A man in a navy blue bomber jacket teaches in a seminar-style classroom.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor of film and electronic arts; director, Film and Electronic Arts Program. Photo by Chris Kayden

Bard Faculty

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 ’13 MM ’15. 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 MM ’15

Faculty News

Bard College Professor Jenny Xie Selected for 2026 Howard Foundation Fellowship

Xie’s fellowship in the category of Poetry is one of 14 fellowships awarded by the foundation this year.

Bard College Professor Jenny Xie Selected for 2026 Howard Foundation Fellowship

Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts.

Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship for 2026-27. Xie’s fellowship in the category of Poetry, conferred by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, is one of 14 fellowships awarded by the foundation this year, which support independent creative and scholarly work on major projects by early mid-career individuals who have demonstrated potential to be future leaders in their fields.

During her fellowship, Xie will receive $40,000 in unrestricted funds to devote her time to researching, developing, and writing her third poetry collection, Dead Time, which delves into forms of directionless time, or time untroubled by plot and by imperatives of action. Xie is the author of two other collections of poetry. Eye Level (2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. The Rupture Tense (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Xie has also been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.

The Howard Foundation is an independent agency administered at Brown University. Established in 1954, it awards annual, unrestricted fellowships to promising individuals in selected artistic and academic fields. Past fellows have authored bestsellers, directed Oscar nominated feature-length films, and earned some of the world’s most prestigious honors including Pulitzer Prizes, the Rome Prize, and the Whiting Award. For more information, visit howard-foundation.brown.edu.

Post Date: 06-04-2026

President Botstein Awarded Honorary Degree and Bard Medal

Botstein received an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law in recognition of his 51 years of transformative leadership. Botstein was also presented with the Bard Medal, which honors individuals whose efforts on behalf of Bard and whose achievements have significantly advanced the welfare of the College.

President Botstein Awarded Honorary Degree and Bard Medal

President Leon Botstein at Bard College’s 166th Commencement. Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

At Bard College’s 166th Commencement, President Leon Botstein, who became the College’s 14th president in 1975, was awarded an honorary degree and Bard Medal. Botstein received an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law in recognition of his 51 years of transformative leadership. Botstein was also presented with the Bard Medal, which honors individuals whose efforts on behalf of Bard and whose achievements have significantly advanced the welfare of the College.

The numerous Bard College initiatives designed and founded under his leadership encompass a wide range of educational work ranging from local community programs to international efforts with global impact. Bard High School Early Colleges have enlarged the opportunities available to talented high school students in under-resourced communities across the country. The Bard Prison Initiative has made a liberal arts education available to incarcerated learners hungry for meaning and hope in their lives. Bard’s renowned music programs, its internationally recognized Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and its Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture offer unparalleled interdisciplinary education in the arts. Bard College Berlin, Al-Quds Bard College, and Bard’s other international programs offer an education across the world to students from places where access to a liberal arts education is otherwise unavailable or suppressed.

“Starting decades ago, with limited resources, President Botstein led Bard toward all these achievements,” states the citation for Botstein’s Doctor of Civil Law honorary degree. “Recently, aided by a generous match from the Open Society Foundations, he completed a boldly ambitious endowment campaign that goes a long way toward securing Bard’s future.” The citation for Botstein’s Bard College Award stated: “Over fifty-one years as president, Botstein has transformed Bard College into the extraordinary institution that it is today, and his work and leadership have defined Bard’s distinct and important mission.”

Post Date: 06-02-2026

More News

Bard Musician Franz Nicolay Testifies in Congress

Bard Musician Franz Nicolay Testifies in Congress

Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music.

Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music at Bard College, spoke at a Congressional hearing about a Live Nation/Ticketmaster antitrust case, reported Chronogram. The case concerned the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster which has resulted in a monopoly on event ticket sales in the United States. “Live music hasn’t been a healthy competitive market,” said Nicolay during the hearing. “Instead, a vertically integrated corporation that controls venues and tour promotion and ticketing and artist management, to the almost total control of many music markets, is, to a comical degree, the epitome of the kind of monopolistic power that antitrust law was created to address.”

“We, as artists, simply don’t have the range of city-to-city, venue-to-venue choices that would constitute a healthy ecosystem,” Nicolay continued. “It’s a problem of affordability, in an economic climate which, through drastically increasing gas prices, airfare, postage and international shipping fees for merchandise, and hardening borders, is making the touring on which our livings depend increasingly unaffordable for musicians. And that increased overhead… has a corresponding effect on affordability and access for fans.”

