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
—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 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
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 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.”Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music.
“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
Post Date: 06-02-2026
-
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 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.Jonathan VanDyke MFA ’05, artist in residence. Photo by Shawn Poynter
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
-
Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time
Hal Haggard's Research on Black Holes Featured on PBS Space Time
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.”Hal Haggard, associate professor of physics.
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.
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
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.”Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli.
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.
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, 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.Beto O'Byrne. Photo by Thomas Dunn
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, 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.Tania El Khoury.
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
Faculty Search
Click the link below to browse through an alphabetical list of Bard Faculty
-
Search Results
Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture
Office: Aspinwall, 112
Phone: 845-758-6822 x7448
Biography: expand/collapseSean McMeekin teaches courses in modern European, Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history. He has also taught at Koç University in Istanbul, Yale, Bilkent in Ankara, and NYU. He is the author of Stalin’s War (2021); The Russian Revolution (2017); The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2015, awarded the Arthur Goodzeit Book Prize); July 1914: Countdown to War (2013, reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review); The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011, winner of the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize); The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010, winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize); History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (2008); The Red Millionaire (2004); and numerous articles and essays. McMeekin also reviews books regularly for the Sunday Times, The Literary Review, American Historical Review, History Today, Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and Journal of Cold War Studies.
BA, Stanford; MA, PhD, UC Berkeley. At Bard since 2014.
Blair McMillen, Artist in Residence; Visiting Assistant Professor of Music; Piano
Office: Edith C. Blum Institute, 210/211
Phone: 917-334-6488
Biography: expand/collapseB.A., B.M., Oberlin College; M.M., The Juilliard School; D.M.A., Manhattan School of Music. Pianist, chamber musician, improviser, concert series curator. Appearances as soloist at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, le Poisson Rouge, Moscow Conservatory, Casals Hall (Tokyo), Miller Theatre. Has performed with American Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Albany Symphony, Juilliard Orchestra (Lincoln Center and tour of Japan). Profiled by New York Times, Washington Post, Accent, others. Member, Da Capo Chamber Players, American Modern Ensemble, Avian Orchestra. Pianist for St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (spring 2011). Solo recordings include Soundings (Midnight Productions), Concert Music of Fred Hersch (Naxos), Multiplicities '38 (Centaur). At Bard since 2006.
Abraham McNally, Visiting Artist in Residence of Studio Arts
Clair W. McPherson, Visiting Instructor in the Humanities
Biography: expand/collapseClair W. McPherson is a renowned scholar in medieval studies, particularly the Early Middle Ages and Late Antiquity periods. He has taught history, theology, and spirituality at colleges and seminaries including General Theological Seminary in New York, where he earned his master of divinity; Union Seminary; Fordham College at Lincoln Center; New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study; Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Chicago; and Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned his doctorate in medieval studies, with a specialty in Old English. McPherson has served as a priest for more than three decades at parishes in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York. His translation of Nilus of Ancyra (Gorgias Press) and translation and study of ninth-century German theologian Rabanus Maurus (Catholic University of American Press) will be published in 2023. He is the author of three earlier books: Understanding Faith: An Exploration of Christian Theology; Grace at This Time; and Keeping Silence: Christian Practices for Entering Stillness. He also served as writer for the Episcopal New Yorker and the online magazine of Trinity Parish–Wall Street, and as a contributing editor for Spirituality and Health.
PhD, Washington University, St. Louis; MDiv, General Theological Seminary, New York. At Bard: Spring 2023.
Walter Russell Mead, Senior Scholar, Center for Civic Engagement and Hannah Arendt Center
Office: BGIA, 108 West 39th St., Suite 1000A, NYC, N/A
Phone: 718-426-6421
Website: https://www.wsj.com/news/types/global-view
Biography: expand/collapseBA, Yale University. Walter Russell Mead was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Stiftung. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow in American Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute. Professor Mead is the author of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2008); Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (2004); and Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2001). He was the winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize and nominated for the 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award. In February 2018, he was named Global View columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He writes articles, book reviews, and op-ed pieces for Foreign Affairs and other magazines and newspapers. From 2008 to 2011, he was the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at Yale University; and from 1987 to 1997, President’s Fellow at the World Policy Institute at The New School. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award (essays and criticism) in 1997. At Bard: 2005–08; 2010–
Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities
Office: Seymour, 106
Phone: 845-758-7450
Website: https://www.danielmendelsohn.com
Biography: expand/collapseAuthor, essayist, critic, translator. B.A., Classics, University of Virginia (1982); M.A., Ph.D., Classics, Princeton University (1994). Contributes reviews, articles, and features on cultural issues to many major publications, primarily The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Books: The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999; Vintage, 2000; selected as New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year); Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays (Oxford University Press, 2005); The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins, 2006; New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Amazon.com Best History Book of the Year); How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (HarperCollins, 2008; Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year); C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems (translation, with introduction and commentary: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, 2012; Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year); Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books, 2012).
