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Bard College is pleased to announce that the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI, directed by Dr. Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence and assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, has been designated as a Humanities Research Center on AI by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This prestigious recognition will confer a $500,000 grant in support of the Center, and position Wihanble S’a at the forefront of innovative research that integrates Indigenous Knowledge systems with cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Beginning in Fall 2024, the Wihanble S’a Center will embark on groundbreaking research aimed at developing ethical AI frameworks deeply rooted in Indigenous methodologies. The Center’s mission is to explore and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI through an Indigenous lens, ensuring that AI technologies reflect diverse perspectives and contribute positively to society.

“This award is a tremendous honor and a recognition of the importance of American Indian perspectives in the rapidly evolving fields of AI,” said Dr. Kite, who is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist and academic, and Bard MFA ’18 alum. “Our goal is to develop ethical methodologies for systems grounded in Indigenous knowledge, offering new guidelines and models through collaboration between Indigenous scholars and AI researchers, challenging the predominantly Western approach to AI. Wihanble S’a (WEE hah blay SAH) means dreamer in Lakota, and we are dreaming of an abundant future.”

The NEH designation will support the Center’s initiatives, including the establishment of a dedicated facility on Bard College’s Massena Campus. This facility will serve as a collaborative hub, bringing together scholars from across diverse academic disciplines—including computer science, cognitive and neuroscience, linguistics, ethics, and Indigenous Studies—to engage in interdisciplinary research and educational activities.

In addition to research, the Center will host public events, workshops, and an interdisciplinary Fellowship and Visiting Scholars program, all aimed at advancing the field of Indigenous-informed AI. The Center’s work will complement the recruitment and support of Indigenous students ongoing at Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies, enhancing Bard College’s commitment to being a leader in Indigenous studies in the United States as well as complementing Dr. Kite’s work with the international Abundant Intelligences Indigenous AI research program. Wihanble S’a Center’s designation as an NEH Humanities Research Center on AI underscores Bard College’s dedication to fostering innovative, socially responsible research that bridges the humanities and technological advancements.

Bard Professor of Economics and President of the Levy Economics Institute Pavlina Tcherneva spoke to Business Insider about Universal Basic Employment (UBE), which is a job guarantee policy. Many countries around the globe have tested out UBE programs, but support for the policy has yet to catch on in America. “A job guarantee is really a public option for jobs. It’s a basic job that is provided irrespective of what the state of the economy is,” said Tcherneva, who is the author of The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020). “We can implement it now when the economy is in a relatively calm state and then be ready when business conditions slow down and people are laid off.” Although logistically more complicated to implement than universal basic income programs, UBE has long-lasting economic benefits, argues Tcherneva. UBE would fight inflation by establishing a minimum livable wage without increasing prices elsewhere, prevent labor shortages by supplying a willing and ready workforce, and mitigate sudden financial hardship. She believes UBE is on par with Social Security as a means to shore up economic stability and that pilot programs are unnecessary. “We didn't really pilot public education to figure out whether we wanted it,” Tcherneva said. The first American UBE pilot program will launch in Cleveland in 2026. Advocates see the potential to win more bipartisan support for UBE over simply giving people checks through universal basic income.

Bard Professor of Economics and President of the Levy Economics Institute Pavlina Tcherneva spoke with journalist Ian Masters about Monday’s panic on Wall Street and fears that it may presage a recession. “I’m not exactly sure if it’s a panic, or an opportunity to liquidate some positions,” said Tcherneva. “The real question for us is, would that then ripple through the rest of the economy? At this moment, I’m not detecting unsustainable processes in financial markets to cause the kind of effects on the real economy as we saw in 2008.” Tcherneva, who watches the data on labor markets and public investments very closely, believes that the US labor market still has significant room to grow, pointing out that we have yet to recover our employment-to-population ratio or labor force participation rate to pre-COVID levels. She believes the government needs to keep investing in the economy to sustain the recovery. “We set the economy on a really strong growth path in the last four years . . . If we pull out too quickly, if we allow an administration to impose drastic cuts to these public programs, this is where I think we can be certain that a recession will come.”

In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous calls James Graham Wilson’s America’s Cold War Warrior on the life and legacy of statesman Paul Nitze “a brilliant political biography, elegantly written, rich in archival material.” Nitze was an expert on military power and strategic arms and served as negotiator and diplomat in several administrations from the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Although lesser known than many of his Cold War contemporaries, Nitze notably “took a ‘walk in the woods’ with his Soviet counterpart at arms-control talks in Geneva in 1982, during the Reagan administration,” which “lay the groundwork” for the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first arms-control agreement to abolish an entire category of weapons systems signed by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev five years later. “Wilson sets out to remind us of Nitze’s critical role in a period of dangerous international rivalry,” writes Aldous.

