First-Year Seminar Faculty

At age 18, Paul Cadden-Zimansky's first classroom jobs were working at a day care on the lower east side of Manhattan and teaching music theory at the National Guitar Summer Workshop.  Since then he's earned a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, an MSc in History and Philosophy of Science from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Physics from Northwestern University; taught at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University; and held research appointments at Argonne National Laboratory and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.  He currently serves on the Executive Committee of an international collaboration of scientific societies planning celebrations to mark a century of quantum mechanics in 2025.  In his labs at Bard, students learn to create and manipulate the thinnest material in the world (graphene).  On weekends he still Zooms with a few of his college classmates to read and discuss philosophy.

Alex Kitnick is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard.  He graduated from Wesleyan University where he majored in something called the College of Letters (which is kind of like a very long FYSEM).  He later went on to earn his Ph.D from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.  His scholarly focus is on modern and contemporary art, primarily in the US and England. A particular interest of his is artist writings and art criticism. Alex is an active critic himself, and his writing has appeared in publications including Artforum and October. He has also contributed to many museum exhibition catalogs. His first book is currently under contract with University of Chicago Press.  

Alys Moody is Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College. She was born and raised on the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, in the hills outside a town best known for its large concrete banana. She lived and taught in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and France, before coming to Bard in 2019. Alys’s research looks at twentieth-century literature as an international undertaking, and particularly (for better or worse) at the way literature has engaged with histories of hunger and starvation in the twentieth century. In addition to FYSEM, she teaches courses on world literature, global modernism, decolonisation, and hunger. In her teaching and her research, she sees literature as part of a larger history of ideas and culture, and she is excited about FYSEM’s ability to help us think creatively about ideas and their history. And as a new faculty member, she is looking forward to getting to know Bard with and through its incoming first-year cohort.

Joshua Boettiger, who begins this Fall at Bard as Jewish Chaplain and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities, is a Bard alum who has an MFA in Poetry (Pacific University, 2018) and a Masters in Hebrew Letters/rabbinic ordination (Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 2006). He is a Rabbis Without Borders fellow, and is also the Associate Rosh Yeshiva at the Center for Contemporary Mussar – where he teaches text, theology, and practice of Jewish approaches to mindfulness and service. He is excited to be back at Bard and to be part of the FYSEM journey.

Vanessa Grajwer Boettiger joined Bard in the Fall as Visiting Assistant Professor of Hebrew.   For her, literary analysis and spirituality is both personal and practical, the language of how we understand our daily lives and relationships. She has a BA from Yale in Anthropology and Economics, and received a Masters of Hebrew Letters and Rabbinic Ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Vanessa was raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and has lived in Israel, Portugal, and, most recently, Oregon. Vanessa is thrilled to be joining the FYSEM community this Spring. 

Since 1991 when I joined Bard College, I worked in various administrative capacities, including most recently being the Vice President for Finance and Administration, Chief Financial Officer.  Last summer I joined the faculty as a full-time member of the philosophy department.  Such a change may seem out of the ordinary, but my educational background sort of explains most of it:  prior to arriving at Bard I had an MBA with a finance emphasis, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy with special interest in philosophy of mind and early modern philosophy.  I have always mixed teaching and administrative duties during my time at the college, and now I’m very excited to be able to give my full-time attention to FYSEM.  Welcome to Bard College!  I look forward to meeting you.  

John Burns is Visiting Associate Professor of Spanish Studies at Bard College. Originally from Maine, he has lived in Chile and Spain and recently spent a semester teaching in Japan. He is interested in literature and literary translation, with a specific focus on contemporary Latin American poetry. He has written about experimental writers from Chile and Mexico and the ways in which their work intersects with politics and history. He is excited to teach FYSEM for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because he still remembers how important the texts that comprise the course were to him as a young man and how they continue to resonate with him many years later. 

Rachel Cavell teaches in Bard’s Language and Thinking Program, and is a Faculty Associate with Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. She teaches Essay and Revision at Bard, and writing and Civics at the Bard Prison Initiative. She has worked with faculty development at Bard-Smolny College (St. Petersburg State University in St. Petersburg, Russia), and has taught in the Bard Masters in Teaching Program. Rachel is also a writer, with recent publications in the Adelaide Literary Journal; an attorney, and a practitioner of Restorative Justice. She is very excited to be discussing, thinking and writing about the great texts in First-Year Seminar.

