News

Bard alum Nic Lindenlaub ’19 published an article about policy options in Afghanistan that is an outgrowth of his Senior Project in Global and International Studies, which evaluated the viability of building regional partner capacity as a strategy to achieve the US objectives of preserving the Afghan republic and denying a safe haven to transnational terrorists.

Using Orwell’s Down and Out to Understand and Write Histories of Homelessness Then and Now 

Bard College presents its annual Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature, with Nick Crowson, Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The lecture takes place in the Lásló Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium (Room 103) of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation on Tuesday, February 18, at 4:45 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
 
What does George Orwell's classic account of homeless living in London during the interwar years offer the historian? Where should we locate this semi-fictionalised account in the tradition of the incognito social investigator? Professor Crowson's lecture will address these questions and ask how Orwell helps us understand the physical manifestations of homelessness in modern Britain. In doing so, he shows how historians can play a crucial role in facilitating better, historically-informed public discourse around homelessness.

Nick Crowson holds the Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The author and editor of many books, including Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–40; Britain and Europe: A Political History since 1918; and A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945, he is writing a new history of homelessness in modern Britain seeking to integrate the lived experience with the policy responses. His research is widely used by a range of policy and cultural organisations, including Crisis, Shelter, the Museum of Homelessness and the Cardboard Citizens Theatre Company.

This annual lecture forms part of the endowment of the Chair in British History and Literature that was established in 2010 to commemorate Eugene Meyer (1875–1959)—the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first President of the World Bank. The endowment has given Bard the opportunity to extend its commitment to teaching and research in modern British studies. Professor Richard Aldous holds the Eugene Meyer Chair.

Photo courtesy Peter Berthoud.

The fallen executive committed a cardinal, culturally unacceptable sin: hubris.

Bard Archaeologist in Residence Christophe Lindner and anthropology major Ethan Dickerman ’20 copresented a poster exhibit, “Cosmic Context, Emancipated Persons, Germantown Parsonage,” at the annual international conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Boston this January. The poster details the hearth at the Maple Avenue Parsonage, or minister’s residence, in Germantown, New York, a site that Bard Archaeology has been excavating since 2009. The hearth dates from 1767–1911, an era in which African Americans first lived in the residence as slaves, next in 1830 as free people with the family of the minister’s physician nephew, and then, in 1852, as owners of the property, where they lived with their relatives until 1911. The excavation revealed a West African cosmography diagram etched in the wooden frame of the cellar fireplace as well as objects concealed beneath the hearthstones, emplaced during rituals of healing and well-being performed on behalf of the community.

 Dickerman, who coauthored the poster, recently completed his Senior Project on the Parsonage site and its surrounding communities, from its immediate neighborhood to the larger Mid-Hudson region. Through the Bard Archaeology Field School, a hands-on for-credit summer learning program that he directs, Lindner has worked with Bard undergraduates, local high school students, and colleagues in the community to excavate the site and research the descendants of the 1710 Palatine migration and their later neighbors, including free African Americans. The Palatines in 1710 constituted the largest single mass migration into the colony of New York and established, 10 miles north of Bard, the first substantial German-speaking settlement in the New World.

Lindner will report on this background research and its symbolic material aspects at the Bard Graduate Center symposium “Revealing Communities: The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the 19th Century.” Fourteen speakers will discuss how they have approached researching these communities, many of which were bulwarks in the abolition and early civil rights movements, and places where residents formed positive social connections both between and across racial lines. Yet these important communities have been largely excluded from mainstream American history.

Free and open to the public, the symposium will be held at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City on February 7. For more information or to register, click below.

Associate Dean of Civic Engagement Brian Mateo talks to Elmira Bayrasli, director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, about moving foreign policy forward in the age of social media. “The internet has really changed foreign policy because it has changed the very nature of power and who holds it,” says Bayrasli. “It used to be that governments really had the monopoly on not only declaring war but on things like collective action in terms of communicating information to people or on governance; if you needed something done in your community, you went to the government to do it. That's no longer true. Now we get the same information that the government does pretty much at the same time.”
 

Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights at Bard, comments that what has been revealed so far in the new Cambridge Analytica leak is “the tip of the iceberg.... The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,” she said. “There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of control.” 

The leak began on New Year’s Day, and more than 100,000 documents are set to be released in the coming months, revealing the defunct company’s work in 68 countries. Emma Briant specializes in the topics of propaganda and political communication, and is interested in changing technologies and their implications for democracy, international security, migration, inequality, and human rights. She is currently writing a book on Cambridge Analytica, Propaganda Machine: The Hidden Story of Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry. This semester, Dr. Briant is teaching Migration and Media and Propaganda: Dark Arts at Bard College.

Wray, a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College and a leading thinker in Modern Monetary Theory, recently testified before the House Budget Committee in a hearing reexamining the economic costs of debt. (As a reminder, MMT argues that sovereign governments with their own currency can’t go broke and can spend until inflation becomes an issue.) He told lawmakers this: “We do not have to repay the debt—what we have to do is make the interest payments.” If there were one sentence that captured the drastic change in economic thought over the past decade, writes Bloomberg columnist Brian Chappatta, “that might just be it.”

Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s anti-Semitism expert, Kenneth Stern was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism.” Now the director of Bard’s Center for the Study of Hate, Stern pens an op-ed about President Trump's executive order applying the definition to college campuses. “It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.”

Since the British Labour Party’s shattering defeat in last week’s general election, many people have been thinking through its implications for the left, and especially for the Democrats’ prospects in 2020. But what did the result mean for the right? Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, weighs in.

Bard alumna Eva Quinones ’17 has been named an Andrew Goodman Puffin Democracy Fellow. This multiyear fellowship will help Eva continue her work to increase voting access for young people. Eva majored in Economics and Global and International Studies at Bard, where she was an Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere Ambassador and Team Leader and worked with Election@Bard to combat student disenfranchisement. Eva was also a member of the Bard Debate Union and the Student Government during her time on campus. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Yale University, where she studies the political economy of voting behavior and democratic backslides. She also holds an MA from Yale.

Artificial intelligence and automation can streamline or eliminate manual labor, but public- and private-sector organizations still need managers to monitor and make corrections when algorithms exhibit biases, writes Russell.

The exhibition catalogue Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich, by Soika and the Cambridge historian Bernhard Fulda, provides a new historical narrative for an artist who fashioned himself a martyr of the Nazi regime—a narrative that has had political reverberations for the current German government. 
 

As America’s fiscal deficit nears $1 trillion for the first time since the financial crisis, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on November 20 seeking answers to a crucial question: Does it pose a clear and present danger to the economy? Professor Wray’s response: “Federal deficits and debt are not so scary. Neither is on an unsustainable path. Rather, persistent deficits and rising debt are normal.” Wray is one of the leading advocates of Modern Monetary Theory, an emerging school of thought that says countries like the United States, which borrow in their own currency, can pursue growth through deficit spending so long as prices are under control. His paper for the committee argued that MMT has never said deficits or debt don’t matter but that they are best viewed as outcomes of policies aimed at lifting the economy, not goals in themselves. When economists and lawmakers push for debt reduction, said Wray, “MMT cautions that what we might be reducing is economic growth.”

Historian Richard Aldous reviews the third volume of Charles Moore’s biography of the iconic and divisive British prime minister. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide third term as prime minister of the U.K. Beneath the sheen of triumph, however, her administration would be beset by decay.

Mariel Fiori, managing editor of La Voz, and Martha Tepepa of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard  College will speak as part of “Immigration Advocacy in the Hudson Valley,” a Chronogram Conversation presented in partnership with Radio Kingston and The River Newsroom. The public is invited to hear from community members who have organized to counteract what they view as unjust federal policies targeting immigrants. Wednesday, December 4, at 6:00 p.m., Holy Cross/Santa Cruz Episcopal Church in Kingston.

