Bard News

Conservatory Advanced Performance Studies alumnus Tomoki Park and second-year Vocal Arts Program student Margaret Tigue recently performed at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, as part of the Tanglewood Music Center's Festival of Contemporary Music. In a concert dedicated to former Tanglewood Music Center director of contemporary music Oliver Knussen, Tomoki Park's "sensitive" performance of Knussen's distinctive "Prayer Bell Sketch" was one of the highlights of the program. Margaret Tigue offered a very fine performance as a soprano soloist in Knussen's "Whitman Settings."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/arts/music/tanglewood-boston-symphony.html

On Friday, August 9, the Class of 2023 arrived on Bard College’s campus for the Language and Thinking Program. The first-year students embark on their Bard education with this intensive introduction to the liberal arts and sciences. The central question of L&T 2019 is: What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise? Students will examine this question in classes supported by a series of speakers and performers, a film series, and an L&T coding component. Students will read Gertrude Stein on how both war and the arts became otherwise during World War I, and Aristotle on how citizens need to live for cities to be noble. They will hear James Baldwin, Etel Adnan, and Ursula Le Guin make the case for migration and exile, and they will argue about revolutions (and their preludes) with Thomas Kuhn, Edmund Burke, Euripides, Karl Marx, and Layli Long Soldier. We look forward to seeing new Bardians gathered in class around campus, writing, thinking, discussing, and continuing this Bard tradition.

His melodic gift rivaled Puccini’s—but his reputation suffered when he began writing movie scores. Now Bard is giving him a fresh listen. Weekend Two: August 16–18.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/erich-wolfgang-korngold-the-opera-composer-who-went-hollywood

Research by Bard professor Felicia Keesing and colleagues suggests health and environmental benefits of integrated ranches in Kenya.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/best-way-help-cows-and-zebras-make-them-live-together

Bardians Abby Bender and Anna Luckey cofounded the Built on Stilts dance festival on Martha’s Vineyard not long after graduation. It has evolved into an all-inclusive, grassroots performance venue for local and visiting artists, featuring more than 50 original works and dance workshops for both children and adults.
https://www.mvtimes.com/2019/08/07/arts-beat-weekly-thoughts-inside-4/

The use of prescription stimulants by those without medically diagnosed conditions marks a growing trend among young adults—particularly college students seeking a brain boost. A new study coauthored by cognitive scientist Sara Mednick ’95 finds that nonprescribed psychostimulants may slightly improve a person’s short-term focus but impede sleep and mental functions that rely on it—such as working memory.
https://www.futurity.org/psychostimulants-sleep-memory-2128502/

Ian Buruma examines how the two nations have “recently become engaged in a flaming economic row, ostensibly sparked by historical wrongs,” in spite of geographical and political factors that make them natural allies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/opinion/japan-south-korea-history-tensions.html

Professor Eshel and colleagues found that if all Americans switched away from meat, it would have a significant impact on land use—eliminating the need for pastureland and reducing cropland by as much as 25 percent—and make the nation’s waterways dramatically cleaner.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-plants-can-replace-meat-but-will-doing-so-help-the-environment/

“For Johns, factual certainties, such as the American flag or a plaster cast of a body part, enable him to dwell in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,’ and not reach after ‘fact,’ which would be redundant,” writes Yau in this two-part essay. “This is the pleasure that Johns gives us. He does not tell us what to see or think. He shows what seeing and thinking can be.”
https://hyperallergic.com/512080/in-praise-of-paintings-ambiguity-part-2/

By replacing meat with protein-conserving plant alternatives Americans could satisfy key nutritional requirements, while eliminating pastureland use and reducing 35-50 percent of the cropland currently needed for food production in the United States, says a new study coauthored by Bard College Research Professor Gidon Eshel. The findings, part of modeling study published in Scientific Reports, suggest that use of nitrogen fertilizer and greenhouse gas emissions would also be reduced, while only food-related water use would rise.

“While widely replacing meat with plants is logistically and culturally challenging, few competing options offer comparable multidimensional resource use reduction,” write Eshel and coauthors Paul Stainier, Alon Shepon, Akshay Swaminathan, all of Harvard University.

