First-year students at the CCE block party. Photo by Jonathan Asiedu '24.
September 2022
News for Families & Friends
Dear Friends,
We are wrapping up the first week of classes at Bard! Pictured above are first-year students enjoying the Center for Civic Engagement block party, which showcased on-campus resources and our local community partners. Red Hook Mayor, Karen Smythe, stopped by for a visit. There is a renewed energy on campus with all of our students back in Annandale and we're excited for the semester ahead.
As of this fall, 47 students from Afghanistan are now enrolled at Bard. This represents 33 returning students and 14 newly arrived Afghan students. Eight of the new students completed L&T this August and the remainder will complete L&T in January, when we hope to welcome approximately 30 more Afghan scholarship students.
On Tuesday, September 6, The OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts will welcome three esteemed writers—Nuruddin Farah, Ilija Trojanow, and Aleksandar Hemon—to present Out of Place: Three Writers on Fiction, Language, Exile and Utopia. All three writers will read and discuss their work to raise questions of place and displacement, cultural difference and shared humanity, and of what Trojanow in his recent work calls “utopian narratives.” The conversation continues on Wednesday, September 7, with The Utopian Prerogative. For more event details, please click here.
Once again, save the date for Family and Alumni/ae Weekend: October 21-23, 2022. Please stay tuned for the schedule of events and registration form to go live next week. Weekend festivities this season include our highly popular classes, tours, concerts, and the fantastic Fund for Visual Learning auction. If you haven't made arrangements already, you can find a list of nearby hotels here.
Best wishes,
Lindsay Davis Carr ’06
Assistant Director of Development, Family Programs
[email protected] | 845-758-7152
Dates to Remember:
- Wednesday, September 7, 2022:
Drop/add period ends - Friday, October 23, 2020:
Moderation papers due - Friday, October 21–Sunday, October 23, 2022:
Family and Alumni/ae Weekend - Thursday, November 24–Sunday, November 27, 2022:
Thanksgiving recess (classes end at 5 p.m. on Wednesday) - Friday, December 16, 2022:
Last day of fall classes
Featured News
Bard Professor Anne Hunnell Chen Receives $350,000 NEH Award to Support Her Project, the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive
Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded $350,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to fund her project, the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict. “What I’m most excited about are the ways the grant funds will allow us to provide hands-on learning opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, as well as displaced Syrians, all the while making an ethical impact on data from one of the most important archaeological resources we have about life in the ancient world,” said Chen.
Full StoryPainter Andy Robert Explores the Present, History, and Memory in His First Solo Show in London
Visiting Artist in Residence Andy Robert’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay, opens September 16 at the Michael Werner Gallery in London. His paintings challenge a static understanding of history. Describing his method, Robert says “in questioning how an image comes into the world, and into being, I want to own up, to admit at any point, a painting, an image can change direction and isn’t fixed.” Robert’s work will also be shown at the 58th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
Full StoryProfessor Omar G. Encarnación Writes about “The Revolt of Empty Spain” in the New York Review of Books
Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación’s essay in the New York Review of Books explores how a nonpartisan movement to bring attention to the depopulation of Spain’s countryside is beginning to shape national politics. “Under the banner ‘The Revolt of Emptied Spain,’ protesters from twenty-four rural provinces complained of neglect from government agencies, poor Internet service, lack of access to transportation and healthcare, and indifference from Spanish multinationals and those who live in Spain’s thriving urban centers,” writes Encarnación.
Full StoryProfessor Lucy Sante on “Writing with the Back Brain” for LitHub
Originally published in LitHub’s “The Craft of Writing” newsletter, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante’s article explores her writing process and how her most recent book, Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (illustrated by Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91), “stemmed from a strong initial emotion” about the place she’s lived for the past 22 years, and took shape intuitively, without a predetermined structure or result in mind.
Full StoryGot an Art Problem? Nayland Blake ’82 Can Help, Writes the New Yorker
As part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Nayland Blake ’82, “bearish, Merlin-bearded, soft-spoken in the manner of a blacksmith teaching kindergartners,” offers advice to artists as part of their performance series “Got an Art Problem?” Writing for the New Yorker, Hannah Seidlitz outlines Blake’s contributions to this year’s Biennial, including “Rear Entry” and “Gender Discard Party,” in which “guests were invited to ‘bring your own baggage’ and dance away the woes of classification.” With “Got an Art Problem?,” Blake schedules meetings with guests who are asked to “illustrate their art problems,” which Blake then talks through with the guest until their time is up.
Full StoryBard Graduate Center Faculty Member Aaron Glass Awarded $150,000 NEH Grant to Support Enhanced Accessibility for the Digital Publication of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Materials
Bard Graduate Center Associate Professor Aaron Glass has been awarded a $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to support his collaborative project to create a critical, annotated, digitized edition of anthropologist Franz Boas's landmark 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast. This NEH grant will support the development of additional features and extensions for a multimedia platform specifically designed to support Indigenous cultural and linguistic content.
