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With fascist salutes, defenders of Spanish dictator Franco gathered recently to protest the new Socialist government's plan to dig up his remains. Professor Encarnación offers context.

Tivoli’s newly reopened Broadway Bridge has been dedicated to educator, historian, and village trustee Bernard Tieger, who taught sociology at Bard from 1967 to 1988.

“Italy’s new populist government signals a major challenge to the European status quo, but not in the way most observers initially expected.”

Cofounded by BGIA professor Elmira Bayrasli, FPInterrupted (FPI) amplifies female foreign policy voices in the media.

The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis shows the Holocaust as an act of cultural plunder and destruction.

In Blood for Thought, “Balberg has somehow managed to write another path-breaking work on another formidable and arcane section of rabbinic literature—sacrificial law.”

Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature, reviews Conservativism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition.

Two Bard College students were awarded a highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship by the U.S. Department of State. Dance major Emma Lee ’19 was awarded $3,000 towards her participation in “Black Dances #3: Around Technique Acogny,” a six-week West-African dance program in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal at Ecole des Sables, the school of renowned dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny.

Sociology major Cindy (Sam) Arroyo ’19 was awarded $2,500 toward her participation in “Development, Environment, and Social Change: Contemporary Issues in Central Asia,” Bard Abroad’s Summer Practicum Program at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000 to apply towards their study abroad or internship program costs with additional funding available for the study of a critical language overseas. The Gilman scholarship supports American undergraduate students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad and, since 2001, has enabled more than 25,000 outstanding Americans of diverse backgrounds to engage in a meaningful educational experience abroad. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. The late Congressman Gilman, who served in the House of Representatives for 30 years, chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee, and was honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, commented, “Study abroad is a special experience for every student who participates. Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views, but also 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.”

Jonathan Chavez is the director of college persistence at Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation (CHLDC) in New York City. Jon graduated from Bard in 2012 with a major in sociology.

CHLDC is a community-based organization that offers a range of free support services to residents. Working with the College Success Programs division, Jon and his staff support local college students. "We assist our students in navigating their campuses, troubleshooting issues that impede their success, and technical processes (i.e. completing FAFSA, class registration). I particularly enjoy reaching out to students to develop plans as they start their semesters."

Drawing on his relationships with Bard administrators, Jon graduated from Bard with the opportunity to participate in a weeklong program exploring the field of student affairs in higher education with NASPA. Upon finishing the program, he worked for the Bard Educational Opportunity Programs (BEOP) while conducting his job search over the summer. A fellow alumnus referred him to CHLDC. "They were seeking a college access counselor to help high school seniors apply to college," he recalls. Every year working with the CHLDC, Jon added new projects to his role, which led to several promotions, eventually placing him in the position of director of college persistence.
 
He credits Bard with helping him develop the skills to guide college students in Cypress Hills. "My field of work is still developing, so many times I rely on my ability to anticipate problems and navigate solutions. Thankfully, my various research courses [at Bard] helped me develop a framework for problem solving. In my counseling, I also use a lot of the techniques I learned from various leadership roles I had at Bard, as a peer counselor with ResLife and peer mentor with BEOP." Jon finds that his work study experiences with the Dean of Student Affairs Office and Change in Action workshops also helped him learn how to navigate a professional office environment and promote leadership among members of his team. 

Jon remembers Bard being a challenging environment. "A lot of responsibilities are placed on students: they run some [campus] spaces and lead clubs and activities in addition to maintaining strong grades. ... I am so grateful for the preparation I received at Bard. In my [current] role, I am constantly in positions where I have to learn processes or context very quickly and I have to decipher information to problem solve. My years at Bard helped me find comfort even when I was in uncomfortable situations."

Jon transferred to Bard from community college, and he appreciated the opportunity to devote his time to being a student among other students. "Living on campus is a subtle privilege that is oftentimes taken for granted, but it allowed me to cultivate many valuable relationships that I utilize to this day." His advice for current students? "When you hear about networking, keep in mind that every relationship is a form of networking; the process is easier than people tend to think and a friend or mentor might be your link to a possible job opportunity."

Joseph Kim '19 has watched the summit with special interest, hoping the U.S. and North Korea would commit to improving human rights in the country he fled in 2006.