In their study, “Environmentally Optimal, Nutritionally Sound, Protein and Energy Conserving Plant Based Alternatives to U.S. Meat,” Eshel and his coauthors used a computer model to devise hundreds of plant-based diets to replace either beef alone or all three dominant U.S. meat types: beef, poultry and pork. Plant-based diets consisted predominantly of soy, green pepper, squash, buckwheat and asparagus. The authors’ goal was to model a range of plant replacement diets that were at least as nutritious, if not more beneficial, than the meats they replaced, while also assessing their environmental impact. Diets were modeled to exactly match the protein content of the meat they replace—13 grams of protein per day from beef or 30 grams of protein per day from all three meat types—while also satisfying 43 other nutrient requirements, such as vitamins and fatty acids.

Buckwheat and tofu jointly delivered a full third of the total protein of diets that replaced all meats, yet accounted for only 12 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer and water and less than 22 percent of the cropland needed to produce the meats they replaced. Soy contributed the most protein to beef-replacing diets, but accounted for only six percent of the overall nitrogen fertilizer needed to produce beef. Replacing meat with plant alternatives was estimated to save approximately 29 million hectares of cropland, three billion kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer, and 280 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. Food-related water use was projected to rise by 15 percent.

Gidon Eshel is a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College. He earned a BA from Haifa University and MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46590-1

The ability to fight bacterial infections with antibiotics has been a longstanding cornerstone of modern medicine, but widespread overuse and misuse of antibiotics has led to unintended consequences. A new paper in the journal Microorganisms coauthored by Bard College Assistant Professor of Biology Gabriel Perron argues that large-scale antibiotic pollution and the resulting antibiotic resistance are major public health problems that require significantly more research—that goes beyond data gathering to more interpretive studies that consider the overall impact of antibiotic pollution on humans and on the environment, in addition to its contribution to antibiotic resistance—as well as more coordinated large-scale policy interventions.

“Today, the evolution of microbial pathogens able to resist antibiotics treatments is seen as one of the most pressing public health crises,” writes Perron and coauthors Susanne A. Kraemer and Arthi Ramachandran, both of the biology department, Concordia University, Montreal, QC. “The sheer magnitude of the antibiotic pollution and resistance crisis, with the estimated deaths due to antibiotic resistance being 700,000 per year globally makes managing its social and economic fallout a global problem.”

In their review, “Antibiotic Pollution in the Environment: From Microbial Ecology to Public Policy,” Perron, Kraemer, and Ramachandran explore the spread of antibiotic resistance from hotspots of resistance evolution to the environment; outline the effects of antibiotic pollution (independent of resistance evolution) on natural microbial populations, as well as invertebrates and vertebrates; and review international polices aimed at mitigating the effects of antibiotics pollution. The authors write that, while the environmental component of this issue (e.g., environmental reservoirs of resistance genes and the likelihood of horizontal transfer of ARGs between pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria) has received an increased research interest in recent years, many dimensions of environmental antibiotic pollution and resistance are still unknown and require further research.

“Current research of environmental dimensions of antibiotic resistance often tallies up resistance genes found within an environment but gives little indication of the associated risks of transmission, and thus the potential impact on human health,” they write, stressing that antibiotic pollution also has the potential to affect human and ecosystem health directly. “On one hand, the effects of antibiotic pollution are expected to be especially disruptive in aquatic environments, where they can inhibit ecosystem functions and impact on organisms that are exposed throughout their life cycle. On the other hand, the presence of antibiotics in the environment and in animals could also impact on human health. While the effect of such exposure is unknown in humans, epidemiological surveys suggest that long-term exposure to antibiotics may lead to chronic conditions including obesity, diabetes, and asthma. For these reasons, it is imperative to consider the overall impact of antibiotic pollution on humans and on the environment, in addition to its contribution to antibiotic resistance.”

Perron and his coauthors contend that moving from data gathering to more interpretative studies will aid in developing more efficient policies. “Current policy schemes are focused on surveillance, but the scope of the crisis must eventually lead to forward-thinking policies,” they write, stressing that understanding antibiotic pollution and antibiotic resistance as a ‘One Health Approach’ (linking human, animal, and environment health domains) may aid in creating more societal engagement and ultimately more efficient policies. “Such policies need to evaluate direct risks of transmission posed by certain contaminated environments while at the same taking into account the complex patterns of inter-environmental transmissions that may exist. As antibiotic resistance and pollution is a global problem and especially rampant in the developing world, international cooperation, data-sharing and globally consistent policies are needed.”

