Bard News

An Immersive Experience of Harmony, Poetry and Gesture, Featuring 50 Singers

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY—The Fisher Center LAB (Fisher Center at Bard’s residency and commissioning program) and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities have teamed up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol. Performed on and around the lawn of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality,” performances will take place on Friday, October 15 at 5:30 pm; Saturday, October 16 at 1 pm and 3 pm; and Sunday, October 17 at 5:30pm. Tickets are $25. Bard students may access tickets for $5 made possible by the Passloff Pass. To purchase or reserve tickets visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon–Fri 10am – 5pm), or email boxoffice@bard.edu.

An intimate, personal experience utilizing the exterior landscapes of the Fisher Center, audiences will be led through musical corridors of sonic architecture formed by the human voice. The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.” 

“Freedom in the sense of the power to act and speak in public spaces is at the heart of Hannah Arendt’s political thinking,” said Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center. “For Arendt, freedom happens in a public space. The Gauntlet is so exciting because it brings people together to experience thinking about freedom in a collective space. And the setting in Olafur Eliasson’s ‘parliament of reality’ provides a context of democratic spaces in which to experience thinking about freedom to act in the practice of self-government. I can’t think of a better way to conclude the Arendt Center’s conference on ‘Revitalizing Democracy and Spaces of Freedom.’” 

The libretto, written by Shirey and Karol, is comprised of text generated from 20 “movement interviews” with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, conducted by Karol as a way to explore individual and collective experiences on the theme of freedom. The Gauntlet will bathe audiences in waves of harmony, poetry and gesture, sung by a choir of 50 singers, assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community. Audiences are led through the performance by four dancers (Karol, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Effy Grey, and Remi Harris). 

Shirey composes the score utilizing melodies and harmonies that are passed from singer to singer in a chain of exchange, creating a “gauntlet” of sound and story, exchanged through the immersive performance as audience members flow through the pathways of sound. Says Shirey about the process, “I am constantly imagining how the audience will hear these stories as a rush of words flowing by, in exchange from singer to singer. The hope is to write grounded phrases and fractile melodies that bloom the minds of the listener.”
 

Make a Gift to Bard's Afghan Student Fund

Bard College junior, rapper, and international human rights activist Sonita Alizada spoke at a virtual United Nations Ministerial Event on Tuesday, September 21 focused on supporting women’s rights in Afghanistan. Alizada is an Afghan refugee who narrowly escaped being sold into marriage as a young girl. She has become an outspoken advocate for women and girls globally, using her music to call for an end to forced marriage. 

The UN event, “Safeguarding the achievements of 20 years of international engagement in Afghanistan: how to continue supporting the future of Afghan women and girls and their access to education,” aimed to assess the challenges and risks currently faced by Afghan women and girls and identify how the international community can provide support and defend the progress that has been made in women’s rights and gender equality in the country.

Addressing the ministerial meeting, Alizada said, “You have been told that this is my story. The only reason that you’re hearing it is because my story is the only one, the only one of millions of Afghan women and girls that has had a happy ending. So let me be clear: this is not my story; it is the story of girls who will be ripped from their homes by Taliban militants and never be able to see their families again, of little boys who will never hear a woman’s opinion in their classroom and growing up under the Taliban’s brainwashing.” 

Alizada called on those assembled to take immediate action by not recognizing the Taliban government, working to guarantee the rights of women and children, securing access to the Internet in Afghanistan, inviting Afghan people into conversations with decision makers, and working to keep Afghan girls in school.

Sonita Alizada was born in Herat, Afghanistan, under the Taliban regime. Her family fled the country for Iran when she was a child and lived as undocumented refugees. When Alizada’s family attempted to sell her into marriage, she resisted by finding her artistic voice and speaking out. Her first rap single, “Daughters for Sale,” was a viral hit and brought worldwide attention to the plight of millions of women and girls who are forced into marriage. Alizada is now a human rights and music major at Bard and plans to become a lawyer and to return to her country to work on behalf of Afghan women and children.

Alizada is a leader in conversations and activism at Bard College for women in Afghanistan. Monthly events supporting Afghan women take place in collaboration with the Bard Center for Civic Engagement (CCE). Bard students interested in getting involved in this important advocacy work can reach out to the CCE at civic@bard.edu.

Watch the Full UN Event Here
 

The Afghan Student Fund at Bard College  

Bard College has pledged to take in as many as 100 students, as well as threatened scholars, to Bard’s campuses in Annandale, Great Barrington, and Berlin. The needs are great and efforts to support the educational, physical, psychological, financial, and legal needs of these displaced individuals will be a marathon, not a sprint.      

Bard has created the Afghan Student Fund to provide living, legal, and other necessary support to Afghan students who come to Bard. The College has committed to providing a full package to each student, including tuition (which is being waived), room and board, books, and a stipend. The Afghan Student Fund provides a clear way forward for educational opportunity and accessibility, and continues Bard’s legacy as a place of refuge in dark times. Give to the Afghan Student Fund

Related News

Sonita Alizada Addresses the UN on Child Marriage and Education for Girls

Sonita Alizada ’23 Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List

The New York Times features two BGC shows, Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 and Richard Tuttle: What is the Object? among the art shows to see this season. Majolica Mania is the first exhibition in decades to showcase the brightly colored, durable, and extremely popular Victorian majolica pottery. On view from September 24, 2021 to January 2, 2022. Richard Tuttle explores the meaning of objects and invites visitors to handle 75 objects, from fancy teacups to swatches of vintage fabric, from this American post-Minimalist’s personal collection. On view February 25, 2021 to July 10, 2022.
 
Also mentioned is International Center of Photography’s INWARD: Reflections on Interiority featuring five young artists using the most extroverted of mediums, photography, for self-reflection. On view September 24, 2021 to January 10, 2022.

