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
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
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
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 301-310 of 375
Frank M. Scalzo, Associate Professor of Psychology; Psychology Program; Health Professions Adviser
Office: Preston, Room 101
Phone: 845-758-7222
Website: https://psychology.bard.edu/faculty/
Biography: expand/collapse
BS, St. Bonaventure University; MA, PhD, Binghamton University. Postdoctoral training at Columbia University and the Food and Drug Administration. Taught at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Fulbright Scholar, lecturing/research in psychopharmacology, Slovenia. Numerous publications, book chapters, and presentations at scientific meetings. Research and teaching interests include neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and neurobehavioral teratology. Member, Society for Neuroscience, Neurobehavioral Teratology Society, and International Society for Developmental Psychobiology. At Bard since 1999.

Jana Schmidt, Assistant Professor of German Studies
Biography: expand/collapse
Jana Schmidt, assistant professor of German Studies, writes about German and American transatlantic literatures and theory. After completing her PhD in comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, she first came to Bard as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, where she also served as director of academic programs in 2022–23. She has held fellowships at the German Literature Archive Marbach, German Historical Institute Washington, and at Fordham University and the New York Public Library. Her first book, Hannah Arendt und die Folgen (2018), traces the influence of Hannah Arendt’s thought on the work of a variety of postwar thinkers, artists, and activists. She has written essays for publications such as Philosophy Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Narrative Theory, and German Quarterly. Her current writing project deals with the encounter of German-speaking refugees with African American thinkers and politics from the 1940s onward.

MA, English, University of Pennsylvania (2007); PhD, comparative literature, SUNY Buffalo (2015). At Bard since 2022.

Zachary Schwartzman, Ear Training & Score Reading, Graduate Conducting Program
Department(s): Bard Conservatory of Music, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Office: Edith C. Blum Institute, 1st Floor
Biography: expand/collapse
Zachary Schwartzman has conducted around the United States, in Brazil, England, Bosnia, and Mexico. His orchestral performances have been featured on NPR, including a national broadcast on “Performance Today.” A recipient of the career development grant from the Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation, he has served as assistant conductor for the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Opera Atelier (Toronto), Berkshire Opera Festival, Opéra Français de New York, L’Ensemble orchestral de Paris, Gotham Chamber Opera, Oakland East Bay Symphony, Connecticut Grand Opera, and Opera Omaha, among others. He was associate conductor for two seasons with New York City Opera, as well as conductor in their VOX series, and has been associate/assistant conductor for fifteen productions at Glimmerglass Opera, where he conducted performances of Carmen and the world premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck.

Mr. Schwartzman’s credits as assistant conductor include recordings for Albany Records, Bridge Records, Naxos Records, Hyperion Records, and a Grammy-nominated world-premiere recording for Chandos Records. He had a twelve-year tenure as music director of the Blue Hill Troupe and has been assistant conductor for the American Symphony Orchestra since 2012. He has appeared as both assistant conductor and conductor at Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. In addition to degrees in Piano Performance and Orchestral Conducting, he earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Oberlin College.

Samuel (Shai) Secunda, Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism
Phone: 845-758-7389
Biography: expand/collapse
Shai Secunda is Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard College. He received a bachelor’s degree from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, a master’s from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA/PhD from Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Talmud in its Sasanian Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context (Oxford University Press, 2020). His work uses philological analysis of the Talmud—the work which sits at the center of the classical Jewish canon—to reveal the rich cultural and religious worlds of late antique Babylonian Jewry and their neighbors in Sasanian Iran, especially the Zoroastrians. He has also published widely on Jewish studies scholarship and contemporary culture in the Jewish Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. Before coming to Bard, he taught at Yale and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Bard since 2016.

Monique Segarra, Visiting Professor, Bard Center for Environmental Policy
Department(s): Bard Center for Environmental Policy
Phone: 845-758-7869
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Segarra’s areas of interest include sustainable development, international environmental politics, and the increasingly contentious politics surrounding natural resource management in Latin America. Her current research focuses on the politics of water reform in Oaxaca, Mexico, and comparative analysis of human and environmental rights movements challenging mineral and oil policies of states and multinational corporations in Ecuador, Mexico, and Chile. She has published articles in journals such as Latin American Politics and Society and Journal of Contemporary Sociology, and edited and contributed to The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America. She has a forthcoming chapter on human rights and the environment in Latin America in Human Rights: Challenges of the Past/Challenges for the Future. In addition to research and teaching, she has worked with a range of international development and research institutions including the World Bank, United Nations Development Programme, Council on Foreign Relations, and Social Science Research Council. She is a member of the Bard CEP graduate committee.

BA, political science, Brandeis University; MIA, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University; PhD, comparative politics and Latin America, Columbia University.