In their new book False Alarm: The Truth about Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, Ethan Porter ’07 and Thomas J. Wood find that if you correct untruths you can make people’s opinion of the facts substantially more accurate; you can also correct outright fake news. “That, however, is the end of the good news,” writes columnist Daniel Finkelstein in the London Times. “Porter and Wood provide a depressing reason why factual correction is possible: it is that facts just aren’t that important to people in forming their political views. So people can accept a correction of a fact that supports their candidate or partisan view without feeling fundamentally challenged. Their basic position and affiliation doesn’t crumble when a mere fact is corrected, so they are content to accept the correction. As the authors put it: ‘People do not care enough about facts to engage in motivated reasoning against them.’”

On November 20 at 10:00 a.m., the U.S. House Committee on the Budget will hear testimony about the growing debate on the costs and consequences of debt, the different perspectives that are driving this important conversation, and the implications of recent economic developments for how we think about our fiscal challenges. Among the expert witnesses is L. Randall Wray, professor of economics and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The hearing will stream on the Committee’s website and Professor Wray's remarks will be available on the Levy Economics Institute website.

Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, spoke on “Antisemitism as a Form of Hate” as part of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ Countering Hate initiative on November 7.

So much of what has catapulted race and racial identity into the mainstream over the past 10 years has been molded by our political climate. Of course, this emphasis on identity politics happens on the left as well as the right—and it’s growing. “It’s a bad strategy to have an identity-based strategy on the left,” says Williams. “Deemphasizing identity all around would help our politics because we would have to pay more attention to the issues. We may have to pay more attention to class if we didn’t have these self-defeating identity agendas.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams has been teaching the Bard College course Retiring from Race this semester, and he spoke, alongside some of his students, at the Hannah Arendt Center fall conference last month.

From the languages we speak to politics, philosophy, art, and architecture, the ancient Greeks and Romans have profoundly shaped the history of ideas. By engaging with their legacy, we can develop critical tools for considering our own ideas and beliefs in a fresh light. Studying the ancient past, then, is a vital part of a liberal arts education, as we prepare students to engage critically, imaginatively, and empathetically with the contemporary world around us. To encourage and support students pursuing this important course of study, Bard College has established a new scholarship in Classical Studies. Generous donor support for this scholarship reaffirms that classical studies are more important today than ever. 

The Classical Studies Scholarship recognizes academically outstanding students committed to classical studies. Scholarships cover up to full tuition for four years and are awarded based on need. Scholarship students must maintain a 3.3 grade point average or higher while earning at least 32 credits per year. Recipients are also eligible for a $1,500 stipend for classics-related summer programs (e.g. archaeological excavations, American School at Athens/Rome, language study) following their sophomore or junior year. Transfer students are also eligible for Classical Studies Scholarship funding.

Desirable experiences for selection as a Classical Studies Scholar include a proven interest in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and their legacies; an interest in, and potential for, learning Greek and Latin; strong performance in high school classes related to English and world literature, languages, history, and/or other related humanities subjects. For more information or to apply, go to connect.bard.edu/register/classics_scholar.

“We in the Classical Studies Program are thrilled about this new initiative. These need-based financial aid scholarships, which include support for summer opportunities such as travel abroad and intensive language study, allow Bard College to make a unique contribution to ongoing efforts to widen access and increase equity in the field of Classics. We are excited to welcome the first scholars to Bard in Fall 2020, where they will join our thriving program and work with our award-winning faculty to pursue their passion for the ancient world,” says Associate Professor of Classical Studies Lauren Curtis.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project announced today that Turkish sociologist, activist, and architectural theorist Pelin Tan has been selected as the sixth recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Her appointment coincides with the generous renewal by the Keith Haring Foundation of the five year-grant supporting the Fellowship, an annual award for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at CCS Bard and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. Tan’s appointment marks the beginning of the Fellowship’s second phase, and reaffirms the shared commitment of the College and the Foundation both to exploring the interaction between political engagement and artistic practices and to bringing leading practitioners from around the world into Bard's classrooms.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship brings some of today's most incisive and engaged voices to Bard.  This innovative, cross-disciplinary, fellowship provides for research, teaching and production of new ideas among the undergraduate and graduate programs,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Pelin Tan's current research concerns political movements that focus on climate justice, landscape, agriculture, and indigeneity, and particularly activist projects that put interactions with the non-human world at the forefront of their practice. She asks about how our concepts of justice and rights can be extended to landscape and territory, and about the role that critical artistic and architectural interventions can play in making these claims. She also continues to explore, and experiment with, alternative modes of pedagogy, new modes of teaching that work from the bottom up to challenge and transform the institutions of art and design education.   

