First-Year Seminar Forum Events

2020-21

First-year students are invited to join a series of course-wide conversations organized by First-Year Seminar this Fall with some of the remarkable writers, thinkers, and artists who are part of the Bard College community. Each panelist will share with us what “the self in the world” means in their own professional work and intellectual life, while also helping us think through one of the texts on the First-Year Seminar reading list.

Each conversation will include a small group of first-year students and faculty, and will be recorded so that all first-year students and faculty can continue the conversation together in their own First-Year Seminar section.

To volunteer as a student participant in one of these conversations, please reach out to one of the First-Year Seminar directors (ocheta@bard.edu, lcurtis@bard.edu). Volunteers will also be solicited in class as the semester goes along. Volunteers will need to be available for both a pre-conversation and the conversation itself, and must be willing for their participation to be recorded and shared with the first-year class.

Chiara Ricciardone

Self, Statehood, and Tradition: A Conversation with Chiara Ricciardone

Recording will be shared Wednesday, October 7

In the first of three panel conversations around the texts and ideas of First-Year Seminar, first-year students and faculty will speak with Chiara Ricciardone, a scholar and activist whose research and teaching interests encompass critical theory and ancient Greek philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Using Virgil’s Aeneid as our touchstone text, this student / faculty panel will discuss what it means to read classical texts in the contemporary world. Is it possible or useful for us, as we grapple with defining the political community we belong to, to engage with or appropriate an ancient text? How could our relationship with ancient texts inform, provoke, and inspire questions about the world we want to live in?

About our panelist: Chiara Ricciardone is the co-founder and provost of the Activist Graduate School, and the Klemens von Klemperer Hannah Arendt Center Teaching Fellow at Bard College. In addition to teaching at the Bard Prison Initiative, she is also co-teaching a new seminar on Classics and Activism at Princeton University. With a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley (2017), Ricciardone writes across a range of genres and disciplines. She is particularly interested in the political and formal problem that difference poses for human beings, and how it might be possible to think of difference without hierarchy. She is at work on a book of autofiction that suggests the self itself is a fiction, and perhaps no longer a useful one. Ricciardone is also the US Commissioning Editor for the public philosophy journal The Philosopher.

Dinaw Mengestu

The Self and the Soul: A Conversation with Dinaw Mengestu

Recording will be shared Wednesday, October 28

In the second of three panel conversations around the texts and ideas of First-Year Seminar, first-year students and faculty will speak with Dinaw Mengestu, the highly-acclaimed Ethiopian-American novelist and journalist who directs Bard’s Written Arts program. Using Dante’s Inferno as our touchstone text, this student / faculty panel will discuss how and why Mengestu is inspired to create (in the words of the New York Times Book Review of his third novel, All Our Names), “disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place, and human connection.”

About our panelist: Dinaw Mengestu is Professor of Written Arts and Director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College. He 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.

Gregory Duff Morton

Encounters, Oppression and Recuperation: A Conversation with Gregory Duff Morton

Recording will be shared Wednesday, November 11

In the final panel conversation around the texts and ideas of First-Year Seminar, first-year students and faculty will speak with anthropologist and activist Gregory Duff Morton, whose teaching and research focus on migrant labor, economics, and social movement organizing in rural Latin America. Using Lėon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears as our touchstone text, this student / faculty panel will discuss the scholarly work required to reclaim indigenous narratives of history in the Western hemisphere, and the political stakes of such an effort. More broadly, the conversation will interrogate the challenges of bringing together academic research and civic engagement through the perspective of an anthropologist.

About our panelist: Gregory Duff Morton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. A graduate of the University of Chicago and formerly a postdoctoral fellow in international and public affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, his academic work has appeared in Social Service Review, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Providence Journal, Journal of Recreational Mathematics, and World Development, among other publications. At Bard, he teaches courses such as “Doing Ethnography,” “The Stranger in Latin America,” as well as the Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course, “The Anthropology of the Institution: Making Change through Social Service and Community Organizing.” He also regularly teaches First-Year Seminar.

