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 51-60 of 375
Jacob Burda, Senior Fellow, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities
Department(s): Hannah Arendt Center
Biography: expand/collapse
Jacob Burda is cofounder of the Alpine Fellowship, an annual symposium centered around aesthetics and ideas that supports, commissions, and showcases artists, writers, academics, and playwrights. He earned his PhD degree at the University of Oxford, writing his doctoral thesis on the conception of infinity in early German Romanticism. His thesis was translated into German and published with Metzler. He has lectured on German literature and philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is particularly interested in cultural history, phenomenology (especially Heidegger), and the philosophy of physics.

PhD, University of Oxford. At Bard: 2022–23.

John Burns, Associate Professor of Spanish
Office: Seymour, 102
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Burns is an educator, poet, translator, and the author of Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age (Cambria Press, 2015). He has also authored books chapters, including “Teaching Infrarrealistas: Using Lesser Known Contemporary Poets in the Undergraduate Classroom” in Teaching Latin American Poetries (forthcoming) and “From Manifesto to Manifestation: The Infrarrealista Movement as an Alternative Latin American Literary Community,” in Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture; and articles and book reviews in publications such as Film International (web), 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada, and Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources. His publications also include translations—of the Chilean poet Raúl Hernández and Galician poet Salvador García-Bodaño, as well as translations of the Beat poets into Spanish—and his own creative work. He has been invited to lecture, read, or present papers throughout the world, including at venues in Japan, Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia, Canada, New York City, and Madison, Wisconsin, among others. He previously taught at Bard High School Early College Queens, Rockford University in Illinois, and Kobe College in Japan, where he served as Visiting Researcher. BA, University of Maine–Orono; MA, PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison. At Bard since 2019.

Ian Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism
Office: Hegeman Science Hall, 310
Phone: 845-758-8170
Biography: expand/collapse
Studies in Chinese literature and history at Leyden University; graduate studies in Japanese cinema at Nihon University, Tokyo. Documentary filmmaker and photographer in Tokyo (1977–80); cultural editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1983–86); foreign editor of The Spectator, London (1990–91). Fellowships: Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin (1991–92); Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. (1998–99); Alistair Horne Visiting Fellow, St. Antony’s College, Oxford (1999–2000). Regular contributor to New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, New Republic, New Yorker, and The Guardian. Books include Behind the Mask (1983); God’s Dust (1988); Playing the Game (1990); The Wages of Guilt (1995); The Missionary and the Libertine (1997); Anglomania: A European Love Affair (1999); Bad Elements (2001); Inventing Japan: 1853–1964 (2003); Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006). Coauthor, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004). At Bard since 2003.

J. Andrew Bush, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Website: https://www.jandrewbush.org
Biography: expand/collapse
Andrew Bush is an anthropologist interested in the intersection of religion, gender and sexuality, law, and poetry in the Middle East. He has conducted research in the Kurdistan region of Iraq since 2004, with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan (Stanford University Press, 2020), describes the kinds of ethical life available to Muslims who spurn devotional piety but retain intimate kin relations with other pious Muslims. His second book has been supported through a fieldwork grant from Wenner-Gren and a fellowship at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. Tentatively titled A History of Husbands in Islamic Law, the book asks how questions of manhood or masculinity have been shaped by different legal forums adjudicating questions of marriage and divorce in Kurdistan since the 18th century. Other writing has been published in American Ethnologist, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. He was previously a Research Fellow at Cracow University of Economics and taught for four years at New York University Abu Dhabi.

BA, James Madison University; MA, PhD, Johns Hopkins University. At Bard since 2022.

Krista Caballero, Artist in Residence; Codirector, Center for Experimental Humanities
Website: https://www.kristacaballero.com
Biography: expand/collapse
Krista Caballero, associate director of the Center for Experimental Humanities, is an interdisciplinary artist exploring issues of agency, survival, and environmental change in a more-than-human world. Moving freely between traditional and emerging media, her work creates situations for encountering alternative ecological and social landscapes. In 2010 she created Mapping Meaning, an ongoing project that brings together artists, scientists, and scholars through experimental workshops, exhibitions, and transdisciplinary research.

Caballero was awarded a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and is currently a Smithsonian Research Associate working with the National Museum of Natural History studying the cultural implications of bird species decline. She has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, among others and exhibited nationally and internationally in exhibitions, festivals as well as venues outside the usual art context. Some of these include: the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA); the North American Ornithological Conference; RAY2018 Photo Triennale in Germany; Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway; and the Association for Computers and the Humanities. MFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. At Bard since 2018.

Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Associate Professor of Physics
Office: Rose Science Laboratories, 113
Phone: 845-758-7584
Biography: expand/collapse
B.A., St. John’s College, Santa Fe; M.S., London School of Economics; M.S., Ph.D., Northwestern University. Also studied at University of California, Berkeley, and University of Wisconsin. Previously served as a postdoctoral science fellow at Columbia University, where he subjected the world’s thinnest material, graphene, to the world’s most powerful magnetic fields, in order to study novel two-dimensional electronic states of matter. Has also conducted research at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. At Bard since 2012.

Mary Caponegro, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing
Office: Shafer House, 303
Phone: 845-758-7891
Biography: expand/collapse
Mary Caponegro is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard, and has been on the faculty since 2002. After graduating from Bard College in 1978, she went on to receive her master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University. Author Jonathan Safran Foer has called Caponegro “one of the most imaginative, daring, serious, and playful writers alive.” She is the author of the short story collections The Star Café, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down, as well as selected works in translation. An international collection of essays on her work, The Exquisite Interruption: Essays, Notes, and Fragments on the Lyrical Prose of Mary Caponegro (La squisita interruzione: saggi, note e appunti sulla prosa lirica di Mary Caponegro), was published in 2018 by Campanotto Editore. Professor Caponegro is a contributor to The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Tin House, Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill, Epoch, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Sulfur, Gargoyle, and Iowa Review, and a contributing editor for Conjunctions. She has received the Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature, General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, Bruno Arcudi Award, Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College, Teacher of the Year Award from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Undergraduate Teaching Award from Syracuse University, a Yaddo Residency, Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship.

BA, Bard College; MA, Brown University. At Bard since 2002.

Nicole Caso, Associate Professor of Spanish; Director, Spanish Studies Program
Office: Seymour, 201
Phone: 845-758-6822 x6073
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Caso’s areas of expertise include Hispanic languages and literature and Latin American literature. She is the author of Practicing Memory in Central American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); has contributed a chapter to The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature; and explored the implications of literacy in “‘Walking the Path of Letters’: Negotiating Assimilation and Difference in Contemporary Mayan Literature,” published in CHASQUI: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana. Additionally, her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Revista Iberoamericana and Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, among others; and she has contributed to critical compilations analyzing novelists such as Manlio Argueta and Rosa María Britton. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century narratives of Latin America, Central American literature, subaltern studies, memory and literature, the cultural production of collective identities, the limits of representation through writing, literature and human rights, ethics and representation, and theories of space and place. Teaching interests include Spanish for heritage speakers, Latin American testimonio, the city in Latin American fiction, literature of human rights in Latin America, historical fiction, and crafting Mayan identities. AB, Harvard University; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley. At Bard since 2004.

Maria Sachiko Cecire, Associate Professor of Literature; Coordinator, Experimental Humanities
Office: Aspinwall, 306
Phone: 845-758-7697
Website: https://eh.bard.edu
Biography: expand/collapse
Professor Cecire is the founding director of the Center for Experimental Humanities, which focuses on how technologies mediate the human experience. She is the author of Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and coeditor of Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789-Present (Routledge, 2015). She is a National Project Scholar for the American Library Association’s Great Stories Club for underserved youth (since 2014); other public-facing humanities work includes podcasting, documentary films, and short fiction. Recipient, Rhodes Scholarship (2006).

BA, University of Chicago; MSt, DPhil, Oxford University. At Bard since 2010.

Luis Chávez, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and the Arts
Biography: expand/collapse
Luis Chávez’s research and teaching interests include ethnic studies, music and sound studies, border studies, Chicanx studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality, and performance studies. He comes to Bard from California State University School of Music, where he taught courses in music history and literature, world music, and Latin American music. He has also served as lecturer in the Department of American Indian Studies, College of Ethnic Studies, at San Francisco State University. He has studied classical guitar and flamenco, in addition to music history and ethnomusicology. Publications include the articles “Decolonization for Ethnomusicology and Music Studies in Higher Education,” in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education; and “Decolonizable Spaces in Ethnomusicology,” SEM (Society for Ethnomusicology) Student News and Ethnomusicology Review. He is the recipient of, among other honors, the Marnie Dilling Prize for Best Paper, “The Figure of Santo Santiago: Memory and Sound in Mexican Danza,” at the Northern California chapter meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology; and a Mellon Summer Research Fellowship.

BA, MA, California State University, East Bay; PhD, University of California, Davis. At Bard since 2022.

Results 51-60 of 375