Her practice combines scholarship, curating, and artistic and architectural creation. She was Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of the Architecture Faculty at Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey from 2013-2017, and has held visiting fellowship and research positions around the  world, from Hong Kong to Cyprus. Most recently she curated the Gardentopia: Cosmos of Ecologies project, in Matera, Italy, a program of European Cultural Capital 2019.

"Throughout her career, the work that Pelin Tan calls 'action research' has demonstrated that the borders between scholarship, activism, and creation can and must be transgressed if we want to pursue justice in this world. In this way, Pelin is an artist very much in the spirit of Keith Haring," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Project.

Tan will take up her one-year appointment in September 2019, and spend the spring semester of 2020 teaching at the College. She succeeds the artist and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden, curator Galit Eilat, architects Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, the artist and curator Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and the first recipient, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk.
 

On Monday, October 7, four cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point joined four members of the Bard Debate Union for a public debate on whether the U.S. prison system should be abolished or reformed. The debate served as an opening event for the annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Racism and Antisemitism," which takes place Thursday and Friday, October 10–11. West Point argued in favor of prison reform, while the Bard team argued in favor of abolishing prisons, drawing upon key arguments about institutionalized racism and criminal justice from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness.

The debate was moderated by Dyjuan Tatro '18, a Bard alumnus who began his college career with the Bard Prison Initiative while incarcerated, completed his degree at Bard College in Annandale, and now serves as BPI's government affairs and advancement officer. Dyjuan was also a member of the famous BPI Debate Union team that defeated Harvard in 2015 and is featured in the upcoming PBS documentary College Behind Bars, directed by Lynn Novick and executive produced by Ken Burns. This four-part series follows a dedicated group of BPI students as they pursue their educations while incarcerated. The film is currently in previews and will air and stream on PBS on November 25 and 26.
 

James Beard Award–winning Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation and founder of the company The Sioux Chef, is committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine. Chef Sean comes to the Fisher Center to discuss The (R)evolution of Indigenous Food Systems of North America, Tuesday, October 29, in the LUMA Theater at 5 p.m. The talk will be followed by a question and answer period and book signing. Admission is free; to reserve tickets and for additional information visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900.

Through his research Chef Sean has uncovered and mapped out the foundations of the indigenous food systems through an indigenous perspective. His book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, earned a 2018 James Beard Award and was a top 10 cookbook of 2017. He has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods and is leading a movement to completely redefine North American cuisine.

Copies of The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen will be available for purchase in the lobby of LUMA Theater courtesy of Oblong Books. In addition, Ken Greene from Seedshed will be showcasing Haudenosaunee crops grown in the Native American Seed Sanctuary, a collaborative initiative with the St. Regis Mohawk tribe Seedshed and The Hudson Valley Farm Hub.

This event is sponsored by Bard College’s Center for the Study of Land, Air and Water, American Studies, Environmental and Urban Studies, Bard Farm, Bard Office of  Sustainability, Experimental Humanities, The Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Trustee Leader Scholar Program, and Oblong Books. The Fisher Center’s presentation of the event is in tandem with the upcoming Live Arts Bard Biennial, Where No Wall Remains: An International Festival About Borders, November 21–24, 2019.

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota, born in Pine Ridge, SD, has been cooking across the US and Mexico over the past 30 years, and has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods. Chef Sean has studied extensively to determine the foundations of Native American indigenous foods systems to bring back a sense of Native American cuisine to today’s world. In 2014, he opened the business titled The Sioux Chef as a caterer and food educator in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area. He and his business partner Dana Thompson also designed and opened the Tatanka Truck, which featured pre-contact foods of the Dakota and Minnesota territories.  

