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The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships to Bard College faculty members Jacqueline Goss, professor of film and electronic arts, and Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, Goss and Luzzi were awarded in recognition of their career achievement and exceptional promise. Guggenheim fellowships were also awarded to James Hoff, Steve Reinke, and Kenneth Tam, who will teach this upcoming summer at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”

Goss’s fellowship will support the development of an experimental narrative film project that engages with larger questions of artistic life, visibility, and the uneven recognition of artists and artistic forms, explored within the social and cultural landscape of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During Luzzi’s fellowship year, he will work on The Lives of Beatrice: The Muse Who Made Us Modern, a book of narrative nonfiction that traces the remarkable afterlife of Dante's great muse, Beatrice Portinari, across seven centuries of art, literature, and culture. Beginning with a biography of Beatrice as a historical woman in late thirteenth-century Florence, the book follows her transformation into one of the most frequently reimagined figures in the Western imagination, from Petrarch and Cervantes to the Pre-Raphaelites and into contemporary pop culture. Ultimately, Luzzi’s project asks what each era's reinvention of Beatrice reveals, not only about the woman herself, but about the cultures that have continually returned to her.

Goss, Luzzi, Hoff, Reinke, and Tam are among 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines appointed to the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Since its inception, the foundation has granted nearly $450 million in Fellowships to over 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.

Jacqueline Goss is an experimental filmmaker whose work examines the human impulse to quantify and control even the most ineffable experiences and environments. Using diverse methods and tools, her work explores the ways vanity, fear, loneliness and desire seep into scientific experimentation, language, mapping, and political systems. Her projects include an animated documentary on the effects of biometric surveillance on migrants’ senses of self (Stranger Comes To Town), a film enacting the quotidian gestures of a weather observer on the windiest mountain in the world (The Observers), and a theoretical musical about Wilhelm Reich (OR119). Over the last 25 years, these works and others have shown at film festivals worldwide including the London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, and Faculdade de Belas Artes. Goss’s moving image work has also screened at art centers, galleries, and museums including MOMA, the Natural History Museum in New York, Eyebeam Atelier, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Center for the Arts, Pacific Film Archive, Kunsthall Aarhus, UnionDocs, Microscope Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Arsenal, Piano Nobile, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Her films, videos, and animations have been covered in various journals and newspapers including The Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Chicago Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Four Columns, Film Comment, BOMB, Art Forum, Cinemascope, Sage Journals, and Millenium Film Journal.

Joseph Luzzi received his PhD from Yale University. He is the author of nine books, including his recent The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood (Norton, 2025), one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025. His other books include Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (Norton, 2022), a New Yorker Best Books of 2022 selection and shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; and My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, amongst others. Luzzi’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TLS, Bookforum, and American Scholar, among others, and his scholarly writing has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, Raritan, Italica, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant in the amount of $1.35 Million from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative, which supports newly developed curricula that instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits. The grant will fund Bard’s project, “The Uses and Abuses of History,” which responds to the rise of unreliable digital, social, and other media, heightened by the proliferation of AI-generated content, which not only threatens our ability to discern fact from fiction but confounds our claims to a shared humanity. Bard was previously a recipient of a Humanities for All Times grant in 2021, the year the initiative was launched, for the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project led by Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and professor of history and American and Indigenous Studies. Participation in the competition is by invitation only and winning institutions are not invited to a subsequent round, which means Bard has won awards for both of the periods in which it was eligible.

“The Uses and Abuses of History” aims to offer students the tools to exercise judgement, to act, and to guard against the erasure of history in a world that is filled with conflicting and often false narratives. The project has three central curricular goals: first, to provide an institutional structure to unite students, staff, and scholars engaged in humanistic inquiry from across Bard College; second, to strengthen students’ habits of attention and abilities to read and think critically and contextually; and third, to make use of the College’s growing collection of archives to make archival research and praxis central to its curriculum. To accomplish these goals and enhance humanities education at Bard, the project will deploy curricular development, a workshop series, and a regranting program including summer research opportunities. The final year of the grant will culminate in an exhibition featuring a broad range of artifacts underscoring the crucial role played by material culture in the shaping of historical narratives.

The principal investigator team for “The Uses and Abuses of History” includes four Bard faculty members: the principal investigator, Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Iberian Studies Miles V. Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Nabanjan Maitra, Associate Professor of Classics Robert Cioffi, and Assistant Professor of Medieval History Valentina A. Grasso. A wider advisory council of faculty and administrators will help guide the project.

“The project team and I are honored to take part in the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative at Bard College,” said Rodríguez. “We are thrilled to contribute to Bard’s historical commitment to curricular and pedagogical creativity and innovation. While we recognize that the spread of false information is nothing new under the sun, we consider ourselves fortunate to respond to its present permutations with a robust collaborative project in service to our students and intellectual community.”

The Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative was established in 2021 to support the development of new humanities-based curricular and community projects at liberal arts colleges across the United States.