Bard News

As part of the College’s 10th Annual MLK Day of Engagement, more than 300 Bard students participated in volunteer projects, workshops, and a conference on campus.

Bard College students, staff, and faculty celebrated the 10th Annual Martin Luther King Day of Engagement last weekend with a host of events on and off campus. Beginning on Saturday, January 18 and continuing on Monday, January 20, Bard students participated in a series of volunteer projects, civic engagement workshops, and a miniconference on campus. Most participants were first-years on campus for Citizen Science; they were joined by 42 Upper College student leaders.

The weekend's events—organized by the Bard Center for Civic Engagement, the Office of Sustainability, and the Citizen Science Program, in cooperation with local nonprofits—take place as part of the nationwide Day of Service that marks the King holiday. Volunteers around the country respond to Dr. King's call, "Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'"

Bard students and staff played a significant role in the popular Red Hook Repair Cafe for the second year. Sixteen students joined other local volunteers at the Red Hook Community Center. The Center bustled with community members sharing their expertise, fixing everything from computers to sweaters. Participants made Valentines for senior citizens who receive Meals on Wheels, learned sewing and woodworking, and connected with local nonprofit organizations.

Participants chose from 16 workshops, trainings, and panels on campus that connected Martin Luther King's legacy as a leader in civil rights and social and economic justice with today's local and global challenges. Facilitators focused on helping students build skills to effect change. Students joined workshops on public speaking, identifying fake news, and how to have difficult conversations about bias with friends and relatives, among others. Panel topics included Reconfiguring Radical Black Politics, Biomimicry: How Learning From Our Biological Elders Could Change Our World, and The Legitimacy and Legacy of Historically Black Fraternities and Sororities.

Bard junior Daniella Mingo, MLK Day of Engagement Fellow and Posse Scholar, was thrilled with how eager and excited the students were to venture out into the community. "These groups of students were able to build up structures, volunteer at food pantries and travel even to Woodstock to participate in the Women’s March, raising their voices to demand equality for all living beings. It has been such a rewarding and inspiring experience. I strongly believe that this first-year class has embodied what it means to show up and show out!"

The organizers included a civic engagement miniconference in Olin Auditorium for the second year, after last year's success, featuring a panel of local leaders who discussed inclusive practices for youth and the community as a whole. The College welcomed to the Olin stage Shaniqua Bowden, outreach coordinator for the Kingston Land Trust; Cammie Jones, associate dean for experiential learning and civic engagement at Bard; Jody Miller, Dutchess County human rights/EEO officer; and L'Quette Taylor, Poughkeepsie community organizer and founder of Community Matters 2, Inc.

"My favorite part of MLK Day of Engagement this year was seeing how much everyone cared about the day as a whole," commented Bard sophomore Mikalah Jenifer, MLK Day of Engagement Fellow and also a Posse Scholar. "From students to professors to workshop leaders, everyone was so invested in perpetuating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy."

 Bard's community engagement this month doesn't stop with MLK Day. The Bard STEM Outreach team was also excited to host about 450 8th graders from local school districts in Rhinebeck, Pine Plains, Germantown, and Hyde Park. They also welcomed onto campus the 9th and 10th graders from Woodstock Day School. Throughout all the schools' visits, local students learned about this year's Citizen Science topic: water. They analyzed drought mapping, calculated water scarcity in a game format, made ice cream with freezing point depression knowledge, and learned about the life cycle of a plastic water bottle. All of these lessons and activities were created and facilitated by Bard CCE student fellows, through a course called Scientific Literacy and Inquiry.
 

Bard College Assistant Professor of Physics Hal Haggard and his fellow researchers were awarded a 2019 Buchalter Cosmology Prize at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii, on January 6. The annual prize series, created by Dr. Ari Buchalter in 2014, seeks to reward new ideas or discoveries that have the potential to produce a breakthrough advance in our understanding of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe. Professor Haggard and his colleagues were recognized for research testing the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black holes.

The $5,000 Second Prize was awarded to Professor Haggard, of Bard College and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and colleagues from the Pennsylvania State University: Eugenio Bianchi, Anuradha Gupta, and B. S. Sathyaprakash (also of Cardiff University). The judging panel recognized their paper, “Quantum Gravity and Black Hole Spin in Gravitational Wave Observations: a Test of the Bekenstein-Hawking Entropy,” as “a remarkable test of the thermodynamic character of black holes, predicting the spin characteristics of an initial primordial population of black holes that thermalize in the early universe, and which could be detectable by current and near-future gravitational wave detectors.”