In October 2017, Sean was able to perform the first decolonized dinner at the James Beard House in Manhattan along with his team. His first book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen was awarded the James Beard medal for Best American Cookbook for 2018 and was chosen as one of the top ten cookbooks of 2017 by the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, as well as the Smithsonian Magazine. This year, Chef Sean was selected as a Bush Fellow, as well as receiving the 2019 Leadership Award by the James Beard Foundation. The Sioux Chef team of twelve people continues with their mission to help educate and make indigenous foods more accessible to as many communities as possible through the recently founded nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). Learn more: natifs.org.

The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. At once a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas and perspectives from the past, present, and future. The organization’s home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country and around the world. The Fisher Center illustrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Building on a 150-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.
 

“Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has written an engaging and informative memoir: The Education of an Idealist. In it, her treatment of the Syrian crisis as it unfolded during the administration of former US President Barack Obama is as illuminating as it is unsatisfying. In the end, Power succeeds in drawing a bright line between her views on Syria and those of her former boss.”

When Hannah Arendt came to the United States as a stateless refugee, she began writing for small Jewish journals and reflected upon the similarities and differences between racism in American and antisemitism in Europe. Arendt argued that racism is an ideology like antisemitism, thereby offering a pseudo-scientific justification for violence that elevates one group at the expense of another. From The Origins of Totalitarianism to The Crises in Little Rock, Arendt’s thinking on race is controversial and has often led many to quickly dismiss her thoughts on race and antisemitism entirely. The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College’s 12th annual conference, “Racism and Antisemitism,” gathers a diverse group of thinkers to explore these oft shunned concepts in Arendt’s work in the context of our contemporary political moment, which is marked by antisemitic and racist violence.

The two-day conference takes place on Thursday, October 10 and Friday, October 11 in Olin Hall, on Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson campus. For registration information, please visit hac.bard.edu/conference2019. Speakers will discuss questions such as: What is racism? Is antisemitism a form of racism? What does anti-racism mean today? Is it antisemitic to criticize the state of Israel? Is equality possible in a world where prejudice exists? How can we respond to racist fantasies?

Featured speakers include:
Kenyon Victor Adams, multidisciplinary artist and curator; Peter Baehr, research professor in social theory, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Étienne Balibar, emeritus professor of philosophy, University of Paris-Nanterre, and anniversary chair of contemporary European philosophy at Kingston University, London; Aliza Becker, associate fellow, Hannah Arendt Center; Kathryn Sophia Belle, associate professor of philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, and author, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question; Roger Berkowitz, academic director, Hannah Arendt Center; Robert Boyers, editor, Salmagundi, director, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and professor of English, Skidmore College; Ian Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, Bard College; Joy Connolly, president, American Council of Learned Societies; Deirdre d’Albertis, dean of Bard College; Lewis R. Gordon, professor of philosophy, University of Connecticut-Storrs; Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, professor of sociology and anthropology, University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis; Eric Kaufmann, professor and assistant dean of politics, Birkbeck, University of London; Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning historian, speaker, and author of Stamped From The Beginning; Jennifer Kidwell, performing artist and cocreator of the Obie Award-winning play Underground Railroad Game; Rev. Jacqui Lewis, public theologian and senior minister, Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan; John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University; Marwan Mohammed, sociologist, research fellow, Centre Maurice Halbwachs in Paris, and visiting scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY); Shany Mor, associate fellow, Hannah Arendt Center, and research fellow, Chaikin Center, Haifa University; Nikita Nelin, writer and winner of 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize; Emilio Rojas, multidisciplinary artist; Peter Rosenblum, professor of international law and human rights, Bard College; Batya Ungar Sargon, journalist and opinion editor, The Forward; Amy Schiller, associate fellow, Hannah Arendt Center; Adam Shatz, contributing editor, London Review of Books, and contributor, to New York Times Magazine, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, and other publications; Scott R. Sheppard, OBIE Award-winning theater artist, codirector, Lightning Rod Special, and cocreator of the Obie Award-winning play Underground Railroad Game; Allison Stanger, Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, technology and human values senior fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity fellow, and external professor, Santa Fe Institute; Kenneth S. Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project; Mebrak Tareke, writer and a content strategy advisor; Eric K. Ward, executive director, Western States Center; Marc Weitzmann, journalist and author of 12 books, including Hate (2019), which explores the rise of antisemitism in French society; Thomas Chatterton Williams, author, Losing My Cool, and contributing writer, New York Times Magazine; Ruth Wisse, former Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, and distinguished senior fellow, Tikvah Fund.

