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In order to retain his position as the head of the government, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party has promised blanket amnesty for those involved in the 2017 extrajudicial referendum on Catalan independence. The move has “set off protests across Spain,” some of them violent, writes Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics, for Foreign Affairs. “But the fact that Sánchez struck his deal under dubious circumstances does not mean that an amnesty for the Catalan separatists is a bad thing,” Encarnación argues. “On the contrary: despite its transactional nature, Sánchez’s amnesty deal is the most promising development in the effort to end the Catalan separatist crisis.”

Six Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. 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. This cohort of Gilman scholars will study or intern in more than 90 countries and represents more than 500 US colleges and universities.

Biology major Yadriel Lagunes ’25, from Clifton, New Jersey, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. At Bard, he serves as a Residential Life Peer Counselor and a supervisor on the Bard EMT Squad. “This scholarship has made studying abroad a possibility for me,” says Lagunes. “I want to center global public health in my future career as a healthcare worker and researcher. Through travel, I hope foster cultural sensitivity and communication skills that are desperately needed in my field. I am so grateful for Gilman scholarship for this opportunity.”

French and Anthropology double major Lyra Cauley ’25, from Blue Hill, Maine, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at the Center for University Programs Abroad (CUPA) in Paris, France via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I would like to thank the Gilman scholarship for giving me financial security and freedom abroad. This scholarship allows me to fully embrace the experience of learning and living abroad with financial worry or strain,” says Cauley.

Biology major Angel Ramirez ’25, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, The Netherlands via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I’m very grateful to be a recipient of the Gilman scholarship,” says Ramirez. “It’s a huge opportunity to be able to pursue my goals within biology for my future in STEM. I’m excited to learn a new language abroad in the Netherlands and experience new cultures without a financial barrier. I proudly come from a family of Mexican immigrants; therefore, I feel empowered that people like me are able to partake in a change as great as this one.”

Spanish and Written Arts joint major Lisbet Jackson ’25, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I am incredibly grateful to the Gilman Scholarship for supporting my semester in Ecuador and ensuring I can commit to developing my Spanish, studying literature, and immersing myself in Ecuadorian culture. Thanks to the Gilman Scholarship I will also be more prepared to pursue a career in multilingual and global education,” says Jackson.

Sociology major Jennifer Woo ’25, from Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded a $3,500 Gilman scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin in Germany for spring 2024. “To be awarded this scholarship means to fully explore and pursue my dream of studying abroad with the freedom of having the financial support I hoped for,” says Woo. “My dad is an artist who has always pushed me to travel and search for culture, the arts, and new experiences, so being able to fulfill this dream while having the resources of education means the world to me.”

German Studies major David Taylor-Demeter ’25, from Budapest, Hungary, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “To combine my studies of German language and literature with a day-to-day experience of Berlin is an invaluable opportunity,” says Taylor-Demeter.

Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 41,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded more than 3,600 Gilman scholarships during the 2022-2023 academic year.
 
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 US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.

The one-night-only, six-hour-long opera Stranger Love by composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, has been selected as one of the best classical music performances of 2023 by the New York Times. The performance was conducted by Mattingly’s fellow Bard alumnus David Bloom ’13. “For all its abstraction and timelessness — what is more ageless than the opera’s themes of love and beauty? — this work is absolutely of its time, slowing down emotion in a world that moves uncontrollably fast,” writes Joshua Barone. “The premiere run, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in May, was just a single evening, but Stranger Love deserves a life far beyond that.”

See the Best Classical Music Performances of 2023 from the New York Times

Read the New York Times Review of Stranger Love

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received a two-year $500,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation. The award will support the institute’s Gender Equality and the Economy (GEE) program and aims to generate new knowledge and share information about the economic empowerment of women, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
 
The GEE program focuses on the ways in which economic processes and policies affect gender equality, and examines the relationships between gender inequalities and economic outcomes. During the grant period from 2023–2025, the institute and its partners—including Levy scholars Thomas Masterson, Fernando Rios-Avila, Aashima Sinha, and Ajit Zacharias, alongside regional partners Abena Oduro of the University of Ghana and Nthabiseng Moleko of the University of Stellenbosch—plan to generate new research on gender disparities in employment security and welfare outcomes in Ghana and South Africa. The dominance of wage employment in South Africa versus self-employment in Ghana, for example, may present different labor market scenarios with potentially significant implications for employment security and welfare outcomes. The grant will also support continued research using the Levy Institute’s expanded measure of poverty: the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP). Inspired by feminist approaches to economics, the LIMTIP takes account of time for household production in order to create a more accurate reading of economic deprivation.

“We are grateful to the Hewlett Foundation for their generous decade-long support” said Ajit Zacharias, senior scholar and director of the Institute’s Distribution of Income and Wealth Program. “Inequality in earnings between men and women is an important and well-studied aspect of gender inequality. However, the gender disparities in child-rearing, care of dependent adults, and division of other family responsibilities often force women into less secure forms of employment than men with similar labor market profiles. The gender distribution of types of employment thus has a fundamental effect on current earnings differentials. Such disparities also drive the gender disparity in cumulative earnings, i.e., earnings over working life. They have gendered implications for old-age income security, e.g., by shaping private savings or eligibility for employer-provided pensions. We aim to provide fresh insights and evidence on these issues, hoping they will contribute to policies that promote gender equality and social justice.”

The award will facilitate two workshops in the region to disseminate its findings, along with related work by scholars in the region, and engage with policymakers and other stakeholders. Additionally, the institute will host an international workshop on gender and economic analysis featuring new research in feminist economics, providing a platform for new studies and mutual engagement with global research and policy community members.
 

Dina A. Ramadan, continuing associate professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College, has received a 2023 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in the category of Short-Form Writing. One of 27 grantees, professor Ramadan will write a series of articles on the relation of contemporary art to migration from the Middle East and North Africa. The articles will approach art criticism as a decolonial strategy that counters neutralizing practices of inclusion and representation. The Arts Writers Grant program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts.