Bard College Political Studies Professor Sanjib Baruah’s In the Name of the Nation (Stanford 2020) has won the biennial International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize for the Most Accessible and Captivating Work for the Non-Specialist Reader Accolade. “Controversies around new Indian laws on citizenship for migrants and refugees from neighbouring countries are embedded in the complicated colonial and post-/neo-colonial history of the Northeast region. In this relevant book, Baruah successfully ‘translates’ this complex political history of ethnic, religious and linguistic identity conflicts in accessible terms for non-specialists,” writes ICAS.

A day-long symposium “Mutations of Sovereignty: Perspectives on Sanjib Baruah’s In the Name of the Nation” will be held at the Annual Conference on South Asia hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Madison on October 21.

Associate Professor of Economics Pavlina R. Tcherneva says a job guarantee is necessary both for managing the disruptions wrought by global warming and for achieving a smooth, just transition to a low-carbon economy. And since the policy is also wildly popular, it should be a no-brainer for any politician who claims to be serious about tackling the climate crisis. “If ‘decent work for all’ is to become an actionable policy benchmark, access to a living-wage job must be guaranteed to everyone, not merely implied in the text of stimulus packages and other policies,” she writes.

For the second year, Bard College has been named by Washington Monthly among the U.S. colleges doing the most to turn students into citizens. Bard's student-led voting rights initiative Election@Bard has defended students’ right to vote since 2014 and is supported by Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement. In last year’s presidential election, Bard College hosted an on-campus polling location for the first time after a court ruling that followed more than two decades of student activism.
 

An immersive three-day residency at the Longy School of Music of Bard College will be presented as part of Castle of Our Skins’ (COOS) ninth season, “Stitching Together Stories, History, and Arts,” celebrating Black artistry through music. It is COOS’ third year as a Music Ensemble in Residence at Longy, and this season’s residency focuses on the music of South African composer Dr. Bongani Ndodana-Breen. Complete with lectures, master classes, open rehearsals, and performances, the residency will culminate in a Portrait Concert featuring chamber works by Ndodana-Breen on December 3.
 
Composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen has written a wide range of music encompassing symphonic work, opera, chamber music and vocal music. According to the New York Times his “delicately made music – airy, spacious, terribly complex but never convoluted – has a lot to teach the Western wizards of metric modulation and layered rhythms about grace and balance.”

On March 30, 2022, Bard College is organizing a Worldwide Teach-in on Climate and Justice, targeting participation by a million students across the planet. “As educators, there is nothing more important than engaging students across our campuses in this extraordinary moment in which we are living,” Goodstein says. Eban Goodstein is the director of the Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability. The Worldwide Teach-in is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in conjunction with partners worldwide and the Open Society University Network. 

“Under the circumstances,” writes Professor Mead, “the old consensus in support of a global liberal order seems fated to fade even as geopolitical challenges such as a rising China and global problems like climate change grow.”

Akil Kumarasamy, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, October 4. This event is free but registration, proof of vaccination, and indoor masking is required. To register, please email bfp@bard.edu. The reading begins at 6:30 pm and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. For more information call 845-758-7087.

Kumarasamy received the Bard Fiction Prize for or her debut story collection, Half Gods, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018). Kumarasamy’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2021 semester, during which time she is continuing her writing and meeting informally with students. 

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life. While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River—the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.”

“I’m very excited to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and to be part of the Bard community,” said Kumarasamy. “This has been such a whirlwind of a year, and, during these very uncertain times, I’m grateful for the support and the committee’s belief in my work. Really thrilled by the opportunity.”
Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the story collection, Half Gods, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Author Clare Beams for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016).
 

Research Professor Gidon Eshel, who teaches primarily in the Environmental and Urban Studies Program at Bard College, has coauthored a paper in Nature that provides the most comprehensive estimate to date of the environmental performance of blue food (fish and other aquatic foods) and for the first time, compares stressors across the diversity of farmed and wild aquatic species. The study reveals which species are already performing well in terms of emissions, freshwater and land use, and identifies opportunities for further reducing environmental footprints.

Read the Paper in Nature
Nature Story on Blue Foods
Learn More about Blue Food Assessment

“Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces,” writes Sante in the Paris Review. “And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into ‘Andy Warhol.’” Luc Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College.

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, who has chronicled war and its aftershocks all over the world, was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he got a call from his studio manager, telling him to turn on the TV: a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. “I looked at it, and it was evident that it was not only a major incident but that it was not an accident; it was an attack,” Peress recalled in the New Yorker.

“Our rich and complex emotional lives are a defining feature of what makes us human. Experiencing the full breadth of human emotion is often healthy and adaptive for our species, but there are times when we may be motivated to change, or regulate, our emotions in the service of other goals we may be pursuing,” says Richard Lopez, assistant professor of psychology, who also directs the Regulation of Everyday Affect, Craving, and Health (REACH) Lab at Bard.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bard students Tobias Timofeyev ’21 (mathematics) and Isabela Cruz-Vespa ’22 (Conservatory and pyschology) began Korona Konsort while hunkered down in Iowa City. With Cruz-Vespa playing the flute, Timofeyev the cello, and Timofeyev’s father Oleg accompanying on a guitar or lute, the trio performs Baroque music of the 17th and 18th centuries in pajama bottoms, an ode to how Zoom learning and work often meant only needing to look presentable from the waist up, for a video-only audience.

“It was a privilege,” Tobias Timofeyev says. “When you perform in person, that’s one thing. Trying to imitate that with a Zoom concert or something is really tough, and it sometimes can set you up for failure in terms of expectations. I really liked that we were mostly dealing with a completely different medium, and really we embraced that this was a video that we were making, and that we could really do whatever we wanted [with it].”

