News

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.

The United States Military Academy at West Point is only 60 miles away from Bard, but philosophically, the two institutions are a million miles apart. Right? Not necessarily. (In the Bardian, page 36)

This article examines the land and its biota as actors in colonialist and postcolonialist processes in Aotearoa-New Zealand. It provides a cultural analysis of Monday's warriors, Maurice Shadbolt's novel of cultural encounter between Maori prophet Titokowaru and nineteenth-century colonials, Herbert Guthrie-Smith's environmental history Tutira: the story of a New Zealand sheep station, and the author's ethnographic fieldwork in the South Island pastoral high country. 

“Crosby devotes one of his chapters to ecological change in nineteenth-century New Zealand - a case study of ecological processes that are 'truly planetary in scope' and with a 'dramatic suddenness and the self-consciousness of those who participated in it [that] has parallels everywhere'. Alan Grey writes: 'The hundred years following 1840 saw the islands that Europeans named New Zealand change from mostly rainforest to mostly grass.' Grey also writes of the remarkable 'speed and thoroughness with which the native flora was stripped and [the land] covered with alien grasses and other plants'. Not only is New Zealand insular and small, developing, in Crosby's words, in 'splendid isolation', but the dramatic biotic changes that accompanied European settlement were observed scientifically and preserved as part of the best-documented history of all European settlements.
[...]
The article argues that introduced grass as a material commodity with social value, and as an instrument of colonial domination and its accompanying agricultural conquest, is an ecological signifier through which identity can be emplaced and land embodied for pakeha and Maori actors. Thinking through grasslands better enables us to consider the mixed authenticities of place and identity. This works as a device for revealing the twisted entanglements within emergent postcolonialism, as Aotearoa, like other settlement nations, collectively invents itself and discovers that there is no fixed place to which one can return” 

pages 15 and 16 in Dominy, Michèle (2002). “Hearing Grass, Thinking Grass: Postcolonialism and Ecology in Aotearoa-New Zealand.” Cultural Geographies 9: 15-34.

Professor Brown explores the history and development of the syncretistic Brazilian religion of Umbanda, from its beginnings in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920s to the late 1970s, examining its changing spectrum of practices, followers, and beliefs.

“On New Year’s Eve 1993, from the window of a Rio de Janeiro apartment overlooking Copacabana beach, I waited expectantly for the worshippers of Yemanjá to arrive, dressed for her ceremonies, the women resplendent in their long, white lace-trimmed outfits or in brightly colored full satin skirts. I wanted to see them loaded down with flowers, candles, food and drink; to watch them set up these offerings in the sand and begin their ceremonies; to go down and join them. In 1970, the last New Year’s Eve I had spent in Rio doing research for this book, the evening had begun with a religious procession much like those for Catholic saint days except that it was the Afro-Brazilian sea deity Yemanjá whose image was carried aloft to the edge of the beach, accompanied by thousands of Umbanda worshippers carrying lighted candles and singing Umbanda hymns and, at the head of the procession, the Umbandista politicians who were the secular patrons of the public event. Then this famous beach, a long crescent of white sand framed by the lights of the buildings along the shore, had become so densely crowded with Umbanda rituals that I could hardly move among them” 

Page xv in Brown, Diana DeG. 1986. Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. New York: Columbia. (Quotation from 1994 edition.)

 “As an anthropologist and a teacher, my most difficult problem has been to explain to myself and to my students how one could extend the concept of culture from the small-scale societies traditionally studied by anthropologists to our own society [...] Seeing myself reflected in the mirror of my immigrant parents, in the experience of travel and field work, has made it difficult to give up a sense of cultural identity, and has led me to pursue my intuition that there is an American culture in some definable sense. My quest has led me to the subject of this paper, baseball. I will argue that baseball, not as a ritual, not as a social structure, not as a set of multivocalic symbols, but as a system of shared knowledge and experience, may provide a key to the thorny problem of cultural identity and continuity in a complex nation state.

What I am suggesting is not a definition of, or delineation of American culture or culture as a concept. Though I may occasionally lapse into the murkiness of national character, I do so inadvertently. [....] I see the ability of members of a society to communicate through a common idiom and shared system of experience and related knowledge as central to the issue of identity”

Page 37 in Bick, Mario (1978). "Double Play: Notes on American Baseball." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 318(1): 37-49.