Haggard’s work is part of an ongoing scientific revolution in the study of black holes. Last year, scientists captured the first direct image of a black hole, less than four years after measuring, for the first time, the gravitational waves created by the collision of two black holes circling one another at nearly light speed. These waves directly oscillate space and time. Contrary to initial expectations, pairs of black holes crashing into each other give rise to most of the gravitational waves we can currently measure. Advanced facilities like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) are now observing and measuring black hole collisions about once a week.

Previously, scientists only knew about two main types of black holes: X-ray binary systems, which often contain one active star and a black hole, in the range of five to 15 times the mass of our sun, that “siphons off” mass from the donor star; and supermassive black holes, a class that includes the black hole imaged in 2019, which measures about 6.5 billion solar masses. 

Prior to LIGO, physicists did not expect that the main class of binary collisions measured would be of two black holes, or that those black holes would have masses in the range of 20 to 80 solar masses. Most surprising of all, it now appears possible that most of the black holes measured through gravitational waves aren’t spinning at all before they collide. Scientists had thought that the majority of black holes were formed in the gravitational collapse of a rotating star. 

Haggard and his colleagues’ paper shows that black holes formed in a different way, as part of the hot primordial soup of the early universe, could naturally have zero spin. The authors also find that these black holes would be expected to have masses of 10 to 100 times the mass of our sun. Their arguments are based on understanding how entropy and temperature determine the physical characteristics of a black hole, for example its spin. 

“I’m delighted about this paper because it brings together so many of the strands of my work,” says Haggard. “Gravitational wave measurements are an exciting probe of the rich interplay between gravitational thermodynamics, black holes, and the early history of the cosmos. It is a rare point of contact between the ideas that go into a quantum theory of gravity, like black hole entropy, and experimental observations that are happening right now.”

The $10,000 First Prize was awarded to Jahed Abedi and Niayesh Afshordi for their work entitled “Echoes from the Abyss: A Highly Spinning Black Hole Remnant for the Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817.” The $2,500 Third Prize was awarded to José Beltrán Jiménez of Universidad de Salamanca and colleagues for their work entitled “The Geometrical Trinity of Gravity.”

Dr. Buchalter, a former astrophysicist turned business entrepreneur, established the prize series in the belief that significant breakthroughs in the field of cosmology still lie ahead but might require challenging and breaking with accepted paradigms. “The 2019 prizewinners represent bold thinking that can help open up new frontiers in our understanding of physics and of the universe,” said Dr. Buchalter. The judging panel for the annual prizes is made up of leading theoretical physicists noted for their work in cosmology. The 2019 panel included Justin Khoury and Mark Trodden of the University of Pennsylvania and Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Learn more at buchwaltercosmologyprize.org.

Patrick Vaill ’07 took his final Broadway bow as Jud Fry, after performing in Daniel Fish’s production of the musical Oklahoma! since he was a student at Bard. The Tony Award–winning Broadway production closed last weekend after an immensely successful run. Daniel Fish’s reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic began as a 2007 staging with Bard students in the Theater Program. Fish then adapted the production for Bard SummerScape 2015, took it to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and then to Broadway. Patrick Vaill played Jud Fry in every iteration of the production. In this interview with the New York Times, Vaill reflects on embodying the iconic role and pays tribute to his alma mater.

John Duke Kisch ’76’s Separate Cinema Archive, the most prominent African American film history repository, is being acquired by George Lucas for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The archive encompasses more than 37,000 rare items, including original film posters, film stills, publicity material, scripts, lobby cards, an extensive reference library, and more dating from 1904 to 2019.

Activists fret about armies relying on killer robots, but some forms of artificial intelligence that don’t actually pull the trigger could still be a nightmare. “The widespread use of sophisticated autonomous aids in war would be fraught with unknown unknowns,” writes Holland Michel, codirector of the Bard Center for the Study of the Drone. “An algorithm with the power to suggest whether a tank should use a small rocket or a fighter jet to take out an enemy could mark the difference between life and death for anybody who happens to be in the vicinity of the target.” He concludes, “Automation’s vast potential to make humans more efficient extends to the very human act of committing war crimes.”

