News

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant in the amount of $1.35 Million from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative, which supports newly developed curricula that instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits. The grant will fund Bard’s project, “The Uses and Abuses of History,” which responds to the rise of unreliable digital, social, and other media, heightened by the proliferation of AI-generated content, which not only threatens our ability to discern fact from fiction but confounds our claims to a shared humanity. Bard was previously a recipient of a Humanities for All Times grant in 2021, the year the initiative was launched, for the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project led by Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and professor of history and American and Indigenous Studies. Participation in the competition is by invitation only and winning institutions are not invited to a subsequent round, which means Bard has won awards for both of the periods in which it was eligible.

“The Uses and Abuses of History” aims to offer students the tools to exercise judgement, to act, and to guard against the erasure of history in a world that is filled with conflicting and often false narratives. The project has three central curricular goals: first, to provide an institutional structure to unite students, staff, and scholars engaged in humanistic inquiry from across Bard College; second, to strengthen students’ habits of attention and abilities to read and think critically and contextually; and third, to make use of the College’s growing collection of archives to make archival research and praxis central to its curriculum. To accomplish these goals and enhance humanities education at Bard, the project will deploy curricular development, a workshop series, and a regranting program including summer research opportunities. The final year of the grant will culminate in an exhibition featuring a broad range of artifacts underscoring the crucial role played by material culture in the shaping of historical narratives.

The principal investigator team for “The Uses and Abuses of History” includes four Bard faculty members: the principal investigator, Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Iberian Studies Miles V. Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Nabanjan Maitra, Associate Professor of Classics Robert Cioffi, and Assistant Professor of Medieval History Valentina A. Grasso. A wider advisory council of faculty and administrators will help guide the project.

“The project team and I are honored to take part in the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative at Bard College,” said Rodríguez. “We are thrilled to contribute to Bard’s historical commitment to curricular and pedagogical creativity and innovation. While we recognize that the spread of false information is nothing new under the sun, we consider ourselves fortunate to respond to its present permutations with a robust collaborative project in service to our students and intellectual community.”

The Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative was established in 2021 to support the development of new humanities-based curricular and community projects at liberal arts colleges across the United States.

Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College, has been awarded the 2026 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing bestowed by the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, in recognition of outstanding achievement in critical writing on the fine and performing arts or on cultural history. Shatz is also the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and other publications. The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is an organization that aims to support writers working in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, intellectual essays, political analysis, and social reportage. 

Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on a progressive platform promising affordability to its working class residents. This message has historically been a winning one, writes Visiting Assistant Professor of History Daniel Wortel-London for Jacobin: “But history also reveals a more sobering lesson: you can’t finance progressive policies with a regressive economy.”

Drawing lessons from New York’s past, Wortel-London makes the historical case that mayor-elect Mamdani will need to reduce the City’s reliance on tax income from its wealthiest residents. “According to the city’s Independent Budget Office, the top 1 percent of earners now contribute about 45 percent of all local personal income tax revenues, up from roughly 30 percent in the 1980s,” he writes. In order to achieve the policies laid out during his campaign, Mamdani will need to diversify the City’s tax base. So far, “there are good signs that the incoming mayor is ready to do this,” Wortel-London writes. “Mamdani is poised to help New York City shift its economic foundations while continuing to tax the wealthy as much as necessary—moving toward an economy that is healthier, more balanced, and better aligned with the needs of the public and the public sector.”

The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.

Early this year, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stood in front of a banner that read Espana en Libertad, announcing a series of 100 events coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Writing for Time, Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies, wrote about the transformation of Spain since Franco’s death. One of Sánchez’s chief campaign promises was to undo the “Pact of Forgetting,” which “upheld the controversial idea of desmemoria, or disremembering, which called for avoiding any situation that could revive the memory of the Civil War, and the Franco dictatorship,” Encarnación writes.

Among other measures, Sánchez’s government exhumed and relocated Franco’s remains “in the interest of national reconciliation,” reformed teaching surrounding Franco’s legacy, and expanded reparation for Franco’s victims. Spain is not immune to the worldwide rise of far-right movements, Encarnación writes, as evidenced by the rise of Vox, a far-right party that “vehemently rejects Sánchez’s historical memory agenda.” However, the recent, collective memory of dictatorship, he argues, may help to inoculate Spain against these trends: “Sánchez’s robust embrace of historical memory could not have come at a more opportune time for Spain. Aside from giving Franco’s victims some measure of accountability and reminding the younger generations of the historic sacrifices that made democracy possible, it is a powerful wake-up call about the risks posed by the far-right.”

