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Currently completing her doctoral work in sociology at Rutgers University, Jomaira Salas Pujols will join the faculty of the Sociology Program at Bard College in fall 2022. Her work focuses on race, place, education, and Black girlhood, with her doctoral dissertation examining the consequences of movement on Black girls’ perceptions of self, their identities, and their worlds. “I look forward to supporting Posse Scholars as a faculty member at Bard,” Jomaira says, “and to joining an institution that is so deeply committed to the public good.”

Full Story on possefoundation.org

On the 50th anniversary of the 1971 civil war in East Pakistan, Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies, wrote about its destabilizing effects and impact on India’s national identity for the Indian Express. “The standard story is that most refugees returned home soon after the liberation of Bangladesh,” Baruah writes. “This is partly responsible for the unfounded myth that India’s domestic political order was insulated from the refugee influx. This is, of course, not how the refugee influx is remembered in Assam and other Northeastern states.”

Full Story in the Indian Express

In the Wall Street Journal, Bard economist and leading scholar of Modern Monetary Theory L. Randall Wray comments on how important elements of MMT, including the claim that a government need never default on debt issued in its own currency, are now accepted by much of the economic and financial establishment. “We got five or six trillion dollars of spending and tax cuts without anyone worrying about payfors, so that was a good thing,” says Wray. “In January [2020], MMT was a crazy idea, and then in March, it was, OK, we’re going to adopt MMT.” L. Randall Wray is Professor of Economics and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Bard Executive Vice President and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement Jonathan Becker and Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Civic Engagement Erin Cannan are coteaching a new course on local politics and civic engagement. As part of the course, Bard students have accepted internship positions in local governments, including the offices of Red Hook Village Mayor Karen Smythe, Red Hook Judge Jonah Triebwasser, and Tivoli Deputy Mayor Emily Major. Students are also working at the City of Hudson mayor’s office, and with State Sen. Michelle Hinchey (D-46). 

“Jonathan and I realized that there is very little engagement with local government here, when more engagement of local people and Bard means more civic literacy and a better functioning government,” said Cannan in an article appearing in the Red Hook Daily Catch. “Few people have access to youth voices, the perspective of someone who is current on certain trends that older people don’t have. Students are going to move into the world soon, and this experience gets them ahead of the times and properly engaged in politics.”

Reporting on Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s pledge to ban prostitution, Omar G. Encarnación, professor of political studies, writes on the politics of regulating sex work for Foreign Policy. “The news caught many by surprise,” Encarnación writes. “Spain is one of the world’s most socially progressive societies, and in 2005, it became the first overwhelmingly Catholic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, ahead of Sweden, Britain, and the United States.” Though politically and legally complicated, “Sánchez is looking to his proposed ban—whatever shape it takes—to bolster an already impressive record of improving the lives of women in Spain as he ponders reelection in 2023.”

The intellectual and political disarray on display at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow was terrifying, writes Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard, in the Wall Street Journal. “Pandering is much more dangerous to human civilization than methane, strategic incompetence a graver threat than CO2; and dysfunctional establishment groupthink will likely kill more polar bears than all the hydrofluorocarbons in the world.”

 

Professor Roger Berkowitz moderates a discussion with Speer Goes to Hollywood filmmakers Vanessa Lapa and Tomer Eliav at the Film Forum in New York City. The film explores the postwar life of Albert Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to be spared the death penalty at Nuremburg, who was widely known as Hitler’s architect. After emerging from 20 years at Spandau prison with a best-selling memoir, rebranded as a “good Nazi,” Speer tried—and got shockingly close—to attaining legitimate movie stardom. The film is based on hours of audio recordings between Speer and screenwriter Andrew Birkin, who was hired by Paramount to script the film version of Speer’s life story. Roger Berkowitz is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College.

Samuel Mutter ’25 was so inspired by reading Vladimir Bukovsky's book To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter as a Bard first-year that he composed “Incarceration,” an original piece of music that premiered at the Atlantic Music Festival over the summer. Mutter read Bukovsky's Soviet prison dissident memoir last year in Alternate Worlds: Utopia and Dystopia in Modern Russia, a common course taught by Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture. In an interview with Soviet History Lessons, a historical archive chronicling the human rights movement in the USSR, Mutter comments on the book and Bukovsky's life as an activist: “What could be a more important battle than a battle for life, for liberty, for basic human rights and freedoms?” He goes on to describe the inspiring experience he had last semester teaching piano lessons to young people in a local juvenile detention center through the Bard student–led Musical Mentorship Initiative. Mutter is a double-degree student in the Conservatory majoring in music composition and global and international studies with a concentration in historical studies.

“Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a British commentator and author with a reputation as an admirably pugnacious contrarian, recalls seeing Churchill in the House of Commons as a schoolboy in 1963,” writes Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature, in the Wall Street Journal. “‘For all that he was aged and infirm,’ [Wheatcroft] writes, ‘I was glad to have seen him for myself, and to have seen him where I did.’ In Churchill’s Shadow, Mr. Wheatcroft attempts ‘to make a reckoning’ with the man he saw on that day—not just with his life and legacy but also with ‘the long shadow he still casts.’”

“After almost two years of Covid-induced absence from Paris and Berlin, I returned to the old world to make a surprising discovery: Europe no longer understands the United States,” writes Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities. “Between Washington’s shift to the Indo-Pacific, the lingering effects of the Trump presidency (along with fears of a return in 2024), and confusing signals emanating from the Biden administration, neither the Germans nor French know what to expect anymore.”

Associate Professor of Economics Pavlina Tcherneva interviews French economist Thomas Piketty as part of the first-ever Global Forum on Democratizing Work, a project of the Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative. Piketty’s groundbreaking book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), showed through data collected on 200 years of tax records from the United States and Europe, a “central contradiction of capitalism”—that the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. Thus, without government intervention, the wealthy continue to grow wealthier leading to unsustainable and undemocratic levels of economic inequality.

In their conversation, Tcherneva and Piketty discuss the #democratizingwork movement, how it resonates with Piketty’s work on wealth inequality and the future of capitalism, and how collective, multifaceted, and organized actions and efforts can address economic inequality. “Human beings are not simple resources and human wellbeing cannot be governed by market forces alone,” says Tcherneva.

Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales: EHESS), Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics, and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics.

The American Ethnological Society has named Associate Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins as a joint winner of the 2021 Sharon Stephens Book Prize.  The Sharon Stephens Book Prize is awarded biennially for a junior scholar’s first book in recognition of Sharon Stephens’ commitment to scholarship of the highest intellectual caliber informed by deep care for the world. Stamatopoulou-Robbins won for her book Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press 2019), which has already received three book awards. 
 
The Prize Committee was unanimous in their praise for Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ Waste Siege: "which provides a nuanced perspective on the difficult topic of Israeli-Palestinian relations.  Through a careful sifting of the various sites at which waste from Israel threatens to overwhelm physical settings and the ordinary lives of Palestinians, Stamatopoulou-Robbins leads us to appreciate the structural impossibility of Palestinian self-government as a rejoinder to utopian fantasies of a two-state solution.  The tracing of the afterlives of bread in the midst of the hurly burly of urban lives and waste management projects, incomplete of necessity, suggests alternative geographies of food infrastructure and mutual aid.  We are treated to people who are fully fleshed-out and multi-dimensional and whose voices of rueful honesty, of humor mixed with anguish, continue to ring in our ears long after we put down the book.  A community under siege is connected to the rest of the world by waste.”

Her book has also won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award, American Library Association's Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, and the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section (MES) Book Award.

“Several Canadian Forces investigations into domestic propaganda and influence operations recently concluded with the results pointing to findings that should concern both Canadians as well as members of the public in other democracies,” writes Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights. Influence activities aimed at Canadians included the monitoring of Black Lives Matter organizers and data mining of the social media accounts of members of the public, all supposedly part of a military effort to help the elderly in long-term care homes during the pandemic.

Human Rights and Global Public Health major Verónica Martínez-Cruz has been honored for her work to bridge language barriers and ensure full and equal participation of Hispanic residents in all aspects of civic, economic, and cultural life in the Hudson Valley. State Senator Michelle Hinchey (D-Saugerties) presented Martínez-Cruz with a New York State Senate Commendation Award.

“Verónica Martínez-Cruz is doing incredible work to build language justice in the Hudson Valley and create inclusive multilingual spaces that empower our Hispanic community to participate equally in our society,” Hinchey said. “Language is power, and it can determine whether a person has access to resources, information, and decision-making processes that affect their daily lives. Verónica possesses a deep understanding of these challenges, and despite being a full-time Bard College student and working other part-time jobs, she remains a committed advocate of our Spanish-speaking neighbors. For all of Verónica’s efforts to build a stronger and more connected community, it was my honor to present her with a Senate Commendation Award.”