Awards and grants: National Book Critics Circle Award (The Lost), National Jewish Book Award (The Lost), Prix Medicis (France: The Lost), Premio WIZO-ADEI (Italy: The Lost), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, two Mellon Foundation awards.
Stefan Mendez-Diez, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Phone: 845-753-7093
Biography: expand/collapseB.A. physics, B.S., mathematics, University of Chicago; Ph.D., University of Maryland. Research experience includes postdoctoral fellowships at Utah State University and University of Alberta, and research assistant positions at University of Maryland (string theory research interaction team), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (numerical relativity group), University of Chicago, Tulane University, and University of Puerto Rico, Humacao. He has published in Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, Communications in Mathematical Physics, and Letters in Mathematical Physics on topics including geometrization of N-extended 1-dimensional supersymmetry algebras, string theory on elliptic curve orientifolds and KR-theory, and T-duality for orientifolds and twisted KR-theory. Selected talks include “Spin Curves from Supersymmetry Algebras,” at the String Math Conference, Tsinghua Sanya International Mathematics Forum; “The Mathematics of Supersymmetry,” at University of Missouri–St. Louis Mathematics Colloquium, and “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Natural Sciences in Mathematics,” at Pepperdine University Natural Sciences Colloquium, among others. He has served as an instructor at Utah State University, University of Alberta, and University of Maryland. At Bard since 2016.
Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities; Director, Written Arts Program
Office: Shafer House
Biography: expand/collapseDinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. In its cover page review of All Our Names, the New York Times Book Review said “You can’t turn the pages fast enough, and when you’re done, your first impulse is to go back to the beginning and start over . . . While questions of race, ethnicity, and point of origin do crop up repeatedly in Mengestu’s fiction, they are merely his raw materials, the fuel with which he so artfully—but never didactically—kindles disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place, and human connection.” BA, Georgetown University; MFA, Columbia University. At Bard since 2016.
Kobena Mercer, Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and Humanities, Bard College and CCS Bard
Office: Center for Curatorial Studies
Biography: expand/collapseKobena Mercer is a British art historian and writer whose scholarship cuts across the fields of art history, Black studies, and cultural studies. He comes to Bard from Yale University, where he was Professor in History and Art and African American Studies and taught courses that examined African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists with critical methods from cultural studies. His groundbreaking first book Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994) brought a Black British perspective to cultural forms—ranging from hairstyles and dress to music and photography—that arose from the volatile transformations of the 1980s. He also authored studies of the artists Romare Bearden, Adrian Piper, Isaac Julien, James Van Der Zee, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. His 2016 essay collection, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s, addresses the contributions of Black artists to art’s transformation in an age of globalization, covering the years 1992 to 2012, and his book Alain Locke and the Visual Arts was published by Yale University Press in 2022. Professor Mercer also edited and introduced Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), and was the editor of the Annotating Art’s Histories series of anthologies, published by MIT Press. He has also contributed to exhibition catalogues for Wilfredo Lam at Centre Pompidou, Frank Bowling at Haus der Kunst, and Adrian Piper at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, among others. Mercer has also taught at New York University; University of California Santa Cruz; and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he earned his PhD. Additional areas of interest include psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality, queer studies, photography, and globalization.
BA, Saint Martin’s School of Art; PhD, Goldsmiths, University of London. At Bard since 2021.
Susan M. Merriam, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture
Department(s): Arts
Office: Fisher Annex, 115
Phone: 845-758-7163
Website: https://arthistory.bard.edu/?page_id=58
Biography: expand/collapseSelect Fellowships: Mellon Conservation Fellowship; Harvard University Art Museums (2002-2003); Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington -Clarice and Robert Smith Fellow (1999-2000); Belgian American Educational Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship (1997-1998).
Select Publications: Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Still Life, Vision, and the Devotional Image (2012), “The Garland Pictures’ Reception in Seventeenth-Century Flanders and Italy,” Domestic and Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti. (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Burlington VT: Ashgate Press, 2009). Her current book manuscript in progress is Inventing the Animal in Early Modern Europe.
B.F.A., School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University; M.A., Tufts University; Ph.D., Harvard University. Faculty, Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. At Bard since 2003.