Arendt Center conferences are attended by nearly a thousand people and reach an international audience via live webcast. Past speakers have included maverick inventor Ray Kurzweil; whistleblower Edward Snowden; irreverent journalist Christopher Hitchens; businessman Hunter Lewis; authors Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, Masha Gessen, and Claudia Rankine; Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead; and political activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Previous conferences have explored citizenship and disobedience, crises of democracy, the intellectual roots of the economic crisis, the future of humanity in an age increasingly dominated by technology, the crisis in American education, and American exceptionalism. The Arendt Center’s 13th annual conference, “Revitalizing Democracy: from Sortition to Federalism,” will take place October 15–16, 2020.

For a full conference schedule and bios of featured speakers, please visit hac.bard.edu/conference2019. For more information or answers to questions about the conference, please contact [email protected].

The halls and classrooms of Olin were bustling last weekend as the Bard Debate Union hosted the Bard IV Debate Tournament. The tournament welcomed over 200 visitors to campus from regional, national, and international debating programs. Among the participating institutions were Cornell, Colgate, Vassar, Middlebury, University of Vermont, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, as well as Bard Network institutions Al-Quds Bard (Abu-Dis, East Jerusalem), Smolny College (St. Petersburg, Russia), and the Bard High School Early Colleges in Queens and Cleveland. Students from the fledgling debate program at Bard College at Simon's Rock also joined as observers on Saturday. 

All participants in the tournament competed in five debates on topics ranging from universal basic income to "cancel culture" to Puerto Rican statehood. Top scoring teams then debated in quarter-final, semi-final, and final rounds. Hobart and William Smith Colleges won the final round, making them the tournament champion. Bard High School Early College Queens won the novice final round, making them the novice champions. 

Bard Debate Union codirectors Ruth Zisman and David Register ran the tournament, together with 20 members of the Bard Debate Union and alumni/ae Eva-Marie Quinones '17 and Clarence Brontë '18. "It was wonderful to see members of the Bard Debate Network from near and far join together in the spirit of competition and collaboration for an exciting weekend of debating," said Ruth Zisman. "We are so proud of our students and the debate leaders throughout the Bard Network for all of the work they put into this event. It is a testament to the value and importance of public discourse and exchange today." 

Upcoming Bard Debate Union events include: the Annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference Public Debate on October 7 (topic: U.S. Prison System: Abolish or Reform) and the Annual Family Weekend Faculty-Student Roundtable on October 26 (topic: Trump and American Foreign Policy). Visit the Bard Debate Union website for a complete list of events.

NPR interviews Professor Mead regarding the United States’ failure to build a consensus on dealing with China, in contrast to the unified American front against the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Mead doesn’t think the U.S. and China are destined to have a military showdown. But, he adds, “It's almost always been the case through human history that when people rationally sum up the costs and benefits of war, it's very often the smarter thing not to go to war. And yet wars still happen.”

The Greater Hudson Heritage Network (GHHN) has announced Gilsonfest, a project of Bard College and Historic Red Hook, among the winners of its 2019 Awards for Excellence. The awards recognize and commend exceptional efforts among Hudson Valley heritage organizations. Awards are made to projects that exemplify creativity and professional vision resulting in a contribution to the preservation and interpretation of the historic scene, material culture, and diversity of the region. Gilsonfest is one of seven projects receiving awards this year.

Gilsonfest is a Bard College–led collaboration including Historic Red Hook, the Dutchess County Historical Society, and the Red Hook Quilters, funded by the Lumina Foundation, focusing on the life of Alexander Gilson (ca. 1824–1889). Gilson was an African American who labored for 50 years at Montgomery Place, an estate that utilized slave labor, eventually becoming the head gardener. Gilsonfest featured lectures, exhibitions at the Historic Red Hook Annex and Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus, new signage, a commissioned quilt, an artistic digital display, and a brochure. Bard students in Professor Myra Young Armstead’s spring 2019 course The Window at Montgomery Place, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering, conducted historical research and assisted in developing the exhibition in partnership with local historians and Bard staff. Gilsonfest focused on and interpreted the life of Gilson, which allowed the project to illuminate the contributions of African Americans in 19th-century New York and the Hudson Valley, including the experiences of slaves, indentured servants, and free-born blacks.

