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Bard College senior Blanche Darr ’25 has been awarded a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which provides for a year of travel and exploration outside the United States. Continuing its tradition of expanding the vision and developing the potential of remarkable young leaders, the Watson Foundation selected Darr as one of 37 students in the 57th Class of Watson Fellows to receive this award for 2025-26. The Watson Fellowship offers college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel in international settings to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community. Each Watson Fellow receives a grant of $40,000 for 12 months of travel and independent study. Over the past several years, 27 Bard seniors have received Watson Fellowships.

Blanche Darr ’25, an anthropology major and violinist in the Bard College Conservatory, will spend a year expanding her musical vocabulary for her Watson project, Reimagining Music-Making as a Way of Life. She will travel to Kenya, Indonesia, India, and Germany to examine barriers to music-making such as access, cost, and elitism, and, by joining international music education programs, explore ways to overcome them. “Learning to play music in a variety of settings and traditions will allow me to meet students with a wider ear for their musical vocabularies, experiences, and goals,” Darr writes in her proposal. “In the United States, music-making is something that is usually only for those with time, money, and some supposed talent. I wish to challenge this idea, looking at music-making around the world that is more participatory, improvisational, and connected to communities. I hope that this will provide me with a deeper understanding of the ways that people can make music integrated in daily life.”

A Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations and abilities through a personal project cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar Award winners, Pulitzer Prize awardees, artists, diplomats, doctors, entrepreneurs, faculty, journalists, lawyers, politicians, researchers and inspiring influencers around the world. Following the year, they join a community of peers who provide a lifetime of support and inspiration. For more information about the Watson Fellowship, visit: https://watson.foundation.

Long-Term Voting Trends Show Democrats Losing Working Class Support Due to Absence of Clear Vision for Popular Progressive Economic Policies

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has published a policy brief outlining economic policies that improve the lives of working-class families and could sway the American electorate. That “Vision Thing”: Formulating a Winning Policy Agenda, Levy Public Policy Brief No. 158, coauthored by Levy Economics Institute President Pavlina R. Tcherneva and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray, analyzes the shifting allegiances of American voters over the decades as the Democratic Party lost the support of its traditional base—blue-collar and rural counties—and came to be seen as the party of the educated elite, socially liberal, and relatively economically secure.

“Trump was the beneficiary of a long-term retreat of working-class voters from the Democratic Party. But becoming the party of the economically secure in a world of runaway inequality, rising precarity, and widespread frustration with many aspects of the economy does not and will not win elections. Still, as we show in this report, Americans are far more progressive than either party gives them credit for. Whatever path forward Democrats choose, winning back the working class would be a long process without a big and bold vision,” says Tcherneva.

For the first time since 1960, Democrats earned a greater margin of support among the richest third of American voters in 2024 than they did among the poorest or middle third. Meanwhile, Trump gained more vote share in counties rated as distressed—and gained less in prosperous counties—despite those counties benefiting significantly and performing better economically under President Biden’s policies that boosted government assistance. In spite of the Democratic focus on inequality, the party fails to reach the financially disadvantaged (who are the true swing voters) with their message, the report asserts.

“Democrats had neither delivered on nor even highlighted the changes that many voters wanted: policies that would provide economic benefits. They were tired of inflation that reduced purchasing power, wages that remained too low (even in supposedly good labor markets) to support their families, and many other issues related to economic precarity, including the costs of healthcare, prescription drugs, childcare and—for a significant portion—college,” write Tcherneva and Wray.

Assessing ballot measures and polling data, the Levy report identifies worker-friendly policies that would improve the wellbeing of the American working class and win elections. “Americans seem to apply two litmus tests to any proposed policy: (1) how will it impact American jobs and (2) how will it impact American paychecks,” they find. “If tariffs are expected to protect jobs, voters are behind them. If they hurt their paychecks, even conservative-leaning voters are strongly against them.”