The Music Program, one of the largest programs on Bard’s campus, provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.

Read more in Chronogram

Further Reading in Rural Intelligence

Watch the Congressional Hearing

Post Date: 06-02-2026
Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time

Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time

Hal Haggard, associate professor of physics.

Research by Associate Professor of Physics Hal Haggard was featured on Matt O’Dowd’s PBS Space Time, an informational show that introduces viewers to concepts in astrophysics. The episode focused on an idea Haggard helped pioneer about black holes: that instead of becoming singularities at the end of their lifetime, as was previously thought, they may instead lead into cores of energy, also known as “white holes.” Haggard’s research on these structures, also known as Planck stars, and black-to-white hole tunneling was discussed in the context of physicists’ anxieties around black holes and how the perception of them has changed in previous decades. The Planck star’s existence is “one of our final hopes,” O’Dowd says. “Let’s hope they’re real, for physics’ sake.”

Haggard teaches in Bard’s Physics Program, which is dedicated to helping students at all levels gain a better understanding of the universe and how it works.

Watch the Episode

Post Date: 06-01-2026
Bard Artist in Residence Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05 Awarded a Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation

Bard Artist in Residence Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05 Awarded a Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation

Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05, artist in residence. Photo by Shawn Poynter

Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05, artist in residence at Bard College, was awarded a Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant, a competitive arts grant for artists who have worked in their field for at least 20 years. The grant, which aims to “recognize and support the serious, fully-committed artist,” gives individuals $25,000 to fund their creative projects. VanDyke’s portfolio began in 2005, while he was pursuing an MFA at Bard focusing on painting and sculpture. He has presented major projects at The Museum of Art of Ravenna, The Columbus Museum, The Power Plant, The AKG Buffalo Art Museum, and many other institutions worldwide. “This award is especially meaningful for me in relation to Bard: to apply for this award you must submit 20 years of studio work, and so the first images in my portfolio came from my Bard MFA thesis exhibition, while the last images documented work I’ve made since joining the Bard faculty a few years ago,” VanDyke said.

VanDyke teaches in the Studio Arts Program at Bard, which provides a breadth of expanded offerings while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles, in an era when much contemporary art cannot be contained within the traditional categories and technology is transforming the production

Post Date: 06-01-2026
Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Profiled in the New York Times

Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Profiled in the New York Times

Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli.

Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli was profiled in a New York Times article about the Luna Composition Lab, the mentorship program she founded with fellow composer Ellen Reid. They founded the lab after they realized they’d never experienced female mentorship in composing. “We took a good hard look at what we wished we had had,” said Mazzoli, and the two asked themselves, “What can we do to make this more diverse, more vital, more alive, more fun?” The Lab, which turns 10 this year, matches young and experienced composers who are female, nonbinary or gender nonconforming, and mentees receive eight months of mentorship and attend a music festival in New York. Now, Mazzoli and Reid are organizing musical events for LunaLab@10, an anniversary celebration of the program and its expanded reach. “We want the field to expand,” said Mazzoli, “and so bringing in gender diversity, racial diversity, economic income diversity, geographic diversity helps [the] field survive and thrive.”

Mazzoli is a Grammy-nominated composer and musician who has written operas including Lincoln in the Bardo and Proving Up that are based on contemporary literature. She teaches in the Bard College Conservatory of Music, which provides the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.

Read the Article

Post Date: 05-28-2026
Visiting Artist in Residence Beto O'Byrne Awarded Franklin Research Grant

Visiting Artist in Residence Beto O'Byrne Awarded Franklin Research Grant

Beto O'Byrne. Photo by Thomas Dunn

Beto O'Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College, has been awarded a Franklin Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society. O'Byrne’s grant will support archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in collaboration with Radical Evolution Performance Collective, toward the development of Forget the Alamo. This research-driven theatrical work reexamines the mythology surrounding the Alamo and the Texas Revolt, restoring Tejano, Black, and Indigenous perspectives long marginalized from state-sanctioned narratives, and grounding the performance in culturally specific aesthetics rooted in Tejano, Mexican American, and carpa traditions.

Established in 1933, the Franklin Research Grant program supports noncommercial research in all areas of knowledge. Awards are designed to help meet various related costs, such as for travel to libraries and archives, the purchase of microfilm, photocopies, or equivalent research materials, fieldwork, and laboratory research expenses.

Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.

Post Date: 05-28-2026
Bard Scholar Tania El Khoury Honored With Two Residencies

Bard Scholar Tania El Khoury Honored With Two Residencies

Tania El Khoury.