Martínez-Cruz has served as a Council Member for both the Kingston Food Co-op and the Kingston Land Trust, as well as serving as a freelance interpreter and translator for area organizations, including the Hudson Valley Young Farmers Coalition, Kingston Midtown Arts District, Kingston YMCA Farm Project, and Catholic Charities of Orange, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties.

“As a faithful believer in Language Justice, it has always been of the utmost importance to me that language resources exist so that Spanish speakers and other immigrants living in and around Kingston can have access to understand and be a part of the changes that are happening every day in our community,” Martinez-Cruz said. “Although I did not expect this recognition, as I am only a small piece of the giant puzzle that is mutual aid, I thank Senator Hinchey for this great honor. Immigrants are part of our community and if we work together we can ensure not only a better future for us but also for future generations.”

Senator Hinchey gathered community members at the Pollinator Garden across from John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Kingston to honor Verónica with the Commendation Award in the presence of organizational collaborators including Executive Director of Kingston Land Trust Julia Farr, Kingston Food Co-op Council Chair Joe Greenberg, Kingston YMCA Farm Project Director and Farmer KayCee Wimbish, Kingston YMCA Farm Project Education Director, Susan Hereth, and members of the YMCA Youth Crew. 

Bard Associate Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ first book Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, 2019) has won the 2021 American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section (MES) Book Award, which is the second major award the book has received. “Waste Siege exemplifies ethnography’s capacity to mediate between the universal and the particular and between the global and the local,” writes the prize committee to her. “You offer a riveting and theoretically capacious engagement with the infrastructural, environmental, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of waste, all the while problematizing the boundaries implied by these categories. The ethnography’s meticulous attention to empirical detail, coupled with expansive multidisciplinary framing, make it a ‘must-read’ across domains of expertise and disciplinary commitments. The committee was especially struck by your subtle yet insistent commitment to documenting devastating and mundane dimensions of life under Occupation while also positioning Palestine as a lens for understanding worldwide and human dilemmas in the face of environmental collapse.” She will be celebrated at the MES business meeting and awards ceremony.

The Middle East Section Book Award is awarded biennially to an anthropological work (single- or multi-authored, but not edited volumes) that speaks to issues in a way that holds relevance beyond our subfield. Criteria may include: innovative approaches, theoretical sophistication, and topical originality. 

Her book also won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award in 2020.

Bard College Political Studies Professor Sanjib Baruah’s In the Name of the Nation (Stanford 2020) has won the biennial International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize for the Most Accessible and Captivating Work for the Non-Specialist Reader Accolade. “Controversies around new Indian laws on citizenship for migrants and refugees from neighbouring countries are embedded in the complicated colonial and post-/neo-colonial history of the Northeast region. In this relevant book, Baruah successfully ‘translates’ this complex political history of ethnic, religious and linguistic identity conflicts in accessible terms for non-specialists,” writes ICAS.

A day-long symposium “Mutations of Sovereignty: Perspectives on Sanjib Baruah’s In the Name of the Nation” will be held at the Annual Conference on South Asia hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Madison on October 21.

Associate Professor of Economics Pavlina R. Tcherneva says a job guarantee is necessary both for managing the disruptions wrought by global warming and for achieving a smooth, just transition to a low-carbon economy. And since the policy is also wildly popular, it should be a no-brainer for any politician who claims to be serious about tackling the climate crisis. “If ‘decent work for all’ is to become an actionable policy benchmark, access to a living-wage job must be guaranteed to everyone, not merely implied in the text of stimulus packages and other policies,” she writes.

“Under the circumstances,” writes Professor Mead, “the old consensus in support of a global liberal order seems fated to fade even as geopolitical challenges such as a rising China and global problems like climate change grow.”

Research Professor Gidon Eshel, who teaches primarily in the Environmental and Urban Studies Program at Bard College, has coauthored a paper in Nature that provides the most comprehensive estimate to date of the environmental performance of blue food (fish and other aquatic foods) and for the first time, compares stressors across the diversity of farmed and wild aquatic species. The study reveals which species are already performing well in terms of emissions, freshwater and land use, and identifies opportunities for further reducing environmental footprints.

Read the Paper in Nature
Nature Story on Blue Foods
Learn More about Blue Food Assessment

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, who has chronicled war and its aftershocks all over the world, was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he got a call from his studio manager, telling him to turn on the TV: a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. “I looked at it, and it was evident that it was not only a major incident but that it was not an accident; it was an attack,” Peress recalled in the New Yorker.