The awards will be presented at GHHN’s Experimenting With History Annual Conference on Tuesday, September 24, at the Bear Mountain Inn and Conference Center, in Bear Mountain, N.Y. Awardees will also be featured in a poster session at the conference.

An initiative of the University of Virginia (UVA), the USS consortium facilitates collaboration among participating institutions as they address both historical and contemporary issues dealing with race and inequality in higher education and in university communities, as well as the complicated legacies of slavery in modern American society. Bard College’s participation in USS is an outgrowth of work begun by students in Professor Myra Young Armstead’s course The Window at Montgomery Place in the 19th Century, which offers an historical exploration of northern social hierarchies during the antebellum period and the critical role of slavery in their formation, using the Montgomery Place Campus as a case study.

Professor Baruah provides historical and political context on citizenship registration efforts in the state of Assam, in northeastern India, which target illegal immigrants and fuel concern by Muslims and human rights advocates.

The neglected history of the Warsaw uprising helps explain the country’s nationalist politics today, writes Professor McMeekin.
 

The Bard Archaeology Field School has just wrapped four weeks of intensive archeological study at historic sites in Germantown, New York, near the Bard campus. Undergraduates, high school students, and community members are eligible to participate in this monthlong summer learning program for college credit. Students worked with anthropology professor Christopher Lindner to excavate sites related to the Palatine settlers of 1710, their descendants, and neighbors, including the Mohican people and, by the early 1800s, African Americans.

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, by Bard College Assistant Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, ​​​is forthcoming in December 2019 from Stanford University Press.

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia (2019). Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford: Stanford.

In her recent study on the cultivation of perfume in early modern England, Griffiths, a PhD candidate in material culture at the Bard Graduate Center, tells a story about plants, artisanal knowledge, and experimentation.
 

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek Professor Wray talks about the once-fringe school of economic thought that’s suddenly of the moment.
 

“Looking in a mirror is just something you do,” writes Kelleher. “We’re so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking.”
 

“Having worked around the world, in countries that are trying to make the transition to democracy, one of the most difficult things to put in place is the sense of loyal opposition—that you can oppose certain policies, you can oppose them vociferously, and still be loyal to the country. Once you lose that, it is almost impossible to put it back in place.”
 

The Heinrich Böll Foundation, Bremen, Germany, has awarded its Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought to Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The annual award was created to honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions. The Hannah Arendt Award is a public prize, and therefore not based solely on academic achievement. Funded by both the state government of Bremen and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the prize is endowed with 10,000 Euros and is awarded by an international jury. Berkowitz shares the 2019 award with fellow recipient Jerome Kohn, trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust and editor of many volumes of Arendt's posthumous work.

The jury praised Berkowitz’s merits as a constitutional theorist and for his work as director of the Arendt Center, a place where “students from all over the world are encouraged to learn to politically think and to study the writings of a political philosopher who never respected the restraints of philosophical thinking.”

The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a catalyst for green visions and projects, a think tank for policy reform, and an international network. We work with more than 100 project partners in over 60 countries and currently maintain 32 international offices. For more information, visit boell.de/en.

Roger Berkowitz is the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center and professor of political studies, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College. Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. His essay “Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics,” has helped bring attention to the centrality of reconciliation in Hannah Arendt's work. The Arendt Center organizes an annual conference every October. Professor Berkowitz edits the Hannah Arendt Center's weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Bookforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Interest, and many other publications.

For more information on Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, visit hac.bard.edu.
 

Jonathan Brent, Bard faculty member and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania from H.E. Dalia Grybauskaitė, President of the Republic of Lithuania. The honor recognizes Brent’s work in promoting cooperation between Lithuania and YIVO and for the preservation of the prewar Jewish archives of Lithuania.