This new volume “offers an English reader a personal tour through the private quarters of Tchaikovsky to his most informal and intimate zone.”

McClodden will use the annual research and teaching fellowship to continue her exploration of underexamined black artists.

Union organizer David Rolf ’92 is at the forefront of the shift in the labor movement, from a focus on organizing workers in manufacturing to those in the service sector.

The program was recognized for its commitment to integrating civic learning and social responsibility within each student’s chosen area of specialization.

When Catherine Baum started looking at colleges, Bard was on her radar: her older brother, Ben, was already a Bard student. The two siblings grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, home of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, about an hour’s drive from Annandale. Their father is a lawyer and their mother is a writer, artist, and teacher; politics and education were frequent topics of discussion as the siblings grew up. When Catherine was still in high school, Ben was telling her about Bard, how he was studying economics and getting involved in political campaigns. She was impressed with what she heard on the news about the Bard Prison Initiative and she loved visiting the campus. She knew she would apply.

Catherine is now a sophomore at Bard studying Human Rights, and plans to become a teacher. She intends to pursue the College’s 4+1 graduate teaching degree through the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching program.

“I wanted human rights to be the lens through which I thought about teaching,” Catherine explains. She sees education as a human right, and an essential component to an educated citizenry and a functional society. Studying human rights gives her new perspective on the classroom, in which she is more aware of the varied backgrounds and struggles of her students, and on her own role as a teacher.

Catherine is a tutor for a long-running Bard TLS project at the Red Hook Residential Center, a low-security juvenile detention center in Red Hook. She visits the location once a week to give students personalized academic attention. “It’s the hardest teaching environment that I’ve been in so far,” she admits. “We read a book with the students and help them with their homework, and also just talk to them and give them some one-on-one time.”

Catherine believes that approaching young students seriously is critical to their sense of worth and their engagement with the learning process. This became apparent to her during her first year at Bard, in a philosophy course taught by Kritika Yegnashankaran. “She was able to make complicated things simple,” Catherine says. “She had high expectations and created an environment where everyone’s contribution was valuable.” Helping her students feel confident and able to access difficult material has become a cornerstone of her approach to teaching.

Catherine has taken advantage of Bard's location to do outdoor environmental education as well. Through a volunteer project during Bard's MLK Day of Engagement last year, she was introduced to the Clearwater. The Clearwater is a replica of a historic Hudson River sloop, an educational vessel that engages people with the life of the river. "Our main thing is bringing school groups on and teaching them. We teach them about the fish, we teach them about the water quality, and we teach them about history." After volunteering on MLK Day, Catherine applied and was accepted as a member of the crew last summer—she lived on the ship for two months.

“She's amazing," Ben Baum says of his sister. "She’s incredible. She’s so much cooler than I am, it’s a problem.” 

When Ben was applying to colleges, he hoped to combine a small classroom environment with the opportunity to compete in college athletics. He visited Bard’s campus and learned about the lacrosse team, and he knew it was “the obvious choice.… I applied to a good number of schools. I realized that Bard offered more of the things that I wanted than any other place.”

Ben, now a senior majoring in economics, attended the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program in New York City the summer after his sophomore year. BGIA students participate in competitive internships while taking Bard courses. While attending BGIA, Ben received an email about an internship opportunity on Zephyr Teachout's congressional campaign. “BGIA was almost over. I had just started as an intern on Zephyr’s campaign in August and then I actually got hired a couple of weeks after that.”

Ben started out at Bard studying politics and economics without a clear idea of where it would lead him. Working on the campaign brought his academic work into the real world, and he loved it. “I can’t really describe how valuable it was,” he observes. “After I started working on the campaign my life took on meaning and intention that I could never have imagined.... I had always wanted to work in politics, but it was being in that world that made it very clear that this was what I wanted to do.”

While working for Teachout, Ben took an academic leave of absence from Bard to commit to the campaign in Washington, D.C. It was through his work on the Teachout Campaign that Ben met his current employer, a New York State congressman.

