Bard MAT Faculty and Staff 2025 - 2026
Molly Albrecht, Education Faculty
Molly lives with her family in the Hudson Valley where she enjoys hiking with her daughter and two standard poodles.
Kimberly Alidio, History Faculty
Kimberly Alidio is the author of five poetry collections, including Traceable Relation (Fonograf Editions, 2025) and Teeter (Nightboat Books, 2023; winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award). Her essays have appeared in e-flux, Poetry Foundation, American Quarterly, Social Text, Journal of American History, and Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of the Nation and Diaspora. She teaches writing, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial history for Bard Prison Initiative and for Bard College, and has been a mentor for The Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship; Writing Faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts; Poetry Workshop Faculty for Kundiman and Naropa’s Summer Writing Program; Social Studies/ History Faculty at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas; and Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas.
She holds a BA from Oberlin College, a PhD from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from University of Arizona. Her work has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, and a Spencer Foundation/ National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship. She lives on the unceded homelands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck, today the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, otherwise known as New York’s Hudson Valley, and supports collective resistance, collective refusal, and collective flourishing to dismantle settler colonialism everywhere.
Jaime Osterman Alves, Associate Professor of Literature and MAT Faculty Chair, Bard Master of Arts in Teaching Program; and Faculty Associate, Institute for Writing & Thinking
Jaime Alves is an associate professor of literature and the MAT faculty chair in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. She also teaches a variety of courses in the undergraduate college, and develops programming to support new- and mentor teachers in secondary schools, through international partnerships with OSUN network faculty, and locally throughout the Hudson Valley. Areas of particular research interest include nineteenth-century literary representations of schoolgirls and female education; domesticity and gender studies; science, medicine and disability studies; newspapers/periodicals and archival research; museums as purveyors of knowledge and sites of informal learning. Among other publications, Jaime's scholarship has been featured in Legacy and American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard; she is the author of Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge 2009; paperback 2013).
E-Mail: [email protected]
Deirdre Branford, History Faculty
B.A. in Philosophy, Politics & Law, minor in Women’s Studies from SUNY Binghamton; MAT in History from Bard College. Deirdre is a 2007 Bard MAT graduate, mentor teacher, and adjunct faculty member for the program. Since graduating from the MAT, Deirdre has been a Social Studies teacher at Kingston High School teaching Global History & Geography II. Deirdre lives with her two children and husband (Bard MAT ‘08 in Literature) in Kingston and enjoys playing board games, baking cupcakes, and crafting.
Jen Buri da Cunha, Education
BA, Rippon College; MA, New York University. As Director of Institutional Engagement and Program Impact at Ramapo for Children, Jen Buri da Cunha leads program evaluation efforts, stewards philanthropic foundations, spearheads fundraising events, and serves as the liaison for Ramapo's board of directors and staff alumni. Jen earned a master’s degree in Special Education from New York University and taught students with disabilities in a variety of public and private schools in New York City. She continues to bring her background in education to bear as the supervisor of Ramapo's college courses in working with youth with disabilities and as the instructor for the MAT program summer fieldwork workshops on social and emotional learning and restorative practices.
Derek Lance Furr, Dean of Teacher Education; Bard MAT Program Director; Literature Faculty
B.A., Wake Forest University; M.Ed., University of Virginia; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Dean of Teacher Education and a literature professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. He also teaches for the Bard Prison Initiative and the Institute for Writing and Thinking. He is the author of three books--Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (Palgrave 2010), Suite For Three Voices (Fomite 2012), and Semitones (2015)--and has recent work in Jacket2, Twentieth Century Literature, and Raritan. Before coming to Bard, he was an English Language Arts teacher and reading specialist in the Charlottesville City Schools.
Phone: 845-758-7136E-mail: [email protected]
Lauren Collet-Gildard, Education
B.A., SUNY New Paltz; MAT, Bard College; Ph.D., University at Albany. Lauren is a social studies educator and adjunct faculty member in the Bard MAT program. Her interests include critical pedagogy and social justice in education, and her research focuses on media literacy and discussions of controversial issues in secondary classrooms.
Email: [email protected]
Sarah Cioffi, English Language Learners (ELL/ ENL)
Sarah Cioffi has spent 34 years in education, with 16 years in leadership positions at Scotia-Glenville, Bethlehem, and Shenendehowa school districts in the Capital Region of New York State. She is the recently retired K-12 Academic Administrator for English as a New Language and World Languages at Shenendehowa, a district which experienced a 1000% increase in its English language learner population over 12 years. Sarah taught in the Clarkson University MAT program for several years, and recently joined the faculty of the Siena College MAT-TESOL program. Sarah sits on the NYS ELL Leadership Council, the NYS World Language Leadership Council, and the NYS Seal of Biliteracy Task Force, and is the former director of the Capital Region ENL Roundtable and Capital Area Language Leaders. She is also the founder of SBC Instructional Consulting, LLC, working with New York State school districts to improve the teaching and learning of their English language learners. Sarah has presented or taught at Capital Region BOCES, CASDA, NYSAWA, NYS-TESOL, the School Administrators' Association of NYS, and the Bard Early College Programs in Manhattan and Queens. Sarah completed her Doctorate in Educational Leadership at Russell Sage College, where her dissertation research was on the roles, responsibilities, and needs of content-area teachers of English Language Learners.
