The Division of Social Studies offers academic programs in anthropology, economics, history, philosophy, politics, religion, and sociology. Additional courses of study are available through interdivisional and area studies programs and concentrations. Students are encouraged to take courses from multiple fields in the division in order to develop an interdisciplinary perspective on fundamental questions about the human experience that is historically rooted but geared toward contemporary issues. Students draw on the interpretive strategies and analytic methods of multiple disciplines to develop a critical perspective on various aspects of society, politics, thought, and culture. Although the main emphasis in the division is interdisciplinary, students are encouraged to design programs of study that address particular areas of inquiry that are personally meaningful and can also provide pathways for graduate or professional work or a future career.
Photo by Karl Rabe
Our Programs
The Division of Social Studies includes the following academic programs:
- Anthropology
- Economics
- Economics and Finance
- Historical Studies
- Interdisciplinary Study of Religions
- Philosophy
- Politics
- Sociology
Coursework and Requirements
Typically, courses in the Upper College are seminars, in which the student is expected to participate actively. Advisory conferences, tutorials, fieldwork, and independent research prepare the student for the Senior Project. The Senior Project may take any form appropriate to the student’s field, subject, and methodology; most are research projects, but a project may take the form of a critical review of literature, a close textual analysis, a series of related essays, or even a translation.
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Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization that encourages a diversity of opinion in the examination of economic issues. The Institute offers graduate programs in economic theory and policy, as well as 3+2 and 4+1 dual-degree options for undergraduates. Bard undergraduates also have the opportunity to meet the prominent figures who serve on the Levy Institute’s research staff and attend its conferences. Integrated activities of the Institute and Bard College include the Levy Economics Institute Prize, awarded annually to a graduating senior; annual scholarships for students majoring in economics; and an endowed professorship, the Jerome Levy Professor of Economics.
Social Studies News and Events
Featured News
Two Bard Students and One Alum Receive Full Scholarships to Study Classics at University of Colorado Boulder
“Between them they have worked as tutors, organized program events, participated in faculty searches, and more. I couldn't imagine better ambassadors for Bard.”
Two Bard Students and One Alum Receive Full Scholarships to Study Classics at University of Colorado Boulder
L–R: Celeste Connell ’26, Peter Fields ’26, and Coulson Matto ’25.
Connell’s area of interest lies in ancient literature's portrayals of social interaction, particularly in subjects like friendship, performance, education, exile, and alienation, with a focus on connecting Greco-Roman literature with other literary traditions. “Fully funded MA programs in the humanities are incredibly rare. Especially at a time like this, when many programs are drastically cutting funding due to federal pressure, I'm grateful beyond words to study at the exceptional program offered by CU Boulder, where Classics is thriving,” said Connell.
Fields’ historical work on the notion of “Romanness” takes him into modern European intellectual history. He is pursuing his masters in Classics in the Latin language track, but is interested in studying ancient ethnography and the Roman imperial period. “I’m grateful to all of Bard’s Classics faculty for getting me to where I am today and excited to continue studying what I am so passionate about,” said Fields.
Matto, who currently works as a Latin teacher in New York City, focuses on ancient gender and sexuality studies, and looks forward to learning more archaeology-influenced methodology at Boulder to inform the strong literary training received from Bard. “It's deeply meaningful to me to be accepted into this program,” said Matto. “Last year I also attempted to go through the graduate school admissions process, but hit a number of roadblocks because of federal budget cuts and program closures. It is immensely satisfying—and exciting!—to see two years of work pay off. I'm also very grateful to all of my advisors at Bard who helped me work within these circumstances and truly put so much effort into my success.”
Bard’s Classical Studies Program seeks to understand the languages, literatures, histories, and visual and material cultures of the premodern Mediterranean world. The program approaches these ancient societies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including linguistics, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy, while also considering the long and complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome in art, language, politics, and culture from antiquity to the present day.
Post Date: 05-05-2026
Recent News
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2026 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Bard Faculty Members
2026 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Bard Faculty Members
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships to Bard College faculty members Jacqueline Goss, professor of film and electronic arts, and Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, Goss and Luzzi were awarded in recognition of their career achievement and exceptional promise. Guggenheim fellowships were also awarded to James Hoff, Steve Reinke, and Kenneth Tam, who will teach this upcoming summer at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.L–R: Jacqueline Goss and and Joseph Luzzi.
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
Goss’s fellowship will support the development of an experimental narrative film project that engages with larger questions of artistic life, visibility, and the uneven recognition of artists and artistic forms, explored within the social and cultural landscape of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During Luzzi’s fellowship year, he will work on The Lives of Beatrice: The Muse Who Made Us Modern, a book of narrative nonfiction that traces the remarkable afterlife of Dante's great muse, Beatrice Portinari, across seven centuries of art, literature, and culture. Beginning with a biography of Beatrice as a historical woman in late thirteenth-century Florence, the book follows her transformation into one of the most frequently reimagined figures in the Western imagination, from Petrarch and Cervantes to the Pre-Raphaelites and into contemporary pop culture. Ultimately, Luzzi’s project asks what each era's reinvention of Beatrice reveals, not only about the woman herself, but about the cultures that have continually returned to her.
Goss, Luzzi, Hoff, Reinke, and Tam are among 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines appointed to the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Since its inception, the foundation has granted nearly $450 million in Fellowships to over 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.
