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Participants Include New York Times Bestselling Author Sebastian Junger, Cultural Commentator and Artist Ayishat Akanbi, Turkish-born American Philosopher Seyla Benhabib, Irish Journalist Fintan O’Toole, Arendtian Scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt was suspicious of cosmopolitanism, world government, and the loss of the commonsense connections that are part of living with and amidst one’s tribe. Wary of assimilation and universalism, Arendt understood the need for a tribe, whether that tribe be her “tribe” of good friends or living amongst people with whom one shares cultural and social prejudices. At the same time, Arendt was also deeply suspicious of tribalism in politics. Politics always involves a plurality of peoples. Thus, tribal nationalism—what she called the pseudo-mystical consciousness—is anti-political and leads to political programs aimed at ethnic homogeneity.

Arendt believed that the aspiration of politics is to bind together a plurality of people in ways that do justice to their uniqueness and yet find what is common to them as members of a defined political community. The rise of tribalist and populist political movements today is in part a response to the failure of cosmopolitan rule by elites around the world. As understandable as tribalism may be, the challenge today is to think of new political possibilities that allow for the meaningful commitments of tribal identities while also respecting the fact of human plurality.

Presented by OSUN, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, and Center for Civic Engagement, the Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics” responds to the undeniable fact that tribalism is real, appealing, and dangerous. The conference asks: How can we make a space for tribal loyalty and tribal meaning while simultaneously maintaining our commitment to pluralist politics? The 16th annual Arendt conference will bring notable speakers to Bard College in Annandale to discuss the implications of tribalist politics just weeks before the national US election. 

The two-day conference takes place on Thursday, October 17 and Friday, October 18 in Olin Hall, on Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, New York campus. Register here.

Registration online closes on October 6th. On-site registration will remain open. The conference is free for Hannah Arendt Center members (plus one guest), Bard College students, faculty, and staff, as well as for members of the press. For non-members, the registration fee is $175. The conference can also be attended virtually via the live webcast. All registrants will receive a link to the live webcast.

The conference will also host a special student journalism contest, where young people will have the opportunity to cover the conference and be paid to have their writing, video, interviews, and photos published in the Hannah Arendt Center’s newsletter Amor Mundi.

Conference highlights include:

• Post-Lecture Discussion and Reflection with Sebastian Junger, in which the public may engage directly with the speaker
• “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism in Israel and Palestine,” a breakout session with Shai Lavi and Khaled Furani, two Israeli and Palestinian scholars and friends who will engage in conversation with the public
• “Bloods, Crips, and Overcoming Tribalism in Los Angeles,” a panel discussion with Mandar Apte, Phillip “Rock” Lester, and Gilbert Johnson, moderated by Niobe Way
• “Embodied Connection: Reimagining the Tribe,” a breakout session with Jacob Burda and Magnus Jonas Støre, cofounders of The Blue Initiative which aims to pioneer a novel approach within higher education
• A guided walking tour to visit Hannah Arendt’s grave on Bard College campus and her personal library archives housed at the Stevenson Library with Arendtian scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge and Bard College’s Jana Mader

For the full conference schedule, click here.

Featured speakers include:
Ayishat Akanbi, a fashion stylist and writer based in London who challenges popular ideas by championing understanding, curiosity, and independent thought; Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University and currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University; Sebastian Junger, award-winning journalist, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker, and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Perfect Storm, as well as Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, Freedom, and In My Time of Dying; Joseph O’Neill, distinguished visiting professor of written arts at Bard whose novels include Netherland, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Godwin (2024); Fintan O’Toole, a prize–winning columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of The New York Review of Books; Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a fellow of the British Academy.

Read a full list of speakers with bios here.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College conferences are attended annually by nearly 1000 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, American exceptionalism, democracy under the tyranny of social media, and friendship and politics.

Bard Associate Professor of Literature Marisa Libbon published her review of two books about Jane Austen’s clothes, “Needle and Pen: Dressing is writing or, the clothes in the writer’s closet”, in the latest issue of the European Review of Books. The two books she reviews, the monograph Jane Austen’s Wardrobe by Hilary Davidson and the novella The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, both explore how bespoke clothing can be a mirror of the people it was made for. Beyond just reviewing these works, Libbon presents selections of Austen’s fashion to explore how Austen “shaped her novels and her wardrobe simultaneously.”

