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Bard College Awarded $300,000 by the Booth Ferris Foundation to Support the Center for Ethics and Writing

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a two-year, $300,000 grant by the Booth Ferris Foundation to support the establishment of the Center for Ethics and Writing. The center, directed by Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program, reimagines the study of literature and writing as both an academic and social practice, one that asks students to translate the skills they develop in the classroom as critical readers and writers to some of the most pressing and divisive social issues of the moment. Center-supported courses and events prioritize the complexity of public discourse and the important role language plays in shaping it. The center aims to address the deterioration of civic dialogue, which has been under increasing threat in recent years from a growing intolerance of opposing viewpoints and widening gaps in experiences along racial, ethnic, and economic lines.
 
"The Booth Ferris Foundation’s incredibly generous support allows us to play a critical role in developing and modeling a creative and critical practice that engages with some of the most pressing issues of the moment,” said Mengestu. “With this grant, the center is able to extend Bard’s history of innovative teaching into classrooms across New York while also supporting artists whose freedom of expression is under threat."

The Center for Ethics and Writing engages in many activities, including developing an interdisciplinary approach to teaching ethics and writing that empowers students to develop narratives that reflect the experiences and concerns of their communities; partnering with local and national nonprofit organizations, including PEN America, to provide students opportunities to produce publishable narratives on social justice topics; promoting the values of free expression through a fellows program that brings in international, at-risk writers and artists; offering multi-day micro-workshops with artists and activists on topics related to current course offerings; providing training for community college faculty; and developing digital platforms including an online journal and podcast series.
 
In its first year, the center will provide an impressive array of programs. It has offered courses such as Writing While Black, Writing as Resistance, and Risk and the Art of Poetry and has hosted four micro-workshops by writer and activist Yasmin El-Rifae; Dana Bishop-Root, the director of education and public programs at the Carnegie Museum of Art; Fahima Ife, poet and associate professor of ethnic and critical race studies at UC Santa Cruz; and Emily Raboteau, writer, critic, and Professor at CUNY. In partnership with PEN America’s Artist at Risk Connection, an inaugural cohort of international fellows will begin this fall. Participating fellows’ freedom of expression is under threat due to their creative practices. Their work will be published alongside writing produced through center-supported courses in the center’s online journal, to be launched later this fall. The center is also partnering with Bard Microcolleges in Harlem and Brooklyn, and the Bard Prison Initiative, to develop courses that empower students to express their cultural and gendered experiences.
 
The Booth Ferris Foundation was established in 1957 under the wills of Willis H. Booth and his wife, Chancie Ferris Booth. The Foundation funds a variety of nonprofit organizations in the areas of arts and culture, K-12 and higher education, and parks and outdoor spaces.

Post Date: 08-22-2023

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Bard Professor James Romm Receives $50,000 NEH Public Scholar Grant in Support of His Project Plato and the Tyrant

James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund his project Plato and the Tyrant: The Experiment that Wrecked a City and Shaped a Philosophic Masterpiece.  The book will use Plato’s little-known letters to illuminate his interventions in the politics of the Greek city of Syracuse and his relationship to the ruler Dionysius the Younger. The grant will support his work over a 10-month term beginning in September. Romm was previously a recipient for the NEH Public Scholar grant in 2018 for work on The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers in the Last Days of Greek Freedom, a book about the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes.

“The Public Scholar program helps situate the humanities just where they ought to be—in the large world of public discourse, rather than behind university walls,” Prof. Romm said.  “I’m honored to be recognized for making the ancient Greeks a part of that discourse. Never have the lessons they taught about tyranny, rule of law, and the meaning of citizenship been more relevant to our lives than they are at this moment.”

Plato is regarded as one of the world’s most influential thinkers, yet his life and personality remain opaque, partially because he did not include himself in his dialogues but used the mask of Socrates to develop his ideas. Plato and the Tyrant will bring his first-person voice to the forefront through quotes from the Platonic letters, documents sometimes regarded as forgeries but, as the book will argue, almost certainly genuine writings of Plato. The five Syracusan letters, addressed by Plato to Dionysius or to other political leaders of Syacuse, help tell the story of Plato’s interventions in that city.  In addition, large segments of the Republic, especially the doctrine of the philosopher-king, can best be understood as reflections of Plato’s encounters with Dionysius, the foremost autocrat in the Greek world of his day. 