Jacqueline Goss is an experimental filmmaker whose work examines the human impulse to quantify and control even the most ineffable experiences and environments. Using diverse methods and tools, her work explores the ways vanity, fear, loneliness and desire seep into scientific experimentation, language, mapping, and political systems. Her projects include an animated documentary on the effects of biometric surveillance on migrants’ senses of self (Stranger Comes To Town), a film enacting the quotidian gestures of a weather observer on the windiest mountain in the world (The Observers), and a theoretical musical about Wilhelm Reich (OR119). Over the last 25 years, these works and others have shown at film festivals worldwide including the London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, and Faculdade de Belas Artes. Goss’s moving image work has also screened at art centers, galleries, and museums including MOMA, the Natural History Museum in New York, Eyebeam Atelier, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Center for the Arts, Pacific Film Archive, Kunsthall Aarhus, UnionDocs, Microscope Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Arsenal, Piano Nobile, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Her films, videos, and animations have been covered in various journals and newspapers including The Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Chicago Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Four Columns, Film Comment, BOMB, Art Forum, Cinemascope, Sage Journals, and Millenium Film Journal.
Joseph Luzzi received his PhD from Yale University. He is the author of nine books, including his recent The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood (Norton, 2025), one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025. His other books include Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (Norton, 2022), a New Yorker Best Books of 2022 selection and shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; and My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, amongst others. Luzzi’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TLS, Bookforum, and American Scholar, among others, and his scholarly writing has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, Raritan, Italica, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.
Post Date: 04-28-2026
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Bard College Awarded $1.35 Million Grant in Support of Humanities Curricular Innovation Project
Bard College Awarded $1.35 Million Grant in Support of Humanities Curricular Innovation Project
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.Clockwise from top left: Miles V. Rodríguez, Nabanjan Maitra, Robert Cioffi, and Valentina A. Grasso.
“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.
Post Date: 04-23-2026
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Author Adam Shatz Awarded Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing
Author Adam Shatz Awarded Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing
Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College, has been awarded the 2026 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing bestowed by the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, in recognition of outstanding achievement in critical writing on the fine and performing arts or on cultural history. Shatz is also the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and other publications. The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is an organization that aims to support writers working in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, intellectual essays, political analysis, and social reportage.Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities.
Post Date: 01-13-2026
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Daniel Wortel-London for Jacobin: “Zohran Mamdani Can Reduce New York’s Dependence on the Rich”
Daniel Wortel-London for Jacobin: “Zohran Mamdani Can Reduce New York’s Dependence on the Rich”
Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on a progressive platform promising affordability to its working class residents. This message has historically been a winning one, writes Visiting Assistant Professor of History Daniel Wortel-London for Jacobin: “But history also reveals a more sobering lesson: you can’t finance progressive policies with a regressive economy.”Daniel Wortel-London, visiting assistant professor of history at Bard College.
Drawing lessons from New York’s past, Wortel-London makes the historical case that mayor-elect Mamdani will need to reduce the City’s reliance on tax income from its wealthiest residents. “According to the city’s Independent Budget Office, the top 1 percent of earners now contribute about 45 percent of all local personal income tax revenues, up from roughly 30 percent in the 1980s,” he writes. In order to achieve the policies laid out during his campaign, Mamdani will need to diversify the City’s tax base. So far, “there are good signs that the incoming mayor is ready to do this,” Wortel-London writes. “Mamdani is poised to help New York City shift its economic foundations while continuing to tax the wealthy as much as necessary—moving toward an economy that is healthier, more balanced, and better aligned with the needs of the public and the public sector.”
The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.
Post Date: 12-09-2025
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Omar G. Encarnación for Time: “50 Years After Franco’s Death, Spain Confronts Its Dark Past”
Omar G. Encarnación for Time: “50 Years After Franco’s Death, Spain Confronts Its Dark Past”
Early this year, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stood in front of a banner that read Espana en Libertad, announcing a series of 100 events coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Writing for Time, Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies, wrote about the transformation of Spain since Franco’s death. One of Sánchez’s chief campaign promises was to undo the “Pact of Forgetting,” which “upheld the controversial idea of desmemoria, or disremembering, which called for avoiding any situation that could revive the memory of the Civil War, and the Franco dictatorship,” Encarnación writes.Professor Omar G. Encarnación.
Among other measures, Sánchez’s government exhumed and relocated Franco’s remains “in the interest of national reconciliation,” reformed teaching surrounding Franco’s legacy, and expanded reparation for Franco’s victims. Spain is not immune to the worldwide rise of far-right movements, Encarnación writes, as evidenced by the rise of Vox, a far-right party that “vehemently rejects Sánchez’s historical memory agenda.” However, the recent, collective memory of dictatorship, he argues, may help to inoculate Spain against these trends: “Sánchez’s robust embrace of historical memory could not have come at a more opportune time for Spain. Aside from giving Franco’s victims some measure of accountability and reminding the younger generations of the historic sacrifices that made democracy possible, it is a powerful wake-up call about the risks posed by the far-right.”
Bard's Politics Program gives students a well-rounded understanding of political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations, studying the choices we can make as individuals and the fates of communities, nations, and states.
Post Date: 11-25-2025
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Professor Daniel Wortel-London Quoted in Al Jazeera Article About Mamdani’s Win in NYC
Professor Daniel Wortel-London Quoted in Al Jazeera Article About Mamdani’s Win in NYC
Daniel Wortel-London, visiting assistant professor of history at Bard College, was quoted in an article by Al Jazeera that explored what Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election means for the rest of the Democratic party. Wortel-London told Al Jazeera that Mamdani’s win signified that “affordability is the defining issue of our time,” noting that focusing on issues of economic security had typically been key for Democrats in the past. “Mamdani has figured out how to combine those priorities with the moral urgency of social justice that animates many progressives,” he said. “If Democrats want to bridge their internal divisions and rebuild a broad coalition, they’ll need to take a page from Mamdani’s playbook.”Daniel Wortel-London, visiting assistant professor of history at Bard College.
The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.
Post Date: 11-11-2025