“One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy.” —Salon.com

The Fisher Center at Bard, in association with Oblong Books & Music, presents a public conversation between two leading writers of fantasy and science fiction: Neil Gaiman, Bard professor in the arts, and Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became will be published in March. 

The program takes place on Saturday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Tickets are $25 and can be ordered online at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. $5 student tickets available to Bard undergraduate students through the Passloff Pass.

The conversation is part of an ongoing series in which author Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. Following the program, N. K. Jemisin will sign books in the lobby, which will be available for purchase, courtesy of Oblong Books. Signed titles by Neil Gaiman will also be available for purchase.

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her most recent work is the acclaimed short fiction collection How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, and her next novel will be The City we Became in March 2020. Jemisin has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. In her spare time she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick Magpie.

Neil Gaiman is a New York Times bestselling author of novels, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, comics, journalism, and screenplays, who is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top 10 living postmodern writers. Works include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, Stardust, Anansi Boys, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, and the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Novels for younger readers include Fortunately, the Milk; Coraline, also an Academy Award–nominated film; and The Graveyard Book, winner of the Newbery (U.S.) and Carnegie (U.K.) Medals. He has written and directed for film and television, including a 2011 episode of Doctor Who that won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was published in a volume designed by graphic artist Chip Kidd. At Bard since 2014.
About the Fisher Center
The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 159-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

The US-China Music Institute presents its first annual Chinese New Year Concert featuring Bard College’s The Orchestra Now performing a lively collection of Chinese symphonic works. Conductor and director of the US-China Music Institute Jindong Cai will share the stage with guest conductor Chen Bing and Chinese instrument masters from the world-renowned faculty of the Central Conservatory of Music, China. The concert will be performed on Saturday, January 25, 2020 at 7 p.m. in Bard’s Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Admission is $20. For tickets and more information go to fishercenter.bard.edu, or call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900.

Special guest soloists from the Central Conservatory of Music include Wang Jianhua, percussion; Wang Lei, sheng; Yu Hongmei, erhu; Zhang Hongyan, pipa; Zhang Weiwei, suona; and Shaanxi Folk singer Ji Tian.

The program features HongMei (Red Plum) Capriccio for Erhu, by Wu Houyuan;  Yun Xiang Hua Xiang Pipa Concerto, by Wang Danhong; Long Teng Hu Yue Percussion Concerto, by Li Minxiong; YanAn YanAn for Tenor, Suona and Orchestra, by Li Shaosheng;  Wan Li Xing Sheng Concertino for Sheng and Orchestra, by Hao Weiya;  and The Spring Festival Overture by Li Huanzhi. Special Chinese New Year public reception before the concert, starting at 6 p.m.

The program will be repeated on Sunday, January 26, 2020 at 3 p.m. at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, New York, NY.

Visit barduschinamusic.org/new-year-2020 for more details.

This concert is co-presented by the Central Conservatory of Music, China, with the participation of China Institute in New York.

Artist and author Jibade-Khalil Huffman talks about his multimedia works and his interdisciplinary experience at Bard as he prepares for You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, his upcoming solo exhibition at the Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles. “At his essence, Huffman is a collector of digital and tangible objects, giving birth to different representation of collage in video, photography, and installation,” writes Marcel Alcalá.

The Valley Table highlights ecologically minded practices at Bard College and other Hudson Valley institutions. “Bard College operates as an agent of sustainable change both within the confines of campus and across the nation,” writes Sabrina Sucato. Sustainability is integrated into the daily life of the College. Initiatives at Bard include growing food for the dining hall at the Bard Farm, reclaiming and donating extra food to a local shelter, student advocacy initiatives, and environmentally focused academic programs. “Bard students receive an education that recognizes climate crisis as a multifaceted issue affecting all departments of study,” notes Office of Sustainability intern and Bard junior Karianne Canfield. “Students graduating from Bard will now be able to support sustainable futures based on this awareness.”
 

The Orchestra Now’s six-concert winter-spring season at Bard Fisher Center will begin on January 25 with its performance in The Sound of Spring, a Chinese New Year concert presented by the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Central Conservatory of Music, China. TŌN’s subscription series continues on February 8–9 with an all-Beethoven program in tribute to the 250th anniversary of the master composer’s birth. The soloist is pianist Anna Polonsky, a recipient of the Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award and frequent guest with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Rest in Pieces, a special program presented by the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program, will celebrate the life of opera with the family and friends of Mozart, Strauss, Bizet, Copland, and Puccini, and will be performed on March 6 and 8.

