News

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.

The Hannah Arendt Center's new book, The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis, contains essays by Bard faculty members and other notable scholars and economists.

Michèle D. Dominy, professor of anthropology, began teaching at Bard in February 1981.

She received her A.B. degree with honors from Bryn Mawr College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Professor Dominy's teaching interests include the anthropology of place, feminist anthropology, interpretive anthropology, the anthropology of religion, and the ethnography of communication. Her research areas include land, culture and identity in settler societies; place attachment and sustainability in mountain lands; and empire and ecology. She has conducted long-term field research in the high country of New Zealand and Australia. She is the author of Calling the Station Home: Place and Identity in New Zealand’s High Country (2001) and articles and reviews in Signs, New Zealand Women’s Studies Journal, Pacific Studies, Anthropology Today, Gender and Society, Pacific Affairs, Landfall: A New Zealand Quarterly, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Forest and Conservation History, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Forum, Cultural Anthropology, Man, Landscape Review, Current Anthropology, Journal of Political Ecology, Ecumene, The Contemporary Pacific, and edited volumes and proceedings. She was the guest coeditor of a special issue of Anthropological Forum on “Critical Ethnography in the Pacific,” and is a past editor of the Pacific Monograph Series, University of Pennsylvania Press. She has received awards and grants from Cornell University and Center for International Studies; National Science Foundation; United States/New Zealand Council; Wenner-Gren Foundation; National Endowment for the Humanities; Cultural Heritage Conservation Research Centre at the University of Canberra; and the Bard Research Fund. She is an honorary life member of the American Anthropological Association and Fellow of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, the Royal Anthropological Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Professor Dominy is an evaluator at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Most recently she has served on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist and on the board of the American Conference of Academic Deans. She is affiliated with the Global and International Studies, Gender Studies and Sexuality, and Environmental and Urban Studies programs. She served as dean of the college from 2001-2015 and as vice president from 2006 until 2015.

"This election should be about a frank acknowledgement of the unsustainability of our economic, social, and environmental practices and expectations," says Arendt Center Director Roger Berkowitz. "We should be talking together about how we should remake our future in ways that are both just and exciting. This election should be scary and exciting. But so far it's small-minded and ugly."

These Bard students spent the summer working for human rights at publications, think tanks, and NGOs from New Delhi to Chicago.

Looking for a summer project? Today the Hannah Arendt Center announced the 2012 Thinking Challenge: "Does the President Matter?" Create a blog post, video, or multimedia piece and enter to win cash prizes and a place at their fall conference.

Myra Young Armstead is Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies. 

She specializes in U.S. social history, with emphasis on urban and African American history. Armstead is the recipient of Danforth-Compton, Josephine de Kármán, University of Chicago Trustees, and New York State African-American Research Institute fellowships; and the Frederick Douglass Award from the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History (Sullivan County, New York, chapter). She is Speaker in the Humanities for the New York Council for the Humanities (2003–present) and she is a member of the New York Academy of History (2006– ). Armstead is the author of Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America (2012); “Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August”: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs (1999); and Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (2003). She received her B.A. at Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She has been on the Bard faculty since 1985.

Jonathan Becker is vice president for academic affairs, associate professor of political studies, and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College.

Dr. Jonathan Becker is the director of the Center for Civic Engagement and vice president for international affairs and civic engagement at Bard. He is also an associate professor of political studies specializing in Russian and eastern European politics, media and politics, and education reform. Jonathan arrived at Bard in 1997. For a decade, Jonathan has overseen the academic development of Bard’s international partnerships, including those in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and the West Bank. He also played a central role in founding Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City; Bard’s debate and Model United Nations teams; and election.bard.edu, which registers students to vote, facilitates student internships with local officials, and has fought voter suppression efforts in Dutchess County.

Mark Danner is a writer and reporter who for 25 years has written on politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict. He has covered, among many other stories, wars and political conflict in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, and, most recently, the story of torture during the War on Terror.

Danner is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and Chancellor's Professor of Journalism, English, and Politics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Bard since 2003. Among his books are Stripping Bare the Body (2009), The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (2006), Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (2004), and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner was a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times, Aperture, and many other newspapers and magazines. He co-wrote and helped produce two hour-long documentaries for the ABC News program Peter Jennings Reporting, and his work has received, among other honors, a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In 1999 Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. He speaks and lectures widely on foreign policy and America's role in the world.

Jonathan Brent is the Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College. He is also the director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, Bard's partner in the Bard-YIVO Institute for East European Jewish History and Culture.

Brent is the author of Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia (2008), Stalin's Last Crime (2003, named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Financial Times), and Isaac Babel (forthcoming). He is the editor of The Best of TriQuarterly (1982) and A John Cage Reader (1984). Brent has held editorial positions at Yale University Press, Northwestern University Press, FORMATIONS, and TriQuarterly. As executive editor at Yale in 1992, Brent founded the internationally acclaimed Annals of Communism series. He has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Scholar, New Criterion, New Republic, New York Times, Commentary, and many other newspapers and journals. He received the Whiting Foundation Fellowship in 1977. Brent earned his B.A. at Columbia University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has been a member of Bard's faculty since 2004.

The New Yorker staff writer and author of the award-winning book Denialism will be teaching the course "Global Politics of Food" in the fall.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. An award-winning writer and critic and author of the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, he was born on Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton.

Since 1991, when he began publishing, his essays and reviews have appeared in many publications, most frequently in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He has also been the weekly book critic for New York and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and is presently a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. The Lost, published by HarperCollins in 2006, won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors, and has been published in more than 15 languages. Other books include a memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), a New York Times Notable Book of the year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a collection of his reviews, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2008), a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and an acclaimed two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), also a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Mendelsohn’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and two Mellon Foundation awards. In 2012 he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008 Daniel Mendelsohn was named by the Economist as one of the best critics writing in the English language.

