News

Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz looks at Massive Open Online Courses and the transformative power of teaching.

Faculty members from Bard College and West Point have collaborated on the new book Just War in Religion and Politics, which developed out of a joint project between the two institutions. Bard religion professors Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton have jointly edited the book with West Point faculty member Robert Tully. The book features chapters by several Bard faculty members, including professors Chilton and Neusner, Roger Berkowitz, Richard Davis, Carolyn Dewald, Joel Perlmann, Kristin Scheible, and Mairaj Syed. Faculty members from West Point and other institutions also contributed. The collaboration between Bard and West Point has comprised a joint course; an international conference hosted at Bard; and a public debate on whether war can be just, with Bard students and West Point cadets working together to argue both sides of the issue. The project, which was carried out with the cooperation of the West Point–Bard Exchange, has served as a model for a Mellon Foundation program on cooperation between service academies and liberal arts institutions.

Bard professor and world-renowned author Norman Manea was well received at the prestigious Salon du Livre in Paris. Manea was an honorary guest at the event in March, which was dedicated to Romanian literature. The French press praised Manea's participation and his new book, The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language. During the Salon du Livre Manea gave interviews, participated in a public debate, and spoke to a large audience about Romanian history and literature. Click here to download PDF.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is presenting a special series of three concerts titled, “Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism,” featuring music composed and performed by Jewish prisoners in Nazi territories during World War II. Part two, “Nationalism, Continuity, and Creativity: Music of Warsaw, Lodz and other Eastern Ghettoes,” will take place on Saturday, April 20. The event will include Robert Cuckson’s 2003 song cycle, “Der Gayst funem Shturem,” with text taken from the poems of Binem Heller. It will be performed in Yiddish by mezzo-soprano Malena Dayen, with piano accompaniment by David Rosenmeyer.

Millennials like Bard sophomore Anna Daniszewski are changing the way we communicate, says Wired magazine.

Nicholas Platt—longtime China specialist, three-time U.S. ambassador (Pakistan, Zambia, and the Philippines), and author of the published memoir China Boys—will share his experiences and insights gained from a long and distinguished career in the diplomatic service and as president of the Asia Society in New York.

A production of The Bakkhai (The Bacchae) by Bard College students takes place at the Fisher Center through April 14. Sunday's events also include a panel discussion, "Euripides' The Bakkhai: Play and Performance" with Daniel Mendelsohn (Bard College), Helene Foley (Barnard), Rachel Kitzinger (Vassar), and Emily Wilson (University of Pennsylvania). The panel is free and open to the public.

Orchestra of Exiles tells the story of how violinist Bronislaw Huberman saved close to 1,000 Jews from the Nazis by moving them to Palestine to form what became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In this preview, President Botstein discusses why Jews stayed in Europe prior to WWII.

After the death this week of former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Bard professor Richard Aldous talks about her complex relationship with U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

The Bard College Debate Union continues to expand, and is having a big impact on campus and in the local community. “Bard students tend to be very successful in debate because they think outside of the box,” says Dean Jonathan Becker. In this video, Bard students and coaches discuss building friendships and pushing their intellectual boundaries in competition.

On Monday, April 29, the Hannah Arendt Center of Politics and Humanities at Bard College will host a film screening of the biopic Hannah Arendt. Directed by renowned German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, the biopic was recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has just been nominated for six LOLA awards, Germany's version of the Oscar.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Kristin Lane gave the keynote presentation on unconscious biases at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Diversity Summit.

From April 17 to 19, the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College will gather top policymakers, economists, and analysts at the 22nd Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the U.S. and World Economies. Participants will discuss the progress of the economic recovery from the global financial crisis and address both financial reform and poverty in the context of Minsky’s work. Click here to view the full schedule of events.

More than 85 colleges and community organizations across the country have joined the Bard Center for Environmental Policy and C2C Fellows Network in leading a national conversation on democracy and climate change with a screening of The Island President—the 2011 documentary that chronicles Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed’s efforts to confront climate change and rising sea levels, which threaten to submerge the low-lying island nation. The film will be screened on Wednesday, April 17.

Professor Armstead lectures on her book Freedom’s Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America at Columbia University's Lehman Center for American History on April 24.

