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab, the recipient of the Lotos Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award in Arts and Sciences, and a winner of the 2017 Robert L. B. Tobin Director/Designer grant.
BA, Marymount Manhattan College; MFA Columbia University; also studied at American Musical and Dramatic Academy. At Bard since 2021.
Pavlina Tcherneva is a macroeconomist specializing in modern money theory and public policy, with a focus on fiscal and monetary policy coordination, full employment policies and their impact on macroeconomic stability, unemployment, income distribution, and gender. Her book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity, 2020) was named one of the Financial Times' best economics books of 2020 and has been published in eight languages. Her first book, Full Employment and Price Stability: The Macroeconomic Vision of William S. Vickrey (coedited with M. Forstater), is a collection of lesser-known works by Nobel Prize–winning economist William Vickrey. Tcherneva is an expert at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and former visiting research fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy. She is also a Research Scholar at the Levy Institute of Bard College and founding director of the Open Society University Network's Economic Democracy Initiative.
BA, Gettysburg College; MA, PhD, University of Missouri–Kansas City. At Bard: 2006–2008, 2012–
B.A., Williams College; Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Previously taught at Williams College as the Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellow in History and Art. Recipient of fellowships from Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, Getty Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright–Institute of International Education, Luso-American Development Foundation, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and has participated in residencies at the International Research Centre “Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History (re:work)” at Humboldt University, the Institute of African Studies at Universität Bayreuth, the Center for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art. Researches and teaches on colonial and contemporary Sub-Saharan African history with topical focus on liberation movements, technology, and methods of visual history and postcolonial theory. Peer-reviewed essays have appeared in Kronos and Social Dynamics, and he published a review essay and review in African Studies Review and History of Photography, respectively. Peer-reviewer for Social Dynamics and Critical Interventions. Currently working on a book manuscript titled Photography’s Bureaucracy: Constructing Colony and Nation in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times. At Bard since 2013.
BS, Southeastern Massachusetts University; PhD, Wesleyan University. Teaching assistant, Peterson Fellowship, Wesleyan University. Adjunct lecturer, postdoctoral fellow, University of Michigan. Recipient, National Science Foundation grant (2008), to study transmission of anaplasmosis from ticks to people. Member of Sigma Xi, Genetics Society of America, American Society of Microbiology. Professional interests: cellular events that lead to appropriate spatial organization of subcellular material. Faculty, The Master of Arts in Teaching Program. At Bard since 1992.
Robert Todd is a microbiologist, educator, and enthusiast of science outreach. His research focuses on genome instability and adaptation in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans. Beyond typical laboratory research, Professor Todd is interested in developing curricula and outreach opportunities that increase (and support) diversity and representation in science. He has worked as a Citizen Science faculty member since 2020, and joined the Biology Program faculty in 2021.
BS, Iowa State University; MS, University of Iowa; PhD, medical microbiology and immunology, Creighton University School of Medicine
Olga Touloumi is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Bard College. Her research concerns the role of architecture and media in 20th-century forms of liberal internationalism. Her book project The Global Interior: Modern Architecture and Worldmaking in the United Nations concerns the design and building of 20th-century public platforms for multilateralism and international relations. Touloumi has coedited Sound Modernities: Architecture, Media, and Design, a special issue of The Journal of Architecture that investigates how acoustics and mass media, such as the radio and the telephone, transformed modern architectural culture during the 20th century; and Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, 1945-1980, a volume of essays about the exchanges between designers and technologists that shaped computational discourses and practices in European and North American institutions. Her essay “Development Media” is forthcoming with the Aggregate edited volume Systems and the South. She has presented her work internationally and her writing has appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes, among them the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Buildings & Landscapes, Journal of Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and her research has been awarded fellowships and research grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Bard College, Harvard University, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Propondis Foundation. Touloumi is the cofounder of the Feminist Art and Architectural Collaborative (FAAC) and board member of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a master of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before arriving at Bard, she taught architectural history at MIT and at Harvard University.
Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. During a career spanning more than 50 years, she has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator. Her works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir quartets; soloists Evelyn Glennie, Carol Wincenc, David Shifrin, and John Browning; and the orchestras of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., among others.