Writing about the 1990s (a period when four of Austen’s novels were adapted to film and TV) as the “Age of Austen”, Libbon explains how important Regency-era fashion has been to our understanding of the period and how it has sometimes eclipsed the actual author. Austen’s wardrobe, Libbon argues, is where we can find information we’ve overlooked about Austen’s life. Putting this information beside DeWitt’s novella, she concludes that fashion and the written word both help us remember the past: “the words we use, like the clothes we wear, give us shape.”

Zain Khalid, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, September 23. The reading begins at 6 pm and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. This event is free and open to the public. For more information call 845-758-7087. 

Author Zain Khalid has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press, 2022). The Bard Fiction Prize committee wrote: “Zain Khalid’s novel Brother Alive is itself alive, made of language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, with at least three valances of narrative draped one on top of another. First is a deeply personal novel about three adopted brothers of mysterious origins growing up in a Staten Island mosque under the care of its eccentric Imam, inhabiting an ordinary world precisely observed and rendered extraordinary with kaleidoscopic language, training its lens on a ride on the back of a motorcycle or a pickup basketball game and turning and turning, changing the patterns of image and sensation, radiating universes of detail. Another is a wild, satirical work of science fiction involving a sinister experimental gas central to the three brothers’ mysteries, which brings them from Staten Island to the Middle East as the book’s politics globalize into ruminations on Islam’s clashes and compacts with the West. And the third is the narrator Youssef’s invisible other “brother” who gives the text its title, the symbiotic shadow-consciousness that lives in his mind and feeds on literature, frequently pointing the reader directly to the author’s influences, as Brother Alive is a novel that knows all literature is about literature, and isn’t afraid to embrace it.”

“I’m honored and grateful to be the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. I’ve long admired the prize’s previous winners, luminaries, really, and am stunned to be joining their ranks,” said Khalid. “To work on my novel alongside Bard’s brilliant literary community is a truly awesome endowment.” 

Zain Khalid is an American writer and novelist, originally from New York. His debut novel, Brother Alive, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Peter Filkins, Bard College visiting professor of literature and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund the writing of his upcoming book, Sibyl and Siren: A Life of Ingeborg Bachmann, which is a biography of Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). Filkins previously received a 2022–23 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2023 Fulbright Fellowship, and a 2024 Translator Fellowship, given by the Austrian Society for Literature, as well as a travel grant from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sport, in support of his travel and stay in Vienna, Austria, where he researched his book project, translating letters and manuscripts while working directly within Bachmann’s archive.

Poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann remains an iconic figure in postwar German literature. With the blessing of her heirs to write her biography, Filkins has completed much of the necessary research for his book—including translating excerpts from personal correspondence, manuscripts, acceptance speeches, essays, poems, stories, librettos, novels, and critical commentary from scholars—as well as studying historical documents, reviews, and memoirs from family members. During his NEH grant period, Filkins will focus on writing this biography. This book will expand the understanding of an important writer outside of her native language and culture, and place biography in the service of literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, and the humanities.

“It’s very pleasing to have such support for the extended period of writing necessary to complete this book. It also goes a long way to bringing more attention to Bachmann's work and introducing it to a larger American audience,” said Filkins.

Ingeborg Bachmann remains Austria’s most celebrated writer of the postwar era, as well as a pioneer of second-wave feminism. Her unblinking examination of fascism’s poisonous, yet subtle effect on language and gender relations informs her poems, essays, stories, and novels. Though she died tragically in a fire at age 47, she remained an important influence on writers such as Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, and Thomas Bernhard. The critical reception of her work has also been enhanced through its translation into English, with Filkins having translated her complete poems, Darkness Spoken.

Filkins’s NEH Public Scholars Award is one of 25 in that category, and part of $37.5 million in NEH grants for 240 humanities projects across the country, announced in the third and last round of NEH funding for fiscal year 2024. The grants will support vital humanities education, research, preservation, and public programs. These peer-reviewed grants were awarded in addition to $65 million in annual operating support provided to the national network of state and jurisdictional humanities councils.

“From exhibitions, books, and documentaries about our past, to research centers to help us meet the challenges of the future, these 240 new humanities projects contribute to our greater understanding of the human endeavor and add to our nation’s wealth of educational and cultural resources,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “We look forward to the exciting range of products, discoveries, tools, and programs these grants will generate at institutions and in communities across the United States.”