Americans in the 19th century wouldn’t have minded the partisanship or military parades, but would have balked at glorifying the commander in chief, writes Assistant Professor of Political Studies Simon Gilhooley.

Richard Davis—author of The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography—discusses the enduring appeal of this 2,000-year-old Indian text, which has attracted some surprising followers.

On Saturday, June 22, The Andrew Goodman Foundation awarded five young campus leaders from around the country for their dedication to ensuring their fellow college students have access to polling places and voter registration services. Bard College student Ava Mazzye ’20 was recognized for her work as part of a team in the fall 2018 semester that registered over 400 students to vote, hosted 26 events, and engaged over 550 people on Election Day with shuttles, educational materials, and a results return watch party. Mazzye also helped to inform her community around polling place accessibility issues, continued dialogues about a polling place relocation effort, and advocated in the community on behalf of legislation that aims to require polling places on campus in New York.

The Hidden Heroes Award honors The Andrew Goodman Foundation’s outstanding Vote Everywhere Ambassadors and Puffin Democracy Fellows for demonstrating a commitment to continuing Andrew Goodman’s legacy of expanding civic engagement and defending democracy in their communities. More than 100 of these civic leaders from around the country were considered for the award. Vote Everywhere Ambassadors are college students from schools around the country who lead voter campus registration drives, Get Out the Vote efforts, and remove the barriers that student voters face. The Puffin Democracy Fellows, the Foundation’s newest leadership program, work on innovative and impactful projects to expand voting rights and social justice in their local communities and nationally.

“This year’s Hidden Heroes award ceremony comes at an important time in our country’s history as more states push to restrict voter registration efforts. These extraordinary young leaders, along with all of our Vote Everywhere Ambassadors and Puffin Democracy Fellows, are standing at the front lines of these battles,” says Sylvia Golbin-Goodman, the Executive Director of The Andrew Goodman Foundation. “We are in awe of their dedication and fearlessness in the face of these efforts and we couldn’t be more honored to recognize these outstanding young people.”

The awards ceremony took place during the Foundation’s fifth annual National Civic Leadership Training Summit where students from 59 campuses around the country meet to train and prepare Vote Everywhere Ambassadors for the upcoming school year. The event featured workshops and lectures with staff, alumni, and expert speakers. The Summit also commemorated the 55th anniversary of Andrew Goodman’s murder by the KKK in Mississippi while registering African Americans to vote.

Ava Mazzye ’20 is a BA candidate at Bard College where she studies Political Studies. She currently serves as a member of the Fiscal Committee in student government and as a Lead Peer Counselor.
 

The Levy Institute Report on the Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation was widely cited this week as presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unveiled a bill to cancel all student debt. Levy economists have concluded that forgiving student debt would significantly boost the economy.

In June 2019, Professor Lauren Curtis traveled to Fribourg, Switzerland, to participate in the conference, The Dance of Priests, Matronae, and Philosophers: Aspects of Dance Culture in Rome and the Roman Empire. She presented her new research about the relationship between dance and politics in ancient Rome, “Roman Rhythms: Music, Dance, and Imperial Ethics,” and learned about new approaches in ancient dance studies from specialists from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
 

Students from 15 countries met at Blithewood June 16–22 for the 10th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar. Graduate students, recent graduates, and early career professionals participated in seminars on green jobs, guaranteed employment, the international dimensions of financial fragility, economic policy evaluation for Europe and Latin America, and Minsky’s economic counterculture, among other topics. Jan Kregel, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, and L. Randall Wray organized this year’s events, with teaching staff that included well-known economists working in the theory and policy tradition of Hyman Minsky and Wynne Godley. 
 

Other countries are taking steps to atone for past mistreatment of LGBT people; the United States should, too, writes Encarnación.

The unorthodox doctrine, which says governments have spare capacity to borrow and spend, has won attention on Wall Street and in Washington. Now, it’s trying to break into academia.

Regardless of the outcome of parliamentary elections in July, Greece’s progress over the past four years—improved credit ratings, competitiveness, and employment growth—should be recognized, says Papadimitriou, and the current fiscal stabilization program maintained.