In its 2023 cycle the Arts Writers Grant has awarded a total of $935,000 to 27 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in three categories—Articles, Books, and Short-Form Writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from short reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies.

“The grants uplift the diverse perspectives of writers whose fine-tuned attention to the content and context of contemporary art-making helps to keep artists at the center of cultural conversations and debates—where they belong,” said Joel Wachs, President, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Further reading:
Ali Cherri Interviewed by Dina A. Ramadan in BOMB Magazine
What Is the Cost of Inclusion? Dina Ramadan Reviews Baseera Khan’s I Am an Archive for Art Papers

While the rate of homelessness has held largely steady across the United States, increasing by roughly 1% over a five-year period, complaints using 311 and other emergency phone numbers have skyrocketed during that same span. “In many cities we've seen extraordinary growth in using 311 to complain about homelessness that go far beyond the number of people experiencing homelessness,” Bard College alumnus Chris Herring ’08, assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, told ABC News. Among the reasons for this, Herring and other experts posit, is that the type of homelessness people are experiencing is changing, and with it, their visibility. The public is much more likely to perceive unsheltered homelessness than sheltered homelessness, and as a result, much more likely to report the presence of people experiencing homelessness to the police, which in turn can create a feedback loop, says Herring. Forcing people to relocate can exacerbate mental health symptoms, which then makes them more visible, and thus more likely to be reported. “It could increase problematic behaviors that are more visible,” Herring said. “It's different from when someone has a stable camp in a hidden spot.”

The Dillon Era, a new book by Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The book, which explores the political career of C. Douglas Dillon, the 57th US secretary of the treasury, offers a new perspective of Dillon as an overlooked but deeply influential figure in the presidential administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Aldous “makes a persuasive case for Dillon’s beneficial role in the tumultuous history of postwar America,” writes Philip Terzian for the Wall Street Journal. “Along the way, he invokes testimonials from JFK (who, according to his brother Robert, thought Dillon ‘a brilliant man’) and approbation from the economist Paul Samuelson and the campaign chronicler Theodore H. White, as well as from the New York Times editorial page, which coined the phrase that furnishes the book’s title.” 

In a joint opinion piece for Scientific American, Greg Eghigian ’83, Bard alumnus and professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University, writes that speculative discussions surrounding UFOs—which have been attracting public attention in the US from ex-government officials, prominent politicians, intelligence agencies, major news outlets, and civilian scientists—have been transforming our politics and culture, and warrant closer attention to how they are influencing both. According to the piece coauthored by Eghigian and Christian Peters, social scientists are particularly well-equipped to weigh in on the debates surrounding UFOs, recently renamed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). “They not only offer effective techniques for assessing social change, but for decades, social scientists have been conducting research on such relevant topics as human-technological systems, behavioral factors in manned space travel, public attitudes toward UFOs, and the psychophysical and cognitive aspects of sightings.” The piece continues, “Talk about UFOs has never been just about UFOs. The social sciences likely won’t tell us whether UAP are from another world. They will, however, help us explore the ‘what ifs’ and reveal what our actions today tell us about ourselves.”

Finding the Money, a new film by Maren Poitras, follows economist Stephanie Kelton, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, on an exploration of Modern Monetary Theory—the heterodox economic policy model that reframes our understanding of government funding, spending, and national debt. “An alternative story of money will revolutionize our conception of what we as a society believe we can afford and can achieve,” says the filmmaker. Bard economists featured in the film include economics professors and Levy scholars Pavlina R. Tcherneva and L. Randall Wray, and Levy research associates Mathew Forstater and Fadhel Kaboub. This past weekend, Finding the Money had its world premiere at the 2023 Woodstock Film Festival with Kelton, Wray, Tcherneva, and Forstater all in attendance. 

“Refusal, Creation, and Intersectionality” Features Keynote Speakers Audra Simpson, Robert Keith Collins, and Corrie Roe

Bard College will host the second annual conference of Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck from October 12 through 14. The conference, “Indigenous Research Methods and Practice in the Liberal Arts: Refusal, Creation, and Intersectionality,” explores the topic of “research” within the humanities. Building on last year’s conference surrounding methods, viewpoints, and experiences of archives within Native American and Indigenous Studies and African American Studies, this conference explores historically marginalized epistemologies of social sciences and arts research. This is the second of three annual conferences supported by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, part of the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative.

As a key mode of academic knowledge creation, in various ways, these lectures, conversations, performances, and workshops aim to unpack the historic and contemporary legacy of harm that social science research perpetuates on Indigenous communities. A special focus will be given to practices of research refusal with the work of Audra Simpson (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk) and to research-as-creation—particularly through musical performance, workshops in researching plants and seeds in archives, and the re-creation and amplification of narrative through Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Cross-disciplinary collaborations will encourage thoughtful conversations about why and how individual and institutional research practices need to shift.

On Thursday, October 12 at 1:30 pm in Bard Campus Center’s Weis Cinema, the conference will open with a workshop with the Director of Cultural Affairs for the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Monique Tyndall (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican). As Bard College is an institution that produces research and writing on the unceded traditional homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, this imperative preliminary workshop will provide foundational frameworks for the next three days of learning.

On Friday, October 13 at 9:30 am in Reem-Kayden Center’s Bito Auditorium, Local Contexts, a global initiative that supports Indigenous communities with tools that can reassert cultural authority in heritage collections and data, will share how the Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels and Notices are being used alongside other interventions to lead to Indigenous attribution, authorship, access, authority, and autonomy. Following this keynote address, concurrent morning workshops include a conversation on the creation of an institutional research guidebook by Rethinking Place Post-Baccalaureate Fellows, Wikipedia edit-a-thons, and a tour of a current exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art (CCS Bard) “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969”. After lunch, another round in the early afternoon includes Three Sisters and The Fourth: Natural Dye and Plant Research in the Archives co-led by Lucille Grignon of Ancient Roots Homestead and Beka Goedde of Bard Studio Arts, Land Narratives & Solidarity in the Archives led by Frances Cathryn and Zariah Calliste of Forge Project, and a roundtable on research in the arts with Jonathon Adams, Rebecca Hass, and Luis Chavez.