Francine Prose, distinguished writer in residence at Bard and author of 12 novels, contributed an essay on the literature of the 2000s to the Washington Post’s ongoing series celebrating the 75th anniversary of the National Book Awards. Prose, who was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000, frames the 2000s as a decade when authors reflected the anxiety of current events in their work. Although writers are not reporters, she writes, “even if they don’t address the current moment in their work, they live inside that time.”

Prose’s list begins with writing about those current events, juxtaposing the 9/11 Commision Report at the beginning of the decade with Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin near the end of it. She also overviews nonfiction, poetry, and short stories, with special focus on the poetry of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Donald Justice, and Kevin Young. Writing about her time serving as a judge for the award in 2007, she notes that the books honored that year—including Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork—“intensely reflected the preoccupations of that time but also raised questions that remain essential—and unanswered—to this day.”

Jenny Offill, writer in residence at Bard College, took part in a “Writing Climate Future” panel discussion for LARB Radio Hour podcast, hosted by Los Angeles Review of Books and the Berggruen Institute. As the world faces a climate crisis, questions about the role and efficacy of environmental writing assume greater urgency. Offill’s most recent book, Weather, which was shortlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, reflects on the looming threat of a warming world against a backdrop of modern daily life. “At the time that I began writing Weather—which was about eight or nine years ago now—I felt like the way that fiction writers would deal with questions about climate was always pretty much going down the apocalyptic road,” Offill says. “I realized that even when I read one of those books and liked it, there was a way in which it kind of felt like, at the end of it I thought, ‘Oh good, that hasn’t happened. We’re not actually on the road dodging cannibals.’ And so I had this idea like, well, what would it be like to write a pre-apocalyptic book that took place now?”
 

The poem “Sudanese Saying” by Bard College alum Pierre Joris ’69 was featured as Poem of the Week in the Guardian. Joris’s work relays the pain and injustice of the 2016 demolition of the refugee encampment once known as the Calais “Jungle” in France, where the inhabitants numbered about 10,000 when they were evicted and the camp demolished. “Poems that put the case for the rights and dignity of refugees often adopt a refugee’s persona,” writes Carol Rumens for the Guardian. “It’s remarkable that Joris’s carefully distanced manner and elegant precision are able to make a statement as powerful—one at whose climax the translated ‘Sudanese saying’ burns into the mind.”
 

Despite China’s status as a major world leader, few American students are returning to study abroad in China. Last semester, only about 700 US students were in China, compared to more than 11,000 prior to the pandemic. In opposition to this trend, Bard is expanding its engagement in China. 

Malia Du Mont ’95, Bard’s Vice President for Strategy and Policy and the first person to earn a BA in Chinese from Bard, stated, “The US and China will play a major role in determining the future of the planet we share, so it is our responsibility as educators to create opportunities for young people from both countries to learn from each other. In the context of challenging political relations and the rise of artificial intelligence, we must strengthen our commitment to the humanities and nurture many forms of communication, including through music and the arts.”

Underscoring the College’s commitment, President Leon Botstein returned to China in June to spend two weeks in the cities of Xiamen and Ningbo, where he conducted concerts and met with high school and university students and administrators. President Botstein also attended a concert in Ningbo conducted by Oscar-winning composer and Dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music Tan Dun.

In July, Bard College Conservatory of Music Director Frank Corliss taught for a week at the Shandong University of the Arts (SUA) in Jinan, concluding with a performance by the students and Corliss with members of the faculty and the director of SUA. The director of SUA, GQ Wang, is eager for continued visits by Bard Conservatory faculty and a trip by Graduate Vocal Arts Program Associate Director Kayo Iwama is planned for the coming academic year.