Also of note is the program Into the Wilderness, offering the first New York performances in more than 50 years of two works: Vincent d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air with solo pianist Blair McMillen—a winner of Juilliard’s Gina Bachauer Competition and faculty member of both Bard College Conservatory and the Mannes School of Music—and Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 7 (Sinfonia Antartica), featuring Filipino-American soprano Diana Schwam. In addition, the program will present the U.S. premiere of César Franck’s What You Hear on the Mountain, possibly the first symphonic poem in musical history (April 25–26). The Orchestra’s series will culminate with a performance of Mahler’s massive Resurrection Symphony featuring the combined forces of the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, Bard College Chamber Singers, and Bard Festival Chorale led by conductor James Bagwell.

Visit fishercenter.bard.edu for more details.

The New York Times follows BPI alumnus Jule Hall for its Sunday Routine series. After serving 22 years in prison, he is making up for lost time, with a job at the Ford Foundation, good coffee, and a long soak in the tub.

As new details emerge about how Cambridge Analytica manipulated voters across the globe, Democracy Now! examines the documentary The Great Hack. They spoke to Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, the film’s codirectors Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, and Emma Briant, Bard visiting research associate in human rights, who is writing a book about Cambridge Analytica.

New research into an oral Lyme Disease vaccine for mice shows promise for reducing human cases of the infection. Professor Keesing, who was not involved in the research, cautions against the limitations of the study but remains optimistic. “I love the spirit of this,” she says. “This has the advantage that a homeowner could put this product in their yard. Other products you need a trained technician.”

Kate Belin BA ’04, MAT ’05 teaches math at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, a small public school in the South Bronx that uses project-based learning. At Fannie Lou, she oversees the Algebra Project, a national initiative that connects math to students’ lived experiences. In this episode of the Ethical Schools podcast, Belin talks about the synergy between the Algebra Project and Fannie Lou, both of which have their roots in the history of the civil rights movement.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, has been given a $50,000 Film Independent Spirit Awards Filmmaker Grant designed to recognize a midcareer female director. Reichardt won the third annual Bonnie Award, named for Bonnie Tiburzi Caputo, who became the first woman to pilot a major U.S. airline when she joined the award’s sponsor, American Airlines, in 1973.

Kelly Reichardt is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose most recent work, First Cow, was screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Other films include Certain Women, starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone; Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy ( 2006), and River of Grass (1994). Honors received include a United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at major international film festivals, with retrospectives at several leading institutions devoted to the cinematic arts.

Reichardt has been teaching in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College since 2006.

Cecilia Alemani MA ’05, director and chief curator of New York’s High Line, has been named curator of the 59th Venice Biennale. She will be only the fifth woman to curate the biennale in its century-long history, and the first Italian woman to do so.

On Tuesday, February 4, esteemed filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Bradford Young will take part in a discussion at Bard College exploring their career trajectories, works, creative processes, and commitments to the humanities. The event is part of a series, “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today,” which seeks to diversify perspectives on the arts disciplines and to offer models for collective and inclusive community dialogues. The discussion is made possible through a 2019 FilmCraft Grant from the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is cosponsored by Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program, Center for Civic Engagement, Art History Program, American Studies Program, and Africana Studies Program. The conversation will be moderated by Tabetha Ewing ’89, Social Studies Division chair and associate professor of Historical Studies, and Dariel Vasquez ’17, director of program design and management at Brothers@Bard (BAB). It takes place from 6–8 p.m. in Olin Auditorium (Olin Hall) and is free and open to the public. Registration is required. For more information or to register, click click here.
 
“Through this public dialogue, we hope to highlight the rich forms of black filmmaking that unfold on university campuses and celebrate the extraordinary work of these marvelous and generous practitioners who have not only changed which actors and stories appear on screen but also the ways audiences interpret and use films in their daily lives,” said Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson, organizer of the discussion series. “Ultimately, these conversations between artists aim to inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in the visual and performing art and to highlight the productive and impactful ways in which visual and performing artists engage communities.”
 

Bard College announces the appointment of Elmira Bayrasli as the new director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA) in New York City. BGIA provides a unique opportunity for college students and recent college graduates from around the world to take advanced courses in international affairs while working in carefully selected internships based on individual interests. BGIA students engage in the study and practice of international law; international relations theory; global public health; political economy; international reporting; and other aspects of international affairs.