To keep up with this college credits, Ben has been taking courses at Georgetown University. He will return to Annandale this fall to complete his Senior Project in the Economics Program, which will examine the role of money in politics. The inspiration for his project, Ben says, comes from a Supreme Court case where Justice Louis Brandeis discusses the “curse of bigness.”

“He talks about how the government shouldn’t be larger than corporations and vice versa—that everything has to be proportional in a sense,” says Ben. “That is the inspiration behind this, looking at that proportion, because I think it’s very much out of proportion.”

The flexibility and support system at Bard encouraged Ben to take risks. “Bard requires self-confidence,” he observes. “There isn’t a rigid structure. They’re teaching you, but you have to take initiative to make it your own—Bard is what you make it. I was given an agency that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and that’s allowed me to make some unorthodox decisions, like taking a leave of absence to go work in D.C.”

“It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as it’s something that’s important and meaningful and fulfilling," he adds. "The desire to feel fulfilled in life, in a really deep way, is what the school teaches. And I think that’s what my future holds.”

 

“Slavery still flourishes in many places and not only on the African continent. It exists in different forms on every continent of the world.”

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou is president of the Levy Economics Institute, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, and executive vice president emeritus of Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 1977.

Papadimitriou is the author or coauthor of academic articles relating to Federal Reserve policy, fiscal policy, financial stability, employment growth, and Social Security reform. He has provided expert testimony before U.S. Senate and House committees, is a former vice-chair of the Trade Deficit Review Commission (1999–2001), and was a member of the Competitiveness Policy Council's Subcouncil on Capital Allocation from 1993 to 1998. He served as Minister of Economy and Development for the Hellenic Republic from 2016 to 2018. Papadimitriou was a distinguished scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (PRC) in fall 2002. He has edited and contributed to 13 books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Edward Elgar, and McGraw-Hill, and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic Analysis, Challenge, and the Bulletin of Political Economy. In addition, he has served as executive vice president of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, since 1979; as managing director of Bard College Berlin, Germany (2011–15); and as trustee and treasurer (1992–2013) and chairman (2013– ) of the American Symphony Orchestra. He was a member of the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research from 1975 to 1976. He is a graduate of Columbia University and holds a Ph.D. in economics from the New School.

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music will present the Harmony and Power conference and concert series on March 30–31 on the Bard College campus.

Laura Kunreuther, associate professor of anthropology at Bard College, looks at the association between voice, speech, and sound in the context of mass politics and modes of authoritarian power. What does it mean to write about the sounds of participatory democracy at this divisive political moment around the world? Democratic soundscapes draw our attention toward the affective and embodied nature of political performance, aspects of democracy that are often disavowed or disparaged in mainstream discussions of a rational public sphere and the political ethics of communication. There are many critical approaches to understanding the relationship between emotional and aesthetic expression within mass politics and modes of authoritarian power. Kunreuther suggests novel ways of understanding such relationships by tuning our attention to sound.

Bard College student Lily Zacharias ’19, who is majoring in Political Studies with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies, has won the prestigious Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs’ 2017 International Student/Teacher Essay Contest on the World’s Greatest Ethical Challenge. Zacharias received first prize in the undergraduate category for her essay “Artificial Intelligence’s Ethical Challenges.”

On Monday, March 5, Daniel Mendelsohn will give a book reading and signing followed by a wine reception for his new book, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.

"An Odyssey is much more than the sum of its parts; it is lucid textual analysis and a profound meditation on the inherent unknowability of the men who raise us."

“For Trump, the idea that America's newfound energy wealth—unconventional hydrocarbons, natural gas, so on—is changing the rules of world politics.”

President Botstein will present the FPA Centennial Lecture on "Elites, Education, and the Future" at the University Club in New York City on January 18.

"It’s an interesting thought, and one as unfashionable today as it was in the 1960s, that some traditions might be worth holding on to even when they appear anachronistic."

Professor Mead draws parallels between the Trump administration’s "America First" security strategy and Pax Britannica.

"The brilliance of An Odyssey lies ... in the insightfulness of the writing, as Mendelsohn explores the themes of the Odyssey, and of our lives."

James Ketterer, dean of international studies and director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, on what he learned about democracy at home by observing elections overseas.

Leon Botstein writes that Jonathan Keates's new book on Handel's Messiah misses the mark.

