News

James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics Garry L. Hagberg has been named the Monroe Beardsley Lecturer for 2025. The annual lecture series, hosted by the American Society for Aesthetics, honors the memory of Beardsley, a 20th-century American aesthetician who researched the relationship between art and philosophy. Hagberg will deliver his lecture on the philosophical nature of the visual arts at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Hagberg also received the Peter Kivy Memorial Prize from the American Society for Aesthetics for his article on how counterpoint in instrumental music generates meaning. His most recent book, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

The Wiháŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College has been announced as the recipient of a $93,000 grant from the Wagner Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Boston. The grant will support the project “Cosmologyscape,” a multi-platform, socially engaged public art initiative co-lead by Wiháŋble S’a Center Director Dr. Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence and assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, and artist and producer Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19.

“Cosmologyscape” will launch its next chapter with an exhibition at Wagner in January 2026, and will include features such as Dream Mosaic tiles visualizing collective dreams installed along long gallery walls, a comfortable Dream Office space in which attendees can gather and rest, digital projections showcasing a localized “Boston Dreaming” webpage, and other installations. The project, which solicits dreams from the public that are translated into quilting patterns generated from 26 Black and Lakota symbols, aims to activate rest and dreaming as liberatory acts through sculpture, digital engagement, and community programming.

“This grant affirms that dreaming is a vital, collective act—and that rest, vision, and story are the seeds of real change,” said Dr. Suzanne Kite, director of the Wiháŋble S’a Center. “With support from the Wagner Foundation, ‘Cosmologyscape’ can continue unfolding as a cosmic quilt—each dream a thread, weaving together Black and Indigenous futures across time, land, and memory.”

Wagner Foundation is a Cambridge, MA-based foundation that invests in health equity, economic prosperity, and cultural transformation across the globe. Wagner Foundation prioritizes work that strengthens equitable systems and views artists as leaders and changemakers who are critical voices in interrogating the past, wrestling with the current moment, and envisioning alternative futures. Learn more at wfound.org.

Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece, a new book by James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, has been reviewed in the Washington Post. The work is “a deft and engaging work of history, philosophy and biography, as well as a meta-commentary on the perils of regarding canonical thinkers as disembodied minds,” writes Becca Rothfield for the Post. In his book, Romm draws on personal letters of Plato―documents that have long been kept in obscurity―to show how a philosopher helped topple the leading Greek power of the era, the opulent city of Syracuse, where Plato encountered two authoritarian rulers and tried to steer them toward philosophy all while writing his masterpiece, Republic. “Romm relates this history—and introduces readers to a colorful cast of sycophantic courtiers, eccentric philosophers and defiant poets—with flair. He is an equally admirable guide to the many controversies in which the affair is mired.”