News

Three Bard College alumni/ae—Beatrice Abbott ’15, Megumi Kivuva ’22, and Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21—have been awarded competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2023 award year. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) aims to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States” and “seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans” through selection, recognition, and financial support of individuals who have demonstrated the potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers early in their careers.

Beatrice Abbott ’15, who majored in political studies at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of social sciences. She is a master’s student in geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include evidence/forensics, critical migration studies, critical cartography and geographic information systems (GIS), and visual culture.

Megumi Kivuva ’22, who majored in Spanish studies and computer science with a concentration in Experimental Humanities at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of STEM education and learning research. Kivuva is a PhD student in computing education at the University of Washington. Their research “aims to broaden participation in computing education for Black and refugee students,” and they “use community participatory research to understand the barriers to accessing computing education and codesign interventions to make computing education more accessible to these communities.”
 
Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21, who majored in mathematics at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of mathematical biology. He is a PhD student in mathematical sciences at the University of Vermont. The fellowship will allow him to focus on his research project, "Decoding Parallel Processing in the Brain using the Connectome Eigenfunctions." 

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The five-year fellowship period provides a three-year annual stipend of $37,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees, as well as access to opportunities for professional development. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. Each year, the NSF receives more than 12,000 applications to the GRFP program, which has awarded fellowships to its selected scholars since 1952.

The Inaugural Rethinking Place Toni Morrison Lecture will take place on Thursday, April 20 at 6 pm in the Bitó Auditorium of the Reem-Kayden Center, Bard College. Delivered by Glenda Carpio, Chair of the English Department and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the lecture “Migrant Aesthetics,” adapted from Carpio’s forthcoming book of the same title, shows how through artistic innovation, contemporary authors allow us to apprehend the historical legacies and political injustice that produce forced migration. A reception prior to the talk will be hosted by Samosa Shack Kingston at 5 pm.

Sponsored by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times project, this lecture series celebrates the work of both Electa “Wuhwehweeheemeew” Quinney, a citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican nation and the first woman to teach in a public school in the territory which would become Wisconsin; and the American novelist, essayist, and editor, Toni Morrison, who was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Bard College from 1979–1981. The series invites luminaries from fields like Native American and Indigenous studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and Black studies to give one lecture each fall and spring semester over the grant duration which models the kind of multi-disciplinary and intersectional scholarship that Rethinking Place seeks to promote.

The Quinney-Morrison Lecture Series provides opportunities for academics and other regional partners to learn what work needs to be done in the creation of land acknowledgement projects. It provides space to reflect on individuals' relationships with spaces, lands, and borders, to dissuade action without reflection, and to share responsibilities for encouraging this type of thought and engagement beyond tribal communities to all.

Bard College students, faculty, and staff along with non-Bard affiliated community members are welcomed. Please join us prior to the talk at 5 pm for a reception hosted by Samosa Shack Kingston. A recording of the lecture will be available upon request.

Glenda R. Carpio is the Chair of the English Department and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008). She coedited African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019).

Bard’s “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment and is supported by the Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Humanities for All Times. The Mellon grant offers three years of support for developing a land acknowledgment–based curriculum, public-facing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) programming, and efforts to support the work of emerging NAIS scholars and tribally enrolled artists at Bard. Rethinking Place emphasizes broad community-based knowledge, collaboration, and collectives of inquiry and also attends to the importance of considering the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, upon whose homelands Bard sits.

Bard College’s Division of Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Valentina A. Grasso as Assistant Professor of Medieval History. Her tenure-track appointment will begin in the fall of the 2023–24 academic year.

Grasso is currently an assistant professor of Semitics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. She was previously visiting assistant professor at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, an affiliate member of the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Qur'an as a Source for Late Antiquity,” and of the Cambridge Silk Road Program, which focuses on the study of the history and culture of the Silk Road countries. She is part of the committee of the London Society for Medieval Studies and a chair of the Society of Biblical Literature and International Qur'anic Studies Association (SBL/IQSA) “Qur'an and Late Antiquity” Program Unit. 

Grasso holds a Ph.D. (Divinity, 2021) from the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctoral dissertation which came out as a monograph, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. She is currently working on her second monograph while co-editing a volume on Indic imagery (Brepols 2024) and a special issue on Arabian epigraphy and Early Islam. 

Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) CCS ’03 recently joined Bard’s faculty as part of the College’s transformative initiatives in Native American and Indigenous studies, developed in partnership with Forge Project and supported by a $50 million endowment. Hopkins, CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies and Forge Project’s executive director, speaks with Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds (Diné/Navajo) for ArtReview about Indigenous self-determination and the importance of this new collaboration between the Native-led arts and cultural organization Forge and Bard College. “We realized that we could attempt to enact quite radical institutional change through a partnership between Forge and Bard,” said Hopkins. “One of those involved naming: American Studies is now American and Indigenous Studies. There are cluster hires for faculty at all different levels, and scholarships (including living expenses) for Native students. There is also support for the recruitment of Native students, because Native students do not always know what opportunities are out there for them. And if they do not know then they are not going to apply. But if they also do not see themselves represented, people are going to feel really alienated when they come to a place.” 

Hopkins notes that these College-wide initiatives, including the establishment of a Center for Indigenous Studies, were “built upon the good work that Bard was already doing with their Andrew W. Mellon grant called ‘Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck’. At the center of it was the question of ‘how do we make land acknowledgments actionable?’ because they have become often rote, performative and not based on real collaboration or community engagement.”

Announced in September 2022, these initiatives are having an immediate impact on Bard’s community and its undergraduate and graduate academic programs. “The intent was for this to be felt right away, and I am already seeing it happening. People are coming here; more Native folks are coming to teach and be engaged with postdoctoral students. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it and what students do, what impact that they make,” she said. 

Hopkins, who currently advises and teaches at CCS Bard, will curate a major exhibition Indian Theater, opening June 24, 2023 at the Hessel Museum of Art.

Bard College student Ariha Shahed ’26 has won a Davis Projects for Peace prize for her proposal, “Train Track to Right Track: Supporting Bangladeshis Who Call the Railway Tracks Their Home.” Ariha, a first-year economics and politics major from Bangladesh, will receive $10,000 to work with Bangladeshi families living in extreme poverty along the country’s railway tracks, communities which often go unnoticed. Partnering with NGO initiative BRAC Bangladesh, Ariha will help families connect with essential social protection programmes, access healthcare, keep their children in school, and improve their economic situations by sustainable and continual support.

Ariha’s project is designed to provide avenues for both short-term and long-term support to these communities through multiple efforts. It seeks to give families a way to re-establish their lives through BRAC’s “Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative,” which aims to help people ‘graduate’ from extreme poverty, and will operate out of workshop hubs near train stations in the country’s three largest cities, Dhaka, Chattogram, and Sylhet. Healthcare volunteers will offer basic health classes to those living along the tracks in these cities, and Ariha will partner with a small local restaurant to organize a food drive to distribute meal boxes from these hubs. “This way, we can incentivize a long-term solution for them using a short-term solution, which have been proven to work better when supporting people in extreme humanitarian need,” Ariha writes in her proposal. 