In 1990, Tower became the first woman to win the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for her composition Silver Ladders. She was the first composer chosen for a Ford Made in America consortium commission of 65 orchestras. The Nashville Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin recorded that work, Made in America, with Tambor and Concerto for Orchestra for the Naxos label. The top-selling recording won three 2008 Grammy awards: Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance.
From 1969 to 1984, she was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her most popular works. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, quickly entered the repertory. Tower's tremendously popular five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman have been played by over 500 different ensembles. She is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972.
Her composer-residencies with orchestras and festivals include a decade with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Composer of the Year for their 2010-2011 season, as well as the St. Louis Symphony, the Deer Valley Music Festival, and the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.
Among her recent premieres: White Water (2012), commissioned by Chamber Music Monterey Bay and premiered by the Daedalus Quartet; Stroke (2011), commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; White Granite (2009), commissioned by St. Timothy's Summer Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, and La Jolla Music Society for SummerFest; Angels(2008), her fourth string quartet, commissioned by Music for Angel Fire and premiered by the Miami String Quartet; Dumbarton Quintet (2008), a piano quintet commissioned by the Dumbarton Oaks Estate (their third commission after Stravinsky and Copland) and premiered by Tower and the Enso String Quartet; Chamber Dance (2006), commissioned, premiered, and toured by Orpheus; and Copperwave (2006), written for the American Brass Quintet and commissioned by The Juilliard School of Music. A Gift (2007), for winds and piano, was commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest and premiered by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS). Other CMS premieres included Trio Cavany (2007) and Simply Purple (2008) for viola, performed by Paul Neubauer.
Her compositions cross many genres: Can I (2007) for youth chorus and percussionist; Copperwave (2006), written for brass quintet; DNA (2003), a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble; Fascinating Ribbons (2001), her foray into the world of band music, premiered at the annual conference of College Band Directors; Vast Antique Cubes/Throbbing Still (2000), a solo piano piece for John Browning; Tambor (1998), for the Pittsburgh Symphony under the baton of Mariss Jansons; and her ballet Stepping Stones (1993), commissioned by choreographer Kathryn Posin for the Milwaukee Ballet and revisited by Posin with the Bulgarian Ballet in June 2011.
Joan Tower's music is published by Associated Music Publishers.
BA, Barnard College; MTS, Harvard Divinity School; MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Teaching and research interests include Asian religions, Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhism and culture, Buddhist art and aesthetics, poetry in Buddhist literature, gender and sexuality in Buddhism, Tibetan language and literature, tantric traditions, and contemporary Buddhist practice. She previously taught at Columbia University and Barnard College, where her courses ranged from Asian humanities and topics in East Asian civilization to women Buddhist visionaries in Tibet and East Asia. She also served as assistant director of interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Fellowships and awards include de Bary Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Whiting Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Columbia University Teaching and Research Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Fellowship (not completed due to unrest in Tibetan areas of People’s Republic of China), and Spalding Trust Grant for research at Dolma Ling Nunnery and Institute for Buddhist Dialectics, Dharamsala, India, among others. Publications include “Buddhism’s Worldly Other: Secular Subjects in Tibetan Buddhist Learning,” in Himalaya: The Journal for the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies (forthcoming), and Shantideva: How To Wake Up a Hero, an introduction to Buddhism for children and families. Language competetency in classical and modern Tibetan and Nepali. At Bard since 2016.
Professor Trudel is the author of La Terreur à l’œuvre: théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan (Paris, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, coll. “L’imaginaire du texte,” 2007), and of several scholarly articles and volume chapters on 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone Literatures. He coedited Poétiques de la liste et imaginaire sériel (Montréal, Nota Bene, 2019), "Tout peut servir." Pratiques et enjeux du détournement dans le discours littéraire des XXe et XXIe siècles (Québec, Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2011), Jean Paulhan on Poetry and Politics (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2008); and oversaw issues of the journals LHT (Crises de lisibilité, 16, 2016, online), L'Esprit Créateur (“Avant-garde and Arrière-garde in Modernist Literature”, 53/3, 2013; “The Documentary Mode”, 61/2, 2021), and XXI-XX. Reconnaissances littéraires ("Avatars du remake", 4, 2023).
BA, Concordia University, Montreal; MA, French literature, McGill University; PhD, Romance languages, Princeton University. At Bard since 2002.