Roger Berkowitz has been teaching political theory, legal thought, and human rights at Bard College since 2005. He is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

Professor Berkowitz is an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher, and writer. His interests stretch from Greek and German philosophy to legal history and from the history of science to images of justice in film and literature. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition; coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics; editor of Revenge and Justice, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and a contributing editor to Rechtsgeschichte. His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals. Roger Berkowitz received his B.A. from Amherst College; J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

“Whether Sudan is considered as a single country or two, cultural diversity and ethnic complexity are among its most immediately striking features. Between them, north and South Sudan are host to two world religions, myriad local belief systems and hundreds of indigenous languages (rivalling Africa’s most polyglot nations, Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo). The modes of livelihood of contemporary Sudanese range from the daily commute of the urban middle-class in the expanding suburbs of Khartoum to the long-range migrations of camel pastoralists in the arid lands of eastern Sudan. And from the deal-making of merchants and itinerant street-traders and the field labour of tenant-farmers in the Gezira to the domestic cultivations of Equatorian forest-dwellers and the seasonal movement of cattle keepers in the swamps and savannahs of Bahr al-Ghazal.” 

Page 31 in Ryle, John (2011). “Peoples & Cultures of Two Sudans.” Chapter 4 in John Ryle, Justin Willis, Sulimam Baldo, and Jok Madut Jok, eds. The Sudan Handbook. Woodbridge: James Currey.

"Germany has repeatedly relied on temporary labor recruitment as a central means of negotiating the paradoxes of liberal industrial democracy. In order to examine the legacies of this practice," writes Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jeffery Jurgens, "I place the Federal Republic's two most prominent recruitment measures, the 1955–1973 guest worker program and the 2000–2004 Green Card program, within a larger history of migration, policymaking, and public debate."

My position is that the [German] Federal Republic's repeated reliance on labor recruitment responds to the exigencies of a particular historical conjuncture, but not the one identified by Castles. Rather than locating recruitment within a structuring of the global political economy that is now a thing of the past, I regard the guest worker and Green programs as comparable efforts to negotiate the enduring “liberal paradox” that confronts postwar industrial democracies (Hollifield, 1992; Hollifield, 2004 J. Hollifield). This paradox emerges through the interplay, on the one hand, of global economic forces that impel these states to adopt postures of openness in matters of trade, investment, and migration and, on the other, of those domestic political forces and aspects of the international state system that prompt them to maintain closure. The paradox has a liberal character because it pits classical liberal principles, including free trade and individual rights, against mandates that underpin the international state system, above all state sovereignty and territorial closure. And it arises with particular urgency in relation to migration, which alters the composition of the populace in a manner that can and does provoke anxieties about the social contract on which government legitimacy is based (Walzer, 1983). Viewed from this perspective, the guest worker and Green Card programs constitute attempts to admit workers in pursuit of the state's economic interests without transforming the society over which it governs.

This line of analysis, however, does not entirely explain why the Federal Republic would have favored temporary recruitment as the means to negotiate the paradoxes of liberal statehood. Why not pursue a policy of targeted permanent immigration? (This is, in fact, what Germany did, but only beginning in 2005.) In order to deal with this issue, we need to situate the two programs within the Federal Republic's record of contradictory, ambivalent, but nevertheless restrictionist policymaking in relation to ethnically non-German migrants. On the other hand, the Federal Republic actively encouraged the immigration of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, although it employed various measures to limit the inflow beginning in 1990 (Joppke, 1999). From the mid 1970s to the late 1990s, this tradition was expressed in the federal government's oft-repeated claim that Germany was “not a country of immigration” (kein Einwanderungsland). To be sure, this official position was and is belied by the millions of immigrants who have settled in the Federal Republic since the 1960s, and successive federal governments have gradually reformulated the country's foreigner and migration policies. On the whole, though, restrictionist impulses have proven remarkably persistent in both policymaking and public debate, and they provide a relevant backdrop for the guest worker and Green Card programs.

page 346 in Jurgens, Jeffery (2010). “The Legacies of Labor Recruitment: The Guest Worker and Green Card Programs in the Federal Republic of Germany.” Policy and Society 29: 345-355.

In 2001, UNICEF initiated a new youth program that began broadcasting on radios throughout Nepal. The program, called Sāthi Sanga Man Kā Kura, or “Chatting with My Best Friend,” was initially started with the objective of preventing drug use and HIV from spreading among Nepali youth. Its broader agenda, as stated on their website, is to provide a “confidential and open platform where anyone can open their heart out on issues deeply related to them” (SSMK 2001). By talking with the radio hosts of this program about intimate matters, the program's designers suggest people will learn to “deal with problems on their own.” Sāthi Sanga Man Kā Kura (henceforth SSMK) seeks to create a person who can speak directly and intimately with strangers on the radio program, friends and family they meet regularly, and most importantly, with themselves. Ultimately, the program envisions that direct speech with others will have profound effects on listener's own self‐perception. Communicating with others in this manner will ostensibly lead to the development of an uninhibited person capable of taking matters into his or her own hands. The program thus aims to create the ideal neoliberal subject implicit in many international aid organizations like UNICEF: a subject who is self‐sufficient and can make his or her own choices, often based on market logic. For such a subject, one's personal life—and most importantly, how one speaks about it—becomes the paradigmatic site of political transformation. In this article, I suggest that the ideology of directness is associated with a linguistic ideology that centers on the idea and powers of the voice.

Kunreuther, Laura. "Transparent media: radio, voice, and ideologies of directness in postdemocratic Nepal." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20.2 (2010): 334-351.