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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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