Following the week in Jinan, Frank Corliss traveled to Changsha where he joined Bard Conservatory Dean Tan Dun and four percussion students of the Conservatory (Maddy Dethof, Jonathan Collazo BM/BA ’19, APS ’24, Estaban Ganem MM ’24; Arnav Shirodkar BM/BA ’24) for concerts with Tan Dun and the Changsha Symphony Orchestra. Tan Dun led the students and Frank Corliss in two of his pieces for voice, piano, and percussion ensemble, and in his recent arrangement of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for two pianos and percussion. The students, with the Changsha Symphony, also gave the premiere of a piece by Tan Dun “Noa Concerto” for four percussionists and orchestra. The students played on specially made replicas of ancient bronze bells recently discovered in Changsha. The week of concerts also included a performance featuring the Bard String Quartet: Bard Director of Asian Recruitment and Institutional Relations Shawn Moore BM/BA ’11, Fangxi Liu BM/BA ’16, Lin Wang BM/BA ’12, and Zhang Hui APS ’17.  There was also a panel discussion at the Changsha Symphony on Education and Music with Tan Dun, Frank Corliss, and Changsha Symphony President Wang Zhi.
 At a time when language instruction is being cut in many American high schools and institutions of higher education, Chinese language is offered throughout the Bard Early College network. This summer, student cohorts from both Bard High School Early College Baltimore (Bard Baltimore) and Bard High School Early College DC (Bard DC) traveled separately to China. From July 21 to August 5, Bard Baltimore students visited Baltimore's sister city of Xiamen, Maryland’s sister province of Anhui, and China’s capital Beijing as part of the Baltimore-Xiamen Sister City Committee 2024 Youth Ambassadors Program. Their two-week study tour included living and interacting with Chinese peers from local schools in Xiamen, cultural immersion experiences, and meetings with local leaders. They had the opportunity to visit cultural sites including Gulangyu Island (a UNESCO World Heritage site), Lingling Zoo (a local zoo where they saw two twin brother pandas), and Xiamen’s first mangrove-themed ecological coastal wetland park Xiatanwei. Their trip also included travel to the famous Yellow Mountains of Anhui Province and China’s capital Beijing, where they visited the Great Wall, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, as well as the US Embassy to attend a panel discussion on the career path of a diplomat.
Bard DC Chinese language students had the opportunity to visit China this summer too. They spent two weeks at Yunnan Normal University in the city of Kunming, taking language classes and enjoying local food, tea, traditional dance, and other cultural experiences such as a visit to the hot springs. Interacting with local Chinese students was a key part of the program for both the Bard Baltimore and Bard DC student groups.

As part of the Chinese language program at the Bard College main campus, Bard undergraduate students from Annandale also went to China this summer, for an eight-week intensive at Qingdao University, which has hosted Bard’s summer immersion courses for over a decade. In addition to taking language classes, participants studied Kung Fu and painting, lived with a host family for one week, and conducted cultural tours in Beijing, Tai’an, and Qingdao.

“This is the first time the complete text of The Book Against Death has appeared in English, compliments of a superlative translation by Peter Filkins,” writes Sam Sacks for the Wall Street Journal. The Book Against Death, translated by Visiting Professor of Literature Peter Filkins from German, is a collection of notes, fragments, and aphorisms that Elias Canetti wrote across half a century. It was the preparation for what Canetti called a “life work,” a book in which he would put “everything” and which he never finished—the manuscript accumulating his musings until his own death at age 89. A Jewish writer who cast himself as “Death’s Enemy,” Canetti lived through the Holocaust and wrote: “No other feeling approaches the intensity and unshakable nature of this one. I accept no death. Thus all who have died remain genuinely alive to me, not because they have claims upon me, not because I fear them, not because I feel that something of them is still alive, but rather because they never should have died. All of the deaths that have occurred thus far are a multi-thousand-pronged form of judicial murder that I cannot deem legal.” This is the philosophical position Canetti maintains throughout his text.

Further Reading:
“Elias Canetti’s war against death” in the New Statesman

Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College, was interviewed for the New York Times Book Review about his new novel, Someone Like Us. “Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales,” writes Anderson Tepper. “With Someone Like Us, out this month from Knopf, Mengestu approaches this essential material from a variety of angles.” Mengestu spoke about the hidden lives of his characters, his goals when directing the writing program at Bard, and the ideas that inform the way he writes about immigrant experiences in his fiction.

Further coverage:
Someone Like Us is a fresh, idiosyncratic novel about immigrating to the US (NPR)
For Dinaw Mengestu, reading can be a return to his youth (Boston Globe)
A new novel from Dinaw Mengestu, our patron saint of longing (Washington Post)

1974, a new memoir by Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose, was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. The memoir reflects on the shift of America’s identity during that historical year and the events that defined it, such as the Vietnam war, drugs, women’s liberation, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. It also examines Prose’s own relationship with Anthony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. “Throughout 1974, Prose skillfully interweaves the political and the personal elements of this watershed time. Many lesser writers have tried this and failed,” writes Meredith Maran for the Los Angeles Times. “Of the many books I’ve read (and written) on the topic—I lived in parallel to Prose’s 1960s–1970s life—none has matched Prose’s use of the personal to deepen the political and vice versa.” Maran continues, “In this, her first memoir, Prose succeeds where many before her have failed, enlivening—without demonizing or idealizing—the valiant, creative, idealistic movement that almost brought capitalism down.”

Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature at Bard College and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has received three awards in support of his individual professional projects. A 2024 Translator Fellowship, given by the Austrian Society for Literature, awarded Filkins with €1,500 in support of his travel and stay in Vienna, Austria, where he translated letters and manuscripts for his upcoming book, A Biography of Ingeborg Bachmann (1923-1973), while working directly within her archive. He will conduct further research and translation from March 26 to June 23, 2024 in the same archive with an additional €4,500 travel grant from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sport. Finally, a Jentel Artist Residency 2024 will enable Filkins to work on a book-length poem about Claude Monet’s Water Lilies during a three-week residency from August 15 to September 7, 2024.

The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College, now in its third year, welcomes its cohort of five writers, Kay Bell, Theresa Lin, Vivian Rivas, Gwendolyn Shaw, and Dessie Zagorcheva.

The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks from June 2–22. During their residency, fellows are residing on Bard College at Simon’s Rock campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees.

“The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College seeks women who have labored as adjuncts and have not yet published a major work,” said Grover. “Like the program's namesake, the participants are independent scholars and writers without institutional support for their work. The Hurston Fellowship provides these women with the time and space to complete their projects.”

The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works. During their residency, each Hurston Fellow spends their time working, writing, and researching independently on dedicated projects.

While in residence as a Hurston Fellow, Kay Bell will work on her poetic memoir, Where the Sun Splits Open, a story of self-discovery and healing after a devastating breakup. In poetry and prose, the book delves into the topic of generational trauma and how it shapes experiences and relationships.
 
Theresa Lin will spend her time during the Hurston Fellowship working on her first novel, which follows the story of a woman named Shau and the significant sacrifices she makes so that she may live on her own terms in 1950s Taiwan. An excerpt of the novel was awarded the De Alba Prize at Columbia University, where Theresa received an MFA.
 
As a Hurston Fellow, Vivian Rivas will be editing and writing her documentary, “Ashley,” which follows Vianney, a 42-year-old woman living in Guatemala City. Because of gang violence in her neighborhood, Vianney enrolled her daughter Ashley in Hogar Seguro, or “Safe Home,” a government-run group home which had promised that each girl would be protected, educated, and sheltered. On March 8, 2017, Ashley and the other girls were tragically killed when a fire broke out, which subsequently revealed the horrific living conditions and sexual abuse the girls experienced at Hogar Seguro, where they were sold to powerful men. In examining the circumstances of Ashley’s death, Rivas uncovers political corruption and highlights the voice of Vianney, who continues to fight for justice for her daughter and all the girls who perished in the fire.

Gwendolyn Shaw’s project while in residence, Amassing and Assembling: Maya Deren and Joseph Cornell, will compare the practices of these two artists. Cornell experimented with film and found objects through a practice of collecting that was akin to fieldwork. Deren experimented with film form and its exhibition, seeding American avant-garde cinema, and developing her interest in film and dance into a multimedia project. To explore the personal and enigmatic works of both artists, Gwendolyn turns to the concept of autoethnography, a reflexive ethnographic practice that simultaneously describes and analyzes personal experience and cultural meaning. 

Dessie Zagorcheva will be working on her book, Kremlin’s Corrosive Capital: How Russia’s Sharp Power Undermines Democracy in Bulgaria and Hungary. She uses insights from the growing literature on “sharp power” and strategic corruption in order to explain how leading authoritarian powers like Russia are undermining democracy and the rule of law within the EU and NATO. In this project, Dessi distinguishes between “sharp power” (as defined by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig, 2017) and other types of power in order to show how the Kremlin seeks to pierce and penetrate the political and informational environment of the target states with a goal of destabilizing, dividing and subverting democratic states. 