Friday afternoon’s keynote address at 3:45 pm in Reem-Kayden Center’s Bito Auditorium, “Intersectionality and Ethnography” will be given by Robert Keith Collins, a four-field trained anthropologist and Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University.

On Saturday, October 14 at 10:30am in Reem-Kayden Center’s Bito Auditorium, recipients of Rethinking Place student research funding will present their work prior to a performance by nêhiyaw michif (Cree-Métis) baritone Jonathon Adams, whose work of recovering and developing a Cree and Metis repertoire, in language and traditional song, is to them “an act of resurgence.” The performance will take place in Olin Auditorium at 2:00pm.

On Saturday, October 14 at 5:30pm in Olin Auditorium, the closing keynote address of the conference and the inaugural Quinney-Morrison Lecture of Rethinking Place, will be delivered by Audra Simpson, a political anthropologist currently based at Columbia University and author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Her talk, “Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow,” asks “not only in what world we imagine time to stop, but takes up the ways in which those that survived the time stoppage stand in critical relationship to dispossession and settler governance apprehend, analyze and act upon this project of affective governance.” 

This conference is free, open to all, and provides food. Please note that the Saturday performance may require separate registration. 

“The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new,” writes Ronan Farrow ’04 in a piece on Elon Musk for the New Yorker. “But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive.” The United States government is widely dependent on Musk and his companies, Farrow reports, “from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.” A recent crisis regarding the abrupt disruption of communication among Ukrainian military forces via Musk’s Starlink technology only furthered the point that Musk, despite not being a diplomat or statesman, increasingly operates as such. Tracing both the histories of Musk’s companies and the man himself, Farrow argues that science fiction has influenced the billionaire’s mindset, especially Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the video game series Deus Ex. “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told Farrow. “But only if he can be the one to save it.”

James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund his project Plato and the Tyrant: The Experiment that Wrecked a City and Shaped a Philosophic Masterpiece.  The book will use Plato’s little-known letters to illuminate his interventions in the politics of the Greek city of Syracuse and his relationship to the ruler Dionysius the Younger. The grant will support his work over a 10-month term beginning in September. Romm was previously a recipient for the NEH Public Scholar grant in 2018 for work on The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers in the Last Days of Greek Freedom, a book about the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes.

“The Public Scholar program helps situate the humanities just where they ought to be—in the large world of public discourse, rather than behind university walls,” Prof. Romm said.  “I’m honored to be recognized for making the ancient Greeks a part of that discourse. Never have the lessons they taught about tyranny, rule of law, and the meaning of citizenship been more relevant to our lives than they are at this moment.”

Plato is regarded as one of the world’s most influential thinkers, yet his life and personality remain opaque, partially because he did not include himself in his dialogues but used the mask of Socrates to develop his ideas. Plato and the Tyrant will bring his first-person voice to the forefront through quotes from the Platonic letters, documents sometimes regarded as forgeries but, as the book will argue, almost certainly genuine writings of Plato. The five Syracusan letters, addressed by Plato to Dionysius or to other political leaders of Syacuse, help tell the story of Plato’s interventions in that city.  In addition, large segments of the Republic, especially the doctrine of the philosopher-king, can best be understood as reflections of Plato’s encounters with Dionysius, the foremost autocrat in the Greek world of his day. 

Plato and the Tyrant follows not only the final two decades of Plato's life (367-347 BC) but the rise and fall, during that period, of a ruler who was at times Plato's student and at other times his nemesis, Dionysius the Younger, who at age 30 came to power in Syracuse in 367 as the sheltered heir of his father, also named Dionysius. The uncle of the younger Dionysius, Dion—a zealous adherent, and possibly lover, of Plato— wished to reshape his nephew’s character through philosophic instruction in the hope of setting Syracuse's regime on a healthier path. At Dion's urging, Plato journeyed to Syracuse just after the Younger's accession, a visit that set in motion a series of disasters for Dion, Dionysius, Plato, and the entire city. Plato and the Tyrant will ultimately examine the question of Plato's relationship to autocracy, a question that resonates strongly with current concerns in global and domestic politics.

Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, spoke to Jimmy Buff of Radio Kingston about Arendt’s life and works, focusing on her ideas of friendship and politics, which are the topics of the Center’s annual international conference taking place October 12–13 in Olin Hall. “The beauty of Hannah Arendt was to say, politics has to be about unifying all sides, and it has to be solidarity of all people,” Berkowitz told Radio Kingston. He stressed the idea of plurality in Arendt’s notion of how people can come together to build a meaningful common world for all. “The whole idea of a plurality,” he says, is that “the world presents itself, to me, to you, to the person on the street, in different ways. It’s the same world. And yet, each of us is going to interpret it and see it differently.” 

The conference, “Friendship and Politics,” presented by the Hannah Arendt Center, the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard, and the Open Society University Network, will bring together writers, thinkers, activists, and artists to collectively think about the importance of friendship in our world. “To create a community, you have to disagree, you have to be able to argue,” Berkowitz continues. “And yet then you have to build a little world, you have to build a bigger world. And so in a sense, personal friendships become a training ground for how you build friendships in the political sphere, but that means you have to actually be willing to be friends with people you disagree with.”

According to New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, of all the reading one can do to put the events of the film Oppenheimer into historical and political context, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, is the one that will restore “a corrective to the movie’s final act, in which the spirit of a simplifying anti-anti-communism prevails over the political complexity that Nolan carries off for most of the film.” McMeekin’s book examines Stalin, not Hitler, “as the central figure in the global conflagration, an instigator and manipulator and ultimate victor” of the Second World War, writes Douthat. “And any viewer of Oppenheimer the movie would be wise to hold the malignancy of Stalin, the scale of his success at both conquest and manipulation, in mind while watching its complex hero’s complex fate unfold.”