Gabriel Perron, assistant professor of biology at Bard College and faculty member of the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, is an evolutionary biologist who studies the emergence of medically important traits in a broad range of microorganisms. His research uses a combination of real-time evolution experiments, genomic and metagenomic approaches, and field studies to understand how bacteria evolve antimicrobial resistance. Using different microbial systems, including bacteria such as Salmonella, Perron’s work seeks to understand the impact of human activity on the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in natural environments and its possible impact on public health issues. More recently, Perron has been also studying the impact of human activity on microbial communities found in Polar Regions.

To read the full paper, click here. For more information on the Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, please visit landairwater.bard.edu.
 
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2607/7/6/180

Globally recognized modern dancer and Bard alumnus Ainesh Madan ’15 observes that art comes to the rescue of the mundane. In this interview, he talks about the importance of a daily artistic practice, his most recent work focusing on his return to India after eight years in New York, and pieces he choreographed at Bard now coming to fruition. “Once I went to Bard College,” he tells the Hindu. “I started discovering my artistic side. I dedicated the majority of my day in the studio, even when I was not in class. I made (choreographed/composed) a lot of work. Once the studios were closed, I would come back to my room and work on music.”
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/dance/dance-with-him/article28772631.ece

In an interview with Public Radio International, Professor Dakwar, who teaches a course on human rights and national security for the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City, discusses the continued use of tear gas by police against protesters.
 
https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-07-31/tear-gas-has-been-banned-warfare-why-do-police-still-use-it

“What this new technology proposes is to watch everything at once,” says Michel. “Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveilled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.” The experimental high-altitude balloons promise a cheap monitoring platform that could follow multiple vehicles for extended periods. They are also subject to fewer restrictions and regulations than drones, raising privacy concerns.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest

The neglected history of the Warsaw uprising helps explain the country’s nationalist politics today, writes Professor McMeekin.
 
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-hitler-and-stalin-made-modern-poland-11564613692

In honor of the 30th anniversary of their Paul’s Boutique album, Beastie Boys (inspired by the late member Adam Yauch ’86, who went vegan after being diagnosed with cancer) have collaborated with Adidas on a vegan shoe.
 
https://www.fastcompany.com/90380410/the-beastie-boys-mark-30th-anniversary-of-pauls-boutique-with-their-own-official-adidas-shoe

Titled After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly, the exhibition is based on a series of poems by Wong on hunger, food, silence, and family. Wong, a first-generation Chinese American, talks to KUOW Public Radio producer Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong about the meal she imagines her ancestors might have today.
 
https://www.kuow.org/stories/country-music-is-about-two-four-letter-words-love-and-loss?fbclid=IwAR3CD44cyAkx-xHlc2da4fJsS_lwxUA0iYVU9LjdbN3FU743zVGRYon9uZM

President Botstein talks about the U.S. premiere of Erich Korngold’s The Miracle of Heliane, and why Bard is the perfect place to revive overlooked works.
 

"Bard is a great place because we are not interested in commercial performance. We want to make a contribution to knowledge and scholarship. We are interested in the future of music both in new music but also in the past.

If the past is only about 20 operas, then the future of the art form is going to be condemned. The way you tell the story of the past influences the way you tell the future. Our mission is not to compete with anyone but to show different repertoire." —Leon Botstein

http://operawire.com/q-a-leon-botstein-on-the-american-premiere-of-das-wunder-der-heliane-the-future-of-opera/

The Bard Music Festival turns its focus on Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the preeminent film composer of the 1930s and ’40s whose art music long went overlooked. August 9–11 and 16–18 at the Fisher Center.

By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Now that film music enjoys an unequivocal presence on contemporary orchestral programs, it’s no surprise that the Bard Music Festival, that bastion of imaginative programming, is marking its 30th anniversary season by turning to a figure somewhat unfamiliar as a “serious” composer: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957). Korngold was arguably the pre-eminent film composer during Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” Yet, by the time he died, his work there during the 1930s and ’40s had effectively obliterated the exceptional stature he had achieved in Europe’s concert halls and opera houses.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/serious-works-from-a-hollywood-composer-11564518246

The Bard Archaeology Field School has just wrapped four weeks of intensive archeological study at historic sites in Germantown, New York, near the Bard campus. Undergraduates, high school students, and community members are eligible to participate in this monthlong summer learning program for college credit. Students worked with anthropology professor Christopher Lindner to excavate sites related to the Palatine settlers of 1710, their descendants, and neighbors, including the Mohican people and, by the early 1800s, African Americans.
https://www.bard.edu/archaeology/

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, by Bard College Assistant Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, ​​​is forthcoming in December 2019 from Stanford University Press.