Ziad Dallal is Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic at Bard College. Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, he earned his BA from AUB in English Literature, and his Ph.D. from New York University in Comparative Literature. Ziad's areas of research/interest include modern Arabic literature and intellectual history, critical theory, translation theory, political philosophy, postcolonial theory, philology, Marxism, finance, and film theory. He is currently writing a book on Civilizational Discourse in nineteenth-century Arabic Literature. He has also written about contemporary Arabic theater and contemporary music in Lebanon and served as lead advisor and translator on This Is Home: A Refugee Story, a 2017 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winner for world cinema documentary. In addition to FYSem, Ziad teaches courses on Arabic Literature and Language. At Bard since 2018. 

Nesrin Ersoy McMeekin is a Visiting Instructor in the Humanities at Bard College. Born in Bulgaria, and emigrated to Turkey as a child, Nesrin has taught at Bard for the past six years. She has taught FYSEM each term since she arrived, and she has been teaching a version of it at Bard Early College Hudson since Fall 2017.   Nesrin's research focused on Turkish-Bolshevik relations during 1917 to 1930s, and she is interested in Turkish emigration-mainly from the Balkans to Modern Turkey- after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  She enjoys teaching FYSEM and having lively conversations on our texts.  

Alexa Gordon Murphy is Outreach and Education Librarian at Stevenson Library, where she supports students in their reading and research endeavors throughout their careers at Bard. Alexa received her B.A. in International Studies from Bard College at Simon’s Rock (then called Simon’s Rock at Bard College), and has an M.A. in Professional Writing from University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons University. Before becoming a librarian, Alexa worked in educational publishing for 15 years as a writer and editor. She’s excited to take the FYSEM journey with students, having once experienced the course as an undergraduate herself.

Seth David Halvorson is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He earned his BA from Macalester College, MA from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he taught in the Core Curriculum.  For the past 11 years he was Associate Professor of Philosophy, History, and Political Studies at Bard High School Early College, Newark- where he was founding faculty and coach of the debate team.  Professor Halvorson has taught Language and Thinking at Bard for many years and his interests include Political, Ethical, and Social Philosophy, Policy Analysis, Legal Studies, and Philosophy of Technology. He has presented at national and international conferences on diverse topics.  Prior to his graduate education, he spent 3 years at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. He is undertaking a book-length study of the civic, moral, and educational dimensions of speed in the spheres of social life. In addition to FYSEM, Halvorson teaches classes in the intersection of Politics, Ethics, Law, Education, and the History of Ideas. Originally from Minnesota, Seth is a painter and a musician and with his partner, a practicing Psychoanalyst, is laughing with and learning from their two young children.  Their youngest child is also an incoming first year student at Bard, at the Abigail Lundquist Botstein Nursery School.  He is thrilled to teach FYSEM because of his love of open dialogue with students on the big issues and questions that spring from the texts and class discussions. 

Claire-Marie Hefner joins Bard College in Fall 2022 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Islam in the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion Program. She is a cultural anthropologist by training and her research is based in the largest Muslim majority country in the world, Indonesia. Her current book examines themes of women's achievement and moral learning in Islamic boarding schools. Her interests in gender, ritual, performance, and embodiment are influenced by her study of Indonesian and Indian arts. She has over fifteen years of training in Classical Balinese and Indian dance (Bharatnatayam and Kuchipudi) and she continues to study Javanese and Balinese gamelan. She looks forward to discussing great books with her FYSEM students in Fall 2022.

Mie is an Assistant Professor in the Politics program at Bard. She is originally from Massachusetts, but her favorite state is Rhode Island. She studies the political theories of organizers and social movements, with a focus on the twentieth-century American labor and civil rights movements. Mie thinks of political practice as an important source of political theory, and she tries to bridge theory and practice in her research, writing, and teaching. She recently published an article on civil rights organizer Ella Baker’s theory of radical democracy in The American Political Science Review. She also writes about organizing, social movements, and religion and politics for magazines like Jacobin, Boston Review, Political Theology Network, and The Forge. Through her teaching, she encourages students to think of themselves as political theorists in their own right. In addition to FYSEM, she teaches classes on political organizing, Western political thought, American political thought, identity politics, and revolutionary theory and practice. When she’s not being a professor she likes to organize, watch reality TV, and go for hikes with her dog, Yoshi. 
 