Ballot measures indicate voters are more progressive than either party recognizes. Winning policies include: raising minimum wages, lowering taxes on earned income and social security (or eliminating them altogether for tips), making healthcare and education more affordable, protecting funding for public schools, increasing Pell grants, reducing the costs of higher education, and implementing paid sick and family leaves. Importantly, whenever asked, Americans strongly support federal programs of direct employment and on-the-job training—in the form of a federal job guarantee or national service for youths in jobs that support the community and the environment. They also care about rebuilding public infrastructure and investing in arts and culture.

Moreover, voters want policies that protect them from price increases, corporate greed, predatory interest rates, and hidden fees. They support more progressivity in the tax system and fewer tax loopholes for billionaires. They are tired of the dominance of billionaires in lobbying by special interests and campaign finance.

“Employment security, economic mobility, community rehabilitation, and environmental sustainability are winning messages. But they are especially powerful when anchored in concrete policies that directly deliver what they promise—good jobs, good pay, decent benefits, affordable health, education, food, and a peace of mind that Americans can care for loved ones without the threat of unemployment or price shocks or the loss of essential benefits,” the report concludes.

Charles Theodore Kellogg and Bertie K. Hawver Chair of Sociology and Religion Karen Barkey has been awarded a 2024 Expenses Grant from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. This grant was awarded in support of her upcoming book project, Successful Religious Pluralism in the Mediterranean: A Comparative-Historical Study. The grant supports Barkey’s archival trips to religious communities including Marseille Espérance, a faith leaders’ committee in Marseille, France, and the Simon Attias Synagogue and Haim Zafrani Research Center in Essaouira, Morocco. It also supports Barkey’s work with a Bard undergraduate who is transcribing, translating, and organizing Greek interviews into English.

Professor Barkey has taught at Bard since 2021, during which time she was named the 2021-22 Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies from the Institute for Advanced Studies D'aix-Marseille. Her current research explores how religious coexistence, toleration and sharing occurred in different historical sites under Ottoman rule. Previously, she focused on the comparative and historical study of the Ottoman Empire in relation to France and the Russian Empire.

In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, covers Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs, a book about the dramatic end of Nicholas II’s reign in Russia. “Hasegawa won’t allow himself to fall prey to the fallacy that things had to turn out the way they did,” McMeekin writes. “His narrative is rich with observations about paths not taken and about the unintended consequences of the paths that were indeed taken, not least the baroque assassination of Rasputin in 1916.” He continues, “Hasegawa’s masterly narrative shows that it was the actions and manipulations of Russian elites pursuing their own interests that, in a ‘dazzling sequence of toppling dominoes,’ ended the Romanov dynasty.”

Bard College senior Aleksandar Vitanov ’25 has been announced as a recipient of a prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship for 2025-26. Vitanov, who is pursuing a double degree in Politics and Music Performance at Bard and the Bard Conservatory, is one of 150 scholars—representing 38 countries and 105 universities from around the world—who will receive the opportunity to attend a one-year, fully-funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

“I am very grateful to the Schwarzman Scholars Program for this opportunity,” Vitanov said. “I would also like to express my appreciation to my family and all of my mentors for their support throughout my journey.”

Schwarzman Scholars has become one of the most selective graduate fellowship programs, with this year’s admitted students marking its tenth cohort. The program supports up to 200 students annually and is designed to build a global community of future leaders who will serve to deepen understanding between China and the rest of the world. This year, Schwarzman Scholars received the highest number of applications in its ten-year history, with the class of 2025-26 selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 candidates worldwide.

“Our tenth cohort fills me with optimism for the future,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, founding trustee of Schwarzman Scholars. “This year’s selected Scholars are keenly interested in learning about China and broadening their understanding of global affairs, which are both now more important than ever. Our network, now ten classes strong, is already starting to make a global impact, and I am proud of our program’s continued success. I look forward to watching this inspiring community continue to grow.”