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia (2019). Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford: Stanford.

“The new British prime minister, Mr. Johnson, sometimes gives the impression that he feels nostalgic for the glory days of British imperialism,” writes Professor Buruma. “But even the most radical Brexiteers realize that those days are over.”
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/opinion/sunday/boris-johnson-churchill-britain-trump-brexit.html

In her recent study on the cultivation of perfume in early modern England, Griffiths, a PhD candidate in material culture at the Bard Graduate Center, tells a story about plants, artisanal knowledge, and experimentation.
 
https://www.doaks.org/newsletter/cultivating-perfume

The Summer Success program “specifically sought to invest in young people by giving them the opportunity to work, learn and earn over the summer,” says Wolff.
 
https://nola.gov/mayor/news/july-2019/mayor-cantrell-celebrates-%E2%80%98summer-success%E2%80%99-jobs-program-for-system-involved-youth/

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek Professor Wray talks about the once-fringe school of economic thought that’s suddenly of the moment.
 
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-26/randall-wray-modern-monetary-theory-is-going-global

“Looking in a mirror is just something you do,” writes Kelleher. “We’re so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking.”
 
https://longreads.com/?s=katy+kelleher

“With Heliane, Korngold was sharpening the talents he would use later in the United States,” says Times critic Seth Walls. Even though his most enduring legacy may be in film, “his take on 1920s Viennese opera is well worth a trip to take in.” Through August 4.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/arts/music/korngold-bard-music-festival.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesarts

A new study coauthored by Bard College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Kathryn Tabb in the journal Nature Human Behaviour finds that people consistently rated antisocial behavior as less genetically influenced than prosocial behavior. In their paper, “Asymmetrical Genetic Attributions for Prosocial versus Antisocial Behaviour,” Tabb and her coauthors write that their findings were replicated across six studies using a range of stimuli that described a variety of prosocial and antisocial behaviors. This was true regardless of whether genetic explanations were explicitly provided or refuted. Their analysis suggested that this asymmetry may stem from people’s motivating desire to hold wrongdoers responsible for their actions.

“The asymmetry was present when participants were only given descriptions of behaviour and asked to rate how much of a role genetics played in causing it, without being told anything about the actor’s genetic predisposition; and it persisted even when participants were told explicitly whether the individual in question was genetically predisposed to the type of behaviour exhibited, suggesting that people may remain relatively reluctant to accept even explicit ascriptions of antisocial behaviour to genetics,” write Tabb and coauthors Paul S. Appelbaum and Matthew S. Lebowitz, both of the Center for Research on Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic, and Behavioral Genetics, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “The relative resistance to genetic explanations for antisocial behaviours demonstrated across these studies might help to explain findings from previous studies that indicate that genetic evidence often fails to influence the punishments deemed appropriate for criminal wrongdoing.”

In addition to adding to the substantial body of research suggesting that factors beyond the inherent quality of biological explanations for behavior can influence people’s likelihood of endorsing them, Tabb and her coauthors contend that their findings have specific real-world implications, particularly for situations involving criminal justice. “If people are generally resistant to genetic explanations for antisocial behaviour, including crime, judges and jurors may be unlikely to be swayed by such evidence,” they write. “Indeed, this resistance might help to explain why providing genetic explanations for misdeeds often fails to affect judgements about criminal culpability and punishment in the ways we might expect, as well as the finding that Americans tend to disfavour genetic explanations for violent behaviour, as compared to environmental and choice-based explanations.”

“When taken together, our results suggest that people’s interpretations and evaluations of findings in behavioural genetics may depend not only on the scientific merit of the evidence, but also on the moral valence of the behaviours in question,” the authors conclude. “This kind of motivated reasoning about empirical information can pose obstacles to scientific literacy, underscoring the importance of identifying exactly what motivations are affecting intuitions about behavioural genetics and precisely what impact biological explanations are having on people’s thinking.”

The study was funded by a grant from the Program on Genetics and Human Agency of the John D. Templeton Foundation, with additional support from the National Institutes of Health.