Bayrasli has taught in the program for the past four years. She is the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the host of Project Syndicate's podcast, Opinion Has It. She is the author of From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places a book that looks at the rise of entrepreneurship globally. Bayrasli has lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina where she was the Chief Spokesperson for the OSCE Mission. From 1994-2000 she was presidential appointee at the U.S. State Department, working for Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, respectively. Elmira is a regular contributor on global entrepreneurship for Techcrunch. She also provides analysis on foreign policy, particularly on Turkey. Her work has appeared in Reuters, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Quartz, Fortune, Forbes, CNN, NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Bayrasli sits on several boards, including Invest2Innovate, Turkish Women's International Network, and Our Secure Future.

Levy Economics Institute Research Scholar Thomas Masterson is the winner of the Journal of Economic Issues’ 2019 Editor’s Prize for his article, “The Great Recession and Racial Inequality: Evidence from Measures of Economic Wellbeing,” coauthored with Senior Scholar Ajit Zacharias, Research Scholar Fernando Rios-Avila, and Research Associate Edward N. Wolff.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera Die Tote Stadt was a hit in 1920. Then it all but disappeared, only to regain its popularity in the 21st century. Bard College President and conductor Leon Botstein discusses the renewed enthusiasm for the composer. President Botstein dived deeply into Korngold’s music at Bard SummerScape last year, and argued in an interview that the opera has benefited from a broader reconsideration of 20th-century music in both academic circles and concert halls. “It’s great that Die Tote Stadt is making a comeback,” he observes. “But this represents just the tip of the operatic iceberg.”
 

Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, was announced to the longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, for his collection Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. The award carries a prize of $10,000. 

Distinguished Writer in Residence Dawn Lundy Martin is among the judges for the PEN Open Book Award. Bard alumnus Pierre Joris ’69 is one of the judges of the Award for Poetry in Translation.

The Bard Debate Union team of Hadley Parum and Gordon Stearns spent 10 days over the Winter Break competing at the World Universities Debating Championship at Assumption University in Bangkok, Thailand. The tournament welcomed 352 teams from countries all over the world. Parum and Stearns debated well against some of the top teams. Bard Debate Union alumna Eva-Marie Quinones ’17, now a doctoral student and debating for Yale, had an excellent tournament, advancing to elimination rounds as the 18th seed.


 

Two Bard College students were awarded a highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship by the U.S. Department of State. Art history major Tatiana Alfaro ’21 has been awarded $5,000 towards her studies at Bard College Berlin. “I’m so happy to have received the Gilman award. It’s definitely an honor and was unexpected. My experience with Gilman will enhance my experience abroad. Studying in Berlin will help me have a more global view on the art world, and specifically, what I want my role within it to be. I believe it will be a good opportunity for me to see my personal and academic interests overlap, not only as an art historian but as a global learner.”

Biology major Mary Reid ’21 has been awarded $3,000 for her term at the Lorenzo di Medici Institute in Florence, Italy. “Studying abroad is an aspiration for many students but financial concerns are often an impossible barrier. I am incredibly privileged to reach for my own aspirations as a result of this scholarship, my supportive friends, and my wonderful family. While abroad, I hope to gain a greater knowledge of new cultures and ideas, as well as an increased sense of autonomy and introspection. I am eager to make my study abroad experience live up to my childhood ambitions. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible.”

Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000 to apply towards their study abroad or internship program costs with additional funding available for the study of a critical language overseas. The Gilman scholarship supports American undergraduate students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad and, since 2001, has enabled more than 31,000 outstanding Americans of diverse backgrounds to engage in a meaningful educational experience abroad. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. The late Congressman Gilman, who served in the House of Representatives for 30 years, chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee, and was honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, commented, “Study abroad is a special experience for every student who participates. Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views, but also adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

Once separated by prison, BPI alumnus Antoine Patton and his daughter, Jay Jay, built Photo Patch, an app that lets incarcerated parents stay in better touch with their children.

“Notwithstanding the conservatism of the opera business,” writes the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, “many top houses offer a world première every season or two.” Chaya Czernowin’s Heart Chamber, which premiered at the Berlin Deutsche Oper in December, is a case in point: “Heart Chamber, for which Czernowin wrote her own libretto, tells of a contemporary love affair infiltrated by anxieties and hesitations. In an early scene, the soprano sings, ‘Hey! Pick up your phone! Are you home? Later, the baritone sings, ‘You can’t just suddenly close up like that.’ The feeling is less of two souls being joined in eternal love than of two individuals negotiating the intersection of their separate lives. 