The Afghanistan withdrawal has made Britain’s abject position in the so-called “special relationship” with Washington humiliatingly apparent, writes Buruma in Foreign Policy. “The United States is being accused by some critics of no longer being a serious power after its latest debacle abroad. But Britain is in an even worse position, because its claim to high international status has rested heavily on the special relationship since World War Two.” Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College.

The digitally remastered Arthur Avilés Collection includes video documentation spanning this groundbreaking dancer/choreographer’s decades-long career. To mark its publication, the Hemispheric Institute and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) are cosponsoring Naked Vanguard: The Arthur Aviles Archive in Motion, a series of conversations and performances that are available for streaming through the Institute’s HemiTV portal.

“Hate is not the status quo. Whenever hate arises as a motivation for violence, we are witnessing a break in what is normal,” writes political scientist Robert Tynes in his new State of Hate Index (SoHI), just published by The Bard Center for the Study of Hate. This new study examines how hate manifests, and is constrained, in the 50 states of the United States, looking at multiple indicators in order to suggest where hate might be more likely to occur. Tynes presents SoHI as a starting point for lawmakers and researchers to better understand where hate-based violence is generated across the United States and which laws and policies might mitigate its impact.

“While nowhere near the sharpest picture of the fields of hate in America, (SoHI) is, however, a sharper view of the dynamics as a whole, drawn from the most accurate data sources existing to date,” writes Tynes, director of research and site director for the Bard Prison Initiative. “If we accept the Index as a baseline about hate, we can then turn to an exploration of correlations and explanations for why hate happens in certain regions. The point here is not to make predictions, but rather to extend what is revealed from SoHI to generate ideas for further research.”

In SoHI, Tynes gathers data for every state and creates a ranked index based on the number of hate groups, violence against women, antisemitic violence, white supremacy violence, laws and policies related to the prevention of hate, LGBTQ laws and policies, and guns and domestic violence policies. He further explores the impact of those categories on the some of the core dynamics underlying hate-based violence in America, including income inequality, poverty, unemployment, and urbanization.

In his forward to SoHI, Kenneth S. Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, writes that the larger frame Tynes brings to the study of hate—to see hate as a combination of factors operating simultaneously in a defined geographic area—is the major contribution of SoHI, one that will create more opportunities for the understanding and study of hate in the United States.

“The demonization and/or dehumanization of others is a larger phenomenon than just how many swastikas are drawn on synagogues or people attacked for who they are perceived to be,” writes Stern. “What Tynes directs us to do is think more broadly. What are the various factors in each state that can be quantified to give us information about hate writ large, and the chances people will encounter it? We hope this landmark study will spur others to replicate this type of approach.”

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate intends to issue periodic updates to the State or Hate Index.

To read the full The State of Hate Index, click here. 

Robert Tynes is a political scientist who researches political violence, child soldiers, online activism, and African politics. He is the director of research and site director for the Bard Prison Initiative.

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. Robert Tynes’ Study was underwritten with a generous grant to BCSH from the GS Humane Corporation. The Center is a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project. For more information, visit bcsh.bard.edu.

This Year’s Theme, Asian American Voices, Focuses on Moving Society Forward Through Music

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music announces the fourth season of the China Now Music Festival, from October 12 to 17. The festival’s concerts will take place at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College and Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. Through an annual series of concerts and academic activities, the China Now Music Festival is dedicated to promoting an understanding and appreciation of music from contemporary China. This year’s theme broadens the festival’s scope to include the voices of a wide array of Asian American composers, with the aim of exploring their importance in contemporary American music and society. “Asian American voices are American voices, and Asian American music is American music. We should always cherish the cultural diversity in American society,” says China Now Music Festival Artistic Director Jindong Cai.

The fourth annual China Now Music Festival, Asian American Voices, arrives in the midst of a particularly challenging time, shadowed by the global pandemic and recent rise in anti-Asian discrimination and violence. The repertoire thus reflects how Asian American composers have responded to this particular moment, as well as to the historical reception of Asians in America. 

“Music is not just an art form but should help move society forward,” says Huang Ruo, the festival’s composer-in-residence.  

The festival features three important works by New York–based composer, Huang Ruo. Born in China in 1976 and based in the United States, Huang has established a career as a major figure in classical music today. Spanning many genres and traditions, Huang’s work often aims to integrate Chinese and Western influences into multidimensional soundscapes. Key festival performances include a preview of excerpts from his latest composition, Angel Island; A Dust in Time, a piece he composed in response to the pandemic; and selections from his opera An American Solider, with libretto by David Henry Hwang. The festival programming also showcases new works by a range of Asian American composers. These works delve into the Asian American experience stretching back 100 years to today.

“The recent spike in anti-AAPI hate reminds us that Asian Americans must lift up our voices and show the world who we are, in all our strength, complexity, and humanity,” says playwright David Henry Hwang.

On Tuesday, October 12 at 8pm, the festival’s opening concert, Asian American Voices: Composing for History, music of Huang Ruo, conducted by China Now Artistic Director Jindong Cai, will be held at the Fisher Center for Performing Arts. The Orchestra Now will perform Huang’s 2020 meditation on the pandemic, A Dust in Time: A Passacaglia for Strings, which mirrors a Tibetan sand mandala in its musical structure. The festival’s ensemble­–in-residence, the San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet, will also present a preview of excerpts from Huang’s latest work, Angel Island: Oratorio for Voices and String Quartet. Angel Island sets to music the haunting Chinese poetry, more than 200 poems, inscribed on the walls of the Angel Island immigration center in San Francisco by detained immigrants during the early 20th century.

On Wednesday, October 13 at 8pm, Asian American Voices: Undercurrents in Contemporary American Music, a multimedia chamber concert, will be held at the Fisher Center at Bard College. Korean-American composer Jin Hi Kim presents the world-premiere of A Ritual for COVID-19, a multimedia composition inspired by the Korean shamanistic ‘ssitkimkut’ ritual for purifying the spirits of the dead. The Del Sol Quartet will perform new compositions by Erberk Eryilmaz, Takuma Itoh, Vijay Iyer, Erika Oba, and Jungyoon Wie, representing many diverse voices to reflect various aspects of Asian American society and history, from the early years of Japanese immigration—with Itoh’s piece Picture Brides—to selections from the quartet’s ‘Joy Project’—an effort to respond to current social and political change, technology, and artistic innovation.

