Bard College Awarded $1.35 Million Grant in Support of Humanities Curricular Innovation Project

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY — Bard College is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant in the amount of $1.35 Million from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative, which supports newly developed curricula that instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits. The grant will fund Bard’s project, “The Uses and Abuses of History,” which responds to the rise of unreliable digital, social, and other media, heightened by the proliferation of AI-generated content, which not only threatens our ability to discern fact from fiction but confounds our claims to a shared humanity. Bard was previously a recipient of a Humanities for All Times grant in 2021, the year the initiative was launched, for the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project led by Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and professor of history and American and Indigenous Studies. Participation in the competition is by invitation only and winning institutions are not invited to a subsequent round, which means Bard has won awards for both of the periods in which it was eligible.

“The Uses and Abuses of History” aims to offer students the tools to exercise judgement, to act, and to guard against the erasure of history in a world that is filled with conflicting and often false narratives. The project has three central curricular goals: first, to provide an institutional structure to unite students, staff, and scholars engaged in humanistic inquiry from across Bard College; second, to strengthen students’ habits of attention and abilities to read and think critically and contextually; and third, to make use of the College’s growing collection of archives to make archival research and praxis central to its curriculum. To accomplish these goals and enhance humanities education at Bard, the project will deploy curricular development, a workshop series, and a regranting program including summer research opportunities. The final year of the grant will culminate in an exhibition featuring a broad range of artifacts underscoring the crucial role played by material culture in the shaping of historical narratives.

The principal investigator team for “The Uses and Abuses of History” includes four Bard faculty members: the principal investigator, Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Iberian Studies Miles V. Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Nabanjan Maitra, Associate Professor of Classics Robert Cioffi, and Assistant Professor of Medieval History Valentina A. Grasso. A wider advisory council of faculty and administrators will help guide the project.

“The project team and I are honored to take part in the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative at Bard College,” said Rodríguez. “We are thrilled to contribute to Bard’s historical commitment to curricular and pedagogical creativity and innovation. While we recognize that the spread of false information is nothing new under the sun, we consider ourselves fortunate to respond to its present permutations with a robust collaborative project in service to our students and intellectual community.”

The Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative was established in 2021 to support the development of new humanities-based curricular and community projects at liberal arts colleges across the United States.
 

This event was last updated on 04-23-2026

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