“At first glance, Czernowin, an Israeli native who teaches at Harvard, is an unlikely composer for such a project. Much of her work has tended toward images of primordial upheaval and elemental change. Her previous operas, Pnima and Infinite Now, conjured scenes of 20th-century catastrophe: the Holocaust in the former, the First World War in the latter. She avoids familiar harmonic signposts and is inclined toward spectacularly vivid eruptions of instrumental and electronic sound. The wonder of Heart Chamber is how she uses her radical sonic palette to evoke the stream of consciousness beneath the surface of ordinary life.”

The San Francisco Chronicle profiles writer, educator, and Bard alumna Emma McGowan as part of a series on how creative professionals live and work in the expensive city, and what makes them stay. McGowan talks about the importance of developing a network and a community, and how she works to “move the cultural conversation forward.”

Wray, a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College and a leading thinker in Modern Monetary Theory, recently testified before the House Budget Committee in a hearing reexamining the economic costs of debt. (As a reminder, MMT argues that sovereign governments with their own currency can’t go broke and can spend until inflation becomes an issue.) He told lawmakers this: “We do not have to repay the debt—what we have to do is make the interest payments.” If there were one sentence that captured the drastic change in economic thought over the past decade, writes Bloomberg columnist Brian Chappatta, “that might just be it.”

Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights at Bard, comments that what has been revealed so far in the new Cambridge Analytica leak is “the tip of the iceberg.... The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,” she said. “There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of control.” 

The leak began on New Year’s Day, and more than 100,000 documents are set to be released in the coming months, revealing the defunct company’s work in 68 countries. Emma Briant specializes in the topics of propaganda and political communication, and is interested in changing technologies and their implications for democracy, international security, migration, inequality, and human rights. She is currently writing a book on Cambridge Analytica, Propaganda Machine: The Hidden Story of Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry. This semester, Dr. Briant is teaching Migration and Media and Propaganda: Dark Arts at Bard College.

Like former UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Susan Rice—national security adviser under Barack Obama and author of the new memoir Tough Love—expresses deep personal sorrow for what has happened to Syrians since March 2011. “But, like Power,” Hof observes, “Rice wraps her regrets in a narrative aimed at selling the proposition that there was, in the end, really nothing her boss could do to protect Syrian civilians from mass homicide; nothing short of involving the United States in another Iraq-like invasion and occupation and perhaps even World War III. The proposition is no truer coming from Rice’s pen than it was from Obama’s lips.”

Class of 2003 alumni and former Bard roommates Bjorn Quenemoen and Jamie O’Shea have grown BjornQorn into a national brand. The Globe Lifestyle section features this vegan, gluten-free, and “exceptionally tasty” snack.

“État remains a wonderfully twisted house of mirrors, where electronic gear and traditional instruments are treated as equals and often rendered indistinguishable from each other.”

Julia Alvarez, Virginia Kantra, Anna Quindlen, Sonia Sanchez, and Jennifer Weiner talk about how Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century classic, now a hit movie, inspired them.

Bard’s Maria Sachiko Cecire talks to Slate about children’s fantasy literature, looking at the way 20th-century authors of what she calls the “Oxford School” used the genre “as a means to preserve a sense of magic inside a modern world they saw as increasingly hostile to belief.”

People often think of Silicon Valley technology firms as an industry that popped up independently and wants less regulation. But historian Jeannette Estruth points out that Silicon Valley is in many ways a federal and state project. “Its roots are totally enmeshed with the government,” says Estruth—in particular to federal contracts with Bay Area universities during and after World War II.

Bard alumna Sana Mustafa ’17 attended the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva last month, at which UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on countries to take joint responsibility for caring for a surging number of displaced people. Mustafa, a Syrian refugee and founding member of the Network for Refugee Voices, was among dozens of refugees attending the forum. She told Al Jazeera: “Having 70 refugee representatives out of the 2,000 plus attendees is not enough. People shaping policies and projects have not necessarily had any refugee experience. These solutions are not efficient. For solutions to be efficient, they have to be well informed. If we are not working altogether, stakeholders including refugees themselves ... we will never have sustainable solutions.” She added, “We are demanding actions, not words. We do not want this to be just another meeting.”