Bard College is pleased to announce that Joshua P.H. Livingston will join the faculty of the American Studies Program, effective fall 2021. Livingston received his PhD in social welfare from the City of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and holds an MSW and a certificate in human services management from Boston University. Using his current work and experiences as a Licensed Master Barber and the Black American barbershop as an exemplar, Livingston’s work focuses on how social innovation, social enterprise, and “placemaking” can be utilized by young people of color to challenge institutional environments through the use of community forms that hold cultural significance. He is the co-owner of Friend of a Barber in New York City’s East Village and brings nearly twenty years of practice experience in youth-based program development, management, and evaluation to his work. At Bard, Livingston will serve as visiting professor of American Studies focusing on placemaking. He will be teaching a course titled Beyond Black Capitalism in the fall.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(8/25/21)

Bard alumnus, U.S. Army veteran, and Stars and Stripes reporter J.p. Lawrence ’14 recalls his hurried evacuation from Kabul. “We loaded into Chinooks, forming an aerial bridge of helicopters from the embassy to the city’s airport just a few miles away. As we flew over the capital, I imagined how left behind the city’s people must have felt, to constantly hear the beating rotors of the foreigners leaving as fast as possible.”

“Human government is often a negotiation over how divine power is reflected in human governance and also what the instruments of that governance should be,” Chilton tells the Washington Post when asked if religion always accompanies times of political ferment. “It is not reasonable to suppose that people are all going to suspend their religious ideas in order to be governed in a just manner. Rather, it’s the reverse: How do they negotiate their religious ideas in such a way that the government attracts their commitment and they can live justly with people who differ from them?” Bruce Chilton is the Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College and executive director of the Institute of Advanced Theology.

After 40 years in prison, Gregory Mingo was pardoned on the night of Monday, August 23, along with several other incarcerated people, in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts as governor of New York State. Bard College students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, worked together with students in the Defenders Clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency in fall 2020, including one with Mr. Mingo. The Bard-CUNY team visited Mr. Mingo in prison in the midst of the pandemic to interview him.

To be granted clemency is a rare victory after an arduous process on the part of the incarcerated individual and their advocates. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” wrote Thomas Keenan and Brent Green, who cotaught the class, in a message to the Bard community. Watching the video, they said, “you can easily see why the Governor's decision was long overdue. Advocating for basic human rights and decency, especially in apparently enlightened situations like ours, ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it's not, and because sometimes—but who knows when—it works.”

Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.

Last month, Bard College and the Open Society University Network sent out a call to Afghan graduates of American programs in Afghanistan and the region. Immediately 120 replies came back. “I had a student this summer who had to miss class because ‘the Taliban surrounded our town.’ She indicated to me her final paper would be late because a bomb blew up her house,” Jonathan Becker told the Atlantic’s George Packer. “This is a tragedy of epic proportions.” After reading Honorable Exit, Thurston Clarke’s account of efforts by individual Americans to save their Vietnamese allies before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Becker realized how little time was left. In recent days Bard and Open Society have appealed to universities in the region to host Afghan evacuees, and to foundations and board members to pay as much as $400,000 to charter flights out of Afghanistan. “In many cases we have institutions to host them. Colleges, universities, and funders are stepping up,” Becker said. “That is not a problem. The challenge is the time to get people out and get them visas into those countries.” Jonathan Becker is OSUN vice chancellor, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard.

Murals by artist Olin Dows in the Rhinebeck, New York, post office “correctly—yet disturbingly—reflect the racialized social hierarchy from the past in the town and region that would otherwise be invisible to the public,” writes Bard Professor Myra Young Armstead in a report commissioned by the town board. “This is a critically important feature of history that needs to be preserved.” Armstead recommends that interpretive signage or art be added to the post office lobby to counter Dows’s simplistic scenes, rather than removing the work entirely. Myra Young Armstead is vice president for academic inclusive excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College.

“No one knows what the future holds for Afghanistan once US-led foreign troops fully withdraw from the country. But the swift battleground victories of the Taliban since the troops’ withdrawal began, have surprised many observers. While a return to Taliban rule is unlikely, few would rule out a descent into civil war.” If that occurs, writes Baruah, “President Ghani, of course, will have to share part of the blame, but only for his failure to master politics as the art of the possible despite being dealt a bad hand.”

