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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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