On Saturday, October 16 at 3pm, Asian American Voices: Symphonic Portraits, with The Orchestra Now, a festival concert, will be held at the Fisher Center for Performing Arts. Jindong Cai will lead The Orchestra Now to showcase three symphonic works by the composers Tan Dun, dean of the Bard Conservatory; Xinyan Li, Bard Conservatory faculty member; and Peng-Peng Gong, Shanghai-based composer and pianist. Tan’s Prayer and Blessing is his initial response to the pandemic, composed in early 2020. Li’s Awakening Light, concerto for guzheng and orchestra, was commissioned by the festival to be performed by the winner of the 2019 Bard Conservatory Concerto Competition, Yixin Wang. Gong’s A Chinese in New York is a raw description of the experience of a Chinese student confronting cultural differences in America. 

The second half of the concert will feature several moving episodes from composer Huang Ruo’s 2014 opera, An American Soldier. The opera tells the powerful and haunting true story of the death of US Army Private Danny Chen, who was born and raised in New York's Chinatown and died in Afghanistan in 2001 after being subjected to relentless hazing and racial maltreatment by his superiors. The episodes presented here will be introduced by the opera’s librettist, Tony award–winning playwright David Henry Hwang.  ­­

On Sunday, October 17 at 3pm, the festival’s closing concert, Asian American Voices: Angel Island Oratorio and An American Soldier, music of Huang Ruo, conducted by Jindong Cai, will be held in the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. The program begins with the Del Sol Quartet and China Now Festival Chorus performing a preview of excerpts from Angel Island: Oratorio for Voices and String Quartet. Angel Island: Oratorio was commissioned by the Del Sol Performing Arts Organization, with support from the Hewlett Foundation “50 Arts Commissions'" and additional funding by the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation. The concert will also feature a second performance of selected episodes from An American Soldier, with The Orchestra Now, soloists, and live narration by librettist David Henry Hwang.

An online panel discussion and performance, Asian American Voices: Artists Confronting Society, on Thursday, October 14 at 8pm will bring together some of the major voices in the 2021 China Now Music Festival. Featured composer Huang Ruo, Tony award–winning playwright David Henry Hwang, artistic director of the China Now Music Festival Jindong Cai, violist Charlton Lee of the Del Sol Quartet, and others will discuss their experience as Asian American artists and reflect on how this particular moment in history has shaped their creative process and their views on the role of the artist in society. Following the panel discussion, the Del Sol Quartet will offer an excerpt of their new recording of Huang Ruo’s meditation on the pandemic, A Dust in Time.

For more information about the China Now Music Festival and for full programming details, visit barduschinamusic.org/asian-american-voices.

Tickets for October 12 and 13 have a suggested donation of $15 or $20. Tickets for October 16 are $25, $30, $35, and $40. To purchase tickets for the Fisher Center concerts, visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm), or email boxoffice@bard.edu. 

Tickets for October 17 are $25, $35, and $50. To purchase tickets for the Jazz at Lincoln Center concert visit the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, Broadway at 60th Street, Ground Floor, (Monday-Saturday 10am–6pm, Sunday 12 pm–6pm) or online at jazz.org, or call CenterCharge at 212-721-6500.

Bard College President Leon Botstein spoke with Len Gutkin of the Chronicle of Higher Education about teaching and technology, the future of the liberal arts, the arbitrariness of philanthropy, and political threats to the university.

Leon Botstein has been the president of Bard College since 1975, during which time he has overseen the Bard Prison Initiative; assumed the directorship of the American Symphony Orchestra; established a network of public early colleges across the U.S.; and forged innovative partnerships with colleges in the West Bank, Central Asia, Central Europe, and Russia. That international orientation recently ran into trouble, when the Russian government used a 2015 law to designate Bard an“undesirable organization” and expel it from the country. (That may have been a bellwether for collaborations between U.S. centers of higher learning and illiberal foreign states — a few months later the National University of Singapore and Yale University parted ways.) “We actually take risks,” Botstein said when I talked with him last week, “and some of them don’t pan out.”

“We need authoritarian-proof higher education models.” —Kyaw Moe Tun

Kyaw Moe Tun, Open Society University Network (OSUN) project leader and president of the Parami Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, published an article in Times Higher Education discussing the need for authoritarian-proof higher education models in Myanmar. Following the military coup, faculty and students fear the end of a budding modern higher education system. Bard is an OSUN cofounder and partner of the Parami Institute.

The Bard Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) celebrates its 10th anniversary by honoring community partners. The festivities will take place on Friday, September 24, 4pm to 6pm, at Blithewood lawn on Bard’s Annandale campus. All New York State COVID-19 guidelines will be in place. Attendance to this event is by invitation only.

Civic engagement is at the core of Bard’s institutional mission, reflecting the fundamental belief that higher education institutions can and should operate in the public interest. CCE initiates programs; fosters sustained partnerships; and supports and connects student, faculty, and staff of Bard’s local, national, and international networks as they work to make a difference in the civic life of their communities. 