“Japan’s Jun Mizutani and Mima Ito shocked reigning champion China by winning the gold medal in mixed doubles table tennis Monday,” writes Bard professor Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. “But Tokyo’s increasingly aggressive pushback against Chinese pressure on Taiwan is causing more heartburn in Beijing than lost Olympic glory.”

Bard economists L. Randall Wray and Stephanie Kelton weigh in on if and how principles of Modern Monetary Theory have been incorporated into the U.S. economy since the start of the pandemic. “The jobs guarantee would make a lot more sense than ramping up jobless benefits and paying airlines $300,000 per job,” or mailing checks to households that didn’t need the money, says Randall Wray, a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute in New York and coauthor of the first MMT textbook. “Even if in the beginning you couldn’t put the people to work because of safety concerns, you at least would be targeting the spending” to people who were out of work. L. Randall Wray is professor of economics and a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Stephanie Kelton is professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and a research associate at the Levy Institute.

“Successful goal pursuit has positive downstream consequences for an individual’s self-confidence, health, and well-being, but perhaps self-regulation of daily eating behavior has some of the most obvious and direct impacts on health,” writes Assistant Professor of Psychology Richard Lopez. “Thus, it is important to understand the mechanisms underlying daily eating behavior, with a special focus on regulatory strategies that are associated with healthier eating patterns, which not only provide nutritional benefits but can also reduce the risk of obesity and other health conditions.”

Madeline Firkser’s advice for activists and young job seekers is the same: Participate. Firkser spoke with the Wall Street Journal about how she pivoted after realizing her first job wasn’t a good fit. Firkser is the special projects associate at JustLeadershipUSA, a New York City–based criminal justice reform organization.

Michelle Murray, associate professor of political studies and director of global initiatives at Bard, comments on the new Comac C919 airplanes from China Eastern Airlines. Aiming to reduce China’s dependency on foreign technology, the People’s Republic has unveiled the new jets with plans to operate about 1,000 of them by the end of the year. But can the Comac C919 compete with the likes of Boeing and Airbus?
 

Cryptocurrency’s libertarian vision of operating outside the mainstream is giving way to the need to comply with regulators, writes Bard alumnus Adam Samson ’09, the markets news editor at the Financial Times. “One of the main draws for hardcore advocates of digital assets is that many theoretically sit outside the reach of government and monetary authorities that oversee activities in conventional markets,” Samson writes. “While the dream of a decentralised financial system is still alive and well in the crypto community, what has actually developed is an industry full of very large financial companies.”

Lebanon is experiencing what the World Bank has described as one of the worst economic depressions in modern history, and a massive political crisis following the deadly explosion at the Port of Beirut last August. Ziad Abu-Rish talks about the lack of accountability for the political class in Lebanon, and its culpability for the Beirut port explosion and the country’s economic collapse. Ziad Abu-Rish is visiting associate professor of human rights and director of the new MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard. 

If passed, a Senate resolution introduced in mid-June would apologize to LGBTQ federal workers for historical acts of discrimination. Real reparations demand far more.

“Based on the experience of nations like Spain, Britain, and Germany, gay reparations are best understood as policies intended to make amends for a history of systemic anti-gay discrimination,” writes Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación in the Nation. “But the movement is not one-size-fits-all; nor is it driven by gay people demanding financial compensation simply for claiming an LGBTQ identity, as some foes of the gay community have contended. Instead, the gay reparations movement encompasses a small but eclectic constellation of approaches to repairing the damage done by state-sponsored anti-gay discrimination and violence, with each approach entailing its own policies and philosophical emphases for how to repair that damage.”

John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College and cofounder of the Rift Valley Institute, has been awarded an OBE, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, “for services to research and education in Sudan, South Sudan and the Horn of Africa.” The educational work that Ryle does in Eastern Africa—in collaboration with Tom Odhiambo, a colleague at the University of Nairobi—takes place largely under the auspices of the Open Society University Network and Bard.

“The award of the OBE recognizes the growing importance of the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) over the past two decades,” said Ryle, thanking RVI staff, interns, consultants, fellows and board members, past and present, for their contributions to the development of the Institute, in particular current Executive Director Mark Bradbury. “I would also like to thank Bard College, where I teach, which for many years has given the Institute a home in the United States. I am grateful for the professional and personal support I have had from the President, Leon Botstein, and from colleagues in the Anthropology and Human Rights Programs. I am happy that the Open Society University Network—led by Bard and the Central European University—now includes the Rift Valley Institute as one of its core partners.”