Bard's Politics Program gives students a well-rounded understanding of political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations, studying the choices we can make as individuals and the fates of communities, nations, and states.

Daniel Wortel-London, visiting assistant professor of history at Bard College, was quoted in an article by Al Jazeera that explored what Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election means for the rest of the Democratic party. Wortel-London told Al Jazeera that Mamdani’s win signified that “affordability is the defining issue of our time,” noting that focusing on issues of economic security had typically been key for Democrats in the past. “Mamdani has figured out how to combine those priorities with the moral urgency of social justice that animates many progressives,” he said. “If Democrats want to bridge their internal divisions and rebuild a broad coalition, they’ll need to take a page from Mamdani’s playbook.”

The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.

Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College, has been named codirector of Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led research program that conceptualizes, designs, develops, and deploys Artificial Intelligence based on Indigenous knowledge systems. In this position, which will last for a term of four years, Kite will help lead the program operations, with a particular focus on how to increase support for the creators and scholars of the organization as they pursue their individual research projects.

“I am elated to continue to support students, staff, and colleagues at Bard and internationally in pursuit of ethical ways of making new things together,” said Dr. Suzanne Kite.

Abundant Intelligences is supported by a Transformation grant in the amount of $23 million from the New Frontiers in Research Fund and a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant, both bestowed by the Canadian government. The program’s Indigenous-led, Indigenous-majority research team collaborates with world-class experts in AI research and development. The program unites 8 universities and 12 Indigenous community-based organizations from North America, the Pacific Islands, and New Zealand to develop novel approaches to conceptualizing, designing, implementing and deploying AI to support the flourishing of Indigenous communities. The program also aims to integrate and adapt existing methods for creating AI into Indigenous Knowledge systems, as well as find ways to use the knowledge generated to help guide the development of AI generally towards a more humane future. To learn more, please visit abundant-intelligences.net.

“Dr. Kite is one of our key co-investigators,” says Jason Lewis, professor of computation arts at Concordia University and codirector at Abundant Intelligences. “The lab she founded at Bard, Wihanble S’a Center, is one of the six main research nodes for the entire project. She is one of the co-founders of the field of Indigenous AI, having co-authored the seminal text in the field (“Making Kin with the Machines”). We look forward to working with her further to help solve the challenge of designing and developing Indigenous-centered AI systems that make for better computational technologies for everyone.”

Introduced by Bard College President Leon Botstein, Event Features Conversation with Bard College Vice President Jonathan Becker, Alum Seamus Heady ’22, and Constitutional Rights Attorney Yael Bromberg

On November 18 at 5 pm, Upstate Films at the Starr Theater in Rhinebeck is hosting a special multi-media presentation of a book and four short documentaries focusing on the fight for voting rights on US college campuses. The event will feature a reading and conversation with book editors, Jonathan Becker and Yael Bromberg, and with documentary producer Seamus Heady. It will be introduced by Bard College President Leon Botstein. The event is free and open to the public. Tickets can be secured here.
 
The book, Youth Voting Rights: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses, coedited by Becker and Bromberg, uses the history of the 26th Amendment and the ongoing fight to promote and defend youth voting rights as a prism through which to teach the history of the struggle for the fundamental right to vote in the United States. 
 
The book and the documentaries focus on case studies of four institutions – Tuskegee University, Prairie View A&M University, North Carolina A&T State University, and Bard College. These cases, which emerged from a joint course that united faculty and students from all four institutions, offer unique insights into the role of college communities in the fight for suffrage, and their contributions to the evolution of the right to vote.
 
Bard College President Leon Botstein says: “This remarkable and inspiring book and the accompanying documentaries tell us about the struggle for voting rights at Bard and at three Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Readers will learn how college communities can and must promote core democratic freedoms, rights and practices. The authors’ achievement testifies to the indispensable link between higher education and democracy.”
 
The book is coedited and includes chapters by Jonathan Becker, professor of political studies, vice president for academic affairs and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, and Yael Bromberg, Esq., a constitutional rights litigator, leading legal scholar of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and election law professor at American University Washington College of Law.
 
Jonathan Becker says: “The book and film, A Poll to Call Our Own, have particular resonance in Dutchess County, where the fight for Bard and Vassar students to vote locally and have polling places on college campuses campus took place over nearly a quarter century. The lessons of the book are particularly important today, as we see the shadow of authoritarianism creeping across the country.”
 