The work of CCE would not be possible without the dedication and generosity of community partners. This year, the 10th anniversary celebration recognizes the following individuals and partner organizations:

Dan Budd, Community Hero Award
In honor of his work in the Red Hook community during the COVID-19 pandemic

Troy Ellen Dixon, Community Hero Award
In honor of her work in the Kingston community during the COVID-19 pandemic

Lifetime Learning Institute at Bard College, Crusader Award
In honor of their 20-year commitment to learning across the ages 
(Award will be accepted by Nancy Kryzak, LLI President)

Felicitas Thorne, Champion Award
In honor of her unwavering support of civic engagement at Bard

For more information about Bard College Center for Civic Engagement, visit cce.bard.edu.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the global importance—and challenge—of understanding the ecology of infectious diseases, especially in regard to the impact biodiversity has on the transmission of zoonotic diseases. A new paper in Ecology Letters coauthored by Bard Biology Professor Felicia Keesing and Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, argues that one key to improving this understanding is more rigorous and creative study of dilution effects, which occur when the diversity of an ecological community reduces the transmission of disease. Dilution effects have been used for decades to manage the transmission of parasites and pathogens in plants, animals, and people.

“The impacts of diversity on the emergence and transmission of pathogens have never been more relevant,” write Keesing and Ostfeld in their paper, “Dilution effects in disease ecology.” “Over the last 20 years, attention has focused on whether the patterns that can be made to happen—when someone chooses which organisms are present in a system—ever happen naturally, as diversity changes under natural conditions, This is a particularly important question because diversity within natural ecosystems is changing rapidly in response to human impacts such as habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, pollution and climate change.”

In their paper, Keesing and Ostfeld discuss how and where dilution effects have been used to manage infectious diseases. “We explore the ecological mechanisms that underlie these effects, and then turn to more recent questions—whether dilution effects occur in natural communities, and if so, whether these effects are impacted by changes to natural biodiversity,” they write. “We review the evidence for when and how frequently natural dilution effects occur, outline some of the challenges of studying them and describe common mis-applications of the concepts, as well as important outstanding questions.”

Keesing and Ostfeld write that analyses reveal that natural dilution effects are common, but studying them remains challenging “due to limitations on the ability of researchers to manipulate many disease systems experimentally, difficulties of acquiring data on host quality and confusion about what should and should not be considered a dilution effect.” Important questions for future research, they write, include: “Does the pattern of variation in host quality vary in predictable ways for different metrics (e.g. reservoir competence, vector preference) and across types of disease systems? How do interactions within hosts affect dilution effects in multi-pathogen systems? How common are positive relationships between ecological resilience and host quality? What are the shapes of these relationships when they do occur, and what are their underlying causes? What are the best metrics for measuring transmission across disease systems? What are the characteristics of natural disease systems that show dilution effects and those that do not, and what does this suggest about whether we might apply our understanding of dilution effects to manage diseases in nature?”

Keesing and Ostfeld conclude that there is much to learn about the relationship between biodiversity change and the emergence of pathogens, and that more study of dilution effects will be essential. “Important questions include how biodiversity, and its loss, affect the emergence of pathogens of non-human hosts; how we can effectively determine whether hosts can actually transmit pathogens, as opposed to simply becoming infected with them and how to manage our behavior and use of landscapes to minimize spillover events,” they write. “Acknowledging what we have learned about dilution effects in nature over the past 20 years is critically important, as is understanding their similarities and differences to the dilution effects that operate in managed disease systems like agricultural fields.”

To read the full paper in Ecology Letters, click here.

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Grant OPUS 1948419 to Keesing.

Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, has been on the Bard faculty since 2000. She has a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1995, she has studied how African savannas function when the large, charismatic animals like elephants, buffaloes, zebras, and giraffes disappear. She also studies how interactions among species influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. Keesing also studies Lyme disease, another tick-borne disease. She is particularly interested in how species diversity affects disease transmission. More recently, she has focused on science literacy for college students, and she led the re-design of Bard College’s Citizen Science program. Keesing has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. She has been awarded the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2000). She is the coeditor of Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems (2008) and has contributed to such publications as Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, BioScience, Conservation Biology, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution, among others.(9.8.21)

Renowned author Sandra Cisneros will be a live guest on the show La Voz con Mariel Fiori on Radio Kingston on Friday, September 10 at 10:00 a.m. Fiori is a Bard College alumna and the editor of La Voz, a Spanish-language magazine focused on the Hudson Valley and published at Bard. Fiori and Cisneros will discuss the author’s new novel, Martita, I Remember You, which is bilingual and will be published this month. They will also talk about The House on Mango Street, the centerpiece of the NEA Big Read Hudson Valley for March and April 2022. Bard College was awarded a Big Read Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for this community-wide reading program in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston this coming spring.

Please send questions for Cisneros to lavoz@radiokingston.org and Fiori will incorporate as many as possible into the interview.

Tune in WKNY 1490 AM, 107.9 FM, online on RadioKingston.org, and live on the Radio Kingston facebook page on September 10 at 10:00 a.m. The interview will be conducted in Spanish; it will be broadcast live and recorded. The recording will be available later in the day on the archive of the show on Radio Kingston's website.

“For Pfaff, more is more,” writes Andre van der Wende for the Provincetown Independent. “Her work is characterized by an eyes-wide-open, constantly curious approach, finding new ways of seeing—fresh nooks and crannies relating to science, psychology, astronomy, or the body.” The show is on view through October 31 at the Gaa Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Judy Pfaff is the Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

Founded at Bard in 2010 and led by alumni/ae, Contemporaneous presents “Day of Imagination,” a daylong festival of world premieres by Kara-Lis Coverdale, Andrés Martínez de Velasco ’15, Dylan Mattingly ’14, and Brian Petuch on Saturday, September 18, 2021, from 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. at The Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, New York. The festival includes Mattingly’s opera Stranger Love, with a libretto written by Thomas Bartscherer, Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College.

Given in Honor of CCS Bard’s 30th Anniversary, Gift will Create $50-Million Endowment Securing Institution’s Program in Perpetuity
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) has announced the creation of a $50-million endowment, comprising a $25-million gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and a matching commitment of $25 million from George Soros as part of Bard College’s transformational $1-billion endowment drive, launched earlier this year. “This gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation marks a milestone in the thirty-year history of CCS Bard,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS Bard and founding director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “Above all, it is a gift to the future.”