Brooke Jude, Associate Professor of Biology, Bard College
Mary C. Krembs, Director, Citizen Science; Mathematics Faculty
B.A., Marist College; M.S., Ph.D., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Research interests: computational geometry, mathematics and music, and software development methodology.
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7454
Learn about the Citizen Science Program
Cecilia Maple ’01, Director of MAT Admission and Student Affairs; Teacher Certification Consultant, Bard High School Early College Network
BA, Bard College; MA, Pace University. Cecilia is currently pursuing her doctorate in educational leadership through Endicott College's School of Education.
Cecilia has been with the program since its inception in 2003. She is an educator and ally, as well as an animal lover and activist. Cecilia lives with an ever-growing family of rescued critters (from dogs to newts and everything in between).
[email protected]
[email protected]
bard.edu/bhsec
845-758-7145 (phone)
845-758-7149 (fax)
Michael Sadowski, Associate Dean of the College; Associate Professor, Bard MAT
B.S. Northwestern University; Ed.M. Ed.D., Harvard University
Michael Sadowski, Interim Dean of Graduate Studies, also serves as Director of Inclusive Pedagogy and Curriculum in the Dean’s Office and an Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He teaches courses in youth identity development in the MAT program and LGBTQ+ Issues in U.S. Education in the Human Rights program. In addition to Bard, Michael has been an instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he completed his doctorate, and was a visiting professor in 2016-17 at Stanford University.
Michael has published extensively on the issues affecting LGBTQ+ students, immigrant students, and adolescents more broadly. His 2016 book Safe Is Not Enough was featured by NPR and was cited by GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings as "the most important book written on LGBTQ issues in education in my lifetime." His other books include In a Queer Voice: Journeys of Resilience from Adolescence to Adulthood (Temple University Press, 2013), based on a seven-year longitudinal interview study, Portraits of Promise: Voices of Successful Immigrant Students (Harvard Education Press, 2013), and the edited volume Adolescents at School (Harvard Education Press, 2020), now in its third edition and used in teacher education programs around the country and abroad.
He also is the editor of the Youth Development and Education book series for Harvard Education Press and was editor of the Harvard Education Letter, for which he won a National Press Club Award. Michael is also a creative nonfiction writer. His memoir, Men I've Never Been, was shortlisted pre-publication for the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for Nonfiction and will be released in Spring 2021 as part of the Living Out series by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Cassandra Taylor, Visiting Faculty, Teacher Opportunity Corps II Advisor
BSE, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; MSE in both Secondary English Education and Secondary Special Education, SUNY New Paltz. Cassandra Taylor is a English Language Arts teacher with over twenty-five years of experience in the classroom. She has helped pioneer African American literature and history courses in both her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and in Kingston, New York, and has been a guest lecture on many social justice issues ranging from African traditional religions, poetry and literature from the prison system, and the importance of trauma-based care in residential facilities for youth.
Robert Tynes, Director of Research; Site Director at Eastern State, Bard Prison Initiative
Wendy Urban-Mead, Associate Professor of History, Bard MAT
B.A., Carleton College; M.A., University at Albany; Ph.D., Columbia University. She is the author of The Gender of Piety: Faith, Family, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press, 2015). Areas of interest include African history, with emphasis on southern Africa; European imperialism; history of Christianity in Africa; religion and gender; the history of the First World War in global context. Taught secondary school social studies for five years in Red Hook and Arlington, New York, school districts. Member, American Historical Association, World History Association, The Africa Network, American Society of Church History, African Studies Association, Britain Zimbabwe Society. Awards: German Academic Exchange Service Grant (1984-85), Richard Hofstadter Fellowship (1995-2000), Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Grant (1999). Past editor of Social Sciences & Missions (Brill, 2007-2017). Articles in Journal of Religion in Africa, Mennonite Quarterly Review, Women's History Review, and chapters in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960 (Duke, 2010), Gendering Ethnicity in African Women's Lives, ed. Jan Bender Shetler (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), and African Christian Biography, ed. Dana Robert (Cluster Publications, 2018.)
E-Mail: [email protected]
Dumaine Williams, Vice President and Dean of the Early Colleges; Adjunct Faculty, Bard MAT
Dr. Dumaine Williams (Vice President and Dean of the Early College) oversees academic programming across the Bard Early College campuses and promotes the Sequence’s academic quality and integration with the broader Bard network. Dr. Williams was previously the founding principal of Bard High School Early College Newark and Bard High School Early College Cleveland. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology from Stony Brook University; an M.A. in Educational Leadership from Montclair State University; and a B.A. in Biology from Bard College.
[email protected]