First-Year Seminar Forum Events

First-Year Seminar Welcome Reception

Monday, September 6, 2021 at 4:45 p.m.

Please join us under the tent behind Manor for a special welcome event. Mingle with your fellow students and faculty and enjoy some refreshments!

Aaron Mattocks - Photo by James Clark

Choreographer Mark Morris's Adaptation of Henry Purcell's Opera Dido and Aeneas

Monday, October 4, 2021 at 4:45 p.m.

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

FYSEM is delighted to announce our first FORUM event of the year: a screening of the modern dance piece DIDO AND AENEAS, with choreography by Mark Morris set to the music of the 17^th-century English composer Henry Purcell.

The ill-fated love affair between Aeneas and Dido, queen of Carthage, is one of the most memorable and significant episodes of Virgil’s epic, dramatizing the human costs of the hero’s empire-founding mission: it has been adapted, riffed, and rewritten by a host of writers and creative artists over the past two thousand years. The most famous of these is Henry Purcell’s one-act opera Dido and Aeneas, written in the 1680s, which searingly presents the despair of the abandoned Dido. In 1995, the choreographer Mark Morris premiered his ballet, set to Purcell’s music, which amplified the story’s interest in gender: he himself danced the part of Dido.

Our event will consist of a screening of a performance of this 50-minute work, preceded by remarks by Aaron Mattocks, the former manager of the Mark Morris Dance Company, who will speak on elements of Morris’s technique and about “Dido” more specifically.

ATTENDANCE AT THIS EVENT IS MANDATORY. Masks are required and there will be room for generous spacing. Students who have special requests with respect to attendance are asked to speak with their FYSEM instructor.

Bard College Orchestra

The Self and the Language of Music

Monday, November 1, 2021 at 4:45 p.m.

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

FYSEM is a course that focuses on language. It asks us to read texts closely, to write about them, and to talk about them. It seeks to deepen and widen our understanding of what words can and cannot do. Although most of our exchanges with ourselves and with others assume a linguistic character, at the same time we appear also to be a musical species. In Europe and North America, the use of sounds, notes, rhythms, and the combination of all the elements of music making developed into an elaborate world of communication and expression with its own distinct system of notation, making it possible to reach an audience well out of earshot. This tradition of music has migrated across continents and cultures, notably to Asia and Latin America. Music in this incarnation is not a language. Yet it seems to be a shortcut to one's emotions. Perhaps it is a mystical means of communication clearer and more powerful than language and therefore a link to the divine?

No music is assigned in FYSEM, but yet music co-existed with all the required reading in both semesters.

This lecture/performance is designed to inspire curiosity about how music, as a form of life, independent of words, images, and any explicit or implicit storyline, reframes time, holds our attention, suggests meaning, appeals to our memory, and becomes easily associated with feelings. The music that will be performed and discussed was not written to narrate a movie or a play. It was not inspired by a vision or a painting or any image. It is rather an eloquent example of musical ideas and thought.

ATTENDANCE AT THIS EVENT IS MANDATORY. Masks are required and there will be room for generous spacing. Students who have special requests with respect to attendance are asked to speak with their FYSEM instructor.

Past Events: 2020–21

A Library by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ilya Milstein, 2018.

Journeys in a Time of Contentment: A panel discussion with First-Year Seminar students and faculty

Zoom event will occur Monday, April 26, 2021, 4:30–5:30 p.m.

First-Year Seminar has taken us on journeys real, spiritual, and metaphorical—from Odysseus’s voyage home to Ithaka to Frederick Douglass’s quest for freedom and Derek Walcott’s imaginative roaming over space and time. Yet many of us have spent the past year in unprecedented physical confinement. This final FYSEM forum discussion considers how our experiences of isolation have inflected our ideas about reading and writing, and asks whether journeys and adventures are possible when movement is not.

Antonio Delgado

A Conversation with Congressman Antonio Delgado: The Self in the World

Recording will be shared Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Many of the assigned readings for First-Year Seminar revolve around intellectual, emotional, and political journeys, underscoring the value of literature through the ages for personal and intellectual growth. In the first of our FYSEM forums this semester, we are honored to welcome Congressman Antonio Delgado, the US Representative for our district, New York-19, to speak about the books that played a crucial role in his own development as a person, thinker, and politician. Congressman Delgado will deliver remarks, and then participate in a Q&A with Bard’s 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?

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.”

Past Events: 2019–20

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.

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: 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 cotaught 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 codirectors, will be joined by a group of first-year students for a roundtable 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 hourlong discussion.

Past Events: 2018–19

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: 2017–18

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.

Past Events: 2016–17

Experiencing Coriolanus

Monday October 3, 2016 at 4:45 p.m.

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:
Daniel Mendelsohn and Karen Raizen

Fall Semester Office Hours: Mondays from 2:30 - 4:00, Olin 307

The program directors hold regular office hours throughout the semester. We welcome the chance to meet with you about your experiences in the course. Note that this is in addition to your FYSEM instructor’s office hours, which you should attend with specific questions/concerns about your own FYSEM section and personal progress in the course.
Questions?

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