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.  

Ingrid Becker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights in the Division of Languages and Literature. Her research and teaching interests bridge the study of Anglo-American literature, poetry and poetics, human rights, and sociology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and her classes at Bard focus on the intersections between human rights discourses and literary texts. She is currently working on a book titled “Socio/Poetics: A Cultural History,” which explores the relationship between literature and sociology in the United States and the broader anglophone world since the early twentieth century. Before coming to Bard, she taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Chicago, where she also received her PhD. She holds previous degrees from the University of Oxford (MSt) and Boston University (BA). 

Alex Benson, Assistant Professor of Literature, was born on Long Island and has lived in California and Minnesota. Before coming to teach at Bard, he received both his BA in Rhetoric and his PhD in English from UC Berkeley. He writes about American fiction and poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on questions of voice, race, the nonhuman environment, and old media. 

Bevin Blaber is a scholar of philosophy of religions. Her work centers on continental philosophy, ethics, and modern Jewish thought and literature, with particular emphasis on post-Holocaust thought. In her first monograph, an interdisciplinary project combining philosophical, literary and historical analyses, she examines French philosopher and theorist Maurice Blanchot’s earliest work: articles published in right-wing French journals in the years preceding World War II. Her current work explores ways that conceptions of guilt and atonement are figured in instances of state or community-perpetrated atrocities, and the impact of these definitions on attempts, both legal and extra-juridical, to grapple with legacies of these events.

Joshua Boettiger is Bard's Jewish Chaplain and also serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities, He 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). Joshua is a Rabbis Without Borders fellow, and in the larger community continues to teach Meditation and Mussar – Jewish approaches to mindfulness and service. He is excited to be back at Bard and to be part of the FYSEM journey.

 

Leon Botstein, conductor, music historian, and leader in education reform, has been president and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities of Bard College since 1975.

Erin Braselmann is the Director of Disability Access Services. An advanced doctoral candidate at Northeastern University, Erin is focusing her research on disability studies and disability in higher education contexts. In addition to First-Year Seminar, Erin teaches in the Disability and Accessibility Studies Initiative. With an academic background in literature (BA/MA), she has previously taught composition, rhetoric, and literature courses at other institutions. Erin has worked in accessibility, student support, and lecturer positions in higher education for 15 years.  

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.  

Andrew Bush is an anthropologist who studies ethics in various forms: in language, law, poetry, gender and sexuality, and religion. His research has been centered around the study of Islamic traditions in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2004. At Bard he teaches in linguistics and gender and sexuality, and he previously taught on topics of Islamic studies, legal studies, and gender at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he also taught seminars focused on writing. He was formerly a researcher at Cracow University of Economics and at Harvard Law School.

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 received her B.A. in English Literature from Harvard University. She is very excited to be discussing, thinking and writing about the great texts in First Year Seminar.

Visiting Instructor in the Humanities
 

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 since 2014. 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.

Molly J. Freitas is Associate Dean of Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Bard.  As an educator, Molly’s greatest passion is helping students to develop the skills and confidence necessary to achieve their academic, personal, and professional goals.  She holds a Ph.D. from Tufts University and an M.A. from Georgetown University, both in English.  Prior to coming to Bard, Molly was an Assistant Professor of English and led the prestigious scholarship program at West Point, the United States Military Academy.  She has also taught literature, critical thinking, and professional development courses at Tufts University, Emerson College, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a book editor at Oxford University Press.  A feminist literary critic by training, Molly has an academic book, From Subjection to Survival:  The Artistry of American Women Writers, forthcoming from Routledge on aesthetics and American women writers; her scholarly articles have also appeared in American Literary Realism, Soundings, and Studies in the Novel.  She lives in Beacon, NY with her husband and two young daughters, who are the light of her life. 

Josh Glick is a Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard. He grew up in a family of educators in the Washington D.C. area and earned a PhD in Film & Media Studies and American Studies from Yale. Josh's research and teaching interests are focused on the comparative histories of film, television, and radio; nonfiction media; race and representation; and civic applications of emerging technology. He is also actively involved in public humanities projects, collaborating with archives, museums, and community organizations. Recently, he co-curated the exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. The show investigates the history of disinformation, the rise of “deepfake” videos, and how media can be used for the public good.

Stephen Graham is a Bard Center Fellow with degrees from Harvard and Columbia University.  His area of expertise is Victorian Studies, specializing in Victorian novels, George Eliot and Victorian poetry.   His research interests include the history and methodologies of reading; 19^th-century historiography; canon formation; fin-de-siècle British and French prose.  He has taught writing, composition and British Literature at Bard since 2006. 