Full Story“A Fertile Contamination”: Professor Valeria Luiselli on Opening the Door for Translated Work for the 2022 O. Henry Prize
When Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College, was asked to guest-edit the 2022 iteration of the O. Henry Prizes, a “fundamental thing” had changed: the prize was now open to any writer, not only “American” ones. “That alone was reason enough for me to accept,” Luiselli writes in Poets & Writers. The rule had “accumulated a number of absurd consequences,” she writes, including the exclusion of authors who “had been living, sometimes entire lifetimes, in the United States” but lacked a U.S. birth certificate.
Full StoryBard Professor Joseph Luzzi Receives $60,000 NEH Public Scholars Award in Support of His Book Project Brunelleschi’s Children
Bard College Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi has been selected for a Public Scholars award in the amount of $60,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) in support of his book project, Brunelleschi’s Children: How a Renaissance Orphanage Saved 400,000 Lives and Reinvented Childhood. “I am deeply honored and grateful for this generous grant from the NEH,” says Luzzi. “This support will enable me to tell the dramatic story of how the Hospital of the Innocents saved the lives of so many children while also reflecting the remarkable cultural and creative developments that were transforming Florence into a center of the European Renaissance. I am especially committed to exploring how these discoveries made by the Hospital of the Innocents centuries ago can be a vital source for our own understanding of childhood today.”
Full StoryRachmaninoff in Our Times: The New Yorker Reviews 2022 Bard Music Festival
“How radical was Rachmaninoff?” asks Alex Ross in his review of the 2022 Bard Music Festival for the New Yorker. Sergei Rachmaninoff “was almost universally considered a throwback during his lifetime,” Ross writes, with forward-thinking composers scorning him as “a purveyor of late-Romantic schlock,” and neither progressives nor conservatives seeing him as innovative. Still, his music proved massively popular, leading Ross to ask: “Can such a figure really be deemed an anachronism?” This question, he writes, was at the heart of this year’s Bard Music Festival, especially in light of the war in Ukraine, a topic from which many purveyors of Russian classical music try to distance themselves—but not Bard.
Full StoryBard Family Leadership Council (FLC)
Members of the Family Leadership Council (FLC) play a key role in the Bard community through a range of optional activities: developing and participating in on-campus and regional recruiting and mentoring events, promoting and providing career opportunities for students, and participating in peer-to-peer fundraising. Parents and family members on the FLC play a prominent role in the success of the Bard College Fund through annual gifts of $1,500 or greater. The Family Leadership Council meets two times each year—once during Family and Alumni/ae Weekend and again in the spring. If you are interested in joining the Family Leadership Council, please contact Lindsay Davis Carr '06, Assistant Director of Development | Family Programs, at 845-758-7152.
News from Athletics
Bard hires Lindsey Veersma to lead women's volleyball program. Veersma comes to Annandale from Centre College in Danville, KY, where she was an assistant coach as the Colonels went from 2-10 in 2020 to 17-9 in 2021. She replaces Stefanie Carrington, who was promoted to Associate Athletic Director at Bard this spring.
News from Career Development
CDO welcomes new staff! We are excited to have Dalaina Yamawaki, Elena Sniezek, and Jeszack Gammon '19 join the Career Development team to serve our amazing Bardians.
Please encourage your students to drop by the office to say hello, and reach out to us at [email protected] to make an appointment.
News from the Center for Civic Engagement
“New York Must Build a Better Election System,” Writes Jonathan Becker in an Op-Ed for the Times Union. “November’s upcoming election serves as an unfortunate reminder that New York still has an election oversight problem,” writes Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs, in an opinion piece for the Times Union. The issue begins with the appointment of election commissioners, who “are not selected by expertise or commitment to voting rights,” but are instead selected by county political committees and are “thus incentivized to create electoral advantage for their patrons rather than facilitate political participation.” Further, there is very little accountability for election commissioners, as citizens must engage in “costly litigation through Article 78 proceedings” in order to challenge violations of their voting rights. Becker proposes multiple solutions to these issues, including greater consistency and transparency with respect to the operations of election commissioners and county boards. “These steps will not solve all problems with New York state voting,” he writes, “but they will bring accountability and empower citizens to defend this most sacred of democratic rights.”
Read more in the Times UnionThank you for your support
A big thanks to our families and friends who made a gift to the College since our last newsletter. Your generosity makes it possible for Bard to educate thousands of students each year:
Anonymous (4) | Helene Tieger '85 and Paul Ciancanelli ● William Conelly ● Lois and Allan Doescher ● Peter W. Greenwald and Dr. Gail M. Newman ● Rt. Rev. Herbert A. and Mary Donovan ● Joseph Iannacone ● Connie Laport ● Dr. Ilya Levinson and Martine Benmann ● David Meikle ● Catriona Shafer and Gurdon R. Miller ● Dr. Bernardo J. Perez-Ramirez and Dr. Mariana C. Castells ● Robin Reames ● Joseph Risse and Sharon Risse ● Lee and Andre Roussel ● Clayton and Kari Saccomanno ● Nancy and Jack Sieber ● David Tucker and Petra Epperlein ● Daisy Tyler
Recent donations will be acknowledged in the October Insider Newsletter.
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