Vitanov, originally from North Macedonia, is a student fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center and founder and former president of the Alexander Hamilton Society at Bard. He interned at Hudson’s Europe and Eurasia Center and Charney Research. Vitanov also founded the Musical Mentorship Initiative to provide free music education to Bard’s local community, and won, with a group of classmates, the Davis Projects for Peace prize to expand the initiative to Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya. As a Schwarzman Scholar, Vitanov hopes to study China’s strategy in Southeastern Europe.

Five Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. This cohort of Gilman scholars, who will study or intern in over 90 countries, represents more than 500 US colleges and universities.

Bard College Mathematics and Italian Studies double major Ezra Calderon ’25, from Harlem, New York, has been awarded a Gilman Scholarship to study at the University of Trento in Italy via exchange, for the spring semester 2025. “This scholarship provides an exciting opportunity to improve my language skills and conduct research while abroad for my Senior Project in Italian Studies,” says Calderon.

Bard College Studio Art major Adelaide Driver ’26, from Taos, New Mexico, has been awarded a $4000 Gilman Scholarship to study at Kyoto Seika University in Japan, for the spring semester 2025. “Receiving this scholarship means the world to me. I have always wanted to study abroad, but money was a concern. This scholarship provides the opportunity to study what I love in an incredible place. I am so grateful,” says Driver. She serves as a peer counselor at Bard and will be studying illustration at Kyoto Seika.

Bard College junior Dashely Julia ’26, who is jointly majoring in Architecture and Art History with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian studies, has been awarded a $3000 Gilman Scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin in Germany, for the spring semester 2025. “Winning the Gilman Scholarship holds profound significance for me. It represents the opportunity to engage with diverse cultures and gain new perspectives that will enrich my understanding of art history and architecture. As someone deeply passionate about exploring how cultural and historical contexts shape artistic and architectural practices, studying abroad is more than an academic pursuit—it is a lifelong dream come true,” says Julia, who is a Posse Puerto Rico Scholar and lead peer mentor for the Office of Equity and Inclusion at Bard.

Bard College Computer Science major Nyla Lawrence ’26, from Atlanta, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship to study at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan via exchange, for the spring semester 2025. “My grandmother told me this quote from Derek Bok: ‘If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.’ There is always something to be ignorant about but, I am happy the Gilman Scholarship provides others and myself the ability to learn more about the world while also studying. Studying abroad not only allows for broader education opportunities, but also life lessons and responsibility before exiting college, which I am really excited for,” says Lawrence, who will be learning Mandarin, her third language after English and German, to better communicate and traverse the land. Lawrence is currently one of three captains of the Bard women’s volleyball team and the Katherine Lynne Mester Memorial Scholar in Humanities for the 2024–2025 academic year at Bard.

Bard College Psychology major Brenda Lopez ’26, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Kyung Hee University in Seoul via exchange, for the spring semester 2025. “I couldn’t be more grateful, and I can’t wait to see how this scholarship helps me when spending my time in Korea,” says Lopez. At Bard, Lopez is part of the Trustee Leader Scholar Project Nicaragua Education Initiative and a clubhead for the K-DIARY club on campus.

The Department of State awarded the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to approximately 1,600 American undergraduate students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, in this fall 2024 cycle. All scholarship recipients are US undergraduate students with established high financial need as federal Pell Grant recipients. On average, 65 percent of Gilman recipients are from rural areas and small towns across the United States, and half are first-generation college or university students.

Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 44,000 Gilman scholars have studied or interned in more than 170 countries around the globe. Supported by the US Congress, the Gilman Scholarship is an initiative of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and is aided in its implementation by the Institute of International Education. To learn more about the Gilman Scholarship and its recipients, including this newest cohort, visit gilmanscholarship.org.

