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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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