2019–20

First-Year Seminar Welcome Reception

Monday, September 2, 2019 at 4:45 p.m.

The Lawn Behind Manor

Please join the other members of the Class of 2023, and the First-Year Seminar faculty and staff, for refreshments and conversation on Manor Lawn as we inaugurate our work together this year.

The Self in the World / Bard in the World

Monday, September 16, 2019 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

Who lived here before us? How does a sense of place, and its layered histories, contribute to our sense of self as students, as individuals, and as a community? Join us for a presentation and panel discussion about Hudson Valley history with Myra Armstead, Vice President of Inclusive Excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies; Susan Merriam, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, and Heidi Hill, Historic Site Manager at the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, NY.

Special Preview of the New Documentary College Behind Bars

Monday, October 21, 2019 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

Directed and produced by award-winning filmmaker Lynn Novick, produced by Sarah Botstein, and executive produced by Ken Burns, College Behind Bars reveals the transformative power of higher education through the experiences of incarcerated men and women earning degrees in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the country’s most rigorous college-in-prison programs. This preview event will feature segments from the documentary followed by panel discussions with Lynn Novick, BPI Executive Director Max Kenner ’01, and BPI alumni featured in the film.

Dido and Aeneas at Bard College. Photo by Eliza Watson '21

Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

Monday, November 4, 2019 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

Acclaimed tenor and Associate Professor of Music, Rufus Müller, together with Bard colleagues and students, presents selections from Purcell’s 1689 opera, Dido and Aeneas. Inspired by the Dido episode in the fourth book of the Aeneid, Purcell’s work translates into music the tragic love story at the heart of Virgil’s epic.

Experiencing The Tempest

Monday, December 2, 2019 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

As you read Shakespeare’s drama of fantastical encounters, magic, love, and betrayal, Bard College Artist in Residence Jonathan Rosenberg and a cast of professional actors perform scenes from The Tempest and discuss the interpretive choices they make when performing the play.

Literacy, Race, and Memory in Douglass and Undocumented

Monday, February 10, 2020 at 4:45 p.m.
Presented by Dan-El Padilla Peralta, Department of Classics, Princeton University

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

This talk will examine the relationship of literacy to the formation of the racial subject by reading a scene in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave against a chapter of Padilla Peralta's own best-selling memoir, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.

Cosponsored by American Studies and the Council for Inclusive Excellence

Professors Ayesha Ramachandran and Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University (Photo credit: Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning)

Ourselves in the World: Reflections on First-Year Seminar

Recording will be shared with all the first-year students on Tuesday, May 5

Now that First-Year Seminar is drawing to a close, we invite you to tune into our final Forum event for the year: a roundtable discussion that will interrogate the concept of the “common course” in college education, and reflect on the aims and experiences of FYSEM—Bard's version of this concept. To help us explore the subject, we’ve invited Professors Ayesha Ramachandran and Marta Figlerowicz of Yale University to be our guests. Most recently, they have co-taught the course “Selfhood: Race, Class, and Gender” (popularly known as “The Self Class”), which, parallel to our FYSEM, explores the nature of the “self” in history, partly through virtual reality. Professors Ramachandran and Figlerowicz are also part of an interdisciplinary group of scholars leading a project known as “The Order of Multitudes: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum,” which aims to trace the long histories of information management across the globe dating back to the late medieval period. They, along with FYSEM’s co-directors, will be joined by a group of first-year students for a round-table that will be recorded and shared during the week of May 4. Please look out for instructions from your FYSEM professor about submitting questions in advance, since we are eager to have student questions framing the agenda of this hour-long discussion.

Past Events: Fall 2018 - Spring 2019

Experiencing Caesar

Monday, September 24, 2018 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

First-Year Seminar explores the dramatic story of the demise of the Roman military commander and “dictator in perpetuity,” Julius Caesar. Bard College Artist in Residence Jonathan Rosenberg and a cast of four professional actors—Ezra Knight, Keren Lugo, Ken Marks, and Richard Topol—perform scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and discuss the interpretive choices they make when performing the play.