 

Bard College is pleased to announce that Clara Sousa-Silva has been appointed to a tenure track faculty position in the Physics Program. Sousa-Silva will join the faculty of the College in spring 2022 as a full-time assistant professor of physics in the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing. Sousa-Silva is a quantum astrochemist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She investigates how molecules interact with light so that they can be detected on faraway worlds. Sousa-Silva’s July 2021 TED talk, “The Fingerprints of Life Beyond Earth,” is featured on the front page of the TED website.

About Clara Sousa-Silva
Clara Sousa-Silva spends most of her time studying molecules that life can produce so that, one day, she can detect an alien biosphere. Her favorite molecular biosignature is phosphine: a terrifying gas associated with mostly unpleasant life. When she is not deciphering exoplanet atmospheres, Sousa-Silva works hard to persuade the next generation of scientists to become an active part of the astronomical community.

Sousa-Silva holds a doctoral degree in quantum chemistry from the University College London, and a masters degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Among her many achievements, Sousa-Silva is the recipient of the prestigious 51 b Pegasi Fellowship from the Heising Simons Foundation. The fellowship supports the growing field of planetary astronomy and exceptional postdoctoral scientists who make unique contributions to the field of astronomy. Her work and commentary has been featured in the BBC, WIRED, and the New York Times, among many others. Prior to joining the Center for Astrophysics, Sousa-Silva served as a research scientist at MIT.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(8/31/21)
 

Bard College is pleased to announce that Joshua P.H. Livingston will join the faculty of the American Studies Program, effective fall 2021. Livingston received his PhD in social welfare from the City of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and holds an MSW and a certificate in human services management from Boston University. Using his current work and experiences as a Licensed Master Barber and the Black American barbershop as an exemplar, Livingston’s work focuses on how social innovation, social enterprise, and “placemaking” can be utilized by young people of color to challenge institutional environments through the use of community forms that hold cultural significance. He is the co-owner of Friend of a Barber in New York City’s East Village and brings nearly twenty years of practice experience in youth-based program development, management, and evaluation to his work. At Bard, Livingston will serve as visiting professor of American Studies focusing on placemaking. He will be teaching a course titled Beyond Black Capitalism in the fall.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(8/25/21)

This article was originally published in Karin Fischer's latitude(s) global education newsletter.

Bard College Executive Vice President Jonathan Becker, who is also the acting president of the American University of Central Asia, has been scrambling to try to get endangered students out of Afghanistan. “The stakes are high for all students but especially for young women who won’t be able to pursue higher education under the Taliban,” he said. “These are women who are smart, who are empowered, who are extraordinary.”

Working with Bard and the Open Society University Network, where he is vice chancellor, Becker has persuaded universities to host displaced students and raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for chartered airplanes. Bard will take as many as 100 students as well as threatened scholars. But a big challenge remains: how to get visas for the students to go to other countries.

In recent days, Becker got some good news: The government of Kyrgyzstan, where AUCA is located, has pledged to issue 500 visas to students from Afghanistan. Now, he hopes other countries will do the same. “It’s a sprint to get these students out.”

READ MORE
Full story: Heartbreak and What You Can Do: How Higher Education Can Aid Afghanistan (latitudes)
American University in Kyrgyzstan Is Offering Afghan Women a Haven. Will the Taliban Let Them Go? (Passblue)

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) returns to the stage for its seventh season on September 11. “Nothing can replace the exhilaration of live performance,” said Music Director Leon Botstein. “During the pandemic, our young musicians kept the music alive by developing the skills to produce and perform extraordinary digital programs. But the return to the stage and the excitement of a real audience in such wonderful venues is crucial to their experience. We are truly thrilled to resume a direct connection with our audiences.”

Bard alumnus, U.S. Army veteran, and Stars and Stripes reporter J.p. Lawrence ’14 recalls his hurried evacuation from Kabul. “We loaded into Chinooks, forming an aerial bridge of helicopters from the embassy to the city’s airport just a few miles away. As we flew over the capital, I imagined how left behind the city’s people must have felt, to constantly hear the beating rotors of the foreigners leaving as fast as possible.”

“Since the evidence is by now overwhelming that long-term human activity is accelerating the emergence of novel pathogens and increasing the risk of pandemics, the question investigators should really be asking is: did some recent, one-off event such as a lab accident exacerbate the already high and growing risk of spillover of a virus with pandemic potential caused by a decades-long shift towards industrialised farming and the wildlife trade?” writes Laura Spinney in the Guardian, citing Keesing’s April 2021 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper.

Susan Weber, Bard Graduate Center director and founder and Iris Horowitz Professor in the History of the Decorative Arts, writes about an ‘Alice Through the Looking-Glass’ type of visual journey that has culminated in the exhibition and catalogue Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 on view at the BGC Gallery from September 24 through January 2.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced the creation of a $50-million endowment, comprising a $25-million gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and a matching commitment of $25 million from George Soros as part of Bard College’s transformational $1-billion endowment drive. Established in 1990, CCS Bard is the first institution of its kind in the United States dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform contemporary art exhibition-making and practice. This unprecedented donation, initiated by the Hessel Foundation in honor of CCS Bard’s 30^th anniversary year, enables CCS Bard to continue its pathbreaking work in perpetuity.

The Hessel Foundation gift builds on over three decades of visionary support from CCS Bard Co-Founder Marieluise Hessel. In the late 1980s, the Foundation entrusted its growing collection of contemporary art to Bard for the exclusive use of its students and faculty, laying the groundwork for the creation of CCS Bard in 1990. Since that time, the Foundation has been an enduring supporter of CCS Bard with transformational gifts including the construction of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2006 and the expansion of the library, special collections, and archives in 2015, alongside annual operating contributions that have inspired many others to support the institution. Its collection, which forms the cornerstone of CCS Bard’s master’s program and the basis for many of its exhibitions at the museum, has grown to encompass approximately 2,000 works of art and is today considered to be among the most important collections of contemporary art on a university campus. Support from the Foundation has also enabled CCS Bard to provide 90% of incoming students with financial aid.