Bard College first-year percussion student Chris Gunnell was featured in the annual report of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. Chris is pursuing a five-year dual degree at Bard, studying music at the Conservatory as well as philosophy and social policy at the College.

Blackburn writes on local and national history in “The Architect and the Artist: FDR, Olin Dows, and the New Deal Post Office Program.”

A new viral video on the income gap in the United States prompts Steven Mazie's response.

Ian Buruma examines two types of contemporary populist leaders: the wealthy business tycoon and the clown.

Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. Professor Buruma is an award-winning journalist and writer.

He was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied Chinese literature and Japanese cinema. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career traveling and reporting from all over Asia. Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Corriere della Sera, and NRC Handelsblad. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The China Lover (2008) and Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (2010). He is the 2008 recipient of Holland's prestigious Erasmus Prize, as well as the 2008 winner of Stanford University's Shorenstein Journalism Award. Professor Buruma has been at Bard since 2003.

Richard Aldous examines this "elegantly written and finely nuanced work on the US in the 1960s," by James T. Patterson.

Steven Mazie looks at the impasse in Congress in light of the advice of Machiavelli.

Washington Post writer Michael Lindgren calls Professor Mendelsohn, "elegant and capacious ... a versatile critic."

The Hannah Arendt Center presents this special concert series, featuring music composed and performed by Jewish prisoners in Nazi territories during World War II. Three concerts will feature a brief introduction by a noted scholar in the field, placing the music in social, historical, and political context. The series also includes a screening of the Academy Award–Nominated documentary Orchestra of Exiles, a film about Bronislaw Huberman, the Polish violinist who founded the Israel Philharmonic.

Bard MAT history faculty member Thai Jones explores an early American anarchist and a revolutionary economic system.

This month, the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College launches the inaugural edition of its annual journal, HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. “HA offers smart, nonpartisan thinking about politics that is smarter than the debate," says Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz.

Daniel Mendelsohn, award-winning author, critic, and Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College since 2006, has been named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism for his most recent book, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture.

Gilles Peress, Bard College visiting professor of human rights and photography and internationally renowned photojournalist, is exhibiting work in Art or Evidence: The Power of Photojournalism, on view from January 3 through March 10 at the Mandeville Gallery, Union College in Schenectady, New York.

"All those jokes about Bard students always talking about Hannah Arendt or Foucault or Derrida are pretty true," says junior Julia DeFabo. Read Julia's story and other student stories:

What does it mean to be human? How can we consider freedom and constraint in the year 2013? Bard's Center for Civic Engagement invites students from the Bard network of institutions to examine these questions in a written essay or multimedia piece for its annual contest. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2013.

A handwritten inscription in a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, gifted from publisher Kurt Wolff to Hannah Arendt, stands as a symbol of survival on many levels: from the survival of the names mentioned to the survival of friendship, to the implications of the date. Bard College senior Kerk Soursourian investigates.

The Association for Social Economics (ASE) has awarded Pavlina R. Tcherneva, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and assistant professor of economics at Bard, the 2013 Helen Potter Prize. The prize was created and endowed by the ASE in 1975 and is awarded each year to a promising scholar of social economics for authoring the best article in The Review of Social Economy.

What place do the humanities have in a global economy increasingly focused on educating a work force for business, finance, and technology? Bard leaders weighed in with the New Indian Express. "Without humanities, social sciences and arts," says Bard IILE Director Susan Gillespie, "we won’t have just and liveable societies or even prosperous economies." Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz adds that teaching the humanities is about "transmitting a tradition of meaning and substance, texts and ideas that can inspire young people to care more for the common world they share than for their parochial or personal interests."

Is hipster culture sincere? The conversation about irony and sincerity has been around at least since Ancient Greece. Josh Kopin writes for the Arendt Center blog on this latest iteration and the cultural conversation around it.

Daniel Mendelsohn, award-winning author, critic, and Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College since 2006, was among 180 influential artists, scientists, scholars, authors, and institutional leaders who were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, October 6.

What is more worrisome, the dehumanization of human beings, or the humanization of robots? Political Studies professor and Hannah Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz looks at the convergence of human and artificial intelligence.