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Peter L'Official, associate professor of literature and director of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, has been awarded a 2026 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The grant will support his project, Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black’s Black Arts Movement, which uses biography as a method to explore how an unsung Black American architect, W. Joseph Black, navigated the structural impediments that even today confront American architects identifying as Black. The project draws on archival architectural and literary sources to reconstruct not only a life, but the broad, interdisciplinary scope of Black’s unrealized works, which included transformative design plans for Harlem as well as field-altering historical texts chronicling the history of Black builders in America, and which reveal Black’s work as an unacknowledged architectural arm of the multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts bestows project-based grants to support the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States. Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way. 
 

Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Bard College, has published a review in the Wall Street Journal of historian Jonathan W. Jordan’s book Ike and Winston: World War, Cold War, and an Extraordinary Friendship, a detailed exploration of the relationship between Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill as they shaped world events from WWII through the Cold War era. “Jordan tells the story of Eisenhower and Churchill with great brio,” writes Aldous for the Wall Street Journal. “He is writing for a general rather than a scholarly audience, so he does not much bother with the debates among historians about these two giants. If perhaps he is sometimes a little heavy-handed with the metaphors … he makes up for it with a sense for drama and telling incidental detail that never disrupts the narrative. 

The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.

Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, has been featured in a new documentary series by the History Channel. The series, World War II with Tom Hanks, reexamines the war through the lens of a new century, guided by Hanks to reveal a sweeping portrait of how the modern world was forged in the fires of global war. The episodes focus on examining dimensions of the conflict like the decisions that shaped the battlefield, the unseen networks that sustained the war effort, and the aftershocks that still shape our world today. 

The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.