James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, contributed a presentation on the Sacred Band of Thebes as part of a group discussion hosted by Classical Wisdom Speaks Podcast on the ancient Greek city state. Romm discusses the mythical and factual aspects of the the Sacred Band, a troop of select soldiers consisting solely of pairs of male lovers which formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC, in the aftermath of Thebes’s defeat of Sparta in the Battle of Leuctra. “This was an epochal event in Greek history,” Romm tells Classical Wisdom. “It was the first time the Spartans had been defeated in open field battle, it punctured the myth of Spartan invincibility, and led to an enormous shift in the balance of power among the Greek city states: Thebes essentially became the superpower of mainland Greece.” He continues, “The Thebans knew that Spartan retribution was coming… the Sacred Band was formed… as a way to protect the city and especially defend it against Sparta. We’re told by Plutarch, who supplies us really our only substantive information, that the Thebans drafted pairs of male lovers—150 couples, so 300 men—on the principle that male lovers would fight to defend one another.”

Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies at Bard, was interviewed in Reuters in an article discussing how the political fortunes of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, and former US president Donald Trump have sharply diverged despite having long been aligned. That Trump will return to the White House despite several court cases while Bolsonaro is sidelined from upcoming elections is due to starkly different tools each country has for holding politicians accountable, Encarnación told Reuters. Trump was impeached twice by a Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives, but his Republican allies in the Senate held enough seats to acquit him. “It's one party out of only two, it buys enormous coverage for Trump, quite in contrast to Bolsonaro,” Encarnación said.
 

Bard College faculty, staff, and students gathered at Blithewood Manor for this year's Annual Scholarship Reception on Monday, November 11. This annual event honors students who have excelled in their studies and contributed to academic and campus life. The evening’s awardees, who were nominated by faculty from across the four divisions of the College, represent excellence in the arts; social studies; languages and literature; and science, mathematics, and computing. 

“We are pleased to recognize this year’s Bard Scholars, who represent the very best of what we are and what we do,” said Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Studies David Shein. “These students, who were selected by their faculty and deans in recognition of their contributions in the classroom and to the campus community, have demonstrated not only excellence in their work but deep care and commitment to that work and to the life of the College.  We are proud of them and look forward to seeing what they will do next.”

Many of the named scholarships are made possible by generous contributions from Bard donors. Thank you to all supporters for believing in the value of a college education, and for investing in the future of Bard students.

Further reading:
Learn More about Postgraduate Scholarships and Fellowships through Bard's Dean of Studies Office
Learn More about Scholarships, Prizes, and Awards at Bard

Pavlina Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, professor of economics, and director of OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative, posted a policy note on the outcome of the US presidential election and how many Americans voted for progressive policies, such as state ballot measures to increase minimum wage and require paid sick leave, despite Donald Trump having won the presidential bid. She addresses how numerous issues, including economic concerns, wages, immigration policy, and reproductive health rights, among many other factors, affected the way voters responded, particularly in states that voted Republican. “All polls—whatever one’s feelings about their reliability—kept pointing to the same defining issue in this (as in every other) election: the economy,” writes Tcherneva. “Critical issues of democracy, abortion, and immigration filled the airwaves and political speeches, but the economy remained once again more powerful than any one of them.”

Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies at Bard, contributed to “Is It Possible to Forgive and Forget,” a group article published in History Today that examines how policies of remembrance and education, versus those that actively promote forgetting problematic pasts, have been used in approaching how countries grapple with their own fraught national histories. In his excerpt, Encarnación explores how Spain’s decision to enact the Pact of Forgetting from 1975 to 2007, intended to avoid confronting directly the authoritarian legacy of Francoism, meant adopting practices that promoted political amnesia. “Spain’s experience suggests that forgetting need not mean condemning the past to eternal oblivion, but rather setting it aside until society is ready to deal with it,” he writes.

A group of Bard students, enrolled in a course titled Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy, attended HBCU Democracy Day at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (North Carolina A&T) on Wednesday, October 16 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The course on student voting, which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Open Society University Network (OSUN), is collaboratively taught by faculty from Bard College, North Carolina A&T, Prairie View A&M University, and Tuskegee University. Students meet virtually every week to discuss issues in the course, including case studies which explore histories of student voting at each institution. Students from each of the campuses attended the HBCU Democracy Day conference.