For the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous reviews author, columnist, and professor Samuel G. Freedman’s most recent book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, calling it “a powerful and captivating read.” Examining Humphrey’s early life and political career, Freedman asserts that Humphrey’s 1948 speech, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, advocating for civil rights legislation and racial equality made the Democratic Party confront its position on civil rights, and “set into motion the partisan realignment that defines American politics right up through the present”—also marking the beginning of the civil rights movement in America long before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision desegregating schools and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Aldous writes: “This is a big claim to make of the man and the moment, so it is to Mr. Freedman’s credit that by and large he makes his case thoughtfully and persuasively.”

Omar G. Encarnación, professor of political studies at Bard College, spoke to the New York Times about differences in the governing structures of Brazil and the United States, which have led to different political aftermaths following the actions of the two former presidents, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. Trump, despite facing state and federal charges, remains a prominent figure on the American Right and is preparing to once again enter the presidential race, while Bolsonaro has faced fiercer blowback and has been blocked from political office for the rest of the decade. Encarnación told the New York Times that Brazil’s democratic system, in spite of grappling with its own issues, can serve as a blueprint for combating new antidemocratic threats. “Democracies basically are fighting misinformation and God knows what else with very antiquated institutions,” he said. “We do need to upgrade the hardware. I don’t think it was designed for people of the likes these countries are facing.”

Jackson Lopez ’24, who is majoring in global and international studies with a focus on international relations, has been awarded the Hudson Political Studies Summer Fellowship and Hertog Fellowship in Security Studies in Washington, DC. During their six-week fellowship in the nation's capital, Hudson Political Studies Fellows take courses led by master teachers, policy workshops directed by field experts and experienced government officials, and a distinguished speaker series of exemplary figures from public life. Hudson fellows receive complimentary housing and a $3000 stipend. Lopez will also take two weeks of intensive seminars focused on the most difficult national security challenges the United States faces today as part of the Hertog Security Studies fellowship. “No matter my career track, I know a sound public policy foundation will be necessary to tackle complex questions,” says Lopez. Lopez has previously interned for the US Department of State and will be studying in New York City as part of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. After graduation, Lopez, who is from San Francisco, California, plans to pursue graduate studies abroad. 

L. Randall Wray, professor of economics at Bard and senior scholar at the Levy Institute, speaks with Mike Carruthers on Something You Should Know about the definition of money and how it actually works. “We need to get away from this notion that money is something we can get our hands on,” Wray explains. “If you go back in time, most market activity as far back as we go took place on the basis of credit and debit. And really that is how we should look at money. Money is credit in your hands and it’s somebody’s debt.” Wray asserts that the Federal Reserve cannot run out of money. “Money is a keystroke credit to an account . . . As long as there is one person left at the Fed with one finger, they can keystroke some more credits . . . Can the government or the private sector spend too much and cause inflation, which will reduce the value of the money? Yes, that can happen.” Wray’s newest book Money for Beginners: An Illustrated Guide was published in May 2023. Professor Wray’s interview begins at 24:00.

Juliana Maitenaz ’22, who graduated with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance, has been selected for an independent study–research Fulbright scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz aims to conduct her research in São Paulo and will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 
 
Evan Tims ’19, who was a joint major in Written Arts and Human Rights with a focus on anthropology at Bard, has been selected for a Fulbright-Nehru independent study–research scholarship to India for the 2023–24 academic year. His project, “From the River to Tomorrow: Perceptions of Kolkata’s Water Future,” studies the perceptions of Kolkata’s water future among urban planners, infrastructure experts, and communities—such as those who work in river transport, fishing, and who live in housing along the banks—most vulnerable to water changes along the Hooghly River. He will analyze the dominant narratives of the city and river’s future and reference scientific and planning literature in understanding the points of confluence and divergence between scientific and colloquial understandings of the river, particularly as different stakeholder communities approach an uncertain water future. “In light of urban development and climate change, Kolkata’s water is facing significant change over the coming decades,” said Tims. “It is crucial to understand the complex, layered relationships between stakeholder communities as they seek to negotiate an increasingly uncertain water future.” While in India, Tims also plans to teach a climate fiction writing workshop. In 2021-2022, he was Bard’s first recipient of the yearlong Henry J. Luce Scholarship, which enabled him to conduct ethnographic research on Himalayan water futures and lead a climate writing workshop in Nepal and, later, in Bangladesh. Earlier this academic year, Tims won the prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship to China. As an undergraduate at Bard, Tims also won two Critical Language Scholarships to study Bangla in Kolkata during the summers of 2018 and 2019. Read an interview with Tims about Southeast Asia's place in contemporary climate fiction here.
 
Elias Ephron ’23, a joint major in Political Studies and Spanish Studies, has been selected as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. While in Spain, Ephron hopes to engage with his host community through food, sharing recipes, hosting dinner parties, and cooking together; take part in Spain’s unique and visually stunning cultural events, like flamenco performances, and Semana Santa processions; visit the hometown of the great poet and playwright Federico García Lorca; and, as a queer individual, meet other queer people. “Having learned Spanish, French, and German to fluency or near-fluency, I understand that language learning requires many approaches. Some are more commonly thought of as ‘fun’ or ‘nascent’ modes of learning, while others more clearly resemble work. I hope to marry this divide, showing students that language learning is both labor and recreation; they may have to work hard, but it can be a great deal of fun, too,” said Ephron. In addition to his work as a writing tutor in the Bard Learning Commons, Ephron has received multiple awards, including the PEN America Fellowship and the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Internship Scholarship.  
 