Bard College is pleased to announce that Writer in Residence Mona Simpson and Visiting Professor of the Humanities Adam Shatz have each been awarded the 2024–25 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Chosen by an independent selection committee, the 2024–25 class of Berlin Prize fellows includes 24 US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition. The annually awarded Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the Academy’s public program.

During the fall 2024 Berlin Prize fellowship, Bard Writer in Residence Mona Simpson will be working on a novel, tentatively titled “The Great Man, So-Called,” a novel centered on two women in the life of the iconic American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt: his wife, Eleanor, from whom he was deeply estranged, and Francis Perkins, his secretary of labor, and the first woman to ever hold that post. The only American president to serve more than two terms, and a man whose disability was carefully kept from the American public, Roosevelt relied on these women as he devoted his energies during his first two terms on lifting the American economy out of a debilitating depression and during his third and fourth to the growing involvement with the war. Simpson became fascinated with these two women while studying letters written by domestic workers (who were not covered by the New Deal’s protections) for her novel My Hollywood, about Los Angeles nannies. Simpson’s most recent novel, Commitment (2023) was chosen as a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times.

During the spring 2025 Berlin Prize fellowship, Bard Visiting Professor of the Humanities Adam Shatz will work on his book project “Worlds They Have Not Told You Of: Adventures in Creative Music,” a sweeping chronicle of the post-war Black music avant-garde that combines history, criticism, and biographical portraiture to trace the musical routes of sonic exploration and creative self-determination from bebop to free jazz to the present day. Additionally, Shatz has received two other fellowships in support of his work. He has been awarded a 2023–24 Visiting Fellowship at the American Library of Paris, in Paris, France, for June 2024. He also won a 2024 Visiting Fellowship at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, also known as the Institute of Human Sciences, in Vienna, Austria, where he will be in residence from September through October 2024. His latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Franz Fanon, was recently included in the New York Times’s The Best Books of the Year (So Far) and reviewed in The New York Review.

Joseph O'Neill, distinguished visiting professor of written arts at Bard College, was profiled in the New York Times Book Review. His new novel Godwin, a tale of family and migration, is an international adventure story in which O’Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual. The Times writes that his “sharp and slippery new novel” also showcases the tendency of his fiction to incorporate his real-world interests in unexpected ways; in Godwin, that turns out to be soccer. “I have spent years of my life playing or watching or dreaming about ball games,” O’Neill told the Times. “I’m also an intuitive, somewhat dreamy writer. So sports seep into, and sometimes saturate, my fiction. Many writers are like that—we have arbitrary, pre-creative obsessions that emerge as our subject matter, whether we like it or not. I’m stuck with sports.”

“At some point in recent history, the merits of reading literary fiction became inextricably entwined with the genre’s potential to instill empathy,” writes Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program, for the New York Times. In a review of The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, which tells the story of 72 migrants in a fictional village in Italy, Mengestu argues that the form of the novel—which utilizes third-person narration alongside monologues, historical interludes, and dialogues—may be more important to the conveyance of its themes than the story itself. “Characters aren’t revealed so much as they are refracted through different narrative lenses,” Mengestu writes. “It’s only fitting that a novel so concerned with how we read, interpret, and respond resists easy attachment (or aversion) to its characters.”

Karen Sullivan, Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture, was interviewed about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen, for the New Books in History podcast. In conversation with Jane Byars, Sullivan discusses the epistemological questions that arise when examining historical figures like Eleanor, exploring what it means to parse truth when relying on historical accounts. “People have somehow tried to separate the historical kind of Eleanor from the mythical or literary Eleanor,” said Sullivan. “But my argument is that you can’t do that, because even as she was going through her very long life, she was constantly having to deal with the mythical Eleanor, and having to kind of respond to that situation, you know, so they really become indistinguishable.”

Bard College student Madilyn Herring ’26 has been awarded both a highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship by the US Department of State and a Freeman Award for Study in Asia (Freeman-ASIA) to study abroad. Herring ’26, a studio arts and written arts double major from Lebanon, New Hampshire, has been awarded a $3,500 Gilman scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman-ASIA scholarship to study at Kyoto Seika University, Japan, for spring 2025. Kyoto Seika University is a longtime tuition exchange partner institution with Bard.

“I'm extremely grateful to be a recipient of the Gilman Scholarship and the Freeman-ASIA Scholarship. They make it possible for me to pursue my goals and dreams in a way that perfectly combines all of my interests in art, writing, and Asian studies. Being able to study abroad seemed like a dream out of reach but being able to have the financial support to do so means so much to me,” says Herring.