The Orchestra Now. Photo by Matt Dine

Also Sprach Zarathustra

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 at 5:00 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

As students in Bard’s First-Year Seminar read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, conductor and historian Leon Botstein explores the relationship between Nietzsche and music. A discussion is accompanied by musical excerpts, then a full performance by The Orchestra Now, followed by an audience Q&A.

Past Events: Fall 2017 - Spring 2018

Experiencing Revolution

Monday, November 13, 2017 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

It starts with the most famous four notes in music. Join us in in Frank Gehry's iconic Fisher Center to hear Beethoven’s legendary Fifth Symphony—a work written under the imaginative spell of revolution. President Leon Botstein will discuss Beethoven and the Age of Revolution, and then lead Bard’s Conservatory Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s dramatic symphony.

Anne Carson

Bracko: A Reading of Sappho’s Poetry by Anne Carson, with Amy Khoshbin, Robert Currie, Nick Flynn, and Sam Anderson

Monday, April 23, 2018 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

First-Year Seminar explores the poetry of Sappho through the lens of acclaimed Canadian poet, essayist, and translator Anne Carson, whose translation, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, we have been reading this semester.

First, Anne Carson will present Bracko, a multimedia recitation of Sappho’s poetry in four voices with accompanying video. Then she will be joined by artist Amy Khoshbin for a discussion on artistic freedom in the ancient world and today, in which students are invited to participate.

Past Events: Fall 2016- Spring 2017

Experiencing Coriolanus

Monday October 3, 2016 at 4:45 PM

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

Join us in in Frank Gehry’s iconic Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts to explore the dramatic story of the Roman soldier and leader Coriolanus. As we approach our own presidential election, his story, set in a war-weary nation starkly divided by internal political conflict, remains as timeless as ever. At its heart is a question that has challenged and perplexed us for millennia: what is the relationship between the people and those who govern them?

Experiencing Malcolm X

Monday, April 3, 2017 at 4:45 p.m.

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

As we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, First-Year Seminar presents The Acting Company (described by The New York Times as “the major touring classical theater in the United States”) in X: Or Betty Shabazz vs. The Nation, a new play written by Marcus Gardley (according to The New Yorker, “the heir to Garcia Lorca, Pirandello, and Tennessee Williams”) and directed by Ian Belknap.

2017 Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature: Francine Prose on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Thursday, May 4, 2017 at 4:45 p.m.

Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center

Acclaimed Bard novelist and critic Francine Prose, who has just written the introduction to a new edition of Frankenstein published by Restless Books, makes the case for the continued relevance of this towering work of gothic fiction. She is the prize-winning author of 20 works of fiction, including most recently Mister Monkey. Her works of nonfiction include the widely praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer.

Eugene Meyer (1875–1959) was the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first president of the World Bank. Previous Eugene Meyer speakers include Sir David Cannadine, Colm Tóibín, Andrew Roberts, Fintan O’Toole, and David Reynolds.

National Theatre Live Encore: Frankenstein

Tuesday, April 25, 2017 at 6:30 and 9:00 p.m.

Avery Arts Complex (South Campus)

As we read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, FYSEM presents the UK National Theatre Live’s thrilling broadcast of Frankenstein, adapted for the stage by Nick Dear. Directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire), Frankenstein features Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange, Sherlock) and Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting, Elementary) alternating roles as Victor Frankenstein and his creation.

Contact Us

Program Directors
Omar Cheta
Lauren Curtis
Daniel Mendelsohn (on sabbatical, Fall 2020)

The program directors hold regular office hours throughout the semester.
We welcome the chance to meet with the first-year class and talk with you about the course.

Fall Semester Directors' Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am EST
(Instructions for joining: please email lcurtis@bard.edu or ocheta@bard.edu for a Zoom link in advance)

Please note that this is in addition to your own FYSEM instructor's office hours, which you should attend with specific questions / concerns about your own FYSEM section and your own personal progress in the course.

For further information, contact Program Assistant Julie Cerulli
fysem@bard.edu | 845-758-7514