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has appointed Pavlina R. Tcherneva as its next president, succeeding Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, who has held the role since its founding in 1986.

“After 38 years as president of the Levy Institute, the time has come to pass the baton to the new generation,” Papadimitriou announced. “I can think of no one better than Pavlina to lead the Levy Institute into its next phase of development in exploring solutions to the economic challenges that lie ahead.” Papadimitriou will remain at the Institute as president emeritus and senior scholar.

Tcherneva, who first joined the Levy Institute in 1997 as a forecasting fellow, has been a scholar at the Institute since 2007, specializing in modern money and public policy. She is a professor of economics at Bard College and founding director of the Bard-OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative. Her book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020), one of the Financial Times economics books of 2020 and published in nine languages, is a timely guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today.

“I am honored and energized to take this new role and am grateful to Dimitri Papadimitriou for building a world-class institution that has influenced economic policy in the US and abroad. I am especially excited to support the work of my colleagues whose research has placed the Levy Institute among the most-cited non-profits in the world,” stated Tcherneva. “My mission is clear: to continue to curate cutting-edge research, grow our graduate programs, and amplify the Institute's impact on policy. We have produced some of the most influential work on financial instability, money, inequality, gender, and employment policy and we will continue to make these impacts and expand the Institute's reach.”

She added, “Our work matters. Financial markets crash. Mainstream theories fail. At the Levy Economics Institute, we will continue to do what we do best: make sense of the senseless, find patterns in the chaos of global economics, and produce actionable policies for a safe, sustainable, and stable economy.”

Since 1986, the Levy Institute and its scholars have reinvigorated heterodox economics, with contributions to macroeconomic theory, modeling, and policy targeting financial and economic stability for the US economy and the rest of the world. The Levy Institute has also developed a distinct research program on the distribution of income and wealth featuring two measures of economic well-being (LIMEW) and time and income poverty (LIMTIP) that will help shift official measures of living standards in the years ahead; is one of few institutions with a focus on gender equality and the economy; and has graduated scholars from its MA and MS degree programs in Economic Theory and Policy, who go on to play significant roles in economic think tanks, international organizations, governments, and the world of finance.

Two faculty members from the Division of Social Studies at Bard College have been awarded a Franklin Research Grant for 2024. Robert Culp, professor of history and Asian studies, will receive a grant of $4,000 in support of his book project, Circuits of Meaning: Book Markets and Reading Communities in Modern China, 1900–1965, an in-depth study dedicated to modern Chinese book distribution, which has been neglected in research on modern Chinese publishing and comparative book history more generally. Peter Klein, associate professor of sociology and environmental and urban studies, will receive $6,000 to support his book project, The Favela and the Sea: Examining the Intersection of Fishing, Urbanization, and Environmental (In)Justice, which is also being supported by a Fulbright US Scholar award and explores how the fishers of Complexo da Maré, Rio de Janeiro's largest cluster of favelas, have preserved traditions and protected their way of life in response to a myriad of threats and upheavals.

Peter Klein, associate professor of sociology and environmental and urban studies at Bard College, has received a 2024 Fulbright US Scholar Program Award for his project “The Favela and the Sea: Fishing, Urbanization, and Environmental (In)Justice in Rio de Janeiro.” The grant, sponsored by the Brazilian government, will support Klein’s work in Brazil for four months starting in August.

“The mission of the Fulbright Program to increase cross-cultural understanding and develop long-lasting collaborations is central to my work in Brazil, so I'm extremely grateful to be named a Fellow,” said Klein. “The support that the Fulbright Scholar Award provides will allow me to deepen my research, advance my book project, and create new opportunities to work with scholars and community members in the future.”

His project will use archival work, oral histories, interviews, and ethnography to examine the history and contemporary struggles of the fishers of Complexo da Maré, Rio de Janeiro’s largest conglomeration of favelas, which have faced urbanization, militarization, industrialization, and environmental degradation since the mid-20th century. Klein proposes that the ways these fishers have persevered, protested, produced art, and protected their way of life can reveal a great deal about what successive urban and climatic upheavals do to individuals and communities, and how these communities not only survive, but create a constantly changing cultural, social, political, and economic life in response.

Fulbright US Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators, and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in cutting-edge research and expand their professional networks, often continuing research collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions. Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided over 400,000 talented and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists, and professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research abroad. Fulbrighters exchange ideas, build people-to-people connections, and work to address complex global challenges. Notable Fulbrighters include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, 41 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

“Marriage equality was not enough to bring full equality to LGBTQ Americans,” writes Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies at Bard, for New York Times Opinion. “It would be wishful to think it could, perhaps. But the gay marriage campaign was a major missed opportunity to expand LGBTQ equality. When compared with its foreign counterparts, the American campaign was notable for one thing: the extraordinary modesty of its framing.” Encarnación argues that, while marriage equality for same-sex couples was a major step in American society, “it did not require Americans to question their fundamental assumptions about LGBTQ people.” He cites the approaches taken in different countries—Spain, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland—as having an emphasis on matters such as dignity and equal citizenship rights. “In all of them, gay marriage was framed as a moral issue rather than a legal matter.”