This year’s cohort of Gilman scholars will study or intern in more than 90 countries and represents more than 500 US colleges and universities. 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. Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 41,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded approximately 2,100 Gilman scholarships in the spring 2024 application cycle.

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but 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.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

The Freeman-ASIA program is designed to support US-based undergraduates with demonstrated financial need who are planning to study abroad in East or Southeast Asia. The program’s goal is to increase the number of US citizens and permanent residents with first-hand exposure to and understanding of Asia and its peoples and cultures. Award recipients are required to share their experiences with their home campuses or communities to encourage study abroad by others and fulfill the program’s goal of increasing understanding of Asia in the United States. From its inception in 2001, Freeman-ASIA has made study abroad in East and Southeast Asia possible for over 5,000 US undergraduates from more than 600 institutions. To learn more, visit: iie.org/programs/freeman-asia/

Two Bard College graduates have won 2024–25 Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects and English teaching assistantships. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The Fulbright program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Sara Varde de Nieves ’22, who was a joint major in film and electronic arts and in human rights at Bard, has been selected for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Chile for the 2024–25 academic year. Their project, “Regresando al Hogar/Returning Home,” aims to preserve the legacy of Villa San Luis, a large-scale public housing complex built in Las Condes, Santiago, Chile from 1971 to 1972. Through a multi-format documentary comprising interviews with former residents and project planners, archival documents, and footage of the current buildings, Varde de Nieves seeks to capture the collective memory of Villa San Luis’s original residents and planners. In executing this project, Varde de Nieves aims to expand the label of “heritage conservation” to include buildings and infrastructure that are not considered culturally significant as classic historical monuments and to make connections among narrative, memory, ephemera, and the historical archive. “I’m very excited to conduct in-person research on Villa San Luis, an innovative project that strove for class integration and high-quality construction. During my time abroad, I hope to foster long-lasting relationships and get acquainted with Chile's fascinating topography,” says Varde de Nieves.

While at Bard, Varde de Nieves worked as an English language tutor in Red Hook as well as at La Voz, the Hudson Valley Spanish language magazine. Their Senior Project, “Re-igniting the Clit Club,” a documentary about a queer party in the Meatpacking district during the 1990s, won multiple awards at Bard.

Jonathan Asiedu ’24, a written arts major, has been selected for an English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) Fulbright to Spain. His teaching placement will be in the Canary Islands. While in Spain, Asiedu plans to hold weekly poetry workshops in local cultural centers, communities, and schools. He hopes to invite the community to bring in their work or poems that speak to them, to share poets and writers and the ways they speak to us. “Studying poetry, learning pedagogical practices to inform my future as an educator, and mentorship opportunities throughout my college career have shaped both my perception of education and the work that needs to be done to improve students’ experiences within the educational system,” he says.

At Bard, Asiedu serves as a lead peer counselor through Residence Life, an Equity and Inclusion Mentor with the Office of Equity and Inclusion, admission tour guide, and works as a campus photographer. Moreover, this past year, he gained TESOL certification and has served as an English language tutor, as well as a writing tutor at the Eastern Correctional Facility through the Bard Prison Initiative. Asiedu, who is from the South Bronx, decided early on that he wanted to speak Spanish and has taken the Spanish Language Intensive at Bard, which includes four weeks of study in Oaxaca, Mexico. After the completion of his Fulbright ETA, he plans to pursue a master degree in education with a specialization in literature from Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching program.

Three Bard students have also been named alternates for Fulbright Awards. Bard Conservatory student Nita Vemuri ’24, who is majoring in piano performance and economics, is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Hungary. Film and electronic arts graduate Elizabeth Sullivan ’23 is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Germany. Mathematics major Skye Rothstein ’24 is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Germany.

Fulbright is a program of the US Department of State, with funding provided by the US Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program.

Fulbright alumni work to make a positive impact on their communities, sectors, and the world and have included 41 heads of state or government, 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, and countless leaders and changemakers who build mutual understanding between the people of the United State and the people of other countries.