Eleanor Tappen ’23, a Spanish Studies major, has been selected as a Fulbright ETA to Mexico for the 2023–24 academic year. Tappen has studied abroad in Granada, Spain, received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training), volunteered in a local elementary school in the fall of 2022, and works as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. For Tappen, a Fulbright teaching assistantship in Mexico is an intersection of her academic interest in Mexican literature and her passion for accessible and equitable language learning. During her Fulbright year, Tappen intends to volunteer at a local community garden, a setting she found ideal for cross-cultural exchange and friendship during her time at the Bard Farm. She also hopes to learn about pre-Colombian farming practices, whose revival is currently being led by indigenous movements in Mexico seeking to confront issues presented by unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. “I’m thrilled by the opportunity to live in the country whose literature and culture have served as such positive and significant points in both my academic and personal life. During my time as an ETA in Mexico, I hope to inspire in my students the same love of language-learning I found at Bard.”
 
Biology major Macy Jenks ’23 has been selected as an ETA to Taiwan for the 2023–24 academic year. Jenks is an advanced Mandarin language speaker having attended a Chinese immersion elementary school and continuing her Mandarin language studies through high school and college, including three weeks spent in China living with host family in 2015. She has tutored students in English at Bard’s Annandale campus, as well as through the Bard Prison Initiative at both Woodbourne Correctional Facility and Eastern New York Correctional Facility. She also has worked with the Bard Center for Civic Engagement to develop curricula and provide STEM programming to local middle and high school students. “As a Fulbright ETA, I hope to equip students with the tools necessary to hone their English language and cultural skills while encouraging them to develop their own voices,” says Jenks. While in Taiwain, she plans to volunteer with the Taiwan Root Medical Peace Corps, which offers medical care to rural communities, or with the Taipei Medical University in a more urban setting to further engage with the community and learn more about Taiwan’s healthcare systems and settings. With her love of hiking, Jenks also hopes to explore various cultural sites including the cave temples of Lion’s Head Mountain and Fo Guang Shan monastery and enjoy the natural beauty of Taiwan.

Bard Conservatory alumna Avery Morris ’18, who graduated with a BA in Mathematics and a BM in Violin Performance, has been selected for a prestigious Fulbright Study Research Award for 2023–24. Her project, “Gideon Klein’s Lost Works and the Legacy of Czech Musical Modernism,” aims to bring to light the early works of Czech composer and Holocaust victim Gideon Klein (1919–1945), which were lost until they were discovered in a suitcase in the attic of a house in Prague in the 1990s. She will live in Prague for the upcoming academic year and continue her research on Klein, which has been a focus of her studies at Stony Brook University, where she is pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Violin Performance.

Getzamany "Many" Correa ’21, a Global and International Studies major, has been selected as an ETA to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. Correa was an international student in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary. As an international student in high school, she started an initiative called English Conversation Buddies with the State Department-sponsored American Corner in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training) and worked as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. In Spain, Correa hopes to create a book club that introduces students to diverse authors writing in English, study Spanish literature, and host dinners with the locals she meets. She also plans to volunteer with EducationUSA and support students applying to colleges and universities in the U.S. “A year-long ETA in Spain will allow me to experience a culture and language central to my academic and personal interests, leverage my background in education while furthering my teaching experience, and make meaningful connections through cross-cultural engagement,” says Correa.
 
The Fulbright US Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright US Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

      

Bard College’s Division of Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor of History. His tenure-track appointment will begin in the fall of the 2023–24 academic year.

Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a historian of cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He is co-editor of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Dumbarton Oaks Press, 2022), and has published articles on the history of scholarship, Byzantine oratory, and late medieval politics. Aschenbrenner is also currently working on a monograph about political and ideological competition over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world titled Empire Beyond Rome: Antiquity, Legitimacy, and Power in the Mediterranean, 1200–1550, under contract with Princeton University Press. His other projects investigate the collection and interpretation of Byzantine material culture in the early modern Mediterranean and unrecognized intersections between scholarship and colonialism's materials and mentalities. 

Aschenbrenner earned a BS from the United States Naval Academy in 2000 and served as a US Navy Special Operations Officer until 2009. He studied global and medieval history at Georgetown University and King's College, London, finishing his joint MA in 2012. He received his PhD in medieval history from Harvard University in 2019. 

Bard archeology students, under the direction of Archaeologist in Residence Christopher Lindner, have been working to unearth cultural clues about the past at a dig site where the new Maya Lin performing arts studio building will be built for the Fisher Center, writes Emily Sachar for the Daily Catch. Ahead of the building construction, the students hope to find artifacts of daily living that may have been used by the Lenape and Muhheakantuck (Mohican), the original stewards of the land where Bard College now resides. “The project is a demonstration of Bard’s commitment to protecting what we can of the Indigenous past,” Lindner, director of the summer Bard Archaeology Field School and Bard’s archaeologist in residence, told Sachar. “It’s a way of showing respect and doing what we can to learn before we have an impact on the land.”

Three Bard College alumni/ae—Beatrice Abbott ’15, Megumi Kivuva ’22, and Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21—have been awarded competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2023 award year. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) aims to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States” and “seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans” through selection, recognition, and financial support of individuals who have demonstrated the potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers early in their careers.

Beatrice Abbott ’15, who majored in political studies at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of social sciences. She is a master’s student in geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include evidence/forensics, critical migration studies, critical cartography and geographic information systems (GIS), and visual culture.

Megumi Kivuva ’22, who majored in Spanish studies and computer science with a concentration in Experimental Humanities at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of STEM education and learning research. Kivuva is a PhD student in computing education at the University of Washington. Their research “aims to broaden participation in computing education for Black and refugee students,” and they “use community participatory research to understand the barriers to accessing computing education and codesign interventions to make computing education more accessible to these communities.”
 
Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21, who majored in mathematics at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of mathematical biology. He is a PhD student in mathematical sciences at the University of Vermont. The fellowship will allow him to focus on his research project, "Decoding Parallel Processing in the Brain using the Connectome Eigenfunctions." 

