A Way Forward in Syria?  The Report of the Syria Study Group

Ambassador Frederic Hof

Tuesday, October 1, 2019
5:30–7 pm

Olin, Room 102
In 2018 Congress created the Syria Study Group, a bipartisan panel of 12 experts charged with assessing the situation in Syria, defining the U.S. policy objective in that war-torn country, and devising a strategy to accomplish the objective. Bard’s diplomat in residence, Ambassador Frederic C. Hof, served as a member of the Group, whose report is being issued on September 26. Please join Ambassador Hof for a discussion of what is in the report and what may be next for U.S. policy in Syria. Sponsored by: Bard Globalization & International Affairs Program; Global and International Studies Program; Political Studies Program.

For more information, call 845-758-7667, or e-mail mkmurray@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Wednesday, October 2, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Thursday, October 3, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Making the Buddha: The Origin and Development of the Buddha's Image

Robert DeCaroli, Director of the MA Program in Art History Professor, George Mason University

Thursday, October 3, 2019
11:50 am – 1 pm

Campus Center, Weis Cinema
Robert DeCaroli is a specialist in the early history of Buddhism and has conducted fieldwork in India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia.  He received his Ph.D. in the South and Southeast Asian art history from UCLA.  The majority of this work deals with early aspects of South Asian material culture and its interaction with forms of regional religious practice.
He is the author of two books: Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (Oxford UP 2004) , and Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia (U Washington Press 2015). He is co-curator of the Encountering the Buddha exhibit at the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.  He is currently an ACLS/Robert H. N. Ho Foundation Fellow, working on a project entitled “The Gods of Buddhism: Regional Deities and Spirits in Early South Asia.”Sponsored by: Art History Program; Asian Studies Program; Religion Program.

For more information, call 845-758-7667, or e-mail rdavis@bard.edu.

Empire on the Line: Botanical Ethnology and Social Distance in Enlightenment-era Tahiti

Dr. Geoff Bil, Visiting Assistant Professor History, University of Delaware

Tuesday, October 8, 2019
4:30–6:30 pm

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
From the Enlightenment era forward, the Pacific has served as a crucial touchstone for European speculation on differences between indigenous and Western cultures. My paper examines the role played by botanists in these considerations, with particular reference to social factors that shaped observations by European naturalists in Tahiti. Following a preliminary discussion of European-Tahitian botanical interactions over the course of James Cook’s Endeavour voyage (1768–71), I proceed to examine the heightened attention to epistemological contrasts between Tahitian and European environmental worldviews given in published accounts authored by Johann (1729–1798) and Georg Forster (1754–1794), who served aboard James Cook’s HMS Resolution (1772–75). I attribute this shift to the Forsters’ relative lack of acquaintance with Tahitian cultures and te reo Tahiti (the Tahitian language), owing largely to the more itinerant nature of the Resolution voyage. The second part of this presentation turns to HMS Bounty expedition’s (1787-1790) unprecedented length of stay at Tahiti to collect breadfruit trees en route to the Caribbean, which encouraged cross-cultural intimacies palpably—even dangerously—at odds with Forsterian dichotomizing. In bringing these case studies together, I reflect on a paradox: namely, that while some grasp of indigenous knowledge was fundamental to global botanical endeavors, it could also prove their ruination.

Dr. Bil received his PhD in history from the University of British Columbia in 2018. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Institute, LuEsther T. Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden from 2018 to 2019. He has published most recently in the British Journal for the History of Science, and his manuscript. Indexing the Indigenous: Plants, Peoples and Empire is under contract with John Hopkins University Press.Sponsored by: Environmental and Urban Studies Program.

For more information, call 845-758-7870, or e-mail mdominy@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Wednesday, October 9, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Thursday, October 10, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Sodomite, Gay, Queer, Trans:
A 14th-Century Document and Its Afterlives

Carolyn Dinshaw, Dean for the Humanities, Silver Professor; Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English,
New York University

Thursday, October 10, 2019
5–6:30 pm

Olin, Room 102
Sponsored by: Medieval Studies Program.

For more information, call 845-758-7211, or e-mail mlibbon@bard.edu.

In Small Places Close to Home

Thursday, October 10, 2019
5:30–7:30 pm

3rd floor of the Watts dePeyster Hall, Village of Tivoli
In honor of the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Human Rights Project at Bard College and the Village of Tivoli invite you to join us for a roundtable discussion about the current state of human rights.

In connection with the commemoration of her childhood home in Tivoli, this public event revisits Eleanor Roosevelt's famous answer to the question “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” For Eleanor Roosevelt, it was clear that “Without concerted citizen action to uphold” human rights “close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” In that spirit, the event connects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the increasingly dire challenges to human rights faced in the United States. How has the political discourse around human rights changed in the United States, and what are its implications? What does the term human rights mean in public culture today and how does it strengthen or limit the struggles around climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and racial, social and economic inequality? This event will take the form of a public conversation involving global and local activists, introduced by Peter Rosenblum, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, and moderated by Larry Cox, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, in which we all grapple together with these questions (and others) "in small places, close to home."Sponsored by: Center for Civic Engagement.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail civic@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Wednesday, October 16, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Thursday, October 17, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