“Bard is very proud of the high honor bestowed on our esteemed colleague, John Ryle, a wonderful teacher and mentor,” said Bard President Leon Botstein.

About John Ryle
John Ryle is a writer, teacher, filmmaker, publisher, and social activist, specializing in Eastern Africa and Brazil. He was born in England and educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford University. Ryle has been Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College since 2007, and currently is leading the Open Society University Network’s (OSUN) Oral History and Literature graduate-level seminar with Dr. Tom Odhiambo of the University of Nairobi. Ryle also serves as director of studies for OSUN’s Eastern Africa Hub for Connected Learning Initiatives.

In 2000, with Jok Madut Jok and Philip Winter, Ryle founded the Rift Valley Institute, a research, training and public information organization operating in Eastern Africa. He was executive director of the Institute from 2001 to 2017 and currently leads an RVI research project on the role of customary authorities in South Sudan. He has been an activist in the international landmines ban campaign, anti-slavery movement, LGBTQI rights, and open access publishing. He was a board member of the Open Society Landmines project and a member of the International Eminent Persons Group, which reported on slavery and abduction in Sudan.

From 1995 to 2000, Ryle was a weekly columnist for the Guardian, and he has been a contributor to the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Granta, and Times Literary Supplement. He has served on the boards of the Media Development Investment Fund, Human Rights Watch Africa, and the journal African Affairs. In 1996–97, he was a research fellow of Nuffield College Oxford; and, in 2015–16, a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.

In the late 1980s, Ryle was a project officer for the Ford Foundation in Brazil and subsequently lived in an Afro-Brazllian religious community in Salvador da Bahia. In the 1990s, he was a consultant to relief and development organizations in Sudan and the Horn of Africa. Previously, he worked as a doorman at the Embassy Club in London, as a roustabout for the Royal American Shows and the Canadian Pacific Railway, and as a ghostwriter for Mick Jagger.

Ryle’s publications include: Warriors of the White Nile, 1984, an account of the Dinka people of South Sudan; The Sudan Handbook, 2011, coedited with Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut; Peace is the Name of my Cattle Camp: Local responses to conflict in Eastern Lakes State, 2018 (with Machot Amuom); and What Happened at Wunlit? An oral history of the 1999 Wunlit peace agreement in South Sudan (editor; 2021).

Ryle was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen’s 2021 Birthday Honours for services to research and education in Sudan, South Sudan, and the Horn of Africa.


About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(6/21/21)

As the cover story for this week's issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación reviews Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. The audacious, controversial, and highly effective ACT UP was led by the artist and activist Larry Kramer, whom Anthony Fauci described as “unique in that he totally transformed the relationship between activism and the scientific, regulatory and government community.” In his review, Professor Encarnación considers ACT UP’s impact on alleviating the AIDS crisis, how it paved the way for the work of advocacy groups around other diseases, and how its waning influence reflects on the state of gay rights in the U.S. and abroad.

Grace Molinaro ’24, a dual degree Bard Conservatory and Middle Eastern Studies major at Bard College, has been awarded a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic during the summer of 2021. The U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program is part of a U.S. government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages. CLS scholars gain critical language and cultural skills that enable them to contribute to U.S. economic competitiveness and national security. Molinaro is one of nearly 700 competitively selected American students at U.S. colleges and universities who received a CLS award in 2021.

“I feel extremely lucky to have received this scholarship because it will help me develop my ability to better express my thoughts in Arabic and communicate across borders—linguistic, national, cultural, and others,” said Molinaro. “I am hoping it will help me get to know the community in my home area better, since a lot of people speak Arabic, and I especially hope that this experience will give me the skills and tools to communicate, negotiate, and foster understanding through language.”

About the Critical Language Scholarship Program
The Critical Language Scholarship Program provides opportunities to U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to spend eight to ten weeks studying one of 15 critical languages: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, or Urdu. The program includes intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains. The CLS Program is developed in partnership with local institutions in countries where these languages are commonly spoken. CLS scholars are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship and apply their critical language skills in their future careers. Since 2006, CLS has awarded scholarships to more than 8,000 American students to learn critical languages around the world. CLS scholars are among the more than 50,000 academic and professional exchange program participants supported annually by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. These exchange programs build respect and positive relations between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The CLS Program is a program of the U.S. Department of State and is supported in its administration by American Councils for International Education. For more information, visit clscholarship.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(6/15/21)

Language has been at the heart of political debate in Assam since the formation of the British colonial province of Assam in 1874, then through the turbulent decades leading to Indian Independence, the separation of the Sylhet district during Partition, and into our times. Professor of Political Studies Sanjib Baruah examines the history and politics of the region in the India Forum.