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The five-year fellowship period provides a three-year annual stipend of $37,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees, as well as access to opportunities for professional development. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. Each year, the NSF receives more than 12,000 applications to the GRFP program, which has awarded fellowships to its selected scholars since 1952.

The Inaugural Rethinking Place Toni Morrison Lecture will take place on Thursday, April 20 at 6 pm in the Bitó Auditorium of the Reem-Kayden Center, Bard College. Delivered by Glenda Carpio, Chair of the English Department and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the lecture “Migrant Aesthetics,” adapted from Carpio’s forthcoming book of the same title, shows how through artistic innovation, contemporary authors allow us to apprehend the historical legacies and political injustice that produce forced migration. A reception prior to the talk will be hosted by Samosa Shack Kingston at 5 pm.

Sponsored by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times project, this lecture series celebrates the work of both Electa “Wuhwehweeheemeew” Quinney, a citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican nation and the first woman to teach in a public school in the territory which would become Wisconsin; and the American novelist, essayist, and editor, Toni Morrison, who was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Bard College from 1979–1981. The series invites luminaries from fields like Native American and Indigenous studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and Black studies to give one lecture each fall and spring semester over the grant duration which models the kind of multi-disciplinary and intersectional scholarship that Rethinking Place seeks to promote.

The Quinney-Morrison Lecture Series provides opportunities for academics and other regional partners to learn what work needs to be done in the creation of land acknowledgement projects. It provides space to reflect on individuals' relationships with spaces, lands, and borders, to dissuade action without reflection, and to share responsibilities for encouraging this type of thought and engagement beyond tribal communities to all.

Bard College students, faculty, and staff along with non-Bard affiliated community members are welcomed. Please join us prior to the talk at 5 pm for a reception hosted by Samosa Shack Kingston. A recording of the lecture will be available upon request.

Glenda R. Carpio is the Chair of the English Department and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008). She coedited African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019).

Bard’s “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment and is supported by the Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Humanities for All Times. The Mellon grant offers three years of support for developing a land acknowledgment–based curriculum, public-facing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) programming, and efforts to support the work of emerging NAIS scholars and tribally enrolled artists at Bard. Rethinking Place emphasizes broad community-based knowledge, collaboration, and collectives of inquiry and also attends to the importance of considering the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, upon whose homelands Bard sits.

Bard College’s Division of Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Valentina A. Grasso as Assistant Professor of Medieval History. Her tenure-track appointment will begin in the fall of the 2023–24 academic year.

Grasso is currently an assistant professor of Semitics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. She was previously visiting assistant professor at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, an affiliate member of the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Qur'an as a Source for Late Antiquity,” and of the Cambridge Silk Road Program, which focuses on the study of the history and culture of the Silk Road countries. She is part of the committee of the London Society for Medieval Studies and a chair of the Society of Biblical Literature and International Qur'anic Studies Association (SBL/IQSA) “Qur'an and Late Antiquity” Program Unit. 

Grasso holds a Ph.D. (Divinity, 2021) from the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctoral dissertation which came out as a monograph, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. She is currently working on her second monograph while co-editing a volume on Indic imagery (Brepols 2024) and a special issue on Arabian epigraphy and Early Islam. 

Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) CCS ’03 recently joined Bard’s faculty as part of the College’s transformative initiatives in Native American and Indigenous studies, developed in partnership with Forge Project and supported by a $50 million endowment. Hopkins, CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies and Forge Project’s executive director, speaks with Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds (Diné/Navajo) for ArtReview about Indigenous self-determination and the importance of this new collaboration between the Native-led arts and cultural organization Forge and Bard College. “We realized that we could attempt to enact quite radical institutional change through a partnership between Forge and Bard,” said Hopkins. “One of those involved naming: American Studies is now American and Indigenous Studies. There are cluster hires for faculty at all different levels, and scholarships (including living expenses) for Native students. There is also support for the recruitment of Native students, because Native students do not always know what opportunities are out there for them. And if they do not know then they are not going to apply. But if they also do not see themselves represented, people are going to feel really alienated when they come to a place.” 

Hopkins notes that these College-wide initiatives, including the establishment of a Center for Indigenous Studies, were “built upon the good work that Bard was already doing with their Andrew W. Mellon grant called ‘Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck’. At the center of it was the question of ‘how do we make land acknowledgments actionable?’ because they have become often rote, performative and not based on real collaboration or community engagement.”

Announced in September 2022, these initiatives are having an immediate impact on Bard’s community and its undergraduate and graduate academic programs. “The intent was for this to be felt right away, and I am already seeing it happening. People are coming here; more Native folks are coming to teach and be engaged with postdoctoral students. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it and what students do, what impact that they make,” she said. 

Hopkins, who currently advises and teaches at CCS Bard, will curate a major exhibition Indian Theater, opening June 24, 2023 at the Hessel Museum of Art.

Bard College student Ariha Shahed ’26 has won a Davis Projects for Peace prize for her proposal, “Train Track to Right Track: Supporting Bangladeshis Who Call the Railway Tracks Their Home.” Ariha, a first-year economics and politics major from Bangladesh, will receive $10,000 to work with Bangladeshi families living in extreme poverty along the country’s railway tracks, communities which often go unnoticed. Partnering with NGO initiative BRAC Bangladesh, Ariha will help families connect with essential social protection programmes, access healthcare, keep their children in school, and improve their economic situations by sustainable and continual support.

Ariha’s project is designed to provide avenues for both short-term and long-term support to these communities through multiple efforts. It seeks to give families a way to re-establish their lives through BRAC’s “Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative,” which aims to help people ‘graduate’ from extreme poverty, and will operate out of workshop hubs near train stations in the country’s three largest cities, Dhaka, Chattogram, and Sylhet. Healthcare volunteers will offer basic health classes to those living along the tracks in these cities, and Ariha will partner with a small local restaurant to organize a food drive to distribute meal boxes from these hubs. “This way, we can incentivize a long-term solution for them using a short-term solution, which have been proven to work better when supporting people in extreme humanitarian need,” Ariha writes in her proposal. 