“The disparity between the families living below the poverty line along the rail-tracks and my own trips inside the comfort of a car had always struck me,” she said. “The first step to eradicating any kind of social inequality, I believe, would be to acknowledge one’s position of privilege. This project is a small way of giving back to the country and the people that raised me—something my parents have always valued. I want to thank my friend Mikaail Kaiser Shahabuddin (Davis Alum, Clark University ‘26) who will be helping me to co-facilitate this project and for his insights. As a Davis Alum myself, I’m overwhelmed and grateful to the Davis Foundation for such opportunities that help call attention to often neglected places like Bangladesh.”

Projects for Peace, a Davis Foundation initiative facilitated by Middlebury College in Vermont, is a global program that partners with other educational institutions to identify and support peacebuilders and changemakers across college campuses. Every year, 100 or more student leaders are awarded a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to implement a “Project for Peace” anywhere in the world. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/office/projects-for-peace.

Bard College’s Division of Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Youssef Ait Benasser as Assistant Professor of Economics. Their tenure-track appointment will begin in the fall of the 2023–24 academic year.

“Bard’s global engagement provides the ideal environment for my work in international economics,” said Benasser. “I am excited to contribute to the disruptive research and support the transformative learning that sets Bard’s community apart in the social sciences and beyond.”

Born in Rabat, Morocco, Youssef A. Benasser (they/he) received a BA in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and an MSc in Economics and Public Policy from Ecole Polytechnique (X), before completing their PhD in Economics at the University of Oregon. Their research agenda is influenced by decolonial critics of the Bretton-Wood international economic system and inspired by the Third World’s quest for an alternative economic project. It centers on empirical assessments of recent trends in international trade policy, such as policy uncertainty, reversals, or rivalries, and their impacts on the global flow of goods and money. Passionate about teaching and pedagogy, Dr. Benasser has taught in higher ed institutions for more than seven years. Their courses span macro and international economics at the introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels. Dr. Benasser also has a risk analysis background, having previously held positions in the financial and government sectors.

“Despite the persistent myth that Silicon Valley was built by rogue engineers in Palo Alto garages, federal funding — especially from the military — has long been the real developmental engine of the American technology sector,” writes Assistant Professor of History Jeannette Estruth for The Drift. Estruth traces the history of Silicon Valley and its innovations, both software and hardware, outlining the longstanding partnerships between the technology sector and the federal government. “High tech’s value has long been in producing war-making technology for the federal government,” Estruth writes, a relationship that, she argues, has historically gone both ways. With public criticism of “Big Tech” on the rise, “the public is falling out of love” with Silicon Valley and its ilk. The question now, she writes, is “whether Washington could be persuaded to do the same.”

Ian Masters spoke with Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard College, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute, and author of The Case for a Job Guarantee (2020), on his nationally syndicated radio program Background Briefing. In the episode, “As Pundits Warn of Recession and Inflation, We Get the Best Economic News Since 1969,” Masters asks Tcherneva for her take on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which added 517,000 jobs in January 2023 and stunned most economists and people who continue to harbor a doomsday mentality about the economy.

According to Tcherneva, two years after the COVID-induced crisis, such good news about low unemployment levels tells us that “public policy has tools. It can act boldly, quickly and bring jobs back.” She points out, however, that these low unemployment numbers also reflect the 5.7 million people who are not looking for work, and 4 million people who are working part-time but would like to have full-time jobs.

“Part of the anxiety still being experienced in the labor market is that the jobs are there but they are not exactly these well-paying jobs with very good benefits and good working conditions. On that front, there is more to be accomplished. Let us remember our minimum wage is still $7.25, and no one can live on $7.25 an hour,” she asserts.

Tcherneva sees the big fiscal policies implemented over the last two years by the Biden administration, which do not overly focus on the financial sector or prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy, as all good news. Still, she advocates for more economic progress. “The question for me is did we come out of the pandemic with better jobs, better conditions for working families than we had going into the pandemic?”

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Sucharita Kanjilal as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2023-24 academic year.
 
Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her dissertation project, Home Chefs: Indian Housewives Produce for the Global Creator Economy, examines the entanglements of gender, race, caste and religious nationalism in the growth of global digital capitalism, through an ethnographic study of food media producers in India.
 
Kanjilal’s research combines approaches from economic anthropology, anthropology of media, digital anthropology, anthropology of food, and theories of affect, while highlighting feminist, postcolonial, and anti-caste epistemologies. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, the Routledge Companion on Caste and Cinema in India, Feminist Media Studies (forthcoming), Scroll.in, Quartz.com, Hindustan Times, and the Heritage Radio Network and Eat This podcasts. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, the UCLA International Institute and the Sambhi Foundation at UCLA.

A diplomatic dispute over an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon seen over Montana echoes a similar Cold War event, writes Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, for the Washington Post. In the U-2 crisis of 1960, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, reversing years of progress in relations between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “Lessons from that crisis tell us two things,” writes Aldous. “That unexpected events can destroy years of diplomatic effort; and that the Chinese are likely now scrambling in a panic to get their story straight.” In a statement analogous to China’s current response, NASA had claimed that the plane was used for weather research and gone off course, which Eisenhower was obliged to renounce when he later took responsibility for the spy planes used for information gathering. “The concern about the historical parallel with 1960,” Aldous continues, “Is that the U-2 crisis marked the beginning of one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.”

Bard College Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and MFA alum in Music/Sound and American and Indigenous Studies Program faculty member Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which will fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined. 
 
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support. 
 
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director. 
 
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan. 
 
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
 
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College. 
 
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.

The American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession (CSQIEP) has awarded Associate Professor of Economics Michael Martell their annual Award for Outstanding Research Paper in LGBTQ+ Economics. “Gender typicality and sexual minority labour market differentials,” Martell’s winning paper, coauthored with Ian Burn of the University of Liverpool, was published in December 2022 in BJIR.

Bard College alumnus Liam Gomez ’22 is among the first Peace Corps volunteers to return to overseas service since the agency’s unprecedented global evacuation in March 2020. The Peace Corps suspended global operations and evacuated nearly 7,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gomez, from Red Hook, New York, graduated in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He will serve as an education volunteer in the nation of Georgia. He first became interested in the Peace Corps while he was studying abroad in Russia on a Bard language intensive program. He enjoys both speaking and writing in the Russian language, a language he acquired at Bard.

“The Peace Corps was always an option thrown around to employ my language skills post-graduation. I also always love a change of scenery and the challenges that will come from this experience, although daunting, excite me more than anything else,” said Gomez. “I see the Peace Corps as a perfect opportunity for both personal growth and helping others.”

In a recently published article about Gomez, the Red Hook Daily Catch writes "he formally applied to the corps in July 2021 at the height of the pandemic, specifically asking to be sent to Ukraine or Georgia, with the hope of improving his Russian language skills. Georgia attracted him for other reasons, too, notably the food and family culture. Known for khachapuri, a flat cake with cheese, meat, or steamed fish, Georgian cuisine is also famous for various sweet pastries. ‘Their country sounded very alluring,’ Gomez said. ‘The food, how closely and tightly knit the families are, Georgian cheese, it all sounded great.’"

The Peace Corps volunteer cohorts are made up of both first-time volunteers and volunteers who were evacuated in early 2020. Upon finishing a three-month training, volunteers will collaborate with their host communities on locally prioritized projects in one of Peace Corps’ six sectors—agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health or youth in development—and all will engage in COVID-19 response and recovery work.