From Voter Suppression to the Census: A Decade of Fighting for Voting Rights

Dale Ho, ACLU Voting Rights Project Director

Tuesday, October 22, 2019
4:45–6:15 pm

Olin, Room 201
Since the 2010 midterm election, a wave of voter suppression laws has been unleashed around the country. The ACLU has been at the frontlines, successful challenging unnecessary voter registration requirements and barriers on Election Day in dozens of states. Attacks on voting rights have now grown to encompass not only registration and the ballot, but also the Decennial Census itself, which the Trump Administration sought to weaponize by attempting to add citizenship question to the census questionnaire. ACLU Voting Rights Project Director, Dale Ho, who argued the census citizenship question case in the Supreme Court, will address these issues and emerging threats to voting rights as we head towards the 2020 election.Sponsored by: Human Rights Program; Political Studies Program; Sociology Program.

For more information, call 845-758-7667, or e-mail perlmann@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Wednesday, October 23, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Thursday, October 24, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Jacob Neusner Memorial Lecture in Jewish and Religious Studies

Professor Moshe Halbertal
NYU & Hebrew University

Thursday, October 24, 2019

at 4:45pm in Olin 102 & Sunday, October 27th at 7PM at The Sixth Street Community Synagogue
Thursday, October 24th at 4:45pm in Olin 102

"The Biblical Book of Samuel and the Birth of Politics: Two Faces of Political Violence"
The Book of Samuel is universally acknowledged as one of the supreme achievements of biblical literature. Yet the book's anonymous author was more than an inspired storyteller. The author was also an uncannily astute observer of political life and the moral compromises and contradictions that the struggle for power inevitably entails. The lecture will explore the ways in which the book of Samuel understands political violence political violence unleashed by the sovereign on his own subjects as it is rooted in the paranoia of the isolated ruler and the deniability fostered by hierarchical action through proxies.


Sunday, October 27th at 7PM
The Sixth Street Community Synagogue
325 E. Sixth Street
New York, NY

"Confronting Loss: The Meaning and Experience of Mourning form the Talmud to Maimonides"
The experience of loss and mourning is a painful and ultimately inescapable feature of human life. Jewish law established practices of mourning that prescribe a rather detailed structure of the mourner’s conduct as well as the response of the community to the mourner and its obligation to provide consolation. Maimonides codified this body of regulations in his great code of Jewish Law, the Mishneh Torah, in the section titled “The Laws of Mourning.” This lecture will focus on the attempt to understand the meaning and practice of mourning in the Talmudic tradition and in Maimonides’ thought. It will explore the relationship of the concept of mourning in the Jewish tradition to other understandings of the dynamics of mourning such as Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia.Sponsored by: Jacob Neusner Memorial Lecture Fund, Jewish Studies, Religion, and Political Studies program.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail secunda@bard.edu.

Faculty-Student Roundtable: Trump and American Foreign Policy

Saturday, October 26, 2019
2–3 pm

Olin Hall
Malia DuMont (Chief of Staff, Vice President for Strategy and Policy, and faculty member in the Political Studies program) and Chris McIntosh (Assistant Professor of Political Studies) join members of the Bard Debate Union for a Faculty-Student Roundtable discussion on Donald Trump and American foreign policy. Moderated by Ruth Zisman, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Co-Director of the Bard Debate Union.  For more information about Family and Alumni weekend, visit: bard.edu/familyweekend; for more information about the Bard Debate Union, visit: debate.bard.edu.Sponsored by: Center for Civic Engagement; Political Studies Program.

For more information, call 845-752-4512, e-mail zisman@bard.edu, or visit https://debate.bard.edu.

Laura Franklin-Hall (Philosophy Lecture)

Monday, October 28, 2019
4:45–6:30 pm

Olin, Room 102
Sponsored by: Philosophy Program.

For more information, call 845-758-7280, or e-mail jelliott@bard.edu.

Ending the Endless War: The Costs of War Project and Activist Scholarship

Stephanie Savell
Co-Director, The Costs of War Project

Monday, October 28, 2019
5:30–7 pm

Hegeman 204A
Americans are starting to say and hear more about the need to end this country’s “endless war,” the United States’ ongoing war on terrorism that began in 2001. Yet most people still don’t realize that this war’s costs – human, financial, environmental, social and political – are so far-reaching as to directly affect each and every American, as well as millions of people around the world. Nor do people recognize that this war is the latest excuse for American empire, and that in the name of counterterrorism, the U.S. government and military are acting in 80 countries, 40% of nations on the globe. Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War project, will speak about bridging academic research and the public sphere to prompt Americans to ask big questions: Is our current approach making us any safer? Is it making others around the world any safer? If not, what could we be doing instead? Dr. Savell will address the project’s major findings and the essential work of translation in using academic research to make a difference in public debate.Sponsored by: Global and International Studies Program.

For more information, call 845-758-7693, or e-mail mkmurray@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Wednesday, October 30, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.

Economics Study Room

Peer-led study space for Economics. 

Thursday, October 31, 2019
7–9 pm

Albee 106
Drop by just to study, or to work with a peer tutor in Economics. Sponsored by: Economics Program; Learning Commons.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail blc@bard.edu.