Prof. Pınar Kemerli teaches political theory and Middle East politics at Bard College. She completed her PhD in the Department of Government at Cornell University, and holds a BA from Boğaziçi University in Turkey, and MA degrees from Goldsmiths College of the University of London and Cornell University. Her interdisciplinary research addresses theories and practices of resistance, decolonization, violence/nonviolence, and religion and politics, and she offers courses on these topics. She is currently completing a book manuscript on decolonization and antiwar politics in Turkey. Her articles and reviews have appeared in a range of journals including Political Theory, New Political Science, Theory & Event,  International Journal of Middle East Studies,  Radical Philosophy, and Political Theology.

Academic Director, Center for Foreign Languages and Cultures; Coordinator, Foreign Languages and Literature Program
 

Stephanie Kufner is Visiting Associate Professor of German Studies at Bard College. Originally, from Germany, she has lived in the US for almost 35 years and came to Bard in 1990. She has taught FYSEM regularly for over 10 years, and is excited to be part of this year’s new FYSEM team and curriculum.  Prof. Kufner enjoys teaching intensive language and culture classes on various levels, German literature and theater, and for many years helped students produce bilingual German/English theater plays. In her role as Academic Director of the Bard Language Center, Prof. Kufner hires an international staff of up to 20 students. They help provide the Bard Community with a wide range of carefully researched academic, cultural and popular language resources, study- and self-evaluation tools, as well as course –specific supplements for learners on any level in all languages taught at Bard. Do stop by any time to say hi or if interested apply for a job!

Peter Laki, a native of Budapest, Hungary, studied at the Franz Liszt Academy (now University) of Music, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, and at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his Ph. D. in 1989.  After serving as Program Annotator for the Cleveland Orchestra for seventeen years, he came to Bard in 2007.  In addition to his music history courses, he has been teaching FYSEM since 2009.  Peter has written on topics ranging from Hungarian composers to 17th-century Italian vocal music and Gustav Mahler, and published a very large number of short essays in concert program books.  He was the resident scholar at the Bard Music Festival in 1995, and served as the editor of the volume of essays Bartók and His World, published by Princeton University Press that same year.

Nicholas Lewis is Associate Vice President for Academic Initiatives and Associate Dean in the office of the Dean of the College at Bard, where he has newly rejoined the campus community in January 2022. His main areas of interest reside at the intersection of music, African diasporic cultures, religion, and social ethics. Nicholas is also a clarinetist and composer steeped in the sensibilities of improvisational music with a Blues aesthetic. He is the clarinetist and co-founder of the BLAK-New Blues Ensemble, an ensemble co-founded with composer-pianist Anthony Kelley and based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. As the ensemble’s manifesto reads, the BLAK-New Blues Ensemble was created to “explore an ensemble’s ability to circumnavigate, through improvisation, the codes and tropes of African-American, European, and music of other parts of the world in ways that produce a coherent and fresh musical product.”

Gabriella Lindsay is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Languages and Literature. She specializes in intersections between aesthetics, politics and ethics in 20th and 21st century literature, thought and culture in French. She is currently working on a book on representations of sexual violence and the afterlives of the Algerian War.

Lecturer in the Humanities
 

Jana Mader is currently a Lecturer in the Experimental Humanities. With a Ph.D. in German Studies/Comparative Literature (University of Munich), her research and teaching interests lie in European literature and art from the 19th century, women writers of the 19th century, nation-building and national narratives, nature in literature, and environmental humanities. Prof. Mader was born in Germany and has been writing and teaching in the US since 2012. She came to Bard in 2019 from the University of North Carolina. Her first novel was published in 2017 and her most recent book, an anthology titled "Denkräume" was published by Rowohlt in 2020. Prof. Mader is currently working on a book on the Hudson River and her second novel.

Archie (Arch) Magno is a European philosopher and political theorist. He is a specialist on continental thought, focusing on the theory of revolution and the dialectical method in critical theory. Professor Magno's recent work is on evil in ethics. You will get detailed bibliographical information in class.