Currently, the agency is recruiting volunteers to serve in 56 countries around the world at the request of host country governments, to connect through the Peace Corps grassroots approach across communities and cultures. Volunteers have already returned to a total of 47 countries around the world. The Peace Corps continues to monitor COVID-19 trends in all of its host countries and will send volunteers to serve as conditions permit. Americans interested in transformative service and lifelong connections should apply to Peace Corps service at www.peacecorps.gov/apply. Apply before April 1 to make a global connection by fall 2023.
 

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes. For Sonevytsky, the brilliance of the statement is how its innocuous phrasing, at first glance a simple greeting, masks its inherent radicalism and defiance of the Russian’s state’s attempts to deny Ukraine’s existence. “The slogan works precisely because it does not traffic in the essentializing rhetoric of being Ukrainian,” she continues. “It is not for an individual declaring an identity: ‘I am Ukrainian.’ It is instead a collective, matter-of-fact statement: ‘We are from Ukraine.’ This also implies—and I still resent that this must be said, but here we are—that Ukraine exists, is a legitimate place, and contains people who claim it as home.”

Reflecting on his perilous days as a US military attache in Beirut, Ambassador Frederic C. Hof argues there is more to successful diplomacy than conferences. Much of the essential work of diplomacy, he writes, is collecting and reporting information, rather than in formal or high-profile negotiations, and a great deal of this work is carried out not by professional civilian diplomats but by military attaches serving under the direction of the ambassador. Frederic C. Hof is diplomat in residence at Bard and the author of Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace.

Bard Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky has received a fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in support of her book project, Singing for Lenin in Soviet Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future. NEH Fellowships support advanced research in the humanities by college and university teachers and independent scholars. Sonevytsky’s award supports her research and writing leading to a book about Soviet education and children’s musical practices in Soviet Ukraine, from 1934 to 1991.

Spectacles of musical childhood were widespread in Soviet life. Children’s groups performed at political events, factories, and international festivals. They were showcased on Soviet radio and television, and institutionalized in “Palaces of Pioneers.” Inculcating children into Soviet norms of citizenship, gender, and musicality was a vital project to ensure the longevity of the USSR, yet both children and music present unruly vectors through which to achieve the goals of norming. 

Singing for Lenin in Soviet Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future, follows the “imperial turn” in Soviet historiography to Soviet Ukraine, interpreting the dynamic arena of children’s musical practices through newly discovered archival materials and original interviews. The research reveals how Soviet Ukrainian children and their educators creatively recast the prerogatives of Soviet education, with its promise of a stateless Communist future. Paying attention to performance, embodiment, and sound, Sonevytsky aims to restore a fuller sensorium to the emerging understanding of how Soviet children and childhood appeared and were managed within the Soviet state, while observing how children and their teachers reacted to—and sometimes against—the ideological dimensions of Soviet musical education. 

“The Biden administration faces a real dilemma,” writes Professor Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. “Feeling overstretched against Russian aggression in Ukraine and Chinese ambition in the Indo-Pacific, the White House wants to minimize its exposure to the Middle East. Yet the region is too important to ignore—and the more the U.S. withdraws, the more influence it sheds. As America becomes less relevant, regional actors feel free to make more decisions that Washington dislikes, effectively undermining U.S. influence around the globe.” Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College.

Yuval Elmelech, an associate professor of sociology at Bard College and author of the book Wealth, spoke with Marketplace about the difficulty millennials face in buying a house, especially in cities such as San Francisco and New York where they are being priced out and even forced to relocate. For many who live there, parental wealth has made a big difference. “If parents can help their children buy a home, this means that these children will need to rely less on loans and mortgages,” he said. “Whereas other young couples, individuals who cannot rely on parental resources—and this is the majority of the population—will have to take out higher loans.”

ARTnews highlighted individuals and institutions that had a significant impact on public engagement with Indigenous art in 2022, including Bard College on the short list. In September, the College announced a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation to support a renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program. A matching commitment by the Open Society Foundations will create a $50 million endowment for Native American and Indigenous Studies in undergraduate and graduate academics and the arts in Annandale, to include a center for Indigenous Studies and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).

Polling shows the British people and Americans are coalescing around the idea that Brexit and Trump were, respectively, mistakes for each country. When it comes to long-lasting impact, however, in Ian Buruma’s view, it’s no contest which is worse. “While Brexit and the election of Trump caused severe shocks to both Britain and the US, it looks like the damage of Brexit will be worse and last longer,” writes Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, for Bloomberg. Poor leadership is, in the long run, easier to recover from than a disastrous referendum, he writes, as the latter “cannot be easily undone.” For the United States, “as long as [Trump] does not return for another term in 2024, much of the damage he did can probably be undone.” With Brexit, no matter the change in leadership, “most people in Britain will be worse off and the country will continue to lag behind its neighbors for the foreseeable future.”

Five Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 452 U.S. colleges and represent 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 81 countries through October 2023.
 
Written Arts major Havvah Keller ’24, from Montpelier, Vermont, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Valparaíso, Chile, on CEA’s Spanish Language and Latin American Studies program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, for spring 2023. “Receiving this scholarship means that I will be able to fulfill my dream of studying Spanish in total immersion, living with a local family in an art-filled, exuberant city, and studying Latin American and Chilean poetry and literature, as well as many other subjects such as Latin American history, Indigenous dances and arts of the Mapuche people, and making international friends of all backgrounds. I am eternally grateful to Gilman for helping me plant the seeds which will open many incredible doors for me in my life this spring, and beyond,” said Keller.
 
Philosophy and German Studies joint major Bella Bergen ’24, from Broomfield, Colorado, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman Scholarship allows me to pursue studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. I have never left the country despite a deep desire to do so, and the Gilman Scholarship helps me finally accomplish this goal. As a joint major in Philosophy and German Studies, my studies and language proficiency will both benefit greatly from my time in Germany. Ich freue mich auf Berlin,” said Bergen.
 
Art History and Visual Culture major Elsa Joiner ’24, from Dunwoody, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman scholarship will enable me to study the subject of my dreams, sound art, in the city of my greatest fantasies, Berlin, Germany. With the scholarship, I plan to explore the role of sound in identity formation and develop my skills as a deep listener, eventually returning to America with the strongest ears in the world and, perhaps, the sharpest mind,” said Joiner.
 
Art History and Visual Culture and Film Studies joint major Sasha Alcocer ’24, from New York, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “As a first-generation American, I am incredibly honored and humbled by the support from the Gilman scholarship to pursue this unique opportunity to learn from and connect with like-minded international students and Berlin-based creatives. Having grown up in New York City, I’ve always been interested in artistic communities and cultural history, therefore Berlin could not be a better place to be immersed in for my studies abroad,” said Alcocer.
 
Asian Studies and GIS joint major Kelany De La Cruz ’24, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship, in addition to a $5,000 Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman ASIA scholarship, to study in Taipei, Taiwan, on the CET Taiwan program for spring 2023. “To me these scholarships mean encouragement to follow my academic and professional dreams because I would not have been able to study abroad without them,” said De La Cruz.
 
Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 36,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 
 
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
 
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
 
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard College, research associate at Bard’s Levy Economics Institute, and director of the Open Society University Network's Economic Democracy Initiative, recently met with government officials in Bogotá, Colombia, to present her proposal for a national job guarantee program. At the invitation of Vice Minister of Finance Diego Guevara, Professor Tcherneva met with five government divisions: the ministries of energy, development, finance, and culture, and the SAE (Sociedad de Activos Especiales, or Special Assets Society), which administers seized assets of narcotics traffickers in the country.

“The job guarantee is an economic policy that provides public employment opportunities on demand to anyone seeking decent, living-wage work,” Tcherneva says. “It is a structural stabilization policy that alleviates the economic, social, and political costs of unemployment and precarious employment. It is equity-driven and draws on a long tradition of human rights and social justice.” Governments all over the world have implemented policies that provide some level of job guarantee, though none have a truly universal job guarantee program. One example in U.S. history is the Works Progress Administration. Part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the agency employed millions of Americans on a wide range of public works projects during the Great Depression.

Three Bard students have won prestigious Schwarzman Scholarships. Edris Tajik ’23, a student who is from Afghanistan studying at Bard College’s Annandale campus, Michael Nyakundi ’23, a student who is from Kenya studying at Bard College Berlin, and Evan Tims ’19, a Bard Annandale alumnus from Maine, have been selected to join the eighth class of Schwarzman Scholars, a fully-funded, one-year master’s degree and leadership program in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Tajik, Tims, and Nyakundi are three of 151 scholars, from 36 countries and 121 universities, to be chosen out of almost 3,000 applicants. They are part of this year’s exceptional cohort, which comprises accomplished young leaders working at the forefronts of their industries, and will enroll in Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in August 2023. 
 
Evan Tims (Bard College ’19) grew up in coastal Maine, where he developed an early interest in the relationship between narrative, social justice, and environmental change. He earned a joint BA in human rights and written arts, received the Bard Written Arts Prize and the Christopher Wise Award in environmentalism and human rights for his Senior Project, and is the founder and director of the In 100 Years Project, an organization focused on building environmental dialogue through creative workshops. Tims is particularly focused on the social challenges of water in the 21st century. As a 2021–22 Henry J. Luce Scholar, he lived in Nepal and conducted research in the hydropower sector while leading climate engagement projects.

Edris Tajik (Bard College ’23) came to Bard last year from Afghanistan and is currently a senior majoring in Political Science. He has spent the past four years of his life on peace-building and youth empowerment projects through NGOs in Afghanistan. Edris has trained 240 students in Model United Nations and 120 students on peace-building initiatives as well as implemented six community-based projects.  Edris is a Generation Change fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and is currently interning with the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He intends to pursue a career in international relations. Edris has been named as a LeadNext Fellow at the Asia Foundation for the year 2023. He is one of ten students from Asia who has been selected to participate in this year's program.
 
Michael Nyakundi (Bard College Berlin ’23) is a Kenyan national studying economics, politics, and social thought who is interested in criminal justice reform through public policy and law. He previously interned at the Kenyan State House analyzing the impact of President Kenyatta’s Big4 agenda and has volunteered with the Kenya Red Cross and Plan International on youth-police arbitration projects. Recently, Michael led a team of 500+ to address police brutality in Soweto slums Nairobi. His project, Project Ma3, co-won the Margarita Kuchma project award this past summer. As a Schwarzman Scholar, Michael hopes to deepen his knowledge of Sino-Kenya relations.
 
Schwarzman Scholars (est. 2015) is designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century and beyond. It was inspired by the Rhodes Scholarship, which was founded in 1902 in an effort to promote international understanding and peace.
 
Schwarzman Scholars supports up to 200 Scholars annually from the U.S., China, and around the world for a one-year master’s in global affairs at Beijing’s Tsinghua University — ranked first in Asia as an indispensable base for China’s political, business, and technological leadership.
 
Scholars chosen for this highly selective program will live in Beijing for a year of study and cultural immersion — attending lectures, traveling around the region, and developing a better understanding of China.
 

This year, various media outlets are selecting works by Bard faculty members for their Best of 2022 lists. Some notable mentions include: 

Assistant Professor of Music Angelica Sanchez’s album Sparkle Beings is named one of the Best Jazz Albums of 2022 by the New York Times.

Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True is named one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review and The Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker.

Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi’s Botticelli’s Secret is named one of the Best Books of 2022 So Far in nonfiction by the New Yorker. 

James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People is named among 100 Notable Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review. 

Bard Graduate Center's Threads of Power: Lace From the Textilmuseum St. Gallen featured in the New York Times Best Art Books of 2022.
 

On January 7, 2021, Venezuela’s Special Action Forces raided the La Vega neighborhood of Caracas, leaving 23 people dead in what the community calls the “La Vega massacre.” The special police unit has been accused of targeting working-class neighborhoods, criminalizing young men for where they live as it attempts to root out gang activity. As part of an ongoing project supported by the Pulitzer Center and a Getty Images Inclusion Grant, Bard alumna Lexi Parra ’18 gets to know the women of La Vega who are maintaining their community and pushing back against state and gang violence. 

Lexi Parra majored in human rights and photography at Bard College.

Further Reading

• As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
• Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
• Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize

“The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives” Conference Features Keynote Speakers Elizabeth N. Ellis and Marisa J. Fuentes

Bard College will host its inaugural Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck conference from October 20 through 22. This conference, “The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives,” considers the topic of archives from a range of humanistic perspectives, with keynotes showcasing methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies and African and African-American Studies, as well as offering the viewpoints of contemporary artists on these topics. The DRE is the first of three annual conferences supported by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, part of the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative.

On Thursday, October 20 at 5 pm, multimedia Tsitsistas/Suhtai Nation (a.k.a. Northern Cheyenne) artist Bently Spang will open the conference with a screening and presentation in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center followed by an opening reception at the Center for Experimental Humanities in New Annandale House. On Friday, October 21, keynotes by award-winning scholars bracket a day of smaller sessions exploring and modeling ethical practices in the archive, open to students, faculty, and staff. Dr. Marisa J. Fuentes, Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, will deliver a keynote lecture, “Buried ‘Without Care’: Social Death, Discarded Lives, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade” on Friday at 9:30 am in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation (RKC). Dr. Elizabeth N. Ellis, Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, will deliver the second keynote lecture, “Recovering Indigenous Histories of Survival: Enduring Louisiana Nations” on Friday at 4 pm in Bitó Auditorium, RKC. Friday’s events, which include concurrent workshops, screenings, and presentations, also take place in RKC. On the morning of Saturday, October 22,recipients of Rethinking Place student research funding will present on their work.

On Saturday, October 22 at 2 pm, Oglála Lakȟóta scholar and multimedia artist Kite aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18 will close the conference with a talk, “Makȟóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ (Fifteen Maps),” at the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater. This event is free and open to the public. Reserve your seat here.

For the full conference schedule, click here. All events are open to Bard College students, faculty, and staff. To register click here. Keynote addresses and Bently Spang’s opening artist presentation are open to the public dependent on space. Non-Bard community members who are interested in attending, please email: [email protected].

Bard’s “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment and is supported by the Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Humanities for All Times. The Mellon grant offers three years of support for developing a land acknowledgment–based curriculum, public-facing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) programming, and efforts to support the work of emerging NAIS scholars and tribally enrolled artists at Bard. Rethinking Place emphasizes broad community-based knowledge, collaboration, and collectives of inquiry and also attends to the importance of considering the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, upon whose homelands Bard sits.