Tschabalala Self, Visiting Artist in Residence, Studio Arts
Website: https://tschabalalaself.com/
Biography: expand/collapse
Tschabalala Self is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas surrounding the black body. Born in Harlem, she lives and works in the Hudson Valley. She constructs depictions of predominantly women using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self’s work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Bard in 2012 and a master in fine arts degree from the Yale School of the Arts. Her work is in public collections including theArt Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has held residency at, among others, the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Recent solo exhibitions include Skin Tight (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), The Illusion of the Self (Longlati Foundation), Around the Way, (Espoo Museum of Modern Art), Feed Me, Kiss Me, Need Me (Cultuurcentrum Strombeek Grimbergen) and Tschabalala Self: Out of Body (ICA Boston). She has been featured in articles in the New York Times, Financial Times, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, Dazed, Frieze, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times, among others.

Gautam Sethi, Associate Professor of Economics and Econometrics, Bard Center for Environmental Policy
Department(s): Bard Center for Environmental Policy
Office: Hegeman Science Hall, 005
Phone: 845-758-7386
Website: https://bard.edu/cep/people/faculty
Biography: expand/collapse
BA, University of Delhi; MA, Delhi School of Economics; MPhil, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, master’s thesis on the conflicts between utilitarianism and libertarianism; Fellow, University of Texas, Austin; PhD, University of California, Berkeley (Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award). Research interests include natural resources and environmental economics, applied microeconomics, game theory, philosophy of economics, and history of economic thought. Worked in India on energy-economy-environment linkages and associated policy issues. Doctoral work focused on fishery management under certainty. Designed and taught a Rethinking Economics course at the University of California, Berkeley. Author, working papers of climate change policy impacts at Redefining Progress, San Francisco, and a companion volume to Jeffrey Perloff’s Microeconomics; article in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Presented research talks at academic institutions (Binghamton University, University of California-Santa Barbara), research institutes (Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, Tata Energy Research Institute, India), policy forums (OECD workshop, Oaxaca, Mexico), and numerous professional society meetings.

Adam Shatz, Visiting Professor of the Humanities
Website: https://www.adamshatz.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to, among other publications, the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and The Nation. He is also host of the podcast Myself with Others, produced by the pianist Richard Sears. His political reporting and commentary have covered subjects such as Trump and the white supremacists in Charlottesville, mass incarceration, Israel’s Putinization, the deep state, and Egypt after Mubarak. Published profiles and portraits include Franz Fanon and Michel Houellebecq (London Review of Books), Nina Simone (New York Review of Books), saxophonist Kamasi Washington (New York Times Magazine); French cartoonist Riad Sattouf (New Yorker); and jazz great Charles Mingus (The Nation), among many others. Shatz previously taught at New York University and was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

BA, Columbia University.

Heeryoon Shin, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture
Department(s): Arts
Biography: expand/collapse
Heeryoon Shin specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on early modern and colonial India. Her research interests include sacred and urban space, cross-cultural encounters, and architectural historiography in early modern and colonial South Asia. Her current book project, tentatively titled Temples Between Empires: Architectural Encounters in Banaras, ca. 1750–1850, explores architectural revival and cross-cultural exchange during the transition between the Mughal and British empires through the lens of temple architecture in the Hindu pilgrimage city of Banaras. She is also developing a project on the global circulation of blue and white ceramics and their interaction with local production and use in South Asia. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Samsung Scholarship Foundation, and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Her work has been published in Artibus Asiae and Journal 18, a journal of 18th-century art and culture. Professor Shin also contributed a book chapter, “Chintz: Indian Textiles in English Bedrooms,” to The Eighteenth-Century Room (2020), and book and exhibition reviews to the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, a Bard Graduate Center publication. She previously served as Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian Art at Vanderbilt University; she also taught at Williams College and was a visiting lecturer at Colorado College.

BA, MA, Seoul National University; MA, MPhil, PhD, Yale University. At Bard since 2021.

Gennady Shkliarevsky, Professor Emeritus of History
Biography: expand/collapse
BA, MA, Kiev State University; MA, PhD, University of Virginia. Editor, Committee for Television and Broadcasting (USSR). Head, public relations, Kiev State Museum of Western and Eastern Art. Recipient, DuPont Fellowship and Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, University of Virginia. Publications include Labor in the Russian Revolution: Factory Committees and Trade Unions, 1917–1918 and articles in Journal of International Studies in Management and Organization, Russian History/Histoire Russe, Journal of Modern History, Dialogue, Annandale, Novoe Russkoe Slovo (New York), Forum (Germany), Rossiiskaia gazeta (Russia), Nevskoe vremia (Russia). At Bard: 1985–2016.

Results 301-310 of 375