“This gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation marks a milestone moment in the 30-year history of CCS Bard,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “The groundwork that Marieluise established in co-founding the institution has catalyzed a shift in the field and, by extension, has advanced bold new discourses in contemporary art. In sustaining CCS Bard for generations to come, Marieluise’s generosity will allow us to build on that legacy and continue to advance new ideas in curatorial practice and contemporary art. Above all, it is a gift to the future.”

“CCS Bard is an integral part of the Bard College community, and we are immensely grateful for Marieluise’s enduring leadership and support. Her generous gift ensures that the groundbreaking work at CCS continues to flourish as it further advances Bard’s overall mission of fostering rigorous programs of free inquiry and creativity,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.

“For the past 30 years, CCS Bard has had an outsized impact within the art world,” said Marieluise Hessel, Co-Founder of CCS Bard. “It is a privilege to be able to celebrate three decades of sustained, transformational inquiry and experimentation into curatorial studies and exhibition-making with this gift. I know that this program will continue to lead the way in finding new stories to tell, artists to champion, and boundaries to push.”

In celebration of its 30^th anniversary, CCS Bard is currently presenting two exhibitions that draw significantly from the Marieluise Hessel Collection: Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection comprises more than 75 works on paper and drawings collected by Hessel over the course of more than four decades to explore the artistic intimacy achieved by the medium; and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first large-scale North American survey of the groundbreaking women-led Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s, showcasing major works from the Collection alongside significant loans to trace the movement's reach in postwar American art.

In addition, this fall CCS Bard will publish the first comprehensive publication on the Marieluise Hessel Collection, examining the impact of the collection on CCS Bard students through original writing from CCS alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Serubiri Moses, and Gabi Ngcobo, among many others.

About Marieluise Hessel and the Marieluise Hessel Foundation
Born in Munich in 1939, Marieluise Hessel began collecting contemporary art in the 1960s. From the first works purchased from Heiner Friedrich in Germany, the Hessel Collection, which is held in trust by the Foundation, has grown contemporaneously with artists working from the middle of the 20th century through the present. The Collection today is considered among the most important contemporary art collections on a university campus and is remarkable for its breadth, eclecticism, and embrace of undervalued and difficult works of art. Hessel co-founded CCS Bard in 1990, launching a groundbreaking new type of institution dedicated to nurturing the next generation of contemporary art curators and critics.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation, The Laura-Lee Whittier Woods Foundation, the Keith Haring Foundation, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation among others.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at its main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

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Professor of French and Comparative Literature Marina van Zuylen will inaugurate the series on September 1. Her talk, “Stumbling on the Good: the Private Triumphs of Common Decency,” takes place at 5 pm in the Multipurpose Room of the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Recognizing Stuart’s fascination with the world around him and his devotion to educating a wide community, the annual lecture will sustain his spirit of courtesy, respect and inquiry. To view a livestream of the September 1 lecture, click here. The Stuart Stritzler-Levine Lecture in Common Decency is generously supported by the President’s Office, the Office of the Dean of the College, and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs.

Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College and National Academic Director, Clemente Course in the Humanities. She was educated in France before receiving a BA in Russian literature and a PhD in comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle, Monomania, and The Plenitude of Distraction. She has published in praise of some of the most beleaguered maladies of modernity—boredom, fatigue, idleness, mediocrity—and written about snobbery, dissociative disorders, and obsessive compulsive aesthetics. She has published extensively on the work of Jacques Rancière and has written about art and aesthetics for MoMA and other art-related venues. She has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the university of Paris VII. She is the national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities (clemente.bard.edu), a free college course for underserved adults, and accepted on its behalf a National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2014. She is presently writing Good Enough, a book about the unsung virtues of classical and modern mediocrity. At Bard since 1997.

Stuart Stritzler-Levine, professor emeritus of psychology and dean emeritus, died May 1, 2020. Stritzler-Levine, who joined the Bard faculty in 1964 and devoted 56 years of continuous service to the College, received his B.A. from New York University, M.A. from New School University, and Ph.D. from SUNY Albany. Before coming to Bard he was a clinical research psychologist at Philadelphia State Hospital, where he worked in a National Institute of Mental Health project designed to rehabilitate patients with chronic mental illness. He also served as a clinical psychologist at Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey. His teaching and research interests at Bard included social psychology, specifically obedience to authority, conformity, attitude measurement, and change; moral development; and experimental design. He was fascinated by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram, on whose work and legacy he was teaching a seminar in the Spring 2020 semester.

“No one has worked as tirelessly and generously for Bard as Stuart did,” writes President Leon Botstein. “He loved the College, its mission, its people, its history, and its landscape. He was fastidious and disciplined, yet he made the time not only to work unstintingly but also to sit and talk with everyone, anytime.”

Stritzler-Levine was dean of the College from 1980 to 2001. In those 21 years he oversaw innovations in the admission process, particularly the Immediate Decision Plan; the rapid growth of Bard’s enrollment and curriculum; and the College’s expansion into graduate education. He served as Dean of Studies at Bard High School Early College Manhattan from 2003 to 2009, then returned to teaching at Bard and at Simon’s Rock. Botstein writes, “He died in active service, not retired, as was his dream.”