For more information, please visit rethinkingplace.bard.edu.

On his weekly podcast Bookstack, Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture, has discussed the demonization of women in power, right-wing narratives and their internet success, and American foreign policy. Speaking with authors like Eleanor Herman, Francesca Tripodi, and Michael Mandelbaum, Aldous engages writers in conversation around their new books. On the latest episode, Aldous spoke with Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, about the American-Israeli relationship, how America sees the world, and Mead’s new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.

As the world watches the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant suffer “weeks of shelling,” the potential for “another nuclear disaster on the scale of the Chernobyl explosion” looms large, writes Bard alum C Mandler ’19 for CBS news. The similarities between Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia are as much organizational as they are structural, says Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs for Bard College. Both share “an environment… in which people are disincentivized from communicating genuine problems to higher-ups,” Becker says, which could result in a “series of mistakes, which are reinforced by a system which doesn't encourage transparent communication.” A nuclear disaster in Ukraine would be catastrophic on “both human and geopolitical” levels, Becker says. Should a nuclear disaster occur, “it will be difficult to imagine the path forward after that,” he said.

 

For the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, Bard Diplomat in Residence Frederic Hof writes about the complexities that the US government, currently the Biden administration, face in trying to negotiate the release of the American journalist Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in Damascus a decade ago and is still being held hostage by Syria’s Assad regime. Hof urges media commentators to “try harder to explain to their readers what exactly they think the president should do and the potential consequences – intended or not – of what they recommend.” Emphasizing the enormous difficulty of engaging in foreign policy with Syria, Hof asserts: “As we encourage our government to act diligently to secure the freedom of Austin Tice, let us at least remember the name of the person responsible for his captivity: Bashar al-Assad.”

Professor Drew Thompson curates an exhibition dedicated to Ben Wigfall, artist, printmaker, and SUNY New Paltz’s first Black professor of art. Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village opens at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz on September 10. The exhibition surveys Wigfall's multimedia work over four decades, including pieces from the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Hampton University, as well as display prints, photographs, and other ephemera documenting Communications Village, the printmaking facility he founded in the 1970s that trained and employed local youth to assist distinguished, mostly Black printmakers. Communications Village played an essential role as an alternative space enabling artists of color to make and show their work, says Professor Thompson. “This was a subversive space, not recognized by the mainstream American art scene,” he says. The exhibition runs through December 10 at the Dorsky Museum and then travels to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Drew Thompson is associate professor of Africana and historical studies at Bard College. He has been a member of the faculty since 2013. (Chronogram)

Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación’s essay explores how a nonpartisan movement to bring attention to the depopulation of Spain’s countryside is beginning to shape national politics. “Under the banner ‘The Revolt of Emptied Spain,’ protesters from twenty-four rural provinces complained of neglect from government agencies, poor Internet service, lack of access to transportation and healthcare, and indifference from Spanish multinationals and those who live in Spain’s thriving urban centers,” writes Encarnación. “Inspired by other successful demonstrations in the capital, such as those that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005, their signs invoked the rhetoric of social justice and human rights: ‘Equality for all,’ ‘My choice of lifestyle does not deprive me of my rights,’  and ‘I am a rural citizen, and I am in danger of extinction.’”

On HillTV's The Rising with Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave, Associate Professor of Economics Pavlina Tcherneva debates former Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore about whether the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law on August 16, will actually reduce inflation. Tcherneva says we are not going to see inflation go down overnight, however, she believes this bill steers us in the right direction. She emphasizes the significance of investments in green energy technologies in the United States while “including major components that are coveted by the conservatives,” such as “increasing energy production from the fossil fuel industry here in a very aggressive way.” She adds, “From the progressive point of view this was a Faustian bargain. We had to do some giveaways to the fossil fuel industry so that we could get this bill passed. But it does have some key components, some major investments in climate that we haven’t seen in decades.”

“In a country where spirits of the dead inspire reverence, anxiety, and fear, the matter of holding a state funeral for a former prime minister – post-War Japan’s longest-serving, and one of the most consequential – should not be controversial,” writes Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies. For the Wire, Baruah navigates the “tricky legacy” of the late Shinzo Abe with respect to his “revisionist rewriting of Japan’s wartime history.” “In India, Abe will be long remembered for his role in bolstering the country’s relations with Japan,” Baruah writes. “But Abe’s push for a revisionist rewriting of Japan’s wartime history, which is a major factor in what makes his legacy controversial, runs the risk of implicating India.”

Support from Bard to jumpstart her cultural and artistic vision has led Joelle Powe to places she never imagined possible. The anthropology major from Jamaica directed a documentary on Jamaican dancehall that has toured the United States, Jamaica, and elsewhere, creating a buzz around the budding filmmaker who calls herself a “visual anthropologist.” 
 
Out There Without Fear details the Jamaican popular dance form as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon, with lively depictions of the music and moves of the genre that has ignited passion as far away as Russia and Japan. The subjects interviewed also reflect on the impact of classism and sexism on dancehall in the Caribbean island nation. 
 
“Abundant opportunities at Bard have supported my academic interest in Jamaica,” Powe says. A Community Action Award from Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, support from the Trustee Leader Scholar program, and the Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Internship Award (for student internships in music or the social sciences—in this case, both) gave her partial funding for the film, which she directed with producer Adtelligent, a social media company in Jamaica.
 
Powe says her time at Bard has been “a truly amazing journey,” one that began when she was on a global voyage during Semester at Sea, a four-month study abroad program for United World College students on a ship that takes them to four continents. She was aboard when she learned she had been accepted to the College. 
 
She was an anthropology major because she is “very excited about local opportunities for anthropological study in Jamaica, a wellspring of culture.” Her Senior Project was a study of a Jamaican family’s participation in the national response to COVID-19, for which she received grants from the Anthropology Program and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard.  Continuing interest in Out There Without Fear, the ideas for which were published in the Jamaica Journal in 2021, has Powe curating discussions on dancehall with Jamaican academics and dancers through universities and cultural centers around the world. She is working on her second documentary, Beverley Manley Uncensored, which follows the ex-wife of former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and explores her reflections on the 1970s in Jamaica, a significant decade in Jamaican political history. The first episode of the documentary series premiered on Adtelligent TV in July 2022.
 
Powe notes the value of the Language and Thinking Program in setting her up to appreciate wrestling with big ideas. “L&T teaches you to read and write. I loved being exposed to great thinkers from around the world in the readings. My mind has been stretched by exposure in my classes across the disciplines—from Cuban documentaries, constitutional laws in Myanmar, Caribbean poetry, and Iranian art, to Spanish short stories. As an anthropology major, I need cultural literacy across diverse mediums.” Also, she says, “I appreciate that I was exposed to international cinema through screenings here. I didn’t know I would get that.”
 
In addition to being a peer counselor—which taught her about “being responsible for people my age and for their ideas about what to expect from their community”—she also decided to join the swim team. “I was stretched beyond my imagination of what was possible, and learned about patience and determination, showing up for practice, getting better over time. The discipline I learned in swimming enhanced my time management skills and focus.”
 