Tyler Williams ’19 MAT ’21 has completed his third Bard College degree. Williams is a graduate of Bard High School Early College Baltimore, the Bard College undergraduate program, and now the Bard MAT program. He graduated from Bard High School Early College in Baltimore, Maryland in 2017 with his associate’s degree. He then enrolled as an undergraduate at Bard College, graduating in 2019 with his BA in religion. In 2020 he joined the Bard MAT program in literature and graduated on May 29, 2021 with his Master of Arts in Teaching degree in literature and a New York State secondary English Language Arts teacher certification.

The American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library Of Congress has awarded Bard College History professor Jeannette Estruth the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History. The annual award is offered annually to support significant scholarly research in the collections of the Library of Congress by scholars at an early stage in their careers in history. The fellowship is named in honor of J. Franklin Jameson, a founder of the American Historical Association, longtime managing editor of the American Historical Review, formerly chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the first incumbent of the library’s chair of American history.

Jeannette Alden Estruth is an assistant professor of American History at Bard College, and a faculty associate at the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She received her doctorate in history, with honors, from New York University in 2018. In 2019, Estruth’s book project was a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Huntington Library, the University of Virginia Miller Center, and the Berkshire Conference. Estruth’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Business Insider, Public Seminar, and Enterprise and Society, among others. Prior to her doctoral work, she worked at Harvard University Press and the Radical History Review. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States.(6/2/21)
 

Bard College is pleased to announce that Yarran Hominh will join the faculty of the Philosophy Program as assistant professor of philosophy, effective fall 2022. Hominh’s research sits at the intersection of moral psychology and social and political philosophy, drawing on the global pragmatist tradition in John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and B.R. Ambedkar, among others. His work examines how modern social and political institutions shape human agency, and how human agency can in turn be used to change those institutions. He also has research interests in philosophy of law, ethics, colonialism, early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

About Yarran Hominh
Yarran Hominh’s dissertation is entitled The Problem of Unfreedom. It examines the question of whether people who are unfree can make themselves free, given that their agency is constrained and limited by the social institutions in which they live. Through examining key modern institutions of unfreedom, Hominh argues that the unfree can make themselves free. The problem of unfreedom is a vicious cycle. Social conditions constrain agency, which in turn further entrenches the social conditions. A virtuous cycle is possible. Agents can change their conditions, reducing the constraint on their agency, in turn enabling greater change. Hominh is working on a new project on the moral psychology of ongoing structural injustices. The project examines the role that emotions and attitudes like anger, blame, hope, trust, and distrust play in continuing and in addressing structural injustices. His work has been published in The Pluralist, Res Publica, and the Australasian Journal of Legal Philosophy, among other venues.

He is the associate editor of the American Philosophical Association’s APA Newsletter on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies, and has been an organizer with the Graduate Workers of Columbia UAW Local-2110 and with the Minorities and Philosophy initiative. Before taking his PhD at Columbia University, where, among other things, he served as a lead teaching fellow and senior lead teaching fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning, Hominh completed undergraduate and master’s degrees in philosophy and law from the University of Sydney. Before joining Bard in fall 2022, he will spend the 2021-2022 academic year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(6/2/21)

Bard College students Jourdan Perez ’23 and Tallulah Woitach ’23 have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships from the U.S. Department of State to study abroad. Perez was awarded $4,500 toward his studies at Bard College Berlin in fall 2021, and Woitach was awarded $4,000 toward her studies at the University of Sydney in Spring 2022.

“It is an unbelievable honor to be selected for such a prestigious award,” said Woitach, a written arts major. “I am so beyond excited to go to Australia to study indigenous culture, with a focus on oral tradition. All too often in western culture, the written word becomes distanced from the deeper ancient energy language is borne out of. I want to learn from those who know how to make words come alive, by connecting to something much greater than ourselves.”