Kathryn Tabb is assistant professor of philosophy at Bard College. Since receiving her doctorate in history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, Tabb has earned a master’s degree in bioethics and health law and served as assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her interests include philosophy of science and medicine, bioethics, psychopathology, American pragmatism, and the history of philosophy, especially early modern philosophy. At Columbia, she taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including Science and Values, The Normal and the Pathological, Darwin, and Contemporary Civilization. Professor Tabb is currently working on a monograph on John Locke, Agents and Patients: Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, that explores his theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. Recent peer-reviewed publications include the articles “Behavioral Genetics and Attributions of Moral Responsibility,” Behavioral Genetics; “Philosophy of Psychiatry after Diagnostic Kinds,” Synthese; “Locke on Enthusiasm and the Association of Ideas,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Vol. 9; and “Darwin at Orchis Bank: Selection after the Origin,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2016). Her published work also includes reviews and commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Medicine, and Evolutionary Education and Outreach; and book chapters in Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry IV: Psychiatric Nosology; Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry III: The Nature and Sources of Historical Change; and Brain, Mind, and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. She is an investigator for the National Endowment for the Humanities grant project “Humanities Connections Curriculum for Medicine, Literature, and Society” (2017–20) and is coprincipal investigator for the Genetics and Human Agency Project “Intuitions about Genetics and Virtuous Behavior,” funded by the John D. Templeton Foundation.
 
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0651-1

Set in an unnamed totalitarian state, The Miracle of Heliane (Das Wunder der Heliane) features an intricate, erotic triangle between a ruthless despot, The Ruler; his beautiful and neglected wife, Heliane; and a young, messianic Stranger. An allegorical tale about the destruction of a dictatorship by a woman, Heliane premiered to great acclaim in Hamburg in 1927, and remains extraordinarily relevant today. This new production is directed by Christian Räth, with sets and costumes by Esther Bialas, both making their SummerScape debuts. The consistently excellent cast includes the stunning Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte in an all-too-rare U.S. appearance alongside rising star tenor Daniel Brenna, and the heralded bass-baritone Alfred Walker. Opening Friday, July 26, at the Fisher Center.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/heliane/

Horowitz, who teaches chemistry at Bard High School Early College Newark, offers strategies for helping first-gen college students develop the metacognitive skills necessary to become effective learners.
 
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Knowing-How-to-Study-Can-Mean/246644

Ambassador Hof dissects Trump’s July 16 statement in which he again reversed course on U.S. involvement in Syria, saying that the U.S. will “be out of there pretty soon.” But did the president intend to set and implement policy, or to appease his political base?
 
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/syriasource/getting-out-again

What is prison for? Who should have access to education? Filmmaker Lynn Novick started with these questions when she began to work on College Behind Bars, the new documentary that follows Bard Prison Initiative students and their families. Airing on PBS in November.
 
https://www.ket.org/public-affairs/filmmaker-lynn-novik-on-how-education-in-prison-transforms-lives/

What are Bard professor Felicia Keesing and her husband and research partner Rick Ostfeld up to this summer? The Ghostbusters of Lyme disease are hunting ticks in Dutchess County.
 
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/tickbusters-on-the-lookout-for-lyme

On Sunday, July 28, at 6 pm, the Spiegeltent at Bard’s Fisher Center will host a showcase of Bard alumni/ae making their mark on the music scene. Bardians near and far come together for a celebration led by Bard alumni/ae musicians, with performances by: Odetta Hartman ’11; Bree and the Reeds, featuring Brianna Reed ’12; Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez '16; and a new musical project by Dan Vernam ’13, Wyatt Bertz ’13, and Joe Tisdall ’13; with Alex Friedman ’12, Jesse Featherstone ’14, Luke McCrosson ’16, Zach Berns, and more.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/still-thinking/

Bardians in conversation: Sam Jaffe Goldstein ’13 interviews Arthur Holland Michel ’13 on his new book Eyes in the Sky, and why he's worried about government surveillance. 
 
https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night-the-way-the-gorgon-stare-did/

Erich Korngold almost single-handedly created the concept of the Hollywood soundtrack, so why isn’t his music better known? A child prodigy born in Austria in 1897, Korngold was in the public eye from a young age. He moved his family to the United States to escape the Nazis and began composing for American movies. His opera The Miracle of Heliane will have its U.S. premiere at Bard’s Fisher Center this weekend. His life and work will be the focus of the Bard Music Festival next month.
 