Bard has enriched Powe’s life “in three very significant ways.” The support she received to pursue academic interests outside the College—through independent study, grants, and student-led initiatives, supported by Bard’s energetic professors—“sped up where I want to be in my career.” She was exposed to “the spirit of internationalism in the College, the community, and academia as a whole,” which led to lifelong friendships; and she found “the freedom to try new things.” Oh, and another thing: “being allowed to make mistakes and try again.” 

Levi Lakota Lowe’s arrival at Bard was like going on a successful blind date: he came to Bard sight unseen—and fell in love with the campus as soon as he saw it. The senior from Jamestown, California, had heard of Bard from the director of a play he’d acted in during high school. 
 
“My first impression was of a campus that’s huge and gorgeous, monumental and so beautiful,” he says. Academically, he was drawn to Bard because “I was attracted to the double major aspect and the fact that it was a small school. I wanted to do things with brains—neurology—and heart—drawing.” Deciding to pursue art on his own, he became a double major in biology and philosophy “because I’m obsessed with questions. What I love to do in my free time is think of new ways to do things and approach new things, and look at their philosophical implications. I love this type of thinking.” His Senior Project in philosophy looks at dependence theory and addiction, advised by Kathryn Tabb, assistant professor of philosophy.
 
Science at Bard is also exciting. “We have really high-tech stuff. We were able to collect soil, inventory the bacteria in it, and extract, isolate, and replicate its DNA.” His Senior Project, with Associate Professor of Biology Gabriel Perron as adviser, examines how temperature affects bacteria that are common in hospital infections. 
 
Lowe’s interactions with Tabb, Perron, and Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude have inspired him. “Brooke is super welcoming and so warm and excited about things,” he says. “I got interested in genetics in her class.” And his associations with fellow students “have completely changed my life. My friends have taught me about morals, patience, relationships, confidence, community.” 
 
His advice to students looking at Bard? “Be willing to talk with people. Ask questions—it’s insane how much the faculty are willing to help you. Go up to a professor after class. It could change the whole course of your life.” He adds, “I have never seen so many resources. All the advice, whether academia or personal, is awesome.”
 
Extracurricular activities for Lowe make Bard “a place to destress,” such as the Surrealist Circus, which creates pop-up events with puppets, costumes, stilts, and acrobatics. Lowe also belonged to the Bard Bars rap club and Brothers at Bard, a mentoring group for young men, “which was a great place to be surrounded by people of color.” Slacklining among trees on campus is a favorite pastime, though juggling two majors means that finding time for activities outside of class is a challenge. 
 
After Bard, Lowe plans to attend graduate school in philosophy; he hopes to teach philosophy of science or medical ethics at the college level. “Being able to see people interested in what I’m interested in is why I want to be a teacher. 
 
“Bard is a place that forces me to think about things,” he says when asked how Bard has changed him. “It’s helped me see I can do whatever I want, so my studies don’t feel like work. I’ve found a way to do two Senior Projects and carry 21 credits and stay relaxed. I’m so excited about going to class. Bard’s given me a perfect metric for what I feel should be a baseline for an education. I’m charmed by this place; this is my safe haven.” 

L. Randall Wray, professor of economics and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, has won the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award. This award is the highest honor given annually by the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) in recognition of significant contributions to evolutionary institutional economics. Named after the founders of institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and John R. Commons (1862–1945), and awarded since 1969, the Veblen-Commons Award is presented to scholars “on the basis of their contributions to a better understanding of both the economic process and the behavior of the major institutions that shape that process and society’s goals and values” (Trebing, 1992, 333). By recognizing significant contributions to institutional analysis, this award furthers the goal of institutional economics to make the world a better place.

Recipients of the Veblen-Commons Award have made outstanding contributions to institutional economics in the tradition of Veblen and Commons. Award recipients have focused their work on some of the most important topics confronting human society. Such topics include exploring the underlying power relations within society, the origins and implications of inequality, feminist economics, the origins of discrimination, the enabling myths of the dominant groups, the continuing conflict between rights and duties, the possibilities offered by modern technologies and the use of those possibilities for good or ill, the causes of financial crises, among others. Previous recipients include Levy scholars James Galbraith (2020), John F. Henry (2017), Jan Kregel (2011), and Hyman P. Minsky (1996).

L. Randall Wray is a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and professor of economics at Bard College. He is one of the original developers of Modern Money Theory. Wray’s most recent books are Why Minsky Matters (Princeton University Press, 2016), and A Great Leap Forward (Academic Press, 2020), and Handbook of Economic Stagnation(with Flavia Dantas; Elsevier, 2022). Four new books will be published in 2022/2023: Making Money Work for Us (Polity Press, Fall 2022), Money For Beginners (with Heske Van Doornen; Polity Press, 2023), Modern Monetary Theory: Key Thinkers, Leading Insights (editor; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), and The Elgar Companion to Modern Money Theory (with Yeva Nersisyan; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023).

Wray is the author of Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1990), Understanding Modern Money (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1998), The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism (with É. Tymoigne; Routledge, 2013), Modern Money Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; 2nd rev. ed., 2015), and Macroeconomics (with William Mitchell and Martin Watts; Red Globe Press, 2019).

Wray previously taught at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and at the University of Denver, and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris, Bologna, Bergamo and Rome, as well as UNAM in Mexico City. He holds a BA from the University of the Pacific and an MA and a Ph.D. from Washington University, where he was a student of Minsky. He has held a number of Fulbright Grants, including most recently at the Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. He is the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award winner for contributions to Institutionalist Thought and will be the 2022-2023 Teppola Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University, Salem Oregon.

Learn more about the Veblen-Commons Award here.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, associate professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Melanie Ford Lemus for American Ethnologist on “the spatial politics and practices of occupation, infrastructure as performative assemblages, shared environments, and their public constitutions.” Discussing concepts outlined in her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stamatopoulou-Robbins explained the usage of “siege” as a conceptual framework. “The word siege suggests overlap with occupation, partly conceptually but also in showing how there are overlapping, not always perfectly, challenges to Palestinian life that are also siege-like and made possible by occupation but that cannot be reduced to it,” Stamatopoulou-Robbins says. “I was interested in the way that, through infrastructure, [engineers] were on the one hand aiming to build the future, to make the future now, by building the state that is not yet here,” she continues, “and on the other hand deferring the future that they might want.”

Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, discusses his new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. In an interview with Yair Rosenberg of the Atlantic’s Deep Shtetl newsletter, Mead unpacks misconceptions of Jewish power and the decidedly non-Jewish roots of support for the Jewish state. 

 

Robert Culp, professor of history, and ​​Lu Kou, assistant professor of Chinese, have been awarded Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar grants in support of their individual professional work. Culp was awarded a $15,000, one-year grant in support of his book project, Circuits of Meaning: Book Markets and Knowledge Production in Modern China, 1900-1965, which explores “how changing systems of book distribution in modern China shaped knowledge production and the formation of reading communities from 1900 to 1965.” Kou received a $20,000, one-year grant to support War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China, his book project that “examines the ‘discursive battles’ fought among rival states in China's early medieval period, specifically, how rhetoric—the art of verbal persuasion—constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity.”