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence, associate professor in theater and performance, and director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, has been honored by two residencies, one with the École Universitaire de Recherche ArTeC, a research school that supports experimental practices, and one with Théâtre Chaillot, a program within the French National Theater of Dance. In April, El Khoury was appointed as one of three leading international scholars invited annually by ArTeC whose work involves a transdisciplinary approach. During this residency in Paris, she delivered a public lecture in French, led a public workshop, provided feedback to MA students, and participated in a creative research event with Performing Knowledge, where she is an associate artist.

El Khoury’s residency through Fabrique Chaillot, a selective program at Théâtre Chaillot within the French National Theater of Dance, provided her with three weeks to develop her new work, Choreography of State. The project deconstructs the embodied gestures of law enforcement and border patrol to reveal the dramaturgy of state violence. This multimedia installation performance approaches choreography as a forensic practice, inviting women choreographers from diverse practices around the world to create dance notations as evidence of power structures: scores of resistance to be activated by performers and embodied by the audience in a celebration of self-defense. Choreography of State is coproduced by the Théâtre Chaillot in Paris and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, as part of Evidence, an international festival by the Fisher Center LAB. The work will premiere at Théâtre Chaillot in Paris from October 8–10, 2026, with its US premiere at Evidence, Fisher Center LAB, at Bard College from December 4–6, 2026.

Post Date: 05-28-2026

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Results 151-160 of 375
Mie Inouye, Assistant Professor of Political Studies
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Inouye is a political theorist whose scholarship investigates the ways that institutions shape people’s understandings of themselves and the social world, and the practices that allow oppressed people to develop and exercise agency. Her research and teaching areas include social movements, democratic theory, theories of political action, socialism, identity politics, American political thought, and religion and politics. Her current book project, Antinomies of Organizing, reconstructs theories of political organizing from the praxis of organizers in the 20th-century US labor and civil rights movements, including William Z. Foster, Myles Horton, and Ella Baker. The book traces the relationship between democratization and personal transformation in the American organizing tradition and argues that this tradition holds important insights into the modes and ends of democratic participation. Inouye’s writings have been published in academic and popular venues including The American Political Science Review, Boston Review, Jacobin Magazine, The Forge, and The Political Theology Network.

BA, Tufts University; MA, University of Toronto; PhD candidate, Yale University. At Bard since 2021.

Michael Ives, Poet in Residence
Office: Shafer House
Phone: 845-758-6822 x7254
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., University of Rochester. Awards: Academy of American Poets Prize; Lillian Fairchild Award for Significant Contributions to the Arts (University of Rochester, 1996). Founding member and composer for the sound/text performance trio F'loom. Taught music performance and composition and creative writing at Aesthetic Education Institute of Lincoln Center (1997–2001). Artist in residence, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (2000–01). Author, The External Combustion Engine (2005); poetry and short fiction published in numerous periodicals. At Bard since 2003.

Swapan Jain, Associate Professor of Chemistry
Office: Reem-Kayden Center, RKC 134
Phone: 845-752-2354
Website: https://chemistry.bard.edu/faculty
Biography: expand/collapse
B.S., Kennesaw State University; Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology. Postdoctoral associate, Boston University. Recipient, Best Thesis Award, Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, Georgia Tech (2007); postdoctoral fellowship, Center of Excellence, Boston University (2006). Area of specialization: nucleic acids. Articles in Journal of the American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chimie Internationale Edition; papers in Journal of Chemical Society, Nucleic Acids Research, Angewandte Chemie, others. At Bard since 2009.

Brooke Jude, Associate Professor of Biology
Office: Reem-Kayden Center, 210
Phone: 845-752-2337
Website: https://www.judelab.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Brooke Jude is a molecular microbiologist who studies isolates of microorganisms cultivated from aquatic sources worldwide. Her work is currently focused on isolating and identifying beneficial violacein producing bacterial strains. She uses classic microbiological techniques for isolation, culture and characterization, and identifies organisms via modern sequence analysis. Investigations within the lab also include motility and biofilm assays, violacein analysis, whole genome sequencing and assembly, and investigation into bacterial behavior within microbial communities.

BA, Colby College; PhD, Dartmouth College. At Bard since 2009.