A new study shows that women were much more often introduced at a prominent oncology conference by their first name rather than by title. Bard alumna Dr. Tatiana Prowell weighed in on the importance of the study, and found herself in the middle of a Twitter backlash.

The world premiere of Bard alumna Chaya Czernowin’s new opera Heart Chamber at the Deutche Oper Berlin on December 6 is one of the year’s top 10 notable performances, says New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, and her “engulfing” war requiem Infinite Now (2016–17) is one of the reasons the it has been a “chaotically great decade for new music.” Czernowin, who studied with composers Elie Yarden and Joan Tower while at Bard, is currently Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Composition at Harvard University.

Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s anti-Semitism expert, Kenneth Stern was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism.” Now the director of Bard’s Center for the Study of Hate, Stern pens an op-ed about President Trump's executive order applying the definition to college campuses. “It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.”

The acclaimed Broadway production has its roots in a 2007 student production at Bard, and developed into the 2015 Bard SummerScape production at the Fisher Center before heading to New York City. Oklahoma! closes on January 19.

Associate Professor of Literature Maria Cecire talks with fellow Rhodes Scholars Jean Balchin and Yan Chen about her new book, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century. The trio discusses what makes fantasy literature magical, why parts of it are culturally inflected, and what we can do to reimagine its future. Cecire also discusses her work as the director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College.

Since the British Labour Party’s shattering defeat in last week’s general election, many people have been thinking through its implications for the left, and especially for the Democrats’ prospects in 2020. But what did the result mean for the right? Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, weighs in.

"For those of us who believe in the liberal ideal—that anyone, regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth, can flourish—the social cost of mass incarceration is deeply troubling," writes Emily Chamlee-Wright. We can find hope for the long-term future in recent proposals to reduce the scope of what’s considered criminal activity and change financial incentives that lead to overcriminalization and excessive punishment. But in the shorter term, how should we address the social cost of having 2.3 million people in prison? "Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s powerful new PBS miniseries College Behind Bars suggests we might find hope in the transformative effect of higher education," writes Chamlee-Wright. "The miniseries follows New York prison inmates who are pursuing liberal arts degrees through the Bard Prison Initiative, a program of Bard College."

Bard alumna Eva Quinones ’17 has been named an Andrew Goodman Puffin Democracy Fellow. This multiyear fellowship will help Eva continue her work to increase voting access for young people. Eva majored in Economics and Global and International Studies at Bard, where she was an Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere Ambassador and Team Leader and worked with Election@Bard to combat student disenfranchisement. Eva was also a member of the Bard Debate Union and the Student Government during her time on campus. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Yale University, where she studies the political economy of voting behavior and democratic backslides. She also holds an MA from Yale.

Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse and Writer in Residence Francine Prose were in conversation at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library on the evening of Monday, December 16. The event celebrated Marcuse’s new book Fruitless, Fallen, and Woven, published by Radius Books. This stunning three-volume set traces the arc of 14 years of Marcuse’s work, from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, immersive photographs of Fallen and Woven. Her work features elaborate tableaux of flora and fauna suggestive of the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock and the symbolism of medieval tapestries. She discussed the creative process with Francine Prose, award-winning writer and best-selling author of more than 20 works of fiction.

Korzyk, who teaches calculus and computer science at Manhattan Village Academy, was one of seven recipients of the Sloan Award for Excellence in Teaching Science and Mathematics, an annual awards program that honors exceptional math and science teachers working in New York City’s public high schools. Winners receive a cash award of $5,000 and their schools each receive an award of $2,500 to augment their educational programming.

Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins featured College Behind Bars and the Bard Prison Initiative for My Cause My Cleats on ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown on December 9. On November 12, BPI was honored to have Jenkins host a special screening of the documentary at the Apollo Theater in New York City.

Bard Professor and Hannah Arendt Center Academic Director Roger Berkowitz on making the Center a place for challenging conversations in the spirit of Arendt’s work: “I’ve always found her to be someone who thinks outside of the box, outside of jargon, outside of discipline. She says things that are provocative and make you rethink the world afresh.”

Bard Prison Initiative graduate Sebastian Yoon, featured in the new PBS documentary College Behind Bars, shares how BPI changed him and the Eastern Correctional Facility, where he was incarcerated until March.

Building a better community is a spiritual and artistic endeavor for Rev. Jack Perkins Davidson and Bard alumnus JaQuan Beachem, a Yale Divinity School student and ministerial intern.