Ahead of the release of his new documentary, Endangered, Ronan Farrow ’04 spoke with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show about the threats facing journalists worldwide. In the United States, journalists are facing threats of violence for their reporting, spurred by authoritarian figures framing them as the enemy of the people—a tactic that, while not new, as Farrow notes, is nonetheless troubling when it comes to the health of our democracy. “We need more and better reporting in communities around this country. We need to support our journalists,” he said. “Otherwise, we're going to have people who are in this state of rage, who are very manipulable by these political leaders, who want to deploy these authoritarian arguments.” Endangered, which follows four journalists and the dangers they face in their work, is streaming now on HBO Max.

Watch the Interview

Stream Endangered on HBO Max

Between 2009 and 2011, a team of U.S. negotiators including Bard Diplomat in Residence and Ambassador Frederic C. Hof came historically close to realizing a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement by seizing on an alignment of interests in Damascus, Jerusalem and Washington. The United States Institute of Peace and Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy present a discussion reflecting on Hof’s experience trying to broker Syrian-Israeli peace and what it can tell us about the possibilities and limitations of American conflict mediation.

Hillary A. Langberg, visiting assistant professor of religion, has been named a 2022 Robert H. N. Ho Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar. The cohort of scholars, through a fellowship made possible by the American Council of Learned Societies and Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, will spend up to two years “bolster[ing] the capacity of museums and publications in Buddhist art and thought across all traditions and regions in which Buddhism is practiced.” Langberg will spend her fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. “Dr. Langberg’s research on our collection will help us design programs and digital experiences that inspire connections between historic and contemporary religious practices,” said Chase F. Robinson, director of the National Museum of Asian Art.

The new Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College welcomes its inaugural cohort of seven writers, Danielle Elizabeth Chin, Neşe Devenot ’09, Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander, Mona Kareem, Madhu Kaza, Obi Nwizu, and Dianca London Potts, this summer. The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks from June 4 through June 26, 2022. During their residency, fellows reside on Bard’s campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book-length work.

The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works.

“For many adjuncts the path to writing and research is closed. The institutions where they labor do not offer funds or sabbaticals for such work. The Hurston Fellowship is one way to help these women find time for their own work. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first independent scholars—writing on an array of subjects from anthropology to fiction. Like Hurston, our fellows, without institutional support, must make their own way through the world of publication and research,” says Grover.

During their residency, Hurston Fellows may participate in a daily program of workshops and meetings, offered in collaboration with the Bard College Institute of Writing and Thinking. However, fellows may also choose to spend their time working, writing, and researching independently. The residency includes visits by literary agents and editors, as well as readings and lectures by established writers and scholars. This summer, the two guest lecturers include Carolyn Ferrell, author of Miss Metropolitan, which was recently shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and literary agent Charlotte Sheedy of Sheedy Lit in conversation with her client Jive Poetic about the agent-author relationship and how an idea becomes a book. Fellows will also be invited back to Bard College in October of the fellowship year for a weekend-long meeting and workshop. 

Danielle Elizabeth Chin graduated Magna Cum Laude from Marymount Manhattan College in May 2013 with a Bachelor of the Arts degree in English and World Literatures and a minor in Creative Writing before receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree from The New School in Creative Writing with a concentration in creative nonfiction. She has been an Adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at Marymount Manhattan College since 2015, where she has taught Introduction to Creative Writing I, Introduction to Creative Writing II, Intermediate Creative Writing, an Independent Study in Nonfiction, and a Special Topics course. She has also served as a Writing Assistant at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and for the CUNY EDGE program. Her other professional experiences include working as a research assistant for poet David Lehman, a teaching assistant for novelist Sigrid Nunez, and an assistant at a literary agency.  Her work has appeared in The Inquisitive Eater, The Best American Poetry Blog, and Side B Magazine. 

Neşe Devenot ’09 received her PhD in 2015 from the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied psychedelic philosophy, the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (“trip reports”), and radical poetics. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bard College in philosophy and literature. Devenot is a Postdoctoral Associate at Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS), University of Cincinnati, and is a Lecturer and Medical Humanities Program Assistant at Pennsylvania State University. She has held positions as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Medicine, Society, and Culture, in the Bioethics Department at the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University (2018-20) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities in the Humanities Program and English Department at University of Puget Sound (2015-18). Her research explores the function of metaphor and other literary devices in verbal accounts of psychedelic experiences. She was awarded “Best Humanities Publication in Psychedelic Studies” from Breaking Convention in 2016 and received the Article Prize for best publication in Romanticism Studies from European Romantic Review in 2020. She was a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where she participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences. She was a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association, which she moderated during 2011-13, and has presented on psychedelics at conferences in the United States, Mexico, Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Shoshanna Edwards-Alexander received her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from Saint Joseph’s University in 2005, M.S.W. from University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work in 1995, and B.A. in sociology and history/gender studies from Saint Lawrence University in 1993. Before teaching, she worked as a social worker and counselor. She is a Visiting and Senior Adjunct Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where she teaches in the Haub School of Business, School of Health and Education, and College of Arts and Sciences. She also serves as a diversity consultant at Saint Joseph’s University. Her research interests include anti-racist and social justice pedagogies, womanist and feminist epistemologies, teacher preparation educational programs, and intersectionality within leadership development. She presents on topics including leadership and student advocacy; mentoring and feminist perspectives; global engagement, training, and development; and social work and mental health. She has won several awards and special recognitions including the Certificate of Recognition for Excellence in Teaching for the Gender Studies Program Department at Saint Joseph’s University (2014).

Mona Kareem holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the American University of Kuwait. She is a research fellow at Center for Humanities at Tufts University (2021-2022) and a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts literary grant. She has taught at Princeton, University of Maryland College Park, SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, and Bronx Community College. She was an affiliated research fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin. Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. She has won several awards and honors including a nomination for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 for her English translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within, which was reprinted by English PEN in 2017.

Madhu H. Kaza received her MFA in fiction, M.Phil and MA in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in English from the University of Michigan. She serves as Associate Director of Microcollege Program and Faculty Development at the Bard Prison Initiative and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is a translator of the feminist Telugu writers Volga and Vimala. She is the editor of Kitchen Table Translation and her own writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Guernica, The Yale Review, Two Lines, Gulf Coast, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of grants and awards including a non-fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Yaddo residency. She was the founding director of the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and has taught at New York University, The New School, and at Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, among other institutions. 

Obi Nwizu received her MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom and her BA in Print Journalism from Georgia State University. Born in Anambra State, Nigeria, raised in Atlanta, Georgia, but currently calling Harlem home, Nwizu is a lover of month-long international vacations, vegan food, afrobeat, and rom-coms. When not writing, she teaches creative writing for the City University of New York and composition writing for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Selected publications include “Gathered Pieces of the Sun” in The Almbec, “Grapeseed Fields” in Torch Literary Arts, and “Lust Painted Walls” in Imagine Curve.

Dianca London Potts earned her MFA in fiction from The New School, MA in English and MA in Humanities from Arcadia University, and BA in English from Temple University. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Department at Pratt Institute and teaches writing courses at Eugene Lang Liberal Arts College at The New School and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a VONA Voices alumna, and the former online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. Her words have been featured in Lenny Letter, The Village Voice, Vice, Shondaland, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Planning for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from 37 Ink / Simon and Schuster.