The conference featured a panel with five of the professors who teach the course: Jelani Favors (North Carolina A&T) who organized Democracy Day and heads North Carolina A&T’s Center of Excellence for Social Justice; Jonathan Becker (Bard College); Melanye Price (Prairie View A&M University); Lisa Bratton (Tuskegee University); and Yael Bromberg, who is a senior fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement and a leading scholar on the history of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

The conference also included an array of distinguished speakers, including: David Dennis Sr., author and civil rights movement veteran; Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history and director of graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University; and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at Ohio State University.

North Carolina A&T Henry E. Frye Distinguished Professor of History Jelani Favors said: “It was great to see the inaugural HBCU Democracy Day come into fruition at North Carolina A&T State University and to have visiting students join us from Bard, Wesleyan, Tuskegee, Prairie View A&M, and High Point University. Black colleges have been critical incubators for idealism and civic engagement since their inceptions in 1837, and the purpose of this program was to lean into that tradition and to foster healthy discourse and dialogue that will inspire students to continue the fight in interrogating, defending, and expanding democracy for the next generation. We look forward to hosting this program again next year and hopefully encouraging HBCUs across the country to implement similar programming.”

Bard College Professor of Political Studies and Vice President for Academic Affairs Jonathan Becker said: “It was an incredible educational experience for Bard students to be able to meet and engage in lively discussions with professors and students from some of the nation’s leading HBCUs on critical issues facing the country on the eve of the presidential election. It was even more meaningful, because the conference was held at North Carolina A&T, the home of the A&T (Greensboro) Four and so many other distinguished figures from the civil rights movement.”

The attending Bard students expressed tremendous enthusiasm about their experience. “It was amazing to see faculty and students that were so connected to their local community and to witness their pride in the role of their institution in the fight for civil rights,” said Emily O’Rourke ’25, a senior majoring in anthropology who is pursuing a certificate in civic engagement. “It was incredibly meaningful to meet face-to-face with students from the other campuses and together to participate in these necessary and important conversations about the history and future of democracy.”

Panhavotey Chea ’28, a first-year student, said: “Everyone on campus at North Carolina A&T was very welcoming, and Democracy Day was extremely informative. As an international student, I found it particularly interesting because I had the opportunity to be exposed to different perspectives on issues of voting and democracy.”

Kay Bell ’26, a junior global and international studies major, said, “It was an amazing experience to be able to go to an HBCU, to be able collaborate with students from other schools like North Carolina A&T, Tuskegee, and Prairie View A&M, and to hear firsthand about their efforts to support voting and democracy. It makes me hopeful for the future of the country knowing that there are so many students involved in the fight for democracy.”

The student voting course includes both written and video-documentary case studies about each of the participating campuses. Seamus Heady, a digital media specialist at OSUN who directed short documentary films on each of the participating campuses for the course, said: “Democracy Day made tangible the legacy of HBCU students’ participation in the process of democracy and gave a glimmer of hope for the future.”

Masha Pankova, a graduate of Bard’s Center Human Rights and the Arts Master’s program who helped produce the documentary films, said: “It was incredibly fulfilling to see the illustrious campus of North Carolina A &T and to visit Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Museum, which exposed me to the history that changed the nation. It’s one thing to read about it and another thing to see it firsthand.”

Roger Berkowitz, professor of political studies and human rights, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College, joins other Hannah Arendt Center conference speakers Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center Uday Singh Mehta, Arendtian scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University Shai Lavi, among other panelists, on WAMC’s Roundtable to discuss tribalism and cosmopolitanism. Opening up the discussion, Lavi asks: “Is there a way to talk about belonging to a community, belonging to a group, or belonging to a people without using the term ‘tribalism’? Are there other ways of belonging that are not tribal? Similarly, what the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ is trying to get at is the question of our shared humanity. So is cosmopolitanism, which is an abstraction, the best way to talk about our shared humanity?” The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College will host its 16th annual international conference on “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics?” on October 17–18, 2024.

Learn more and register here.