Bard College is pleased to announce that Writer in Residence Mona Simpson and Visiting Professor of the Humanities Adam Shatz have each been awarded the 2024–25 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Chosen by an independent selection committee, the 2024–25 class of Berlin Prize fellows includes 24 US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition. The annually awarded Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the Academy’s public program.

During the fall 2024 Berlin Prize fellowship, Bard Writer in Residence Mona Simpson will be working on a novel, tentatively titled “The Great Man, So-Called,” a novel centered on two women in the life of the iconic American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt: his wife, Eleanor, from whom he was deeply estranged, and Francis Perkins, his secretary of labor, and the first woman to ever hold that post. The only American president to serve more than two terms, and a man whose disability was carefully kept from the American public, Roosevelt relied on these women as he devoted his energies during his first two terms on lifting the American economy out of a debilitating depression and during his third and fourth to the growing involvement with the war. Simpson became fascinated with these two women while studying letters written by domestic workers (who were not covered by the New Deal’s protections) for her novel My Hollywood, about Los Angeles nannies. Simpson’s most recent novel, Commitment (2023) was chosen as a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times.

During the spring 2025 Berlin Prize fellowship, Bard Visiting Professor of the Humanities Adam Shatz will work on his book project “Worlds They Have Not Told You Of: Adventures in Creative Music,” a sweeping chronicle of the post-war Black music avant-garde that combines history, criticism, and biographical portraiture to trace the musical routes of sonic exploration and creative self-determination from bebop to free jazz to the present day. Additionally, Shatz has received two other fellowships in support of his work. He has been awarded a 2023–24 Visiting Fellowship at the American Library of Paris, in Paris, France, for June 2024. He also won a 2024 Visiting Fellowship at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, also known as the Institute of Human Sciences, in Vienna, Austria, where he will be in residence from September through October 2024. His latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Franz Fanon, was recently included in the New York Times’s The Best Books of the Year (So Far) and reviewed in The New York Review.

In a new monthly radio show, For Love of the World (Amor Mundi), Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College Roger Berkowitz hosts deep conversations about contemporary issues in the Arendtian tradition of “patient humility” with renowned scholars and public intellectuals. In this debut episode, President Leon Botstein joins Berkowitz, talking about his time as Hannah Arendt’s student at University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967. “She was brilliant on her feet,” says Botstein. “You could watch her think. In a small seminar or a large lecture, when you asked her a question, you didn’t get a packaged answer, but you got a glimpse on how someone uses information and ideas, listens to somebody else, turns a problem around, and brings a new insight into what we’re talking about. She really taught how to think.” 

For Love of the World (Amor Mundi) airs the fourth Tuesday of each month from 6:00 to 6:30 pm on Radio Kingston.

Two Bard College students, William Helman ’25 and Declan Carney ’26, have been awarded Hertog Foundation Fellowships in Political Studies for 2024. Helman, a joint major in History and Film, and Carney, majoring in Global and International studies, will study the theory and practice of politics during six weeks of intensive seminars that will take place this summer in Washington, DC. The sessions will explore contemporary public affairs, economics, foreign policy, and political philosophy, drawing upon the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Tocqueville, and Lincoln.

“I want to thank my advisor Richard Aldous for nominating me for the program,” said Helman. “I wouldn’t have been part of it without him.”

Each year, the Hertog Foundation brings together top college students to the nation’s capital to explore the theory and practice of politics in an intensive seminar setting with acclaimed faculty. Political Studies Fellows take courses in a wide variety of subjects and will have the opportunity to hear from leaders in American government and politics. The Hertog Foundation, which aims to support individuals who seek to influence the intellectual, civic, and political life of the US, also offers several other highly competitive educational programs in Constitutional Studies, Humanities, and War & Security Studies.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College. Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, Shatz was among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship. Bard MFA faculty and alumna Lotus Kang MFA ’15, and alumnae Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 and Ahndraya Parlato ’02 were also named Guggenheim Fellows for 2024. 

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community.

Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 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. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2024 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Adam Shatz, who will be working on a book about jazz throughout his Fellowship, is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among other publications. He is the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso, 2023). He is also host of the podcast Myself with Others, produced by the pianist Richard Sears. His political reporting and commentary have covered subjects such as Trump and the white supremacists in Charlottesville, mass incarceration, Israel’s Putinization, the deep state, and Egypt after Mubarak. Published profiles and portraits include Franz Fanon and Michel Houellebecq (London Review of Books), Nina Simone (New York Review of Books), saxophonist Kamasi Washington (New York Times Magazine); French cartoonist Riad Sattouf (New Yorker); and jazz great Charles Mingus (The Nation). Shatz previously taught at New York University and was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

Lotus Laurie Kang MFA ’15 works with sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation, exploring the body as an ongoing process. Combining theory, poetics and biography, her work takes a regurgitative approach rather than a prescriptive or reiterative one. Kang considers the multiplicitous, constructed nature of identity and the body and its knots to larger social structures through sculpture, architectural interventions and material innovations, and an expansive approach to photography where materials are often left in unfixed and continually sensitive states. Notable group exhibitions include Hessel Museum of Art, The New Museum, SculptureCenter, Cue Art Foundation, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Art Gallery of Ontario, Franz Kaka, Cooper Cole, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Misk Art Institute, Riyadh; Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana; and Camera Austria, Graz. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, Franz Kaka, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, and Helena Anrather, Interstate Projects, New York. Artists residencies include Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Triangle Arts Association and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; and Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 uses photography, writing and performance to plumb photography’s continuing significance. Considering analog photography as a mimesis of the body, Hubbard asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs, the physical positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, culling the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking, bridging the imaginary with the familiar. She is currently Associate Professor and MFA Director at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.

Ahndraya Parlato ’02 is an artist based in Rochester, New York. She has published three books, including Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Parlato has exhibited work at Spazio Labo, Bologna, Italy; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Aperture Foundation, New York, New York; and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. She has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop and was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant recipient.

Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was barred from running for office for eight years after his efforts to overturn a democratic election in 2022. Meanwhile, in the US, former president Donald Trump faces a slew of trials in the leadup to his possible reelection in November. Why was Brazil so quick to prosecute their former head of state while the US moves more slowly? In an interview with NPR, Professor Omar G. Encarnación said the answer is multifaceted. There are differences in the law and makeup of each country’s highest court, but there’s also a gulf in how seriously each electorate views political corruption. “Brazil does have a political culture that appreciates and that is more receptive to arguments about protecting democracy,” Encarnación told NPR. “This is a country that endured a 20-some [year] military dictatorship from the mid-’60s through the mid-’80s. So I think there's an effort to protect democracy that resonates more broadly with Brazil than it does with the American electorate.”

Thousands of high school students across the United States have been studying the work of Bard Professor of Economics and Research Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute Pavlina Tcherneva in preparation for their national debate tournaments. The official resolution for the 2023–24 High School Policy Debate Topic reads: “The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income.” Tcherneva’s book The Case for a Job Guarantee was included in the compilation of research, which the Library of Congress prepares each year, pertinent to the annually selected national debate topic. As this year’s debate season progressed, the federal jobs guarantee policy has emerged as the overwhelming favorite policy for student debate teams on the affirmative. As a result, there are at least a few thousand students across the United States who have gotten very well acquainted with Tcherneva’s work over the past three months. 

According to Chris Gentry, program manager of the Policy Debate League for Chicago Public Schools, “Almost every affirmative team across the country is running a jobs guarantee case, and to do so they are pulling heavily on Tcherneva’s publications.” During one weekend tournament, Gentry realized that essentially every debate relied on Tcherneva’s work. In just one round that he was judging, 10 different articles or books that she wrote had been quoted. “At least twice this last weekend, I heard ‘well that’s not what Tcherneva is trying to get at here,’” he added. Another high school debate coach in Los Angeles confirmed that Tcherneva has likely been the most cited author in high school debate this year, and as a result the student debaters are quite familiar with her work.

“Personally, I can’t think of a greater impact of my work than seeing young people engage with it, study it, and defend its principles,” says Tcherneva. After meeting with a group of high school student debaters this month, she adds, "The questions the students asked about the job guarantee were probing, well-informed, thoughtful, and inspired—with a keen focus on social justice. I hope that some of them will become policy makers.”

Inspired by this nationwide student engagement, Tcherneva has also opened up spots in her summer workshop “Public Finance and Economic Policy” to select high-school debate students interested in going deeper into Modern Monetary Theory and the job guarantee. Organized and hosted by Bard College and the OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative (EDI), this five-day workshop taking place online June 17–21 is for undergraduate students interested in public policy to tackle economic instability and insecurity, and in understanding the financing capacity and policy space available to governments to pursue these aims. Applications from high school debate students will be reviewed in April and early May. Students can apply here.

Tcherneva also recently developed a resource tool jobguarantee.org, created and maintained by Bard College students and alumni, with the support of OSUN, for anyone interested in learning more about the job guarantee policy innovation.

Centered on the well-being of some of the most vulnerable parts of the US population, the 2023–24 national debate topic of “Economic Inequality” prevailed over “Climate Change” and represents a pressing issue at the forefront of our collective societal consciousness.