Craig Jude, Associate Registrar, Assistant Men's & Women's Track and Field Coach
Office: Ludlow, 200
Phone: 845-758-7459
Website: https://www.bard.edu/registrar/

Jeffrey Jurgens, Continuing Associate Professor of Anthropology; Faculty Adviser to the Bachelor's Degree Program, Bard Prison Initiative
Department(s): Bard Prison Initiative, Hannah Arendt Center
Office: Achebe House
Phone: 845-758-7308
Website: https://bpi.bard.edu/who-we-are/
Biography: expand/collapse
Jeffrey Jurgens' research and teaching interests focus on topics related to migration and displacement, citizenship, affect, public memory, religiosity and secularism, urban space, youth, and the cultural politics of college-in-prison. His early scholarship examined formations of diaspora and citizenship among people of Turkish backgrounds in Berlin since the 1960s. More recently, he has written about the impact of labor recruitment policies on German citizenship, the role of immigrants in public memories of German division, the significance of Islamic religious instruction in Turkish and German public schools, and the affective dimensions of the “refugee crisis” in Europe. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, IIE Fulbright, Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, National Humanities Center, and the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to his work in the undergraduate college, he teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) and directs its bachelor’s degree program. Jeff also participates in the Liberal Arts Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education, which aims in part to establish a curricular cluster in migration studies at Bard.

BA, Colorado College; MA, PhD, University of Michigan. At Bard since 2005.

Sucharita Kanjilal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Biography: expand/collapse
Sucharita Kanjilal’s research focuses on feminist theories of global capitalism, shifting regimes of social reproduction, critical food studies, and contemporary caste-class relations in South Asia. She draws connections between feminist economic anthropology, anthropology of media, gender studies, the anthropology of food, and anti-caste epistemologies. Her current book manuscript, titled Home Chefs: Indian Households Produce for the Global Creator Economy, is an ethnographic study of Indian food media producers engaged in global platform-based industries of online content creation. A former journalist from Mumbai, Kanjilal's work can be found in Feminist Media Studies, Gastronomica, the Routledge Companion to Caste and Cinema in India, Hindustan Times, Scroll.in, the News Minute, and the Heritage Radio Network and Eat This podcasts. She has received grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, the UCLA Sambhi Foundation, as well as awards from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Robert B. Edgerton foundation. She teaches courses on the anthropology of food and recipes, feminist economic anthropology, comparative approaches to media, and ethnographies of South Asia, among others.

BA, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai; MA, SOAS University of London; PhD, University of California, Los Angeles. At Bard since 2023.

Felix Kaputu, Faculty in Literature & Social Studies
Department(s): Simon's Rock at Bard College
Office: Massena East Wing, 255a

Erica Kaufman, Director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking; Writer in Residence
Department(s): Institute for Writing and Thinking
Office: Alumni/ae Center,
Phone: 845-758-7383
Biography: expand/collapse
Erica Kaufman, director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking, specializes in composition and rhetoric and contemporary American poetry. Her areas of interest include writing and literacy studies (first-year/core curriculum), feminist and LGBTQ+ poetics, history of American education, and digital pedagogies. She is the author of three books of poetry: POST CLASSIC (Roof Books, forthcoming 2019), INSTANT CLASSIC (Roof Books, 2013), and censory impulse (Factory School, 2009). She is coeditor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Venn Diagram, 2009) and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974 (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2014). Among other places, Erica's scholarship has been included in New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels (ed. M. Silverberg, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein (eds. L. Esdale and D. Mix, MLA, 2018), and the forthcoming Reading Experimental Writing (ed. G. Colby, Edinburgh University Press). In collaboration with the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, Erica co-coordinates the Teacher Resource Center section of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, a course offered each fall as a MOOC (massive online open course). BA, Douglass College, Rutgers University; MFA, The New School; PhD, CUNY Graduate Center.

Thomas Keenan, Professor of Comparative Literature; Director, Human Rights Program
Department(s): Human Rights Project
Office: Arendt Center, 202
Phone: 845-758-7086
Website: https://www.bard.edu/hrp
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., Amherst College; M. Phil., Ph.D., Yale University. Author, Fables of Responsibility (1997); Mengele's Skull (with Eyal Weizman, 2012); articles in PMLA, South Atlantic Quarterly, Grey Room, New York Times, Aperture, Cabinet. Coeditor, New Media, Old Media (with Wendy Chun, 2005; 2nd edition with Wendy Chun and Anna Fisher, 2015); The Human Snapshot (with Tirdad Zolghadr, 2013); and The Flood of Rights (with Suhail Malik and Tirdad Zolghadr, 2016). Editorial and advisory board member, Journal of Human Rights, Grey Room, Humanity, and Scholars at Risk Network. Curator, Antiphotojournalism (with Carles Guerra, 2010–11) and Aid and Abet (2011). At Bard since 1999.

Results 151-160 of 375