Professor Walter Russell Mead writes that the most important strategic reality in the Middle East is the collapse of Arab power in the face of low oil prices and competition from American frackers.

Bard alumnus J.I. Abbot reflects on the late William Mullen, his Greek professor at Bard, for his engaged mentoring and lifelong impact on Abbot's own teaching.

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Levy Institute research professor and distinguished fellow of the Bard Prison Initiative, received the Lee Benson Activist Scholar Award from the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. The award recognizes an outstanding scholar whose academic work and career have effectively integrated scholarship and social change. Professor Lagemann was honored at the Netter Center's 25th anniversary conference, "Higher Education: Community Partnerships for Democracy and Social Change," which took place November 16–17.

Mendelsohn weaves Homer's epic with episodes from his own life in a book of "shimmering, beautiful, dapple-skilled intelligence" about his relationship with his father.

"The most trenchant criticism of President Trump’s foreign policy is that it risks forfeiting America’s hard-won position of global leadership," writes Professor Mead.

Eva-Marie Quinones, now a doctoral student at Yale, discusses the Unity March for Puerto Rico in her role as head of national youth engagement. Interview by Stephanie Presch '15.

Professor Richard Aldous, author of a new biography of Arthur Schlesinger, looks at the historian's "vital center" in relation to liberal democracy and global affairs.

Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's Odyssey and Professor Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic give the classic fresh relevance.

Bard College Experimental Humanities Digital Projects Coordinator Gretta Tritch Roman will receive the Dutchess County Historical Society’s (DCHS) Dutchess Award at the group’s annual awards dinner this month. Roman was lauded for her "exceptional, highly innovative contributions to her students and to the broader community in the areas of preservation, history, and education," according to the award citation. Roman coordinates the Bard College Experimental Humanities Digital History Lab (DHL), an innovative humanities laboratory focused on the production of local history projects between Bard College faculty and students and the community of citizens, public servants, historical societies, and libraries dedicated to local history in the Hudson Valley.

Mendelsohn, who earned a Ph.D. in classics from Princeton in 1994, will receive the James Madison Medal during Alumni Day activities on February 24.

Bard seniors Mya Gelber and Kevin Barbosa represented the College at this year's Student Conference on U.S. Affairs (SCUSA) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, held November 1-4. The three-day conference focused on "The Politics of the Forgotten and the Aggrieved: Remaking the World Order?" SCUSA attracts students from colleges and military academies across the country and has students participate in intensive roundtable sessions on specific national security issues as well as plenary sessions led by prominent military and civilian officials. Bard's participation in this conference is part of the overall Bard–West Point Initiative and is supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Writer in Residence Wyatt Mason examines how the classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer’s epic a radically contemporary voice.

In Professor Richard Aldous’s biography, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian, he chronicles the life of a public intellectual instrumental in crafting John F. Kennedy’s legacy.

The Spanish region’s leaders believe punishment can be a path to redemption—as long as they’re not the ones who suffer, writes Professor Encarnación.

Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, a "stunning new book of reportage and analysis," chronicles the reign of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.

Plato Goes Live puts Plato’s Republic into sharp focus at Bard College Berlin this semester. The series features Bard Professor Thomas Bartscherer and President Leon Botstein.

The use of violence against separatists in Catalonia on the day of the independence referendum wasn’t an aberration, writes Professor Encarnación.

Intolerance: Political Animals and Their Prey is the product of a year-long multi-disciplinary collaboration between faculty members of Bard College and the United States Military Academy at West Point. The project involved parallel seminar courses at both institutions along with joint sessions, all focused on the central theme of intolerance, and culminated in a three-day academic conference at Bard in the spring of 2015. This volume inaugurates a new series being published by Hamilton Books under the general title, Dialogues on Social Issues: Bard College and West Point.

Bard Conservatory alumnus Christopher Carroll is among the young movers and shakers of New York City, in his role as political director of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York.

What happens when Professor Daniel Mendelsohn's 81-year-old father enrolls in his Odyssey seminar at Bard? The author discusses his new memoir on Friday, October 20.

Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature, has penned a "compellingly narrated and well-researched" biography of historian Arthur Schlesinger.