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. 

Seth David Halvorson is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He earned his BA from Macalester College, an 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 a 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. 

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.

Jana Mader is a Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard. 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, nation-building and national narratives, nature in literature, and environmental humanities. Prof. Mader was born in Germany and taught at the University of North Carolina and at Juilliard before coming to Bard. 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 her second novel and finishing a book on the Hudson River that will come out in the Spring of 2023.

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.

Nabanjan Maitra migrated to the U.S. from India in 2000, at the age of fifteen. Since then, he has been trying to figure out who he is. The pursuit of that question has brought him back to the classroom and to teaching. After graduating from college, Nabanjan taught Special Education in Washington D.C. for a few years before realizing that it was too hard. Since entering graduate school, Nabanjan has been interested in the role of teaching in forming subjects (citizens, disciples, initiates). Specifically, he is interested to study and describe the techniques that monastic institutions, in medieval and premodern India, developed to govern their subjects, and what these techniques and practices might tell us about the ways in which monastic power operates. Nabanjan prefers spending the summer months playing cricket in England. 
 

Franz Nicolay is a musician and writer. In addition to records under his own name, he was a member of cabaret-punk orchestra World/Inferno Friendship Society, “world’s best bar band” the Hold Steady, Balkan-jazz quartet Guignol, co-founded the composer-performer collective Anti-Social Music, was a touring member of agit-punks Against Me!; and recorded or performed with dozens of other acts. He studied music at New York University and writing at Columbia University (where he was awarded a Felipe P. de Alba Fellowship). He received fellowship residencies in composition at the Rensing Art Center and writing at the Ucross Foundation and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and he has taught at Columbia University and UC–Berkeley.

His first book, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (The New Press, 2016), was named a “Season’s Best Travel Book” by The New York Times; and Buzzfeed called his novel forthcoming Someone Should Pay For Your Pain was called a “knockout fiction debut." His writing has appeared several anthologies and in publications including The New York Times, Slate, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Threepenny Review, LitHub, Longreads, and elsewhere.

Peter previously taught at Columbia Law School, where he was Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein Clinical Professor in Human Rights and faculty codirector of the Human Rights Institute. He has served as project director, associate director, and clinical director of the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program; human rights officer at the United Nations Human Rights Centre (now Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) in Geneva, where he led missions to Rwanda, South Africa, and Zaire; program director with the International Human Rights Law Group (now Global Rights) in Washington D.C.; consultant to Human Rights Watch/Africa Watch; and staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). Publications include law review contributions, book chapters, reviews, newspaper opinion pieces, and numerous articles for Current History. Recent projects include field research on obligations and oversight in mining in South Africa and Peru and on tea plantations in India, and consultancies for projects in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kashmir, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, São Tomé e Príncipe, Vietnam, Rwanda, and Peru. At Bard since 2012.

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco is an architect, historian, and educator. She is an assistant professor of architecture and co-director of the architecture program at Bard College. Santoyo-Orozco’s research focuses on the relations between architecture and property regimes in Mexico with an emphasis on understanding spaces of resistance against the privatization of common lands. Her writings have appeared in Avery Review, Scapegoat, New Geographies, and e-flux Architecture, among other publications. She received a PhD in architectural history from the Architectural Association, an M.Arch from the Berlage Institute, and a B.Arch degree from Universidad de las Américas.
 

Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching and research explore global documentary, Russian and East European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. She is currently at work on two edited volumes: Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (with Lukas Brasiskis), forthcoming from Berghahn Books and Contemporary Russian Documentary (with Anastasia Kostina),under contract at Edinburgh University Press. She is originally from Odesa, Ukraine, and holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies & Comparative Literature from Yale University.

Robert Weston holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and serves as Continuing Associate Professor of Humanities at Bard College. He has enjoyed teaching FYSEM nearly every semester since arriving at Bard, and has served as co-director of the course. He helped build the Al-Quds Bard partnership in Palestine, where he served as Associate Dean, and he currently directs Gender and Sexuality Studies at the college. His areas of expertise include the philosophy, literature and culture of the European Enlightenment, the historical avant garde, post-structuralism, Marxist cultural analysis, gift theory, the history of sexuality, and the Frankfurt School. His current teaching focuses primarily on global issues of gender, sexuality, and race in the contexts of colonialism and human rights.

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.