https://bachtrack.com/feature-erich-korngold-vienna-hollywood-bard-college-july-2019

“Having worked around the world, in countries that are trying to make the transition to democracy, one of the most difficult things to put in place is the sense of loyal opposition—that you can oppose certain policies, you can oppose them vociferously, and still be loyal to the country. Once you lose that, it is almost impossible to put it back in place.”
 
https://www.wamc.org/post/71619-panel

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that distinguished scholar, curator, and educator Nana Adusei-Poku will join CCS Bard as senior academic adviser and Luma Foundation Fellow. In this role, Adusei-Poku will collaborate with the staff and faculty to develop and advise on the curriculum, which centers around the study of contemporary art, the institutions and practices of exhibition-making, and the theory and criticism of the visual arts. She will also work with Executive Director Tom Eccles, Chief Curator and Graduate Program Director Lauren Cornell, and faculty to develop the curatorial and publishing program at CCS Bard, including symposia, conferences, performance, and exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies and in collaboration with partners, including departments across Bard College and contemporary art institutions.

“Nana Adusei-Poku is an exceptional scholar, curator, and teacher. Her intellectual rigor and commitment to original research will be invaluable to our program and to future classes of CCS Bard graduate students,” said Cornell. Previously, Adusei-Poku served as visiting professor at The Cooper Union, and as a guest lecturer in the Department of Art and Media at the University of the Arts, Zurich. She was research professor for visual cultures (2015–17) and for cultural diversity (2013–14) at the Hogeschool Rotterdam with affiliation to the Piet Zwart Institute and Willem de Kooning Academy. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin following degrees in African and gender studies, and in media and communications at Goldsmiths College London. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon, London School of Economics, and Columbia University, New York.

She is the curator of the program Longing on a Large Scale in conjunction with Todd Gray's exhibition Eucledian Gris Gris at Pomona College Museum of Art, which starts in September 2019 and will run until May 2020. In 2018, Adusei-Poku curated the immersive event performance of No-thingness at the Academy of Arts Berlin and, in 2015, she co-curated the exhibition NO HUMANS INVOLVED at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam. She has published in artist monographs about Leslie Hewitt, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, and Todd Gray, among others, and in publications such as e-flux, multitudes, Le Journal des Laboratoires, Kunstforum International, as well as peer-reviewed journals such as Nka Journal for Contemporary African Art, Feministische Studien, and Dark Matter.

Adusei-Poku replaces Jeannine Tang, who joins Eugene Lang College at The New School as assistant professor in modern and contemporary art history, after nearly a decade at CCS Bard. In 2018, Tang co-curated The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts. Co, (1983–2004) at the Hessel Museum of Art, a project that exemplified her commitment to building groundbreaking scholarship in contemporary art and curatorial history.
 

General information on the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College can be found at:
https://ccs.bard.edu/

After years of more clandestine contracting, the Pentagon has turned to Silicon Valley’s algorithms to build “Enemy of the People”-style surveillance systems, writes Michel.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90342971/how-the-pentagon-is-bringing-algorithmic-spycraft-and-big-tech-to-war

Ellegood is currently senior curator at the Hammer Museum, and cocurator of the Hammer biennial Made in L.A. She succeeds ICA founding director Elsa Longhauser.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/arts/design/institute-of-contemporary-art-los-angeles-chooses-its-new-director.html

Bard Language and Thinking faculty member Cecelia Watson brings the semicolon to life in this “deceptively playful-looking book that turns out to be a scholarly treatise on a sophisticated device that has contributed eloquence and mystery to Western civilization,” Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.
 
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/comma-queen/sympathy-for-the-semicolon

Daniel Fish's production of Acquanetta is “great fun and highly unnerving … a must-see for fans of his revival of Oklahoma! currently on Broadway.” Bard alumnus David Bloom ’13, GCP ’15 conducts.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/theater/acquanetta-bard-summerscape-review.html

The Heinrich Böll Foundation, Bremen, Germany, has awarded its Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought to Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The annual award was created to honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions. The Hannah Arendt Award is a public prize, and therefore not based solely on academic achievement. Funded by both the state government of Bremen and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the prize is endowed with 10,000 Euros and is awarded by an international jury. Berkowitz shares the 2019 award with fellow recipient Jerome Kohn, trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust and editor of many volumes of Arendt's posthumous work.