Christopher McIntosh is an Assistant Professor of Political Studies who works on the intersection of contemporary global politics, political violence, time, and critical/poststructural international theory.  Originally from Marietta, Georgia, he has studied at and received degrees from the University of Georgia, Georgetown, and the University of Chicago.  He is currently working on a book that argues how we understand time and choose to relate past, present, and future play a crucial role in the practice of politics. Beyond FYSEM, he teaches courses on time and political violence, gender, global ethics, sovereignty and war, terrorism, nations and nationalism, security, and international relations.  He has taught FYSEM since 2010.

Oleg Minin is a professor of Russian modern art, literature and language. His research and publication interests range from the literature and visual culture of the Russian Silver Age and the Avant-Garde to Soviet literature for children, the satirical press of the Russian fin de siècle, J. Habermas’s social theory, P. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and diaspora studies. Prof. Minin is editor at large of Brill’s Companions to the Slavic World and co-editor of the 19^th volume of the journal Experiment (2013) devoted to the study of the satirical press of the 1905 Revolution. He is also the co-author of One Hundred and One Photographs: Emil Otto Hoppé and the Ballets Russes. His current publishing projects include a chapter contribution to a book titled Russian Émigré Artists in America, an article to the volume Images of Otherness in Russia, 1400-1917: At the Crossroads of History and Politics and editorship of a volume of critical essays on the history of Russian caricature. Prof. Minin’s numerous articles on Russia’s modern visual and literary culture appeared in publications such as The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Experiment, and The Russian Review.

I’m an Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard. My research bridges political theory and social history by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, and the legacies of racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century. My current book manuscript, Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, develops a new historical and conceptual framework for understanding modern capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of racialization, discipline, and inequality from slave plantations to Amazon warehouses. My essays and reviews have been published in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, and Disability and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Before coming to Bard, I held positions at Dartmouth, the New School, and the University of Chicago, where I taught in the core curriculum—a similar program to FYSEM that invites students to participate in a year-long conversation about questions that have puzzled thinkers for millennia, from Plato to Judith Butler. I also explore many of the themes in my research and teaching through new media artforms. To that end, I’ve curated exhibitions at the New Museum, Rhizome, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. My artwork has appeared in LEFT: A Book of Words and Pictures and MACRO: An Anthology of Image Macros.

Jana Schmidt is Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities where she collaborates with the Center's student fellows to create spaces for meaningful political discussion and for thoughtful inquiry into Arendt’s writings (ask if you're interested in the Center’s events or in becoming a fellow). She is a comparatist by training (PhD in Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo) with interests in German, European, and American literature and theory post-1945, questions and alternative visions of of community, the senses of the political, and the temporalities of narrating memory She has published a book on Hannah Arendt's literary interpellators that tries to retrace the political theorist's influence on poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, as well as articles on other topics like refugee literature, irony, and bad painting. At the moment she is working on a book on Jewish exile encounters with Black politics in the postwar United States.

Steven Simon has been at Bard since Fall 2016, where he is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics  He received his Phd from New York University in 2011 and his BA from Yale University in 2005 after switching from Philosophy to Mathematics in his  junior year.  Although he primarily teaches mathematics, he still has great interest in the history of philosophy, and in particular has designed and frequently teaches a course on Zeno’s paradoxes. He also enjoys the humanities more broadly and is very excited to be teaching First-Year Seminar for the first time this semester. In his spare time, he loves playing with his two young daughters, listening to music from around the world, and hiking. 

David Ungvary is Assistant Professor of Classics at Bard College. Hailing from Buffalo, NY, he studied Classics at Duke University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University before joining Bard in 2018. Prof. Ungvary is a literary historian whose current research centers on intersections of Christian asceticism and poetry in the Late Roman and early medieval worlds. He teaches courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, Roman cultural history, and late ancient religion. Through FYSEM, he is excited to join students as they discover the complexities of their own philosophies of literature – what it means and what is at stake when we read and write about specific texts. He also bakes for his students.

The Rev. Mary Grace Williams, Chaplain of the College/Dean of Community Life, came to Bard in 2016 excited to work with college students.  She received her B.A.  from Rutgers University where she studied Theater Arts (Acting and Directing) which led her to move to NYC directly after college to pursue a career in theater.  While living in the West Village, she rediscovered her deep interest in spirituality and religion and that inspired her to do a M.A. in Religious Education from Fordham University.   Eventually this led her to seek ordination as an Episcopal priest and she attended Yale Divinity School and earned a M. Div.  Mary Grace is a single mother of two adopted daughters, one of whom is currently attending Bard College.