About the Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College
The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College is a 3-week residential program designed to enable writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, specifically, those who are without access to sabbaticals or their institution’s research funding. We seek fellows who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees and who have not yet published a book length work. Prospective Fellows should submit a vita, a letter of recommendation by someone familiar with their work, and an abstract of the project they wish to work on during the three-week residency. The abstract should not exceed 2000 words. Applicants need a college or university affiliation and should have a minimum of five years of teaching as an adjunct, lecturer or visiting professor. The application deadline is April 15, 2023. All applicants will be notified of the admission Committee’s decision by May 15, 2023. To submit materials or for questions please email [email protected].
 

As millions grapple with the realities of a post-Roe America, Omar G. Encarnación, professor of political studies, looked to Latin America for hope and lessons from their abortion rights revolution. “There’s no single trajectory for how Latin American countries came to legalize abortion,” Encarnación writes in the Nation. Instead, a combination of increased secularization, constitutional advances, and strategic reframing of the issue helped to undo “some of the most draconian abortion laws imaginable.” Similarly, highlighting abortion access as an issue of socioenomic access framed the issue as an economic one. Fashion, too, played a role, with the symbology of green scarves creating “the phenomenon known as marea verde, or green tide,” imagery unmistakably tied to previous political campaigns led by women. Perhaps the most concrete takeaway, in Encarnación’s view, was that criminalizing abortion did not lead to the end of abortion, but rather to the increase of illegal and often unsafe procedures, the “gruesome” details of which “eventually pushed the issue to the forefront in the effort to decriminalize abortion.” Encarnación concludes: “The lesson for the American anti-choice movement here is quite clear: When it comes to criminalizing abortion, be careful what you wish for.”

What do AccuWeather and bottled tap water have in common? To find out, you’ll have to watch The G Word by Adam Conover ’04, a Netflix series on the workings and failings of government. Nell Minow, writing for RogerEbert.com, calls Conover’s new show a lively examination of the “one out of every 16 people” who work for the government—and how their labor touches every aspect of American life. Each episode begins with a positive story about the work of governance before shifting into an examination of its challenges and failures. “The government is better at setting up systems that work than protecting them from predation by businesses who want to profit from what has already been paid for with tax dollars,” Minow writes. Coproduced by Barack and Michelle Obama, The G Word is streaming now on Netflix.

In an op-ed for the LA Times, civil rights attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03 and Kate Bertash raise serious legal concerns over how the overturning of Roe could impact data privacy and they advocate for more robust protections of our digital autonomy. “The leak of a draft opinion indicating the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn Roe vs. Wade raises huge concerns for how online searches, text messages, and emails can be used to target and criminalize pregnant people seeking abortion care and support,” they write. “Digital autonomy and bodily autonomy are inextricably linked. Just as we need the right to ownership and control over our bodies, we should have the same over our data. But this has not been the case . . . At least as far back as 2015, we’ve seen law enforcement extract data from devices and present it as evidence in criminal cases against women facing charges related to terminating their pregnancies.” Conti-Cook and Bertash also lay out three steps individuals can take to help reduce the digital footprint of their internet research into abortion and related services in anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling.

In an ideas piece for Time, Omar G. Encarnación, professor of political studies, asserts that Florida’s “long history as America’s breeding ground for toxic anti-gay politics” is pivotal in trying to understand how the state’s “Parental Rights in Education Bill,” which prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools from kindergarten through the third grade, was signed into law last month. 
 
Rather than understanding Florida as the battleground of a contemporary right-wing culture war, Encarnación discusses “Florida’s dark and painful LGBTQ history,” with homophobic legislation spanning back to the 1950s, and the lack of any formal reckoning with that past as crucial in understanding the politics leading to this new law. “In the absence of such a reckoning, history continues to repeat itself in Florida with grave consequences for the state’s reputation, the welfare of its LGBTQ citizens, and even for the American nation as a whole,” he writes.

Four Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 536 U.S. colleges and represent 49 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, who will study or intern in 91 countries around the globe through April 2023. 

Computer science and Asian studies joint major Asyl Almaz ’24, from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, has been awarded $4,000 towards her studies via Bard’s Tuition Exchange at Waseda University in Tokyo for fall 2022. “Coming from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, it has not been an easy journey immersing myself into a different culture when I moved to America for college—let alone another one. I am so incredibly grateful to receive the Gilman scholarship to be able to spend a semester in Waseda. This will ensure that I will be able to not only step foot in another country and learn so many new things about Asian history and culture, but also to be able to afford the expenses that I will have to pay there,” said Almaz.

Music and Asian studies joint major Nandi Woodfork-Bey ’22, from Sacramento, California, has been awarded $3,500 to study at the American College of Greece for fall 2022. “I’m immensely grateful to have received the Gilman Scholarship. I look forward to spending a semester abroad in Greece as I expand and diversify my studies in music and culture. Studying abroad will help me build the global and professional skills needed to succeed in my future endeavors, and I’m thankful that the Gilman program has further helped me achieve this opportunity” said Woodfork-Bey.

Theater major Grant Venable ’24, from Sherman Oaks, California, received a Gilman-DAAD scholarship and has been awarded $5,000 to study at Bard College Berlin for fall 2022. “I am honored to be able to attend Bard College in Berlin with the help of the Gilman scholarship. This scholarship will allow me to pursue my passion for theater and challenge my work as a performance artist through my studies in Berlin,” said Venable.

Philosophy major Azriel Almodovar ’24, from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, has been awarded $3,500 to study in Taormina, Italy on Bard’s Italian Language Intensive program in summer 2022. “Thanks to the Gilman Scholarship, I am able to study abroad with no financial issues and really take advantage of all that the Italian Intensive Program has to offer. I am very grateful for being a recipient and look forward to my time abroad,” said Almodovar.

Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 34,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 

As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

Speaking with Joe Donahue on the Roundtable on WAMC, Diplomat in Residence Frederic C. Hof talked about what makes for a good diplomat, his insights as the chief architect and mediator of the United States effort to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal, and how his experiences have influenced his teaching at Bard College. “The Bard student body is terrific,” Hof says at the top of the interview. As the conversation shifted to the war in Ukraine, Hof emphasized that, even now, diplomacy remains an option. “Diplomacy is always, always in the equation,” Hof said. “I think we have to keep in mind that diplomacy has to be backed by the potential use of military force if it’s going to be effective.” Hof’s new book, Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace, was published April 5, 2022. 
 

Jennifer H. Madans ’73, former National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) associate director for science and acting director, cowrites an op-ed for The Hill about how a lack of government funding for the NCHS was a “weak link in the administration’s data-driven COVID-19 response.” The NCHS is the Department of Health and Human Services’ equivalent of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. It collects and disseminates core public health information on births, deaths, chronic and acute disease, disability and health care access and utilization. “Just as the timeliness and granularity of employment data, with information by state, if not county, and by sector or product category, help bolster our economy and job growth, more timely and granular health statistics would improve public health.”
 
Madans asserts: “Had investments been made in maintaining and modernizing the health data infrastructure we would have had information on COVID-related deaths, hospitalizations, ambulatory care visits and symptoms along with information on the impacts of the pandemic on wellbeing. This would have allowed for immediate tracking of the pandemic at its earliest stages and the continuing monitoring of response capabilities as it changed course. Without this investment, the data that were produced were delayed and in many cases they were of limited quality, which hampered our ability to control the pandemic and meet the health and health care needs of the population.”