News

Assistant Professor of Politics Lucas G. Pinheiro has been named a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey, for the 2025-2026 academic year. One of two scholars chosen from liberal arts colleges, he will join 21 colleagues to pursue a year of intense study focused on interdisciplinary exchange. The Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 1930 as a scholarly refuge where members could pursue research without administrative responsibilities.

Pinhero will use his time at the Institute to work on his book project Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch. The book imagines the factory as a foundational institution in the histories of modern political thought and global capitalism, using case studies to trace the factory’s evolution across Britain, Africa, and the Americas. Pinhero’s research focuses on the development of global capitalism, empire, racial slavery, and abolition in the Atlantic world from the late 17th century to today.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, spoke with the New York Review of Books about his new translation of Homer’s Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press. In conversation with Lauren Kane, Mendelsohn discussed the challenges of balancing both poetic beauty and literal meaning in translating, the ways in which the story handles depictions of family relationships, and why the epic is experiencing a resurgence in modern retellings. The Odyssey, he says, is a “postwar poem, but it’s also a sort of post-everything poem. The old order has disappeared. The gods have receded. They’re almost not present at all, except in a couple of crucial moments, and certainly not in the way they’re present in the Iliad, where they’re all over the action and fighting in the battles. You feel the gods have withdrawn. Odysseus is a lone guy in a strange world with no familiar landmarks. The whole poem is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can. That may be what’s speaking to people.”

Associate Professor Drew Thompson will appear in the PBS Documentary Mr. Polaroid, premiering May 19 on American Experience. Mr. Polaroid tells the story of the inventor of the Polaroid camera Edwin Land, who released his first instant camera in 1948. Long before the smartphone, the Polaroid “would launch not only instant photography mania but also become the model for today’s Silicon Valley tech culture.”

Thompson has written about the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers’ movement which opposed Polaroid’s use in apartheid South Africa’s passport system. Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, two employees at Polaroid, cofounded the movement to pressure the company to acknowledge its involvement in apartheid. Through archival research and speaking with Hunter, Thompson learned how PRWM used Polaroid’s marketing against them and ultimately pressured them to end their business in South Africa.

James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, will take part in a conversation with Bard president Leon Botstein to discuss Romm’s new book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece, at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck. In the book, Romm refers to a little-known set of Plato’s personal letters to reintroduce the philosopher and to explore the formation of his most famous work, Republic. The event takes place on Tuesday, May 13, at 6 pm and is free and open to the public. Visit here for more information.

In the second half of his life, an already famous Plato involved himself in the affairs of the two Dionysii, a father and son who ruled Syracuse, at that time the greatest power in the Greek world. Plato and the Tyrant explores how Plato’s interventions in the violent contest between Dionysius the Younger and his brother-in-law, Dion—with whom Plato may have had a long love affair—were the backdrop and perhaps the motivation for his masterwork. Romm reveals how Plato’s experiment in enlightened autocracy spiralled into catastrophe and offers a new account of the origins of Western political philosophy.

James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and editor of the Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press. He is the author of several books, including Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero and Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire. He has edited numerous translations of ancient Greek texts, including the Anabasis of Arrian for the volume The Campaigns of Alexander in the distinguished Landmark Series of Ancient Historians. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and other venues. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), the Birkelund Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library (2010-11), and a Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center of the City University of New York (2014-15).

Leon Botstein is president of Bard College and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He is the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO), founder and music director of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), artistic codirector of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, and principal guest conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (JSO), where he served as music director from 2003 to 2011. He is editor of The Musical Quarterly and of The Compleat Brahms (Norton); publications include Jefferson’s Children (Doubleday), Judentum und Modernität (Böhlau), and Von Beethoven zu Berg (Zsolnay). Honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Carnegie Foundation Academic Leadership Award, National Arts Club Gold Medal, Leonard Bernstein Award, Bruckner Society Medal of Honor, Alumni Medal from the University of Chicago, and Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. President Botstein is also chancellor of the Open Society University Network and trustee emeritus, Central European University (board chair, 2007–22; board member, 1991–22) and Foundation for Jewish Culture.