The jury praised Berkowitz’s merits as a constitutional theorist and for his work as director of the Arendt Center, a place where “students from all over the world are encouraged to learn to politically think and to study the writings of a political philosopher who never respected the restraints of philosophical thinking.”

The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a catalyst for green visions and projects, a think tank for policy reform, and an international network. We work with more than 100 project partners in over 60 countries and currently maintain 32 international offices. For more information, visit boell.de/en.

Roger Berkowitz is the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center and professor of political studies, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College. Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. His essay “Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics,” has helped bring attention to the centrality of reconciliation in Hannah Arendt's work. The Arendt Center organizes an annual conference every October. Professor Berkowitz edits the Hannah Arendt Center's weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Bookforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Interest, and many other publications.

For more information on Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, visit hac.bard.edu.
 

The Bard Graduate Center (BGC) and U’mista Cultural Centre have launched an exhibition website that explores the hidden histories and multiple legacies of Franz Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. It is part of an international project to create a new critical edition of the volume. BGC also hosted an exhibition of The Story Box at its New York City gallery this year.
 
http://exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu/storybox/

Jonathan Brent, Bard faculty member and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania from H.E. Dalia Grybauskaitė, President of the Republic of Lithuania. The honor recognizes Brent’s work in promoting cooperation between Lithuania and YIVO and for the preservation of the prewar Jewish archives of Lithuania.
https://www.yivo.org/Lithuanian-State-Award

Painter Leidy Churchman's first museum survey is taking place at Bard’s Hessel Museum. Crocodile is full of intriguing patterns and radical juxtapositions ... and a 32-foot-long painting on the floor.
http://www.artnews.com/2019/07/10/leidy-churchman-hessel-museum-exhibition/

On Wednesday, July 10, 2019, Professor Jain gave a seminar at the North West Cancer Research Centre at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. The seminar, "RNA Binding and Translation Inhibition by Novel Chemotherapeutic Compounds," was part of the Centre's 2019 Seminar Series.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents Say Ever Moves, the class of 2020 thesis presentation, which brings together works by MFA candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. The exhibition will be on view from July 21 through July 28 at the Bard College Exhibition Center / UBS Gallery, 29 O’Callaghan Lane, Red Hook, New York.

An opening reception takes place on Saturday, July 20, 1–4 p.m. Evening presentations of time-based works, including performances, readings, and screenings, will be held at several locations on the Bard College campus during the week of July 22. All presentations are free and open to the public.

The Bard MFA thesis presentations feature works by Luis Arnias, Georgian Badal, Jobi Bicos, Lauren Burrow, Gwenan Davies, Omari Douglin, Carolina Fandiño Salcedo, Carolyn Ferrucci, Marco Gomez, Colleen Hargaden, Evie K. Horton, Christiane Huber, Rachel James, Jamie Krasner, Nawahineokala'i Lanzilotti, Dani Leder, Isabel Mallet, Carla Jean Mayer, Lee Nachum, Brandon Ndife, Diane Severin Nguyen, Miko Revereza, Alicia Salvadeo, Robert Sandler, Jaxyn Randall, Estelle Srivijittakar, Jordan Strafer, Daniel Sullivan, Christopher van Ginhoven Rey, Jessica Wilson, and Alex Zandi. The exhibition is coordinated by Marisa Espe ’20, a graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard).

The Bard College Exhibition Center will be open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., and Saturday/Sunday, 1–5 p.m. For the opening reception, a return shuttle service will be offered from Rhinecliff Amtrak station. Schedules, accessibility information, and more are available below. Parking is available in the Saint Christopher’s Church lot at 7411 South Broadway or on Garden Road.
https://www.bard.edu/mfa/thesis/

“Found photographs are memories that have gone feral,” writes Professor Sante, “the living trace of a human who may otherwise survive only as a census entry, or not even that.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/13/other-peoples-photographs/

Americans in the 19th century wouldn’t have minded the partisanship or military parades, but would have balked at glorifying the commander in chief, writes Assistant Professor of Political Studies Simon Gilhooley.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/04/trumps-july-celebration-is-partisan-militaristic-just-like-early-independence-day-celebrations/?utm_term=.1824ae239590