“The disparity between the families living below the poverty line along the rail-tracks and my own trips inside the comfort of a car had always struck me,” she said. “The first step to eradicating any kind of social inequality, I believe, would be to acknowledge one’s position of privilege. This project is a small way of giving back to the country and the people that raised me—something my parents have always valued. I want to thank my friend Mikaail Kaiser Shahabuddin (Davis Alum, Clark University ‘26) who will be helping me to co-facilitate this project and for his insights. As a Davis Alum myself, I’m overwhelmed and grateful to the Davis Foundation for such opportunities that help call attention to often neglected places like Bangladesh.”

Projects for Peace, a Davis Foundation initiative facilitated by Middlebury College in Vermont, is a global program that partners with other educational institutions to identify and support peacebuilders and changemakers across college campuses. Every year, 100 or more student leaders are awarded a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to implement a “Project for Peace” anywhere in the world. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/office/projects-for-peace.

Bard College’s Division of Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Youssef Ait Benasser as Assistant Professor of Economics. Their tenure-track appointment will begin in the fall of the 2023–24 academic year.

“Bard’s global engagement provides the ideal environment for my work in international economics,” said Benasser. “I am excited to contribute to the disruptive research and support the transformative learning that sets Bard’s community apart in the social sciences and beyond.”

Born in Rabat, Morocco, Youssef A. Benasser (they/he) received a BA in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and an MSc in Economics and Public Policy from Ecole Polytechnique (X), before completing their PhD in Economics at the University of Oregon. Their research agenda is influenced by decolonial critics of the Bretton-Wood international economic system and inspired by the Third World’s quest for an alternative economic project. It centers on empirical assessments of recent trends in international trade policy, such as policy uncertainty, reversals, or rivalries, and their impacts on the global flow of goods and money. Passionate about teaching and pedagogy, Dr. Benasser has taught in higher ed institutions for more than seven years. Their courses span macro and international economics at the introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels. Dr. Benasser also has a risk analysis background, having previously held positions in the financial and government sectors.

“Despite the persistent myth that Silicon Valley was built by rogue engineers in Palo Alto garages, federal funding — especially from the military — has long been the real developmental engine of the American technology sector,” writes Assistant Professor of History Jeannette Estruth for The Drift. Estruth traces the history of Silicon Valley and its innovations, both software and hardware, outlining the longstanding partnerships between the technology sector and the federal government. “High tech’s value has long been in producing war-making technology for the federal government,” Estruth writes, a relationship that, she argues, has historically gone both ways. With public criticism of “Big Tech” on the rise, “the public is falling out of love” with Silicon Valley and its ilk. The question now, she writes, is “whether Washington could be persuaded to do the same.”

Ian Masters spoke with Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard College, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute, and author of The Case for a Job Guarantee (2020), on his nationally syndicated radio program Background Briefing. In the episode, “As Pundits Warn of Recession and Inflation, We Get the Best Economic News Since 1969,” Masters asks Tcherneva for her take on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which added 517,000 jobs in January 2023 and stunned most economists and people who continue to harbor a doomsday mentality about the economy.

According to Tcherneva, two years after the COVID-induced crisis, such good news about low unemployment levels tells us that “public policy has tools. It can act boldly, quickly and bring jobs back.” She points out, however, that these low unemployment numbers also reflect the 5.7 million people who are not looking for work, and 4 million people who are working part-time but would like to have full-time jobs.

“Part of the anxiety still being experienced in the labor market is that the jobs are there but they are not exactly these well-paying jobs with very good benefits and good working conditions. On that front, there is more to be accomplished. Let us remember our minimum wage is still $7.25, and no one can live on $7.25 an hour,” she asserts.

Tcherneva sees the big fiscal policies implemented over the last two years by the Biden administration, which do not overly focus on the financial sector or prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy, as all good news. Still, she advocates for more economic progress. “The question for me is did we come out of the pandemic with better jobs, better conditions for working families than we had going into the pandemic?”

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Sucharita Kanjilal as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2023-24 academic year.
 
Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her dissertation project, Home Chefs: Indian Housewives Produce for the Global Creator Economy, examines the entanglements of gender, race, caste and religious nationalism in the growth of global digital capitalism, through an ethnographic study of food media producers in India.
 
Kanjilal’s research combines approaches from economic anthropology, anthropology of media, digital anthropology, anthropology of food, and theories of affect, while highlighting feminist, postcolonial, and anti-caste epistemologies. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, the Routledge Companion on Caste and Cinema in India, Feminist Media Studies (forthcoming), Scroll.in, Quartz.com, Hindustan Times, and the Heritage Radio Network and Eat This podcasts. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, the UCLA International Institute and the Sambhi Foundation at UCLA.

A diplomatic dispute over an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon seen over Montana echoes a similar Cold War event, writes Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, for the Washington Post. In the U-2 crisis of 1960, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, reversing years of progress in relations between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “Lessons from that crisis tell us two things,” writes Aldous. “That unexpected events can destroy years of diplomatic effort; and that the Chinese are likely now scrambling in a panic to get their story straight.” In a statement analogous to China’s current response, NASA had claimed that the plane was used for weather research and gone off course, which Eisenhower was obliged to renounce when he later took responsibility for the spy planes used for information gathering. “The concern about the historical parallel with 1960,” Aldous continues, “Is that the U-2 crisis marked the beginning of one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.”

The American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession (CSQIEP) has awarded Associate Professor of Economics Michael Martell their annual Award for Outstanding Research Paper in LGBTQ+ Economics. “Gender typicality and sexual minority labour market differentials,” Martell’s winning paper, coauthored with Ian Burn of the University of Liverpool, was published in December 2022 in BJIR.