Yael Bromberg says: “It is fitting that we are launching this book release in Dutchess County. What started as successful litigations to secure an on-campus polling site at Bard College, then motivated a state mandate to secure the mechanism on campuses across the state. These efforts evolved from litigation and advocacy into an ongoing national academic partnership and resulting book, which examines evolution of the right to vote from the perspective of college communities. We look forward to sharing these lessons in the midst of this moment of constitutional crisis.” 
 
The films were directed by Seamus Heady ’22 and Mariia Pankova MA ’24 in Human Rights and the Arts. Heady says: “As a lifelong resident of Dutchess County, I was shocked and disheartened to learn of the barriers local students have faced in casting their ballots. The multi-campus collaboration allowed us not only to situate Bard's story in a national context, but to draw on the rich activist history of all four campuses. When you start making these connections across geography and history, the authoritarian playbook is really laid bare, and we get to see what strategies have prevailed in resisting that.”
 
For free tickets, go here. Books will be for sale courtesy of Oblong Books.
 
Further information on the event can be found here. More information on the book can be found at: https://cce.bard.edu/get-involved/election/youth-voting-rights-book/

On November 19, the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is launching its Capitol Hill Series, which will bring together financial experts, academics, and policymakers in Washington, D.C., to discuss the most pressing issues facing the economy. The inaugural session, “Rethinking the Federal Reserve’s Policy Framework and Independence,” aims to foster dialogue on critical economic issues among policymakers, congressional staffers, experts, and the public, featuring panels on whether the Fed’s current policy is framework sufficient for the challenges of today, whether it risks becoming impervious to necessary political oversight, and what form oversight should take to ensure both effective governance and democratic accountability.

Speakers include Pavlina R. Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute; Claudia Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisors; James K. Galbraith, professor at the University of Texas at Austin; L. Randall Wray, professor at the Levy Economics Institute; and William Bergman, former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. A Q&A period will follow, moderated by Claire Jones, US economics editor at the Financial Times.

The event will take place on Wednesday, November 19 from 1:30 – 3:30 pm at the Rayburn House Office Building (Room 2045) in Washington, D.C., followed by refreshments and appetizers. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required and space is limited. Learn more about the event and registration here.


SPEAKER SCHEDULE

Introduction | Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Levy Economics Institute

“Why Fed Independence Matters” | Claudia Sahm, New Century Advisors

“Congress and the Federal Reserve” | James K. Galbraith, University of Texas at Austin

“The Fed Is Still Flying Blind” | L. Randall Wray, Levy Economics Institute

“When Does ‘Independence’ Become Tyranny?” | William Bergman, Former Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago


William Bergman is a semi-retired independent scholar with four decades of financial market and related educational experience, in private and public sector roles. From 1990 to 2004, he served as an economist and financial markets policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He earned an MBA (Finance) and an MA (Public Policy) from the University of Chicago in 1990.

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. He chairs the board of Economists for Peace and Security and directs the University of Texas Inequality Project. He was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee in the early 1980s. From 1993 to 1997, he served as chief technical adviser to China’s State Planning Commission for macroeconomic reform, and in the first half of 2015 as an informal counselor to the Greek minister of finance.

Claudia Sahm is the chief economist at New Century Advisors. She is a highly regarded expert on monetary and fiscal policy with many years of experience advising key decision-makers at the Federal Reserve, White House, and Congress. She developed the Sahm rule, a closely followed indicator of recessions. Sahm holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan (2007), and a bachelor’s degree in economics, political science, and German from Denison University (1998).

Pavlina R. Tcherneva is president of the Levy Economics Institute, a professor of economics at Bard College, and founding director of the Bard Economic Democracy Initiative. She specializes in modern money and public policy. Tcherneva’s book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020) is a timely guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today, recognized by the Financial Times in 2020 and published in nine languages. Tcherneva has collaborated with experts from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the International Labor Organization, members of the European Parliament, as well as policy makers from the United States and abroad on designing and evaluating employment programs. She also worked with the Sanders 2016 Presidential campaign, and in 2020 she was invited to serve on the Biden-Harris economic policy volunteer committee, during their Presidential run.

L. Randall Wray is a professor of economics at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and Emeritus Professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is one of the developers of Modern Money Theory and his newest book on the topic is Understanding Modern Money Theory: Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Elgar). He is the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award winner for lifetime contributions to Institutionalist Thought. He has been a Fulbright Scholar to Italy (twice) and to Estonia, and a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris, Bologna, Bergamo, Rome, UNAM in Mexico City, UNICAMP in Brazil, Tallinn University in Estonia, Nankai University, China, and a visiting professor on a continuing basis at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University, Oregon, in 2022-23.