In an essay for the New York Times, Ayana Mathis asks what can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? Mathis turns to three books, including Visiting Writer in Residence Jenny Offill’s novel Weather, that “suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire.” In Offill’s book about a disaster-obsessed protagonist, Mathis finds meaningful insights on facing a near-future doomsday, or what theologian Cahtherine Keller calls “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “In Weather, Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones,” writes Mathis. “‘There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,’ Lizzie says. ‘What if we were to tear through it?’ The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory ‘dis-closure.’”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College. Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, Shatz was among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship. Bard MFA faculty and alumna Lotus Kang MFA ’15, and alumnae Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 and Ahndraya Parlato ’02 were also named Guggenheim Fellows for 2024. 

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community.

Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2024 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Adam Shatz, who will be working on a book about jazz throughout his Fellowship, is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among other publications. He is the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso, 2023). He is also host of the podcast Myself with Others, produced by the pianist Richard Sears. His political reporting and commentary have covered subjects such as Trump and the white supremacists in Charlottesville, mass incarceration, Israel’s Putinization, the deep state, and Egypt after Mubarak. Published profiles and portraits include Franz Fanon and Michel Houellebecq (London Review of Books), Nina Simone (New York Review of Books), saxophonist Kamasi Washington (New York Times Magazine); French cartoonist Riad Sattouf (New Yorker); and jazz great Charles Mingus (The Nation). Shatz previously taught at New York University and was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

Lotus Laurie Kang MFA ’15 works with sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation, exploring the body as an ongoing process. Combining theory, poetics and biography, her work takes a regurgitative approach rather than a prescriptive or reiterative one. Kang considers the multiplicitous, constructed nature of identity and the body and its knots to larger social structures through sculpture, architectural interventions and material innovations, and an expansive approach to photography where materials are often left in unfixed and continually sensitive states. Notable group exhibitions include Hessel Museum of Art, The New Museum, SculptureCenter, Cue Art Foundation, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Art Gallery of Ontario, Franz Kaka, Cooper Cole, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Misk Art Institute, Riyadh; Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana; and Camera Austria, Graz. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, Franz Kaka, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, and Helena Anrather, Interstate Projects, New York. Artists residencies include Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Triangle Arts Association and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; and Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 uses photography, writing and performance to plumb photography’s continuing significance. Considering analog photography as a mimesis of the body, Hubbard asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs, the physical positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, culling the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking, bridging the imaginary with the familiar. She is currently Associate Professor and MFA Director at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.

Ahndraya Parlato ’02 is an artist based in Rochester, New York. She has published three books, including Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Parlato has exhibited work at Spazio Labo, Bologna, Italy; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Aperture Foundation, New York, New York; and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. She has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop and was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant recipient.

This spring, Susan Fox Rogers, visiting associate professor of writing, is leading Monday morning birding walks from 7 to 9 am down Cruger Island Road on Bard College’s campus. The walks, which will continue through May 27, draw an intergenerational audience and are part of a greater environmental education initiative at the Red Hook Public Library, where Rogers is the inaugural Ascienzo Naturalist in Residence. Typically, participants will spot at least four of the Hudson Valley’s most common birds: robins, chickadees, tufted titmouses, and white-breasted nuthatches. On occasion, birders will spy more unusual specimens. “On these morning walks, we have seen eagles and listened to winter wrens, spied a rare rusty blackbird with its blazing white eyes, and delighted in the wood ducks crying as they take flight,” Rogers says. Biology major William Mennerick ’25, who took up birding during the pandemic, enjoys the walks. “I love birds,” he said. “I savor the weekly evolution of the landscape over spring. It’s amazing when vegetation starts to come in and then we wait for the spring chorus of songbirds, all at once.”

Novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Hand will read from new work at Bard College on Monday, April 22, at 4 pm in Weis Cinema, located in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Hand is the author of more than 20 genre-spanning, award-winning novels and collections of short fiction. Her most recent novel, A Haunting on the Hill, is an homage to Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House and was commissioned by Jackson’s family. “Hand has a gift for the sensuous, evocative detail, and her descriptions are often simultaneously seductive and spooky,” writes The New Yorker. The reading, which is being presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public. 

A longtime critic and reviewer, Hand’s writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Review, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among other outlets. Her noir novels featuring post-punk photographer and provocateur Cass Neary have been translated into myriad languages and are being developed for a TV series. Hand has been an instructor at writing workshops across the US and abroad, including Oxford and Pakistan, and is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London, and is at work on Unspeakable Things, which is loosely inspired by Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.