“I'm very excited to explore Berlin and continue studying German language and culture,” said Perez, a sociology major with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. “I would like to thank Trish Fleming (Bard’s Study Abroad Adviser) for informing me about the Gilman Scholarship, as well as reviewing my application one last time before I submitted.”

Perez and Woitach were among more than 1,500 U.S. undergraduate students selected to receive Gilman scholarship awards from the March 2021 application deadline. The recipients of this prestigious scholarship are American undergraduate students attending 467 U.S. colleges and represent all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 96 countries through the end of 2022.

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program enables students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad, providing them with skills critical to our national security and economic prosperity. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,300 U.S. institutions have sent over 33,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 151 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.” The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). For more information, visit gilmanscholarship.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/24/21)
 

Bard College is pleased to announce that Lucas G. Pinheiro will join the faculty of the Political Studies Program as assistant professor of political studies, effective fall 2022. Pinheiro received his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 2019. His research bridges political theory and social history by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, and the legacies of racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the late seventeenth century.

About Lucas G. Pinheiro
Lucas G. Pinheiro is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. His book manuscript, titled Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, recasts the early modern factory system as a decisive stage for political thought and practice in Britain and its Atlantic colonies between 1688 and 1807. From this historical study, the book develops a long-range conceptual framework for understanding modern capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of racialization, labor discipline, and inequality. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, and Disability and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2016), among others.

Pinheiro is the recipient of the 2020 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award in New Political Science from the American Political Science Association and the 2021 Glenn and Claire Swogger Award for Exemplary Classroom Teaching from the University of Chicago. Pinheiro will spend the 2021-2022 academic year at Dartmouth College as postdoctoral fellow in the Political Economy Project and Department of Government. He will join Bard in August 2022 as assistant professor of political studies.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/18/21)
 

Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics, joins the second installment of Current Affairs’s podcast series Is MMT Real? to talk about the connection between Modern Monetary Theory and a nationwide jobs guarantee. She counters the assumption that unemployment is a natural feature of the economy, and talks about how a direct jobs program could work.

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Mie Inouye to a tenure track faculty position with the Bard Political Studies Program, effective fall 2021. A joint PhD candidate in political science and religious studies at Yale University, Inouye is a political theorist and organizer who studies theories of political action in 20th-century U.S. social movements. Her scholarship investigates the ways that institutions shape people’s understandings of themselves and the social world, and the practices that allow racially and economically oppressed people to develop and exercise agency.

About Mie Inouye
In her dissertation, Antinomies of Organizing, Mie Inouye takes the praxis of political organizers as a source of political theory. She presents a dilemma that social movement organizers have faced in their pursuit of more democratic institutions: How can people constituted as political subjects by oppressive institutions develop the capacity to resist and transform those institutions? Drawing on histories, biographies, and her own archival research, she reconstructs the answers that four influential twentieth-century American organizers—William Z. Foster, Saul Alinsky, Myles Horton, and Ella Baker—offered to this question. She argues that the American organizing tradition offers democratic theory important insights into the modes, ends, and spheres of democratic participation.

Inouye is committed to engaged scholarship and has written on topics related to her research in Jacobin Magazine and The Forge. She holds a BA from Tufts University and an MA from the University of Toronto and is a joint PhD candidate in political science and religious studies at Yale University.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/11/21)
 

“Simply put, the Biden doctrine holds that geopolitical competition must not be allowed to drive world history,” writes Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, in the Wall Street Journal. “Competition with China is real and must be vigorously pursued, but the essential goal of American foreign policy is to construct a values-based world order that can tackle humanity’s common problems in an organized and even collegial way.”

“In world historical terms, the birth of India and Pakistan as separate countries, and the subsequent break-up of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh, were the result of the emergence of the nation-state as the new global norm of political organisation. But as thinkers such as Hannah Arendt have warned us, the formation of new states is almost always a refugee-generating process.” That there are migration flows across the Partition border even after seven decades wouldn’t surprise many historians, says Baruah. “Partition was not a conclusive one-time event; it has been a protracted and long-drawn-out affair.

“On April 13, 1941, Japan’s foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a neutrality pact, valid for five years. Although less notorious than the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviets and the Nazis, which plunged Europe into war, the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact had similar consequences in Asia,” writes Sean McMeekin in the Wall Street Journal. “As the London News Chronicle observed in reporting on the agreement: ‘What better guarantee [for Stalin] against Japanese hostility than that Japan turn south and cross swords with the United States? Moscow will feel secure in the Far East only when the Japanese and American navies engage.’”