 

"Philosophy and soldiery marched hand in hand among the Greeks," Romm observes, and some of his most compelling writing takes a deep look into attitudes about, and the practice of, homosexuality by the likes of Socrates and Plato, again without resort to easy generalization. Similarly, his examination of the dynamics of age disparity within the couples is consistently revelatory, rather than dismissively judgmental. James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard College.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to support efforts in reversing the Russian government’s recent designation of Bard College as an “undesirable” organization. Bard first partnered with St. Petersburg State University 25 years ago, cofounding Smolny College, Russia’s first liberal arts college. Bard’s longstanding affiliation, degree partnership, and exchange programs with St. Petersburg State University have been critical to building ties between young Americans and Russians, and played a large role in developing a cohort of Americans well-versed in Russian language and culture. The recent designation of Bard College by the Russian government effectively ended this program and makes any student or worker associated with Bard’s program a potential criminal subject to fines or imprisonment.

Avilés, award-winning Bronx-based dancer/choreographer, will perform in two events and be celebrated by NYU's Hemispheric Institute. After graduating from Bard, Avilés joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In 1998, he co-founded The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!), a performance space that blazed a path for professional art and dance in the Bronx. Avilés received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bard in 2015, a Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) award, and multiple Bessie Awards including a 2020 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance.

Two shows now on view at the Hessel Museum of Art reexamine underexplored art movements and media, and provide a glimpse into the collecting history of CCS Bard cofounder Marieluise Hessel. Closer to Life explores drawing as a tool for reflection on issues of significant personal and social import. With Pleasure, the first large-scale North American survey of the women-led Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement of the 1970s and ’80s, traces the movement’s reach in postwar American art. Countering the male-dominated minimalist aesthetics of the day, P&D celebrated color, excess, and the decorative.

“Human government is often a negotiation over how divine power is reflected in human governance and also what the instruments of that governance should be,” Chilton tells the Washington Post when asked if religion always accompanies times of political ferment. “It is not reasonable to suppose that people are all going to suspend their religious ideas in order to be governed in a just manner. Rather, it’s the reverse: How do they negotiate their religious ideas in such a way that the government attracts their commitment and they can live justly with people who differ from them?” Bruce Chilton is the Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College and executive director of the Institute of Advanced Theology.

After 40 years in prison, Gregory Mingo was pardoned on the night of Monday, August 23, along with several other incarcerated people, in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts as governor of New York State. Bard College students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, worked together with students in the Defenders Clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency in fall 2020, including one with Mr. Mingo. The Bard-CUNY team visited Mr. Mingo in prison in the midst of the pandemic to interview him.

To be granted clemency is a rare victory after an arduous process on the part of the incarcerated individual and their advocates. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” wrote Thomas Keenan and Brent Green, who cotaught the class, in a message to the Bard community. Watching the video, they said, “you can easily see why the Governor's decision was long overdue. Advocating for basic human rights and decency, especially in apparently enlightened situations like ours, ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it's not, and because sometimes—but who knows when—it works.”

Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.

In the Economist, Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi calls Dante a “poet of crisis,” whose life split in two when he was expelled from Florence. Seven hundred years after Dante’s death, his masterpiece still resonates.

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose remembers her dear friend James Alan McPherson through his work. Last spring, Prose taught a course through the Bard Prison Initiative under challenging pandemic conditions, in which she could only interact with her class on speakerphone. One of her texts was McPherson’s short story “Gold Coast.” Prose writes, “It was the only time that I was glad to be on speakerphone, because each time my students read aloud from ‘Gold Coast,’ I began to cry.”

“It’s not one faculty offering a course. It's a real team approach,” says Gedeon on how the program differs from other summer schools. “There can be a group of five or six or seven people working and teaching together. . . Very often, because it's a team, there's a chance to be multidisciplinary so it's not just one narrow discipline but a multidisciplinary union with a 360-degree look around the world and within those fields. And that's exciting.” Bard College and the Central European University cofounded the Open Society University Network with the support of the Open Society Foundations.

Isabel Polletta’s 2020 Senior Project at Bard has led to a published study in Frontiers in Psychology. Her research with Assistant Professor of Psychology Richard Lopez, who was her Senior Project adviser, has now been published as “Regulating self-image on Instagram: Links between social anxiety, Instagram contingent self-worth, and content control behaviors.”

Last month, Bard College and the Open Society University Network sent out a call to Afghan graduates of American programs in Afghanistan and the region. Immediately 120 replies came back. “I had a student this summer who had to miss class because ‘the Taliban surrounded our town.’ She indicated to me her final paper would be late because a bomb blew up her house,” Jonathan Becker told the Atlantic’s George Packer. “This is a tragedy of epic proportions.” After reading Honorable Exit, Thurston Clarke’s account of efforts by individual Americans to save their Vietnamese allies before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Becker realized how little time was left. In recent days Bard and Open Society have appealed to universities in the region to host Afghan evacuees, and to foundations and board members to pay as much as $400,000 to charter flights out of Afghanistan. “In many cases we have institutions to host them. Colleges, universities, and funders are stepping up,” Becker said. “That is not a problem. The challenge is the time to get people out and get them visas into those countries.” Jonathan Becker is OSUN vice chancellor, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard.

Francine Prose writes in the Guardian of the striking viral video of a tourist ferry sailing across the water from the raging fire incinerating the Greek island of Evia. “This is what climate apocalypse looks like from the deck of a tourist boat. It’s a vision we need to see, a reminder that the hard work of keeping our planet from becoming hell can’t be put off any longer. We have run out of time. We need to wake up. We need to say it till somebody listens: something has to be done.”

Murals by artist Olin Dows in the Rhinebeck, New York, post office “correctly—yet disturbingly—reflect the racialized social hierarchy from the past in the town and region that would otherwise be invisible to the public,” writes Bard Professor Myra Young Armstead in a report commissioned by the town board. “This is a critically important feature of history that needs to be preserved.” Armstead recommends that interpretive signage or art be added to the post office lobby to counter Dows’s simplistic scenes, rather than removing the work entirely. Myra Young Armstead is vice president for academic inclusive excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College.