Bard College Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and MFA alum in Music/Sound and American and Indigenous Studies Program faculty member Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which will fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined. 
 
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support. 
 
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director. 
 
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan. 
 
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
 
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College. 
 
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.

Bard College alumnus Liam Gomez ’22 is among the first Peace Corps volunteers to return to overseas service since the agency’s unprecedented global evacuation in March 2020. The Peace Corps suspended global operations and evacuated nearly 7,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gomez, from Red Hook, New York, graduated in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He will serve as an education volunteer in the nation of Georgia. He first became interested in the Peace Corps while he was studying abroad in Russia on a Bard language intensive program. He enjoys both speaking and writing in the Russian language, a language he acquired at Bard.

“The Peace Corps was always an option thrown around to employ my language skills post-graduation. I also always love a change of scenery and the challenges that will come from this experience, although daunting, excite me more than anything else,” said Gomez. “I see the Peace Corps as a perfect opportunity for both personal growth and helping others.”

In a recently published article about Gomez, the Red Hook Daily Catch writes "he formally applied to the corps in July 2021 at the height of the pandemic, specifically asking to be sent to Ukraine or Georgia, with the hope of improving his Russian language skills. Georgia attracted him for other reasons, too, notably the food and family culture. Known for khachapuri, a flat cake with cheese, meat, or steamed fish, Georgian cuisine is also famous for various sweet pastries. ‘Their country sounded very alluring,’ Gomez said. ‘The food, how closely and tightly knit the families are, Georgian cheese, it all sounded great.’"

The Peace Corps volunteer cohorts are made up of both first-time volunteers and volunteers who were evacuated in early 2020. Upon finishing a three-month training, volunteers will collaborate with their host communities on locally prioritized projects in one of Peace Corps’ six sectors—agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health or youth in development—and all will engage in COVID-19 response and recovery work.

Currently, the agency is recruiting volunteers to serve in 56 countries around the world at the request of host country governments, to connect through the Peace Corps grassroots approach across communities and cultures. Volunteers have already returned to a total of 47 countries around the world. The Peace Corps continues to monitor COVID-19 trends in all of its host countries and will send volunteers to serve as conditions permit. Americans interested in transformative service and lifelong connections should apply to Peace Corps service at www.peacecorps.gov/apply. Apply before April 1 to make a global connection by fall 2023.
 

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes. For Sonevytsky, the brilliance of the statement is how its innocuous phrasing, at first glance a simple greeting, masks its inherent radicalism and defiance of the Russian’s state’s attempts to deny Ukraine’s existence. “The slogan works precisely because it does not traffic in the essentializing rhetoric of being Ukrainian,” she continues. “It is not for an individual declaring an identity: ‘I am Ukrainian.’ It is instead a collective, matter-of-fact statement: ‘We are from Ukraine.’ This also implies—and I still resent that this must be said, but here we are—that Ukraine exists, is a legitimate place, and contains people who claim it as home.”

Reflecting on his perilous days as a US military attache in Beirut, Ambassador Frederic C. Hof argues there is more to successful diplomacy than conferences. Much of the essential work of diplomacy, he writes, is collecting and reporting information, rather than in formal or high-profile negotiations, and a great deal of this work is carried out not by professional civilian diplomats but by military attaches serving under the direction of the ambassador. Frederic C. Hof is diplomat in residence at Bard and the author of Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace.

Bard Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky has received a fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in support of her book project, Singing for Lenin in Soviet Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future. NEH Fellowships support advanced research in the humanities by college and university teachers and independent scholars. Sonevytsky’s award supports her research and writing leading to a book about Soviet education and children’s musical practices in Soviet Ukraine, from 1934 to 1991.

Spectacles of musical childhood were widespread in Soviet life. Children’s groups performed at political events, factories, and international festivals. They were showcased on Soviet radio and television, and institutionalized in “Palaces of Pioneers.” Inculcating children into Soviet norms of citizenship, gender, and musicality was a vital project to ensure the longevity of the USSR, yet both children and music present unruly vectors through which to achieve the goals of norming. 

Singing for Lenin in Soviet Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future, follows the “imperial turn” in Soviet historiography to Soviet Ukraine, interpreting the dynamic arena of children’s musical practices through newly discovered archival materials and original interviews. The research reveals how Soviet Ukrainian children and their educators creatively recast the prerogatives of Soviet education, with its promise of a stateless Communist future. Paying attention to performance, embodiment, and sound, Sonevytsky aims to restore a fuller sensorium to the emerging understanding of how Soviet children and childhood appeared and were managed within the Soviet state, while observing how children and their teachers reacted to—and sometimes against—the ideological dimensions of Soviet musical education. 

“The Biden administration faces a real dilemma,” writes Professor Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. “Feeling overstretched against Russian aggression in Ukraine and Chinese ambition in the Indo-Pacific, the White House wants to minimize its exposure to the Middle East. Yet the region is too important to ignore—and the more the U.S. withdraws, the more influence it sheds. As America becomes less relevant, regional actors feel free to make more decisions that Washington dislikes, effectively undermining U.S. influence around the globe.” Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College.

Yuval Elmelech, an associate professor of sociology at Bard College and author of the book Wealth, spoke with Marketplace about the difficulty millennials face in buying a house, especially in cities such as San Francisco and New York where they are being priced out and even forced to relocate. For many who live there, parental wealth has made a big difference. “If parents can help their children buy a home, this means that these children will need to rely less on loans and mortgages,” he said. “Whereas other young couples, individuals who cannot rely on parental resources—and this is the majority of the population—will have to take out higher loans.”

ARTnews highlighted individuals and institutions that had a significant impact on public engagement with Indigenous art in 2022, including Bard College on the short list. In September, the College announced a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation to support a renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program. A matching commitment by the Open Society Foundations will create a $50 million endowment for Native American and Indigenous Studies in undergraduate and graduate academics and the arts in Annandale, to include a center for Indigenous Studies and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).