Plato and the Tyrant follows not only the final two decades of Plato's life (367-347 BC) but the rise and fall, during that period, of a ruler who was at times Plato's student and at other times his nemesis, Dionysius the Younger, who at age 30 came to power in Syracuse in 367 as the sheltered heir of his father, also named Dionysius. The uncle of the younger Dionysius, Dion—a zealous adherent, and possibly lover, of Plato— wished to reshape his nephew’s character through philosophic instruction in the hope of setting Syracuse's regime on a healthier path. At Dion's urging, Plato journeyed to Syracuse just after the Younger's accession, a visit that set in motion a series of disasters for Dion, Dionysius, Plato, and the entire city. Plato and the Tyrant will ultimately examine the question of Plato's relationship to autocracy, a question that resonates strongly with current concerns in global and domestic politics.

Post Date: 08-18-2023

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Masha Gessen Wins Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking

Distinguished Visiting Writer Masha Gessen was awarded the 2023 Prize for Political Thought by the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking, calling them “one of the most courageous chroniclers of our time.” The award, founded in 1994 and awarded by an international jury, comes with a cash prize of €10,000. “Gessen reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom,” the committee said in a statement. “With books as well as essays in the New Yorker and a strong public presence, Gessen opens up new perspectives that help to understand a world in accelerated change.”

Post Date: 08-15-2023

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Wyatt Mason Writes about Poet Shane McCrae’s Memoir for the New York Times Magazine

In his new memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, poet Shane McCrae explores the rupture that resulted from being taken at age 3 from his Black father by his white grandparents, writes Wyatt Mason, Bard College writer in residence, for the New York Times. “The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” McCrae told Mason, “is if it happens early enough, there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know.” The narrative McCrae unfolds as he tries to piece together the truth of his past winds across American landscapes, the inner world of his childhood experiences, the emotional and physical abuse he suffered, and finding his father again as a teenager. McCrae’s book “is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity,” writes Mason. He adds, “The memoir accumulates a hugeness of feeling that puts a lie to the idea that difficulty in a piece of writing is necessarily cold or aloof or incompatible with the kind of intense emotion that McCrae’s narrative uncommonly yields.”

Post Date: 08-01-2023

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Claudia Cravens ’08 Interviewed by the New York Times about Her New Novel Lucky Red, among New Fiction “Reframing the West”

Lucky Red (Dial Press, 2023), the new novel by Bard alumna Claudia Cravens ’08, is among a cohort of new fiction that is reexamining the Western, writes the New York Times. For Cravens, the trope of the “mysterious stranger” was irresistible while drafting the novel. “I love that archetype,” Cravens said to the Times, “but I thought, ‘what if the stranger Bridget falls in love with is a woman instead of a man?’”‌ Other contemporaries of Cravens are bringing more racial diversity to the genre, including those exploring old archetypes with an Indigenous perspective. For Cravens, “playing with the genre and the mythic space” brought new life to her love of the Western, but perhaps another genre is on the horizon. Recently, she’s been “reading a lot about forests and monsters and mysteries.” “I’m looking forward to seeing where that takes me,” Cravens said.

Post Date: 06-21-2023

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Mona Simpson Spoke about Her New Novel, Commitment, on LitHub’s First Draft Podcast

While drafting Commitment, Writer in Residence Mona Simpson asked herself what it might be like to imagine a mental health system that would’ve made life “gentler” for her own mother. Commitment follows Diane, a single mother, and her children, tracing the ways that mental illness affects not only Diane, but the entire family structure—something Simpson says rings true to her experience. “It just travels through the family,” Simpson says. “We do share the burdens and the exhilarations of the people we’re closest to.” For Simpson, writing the novel was an exercise in imagining what life might be like for someone like her mother if the system were slightly different, or if luck had been more on her side. “I guess this book started out being set right at the point where the mental health hospitals were beginning to empty out,” she says. “So it was a little bit of a ‘what if.’”

Post Date: 06-13-2023

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Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard Hosts 2023 July Weeklong Workshops

The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College will hold its 2023 July weeklong workshops from Sunday, July 9, through Friday, July 14. The workshops are designed to help teachers deepen their understanding of writing-based teaching, its theory and practices, and its application in the classroom. Register by Friday, June 9, to take advantage of early bird discounted rates.

Each workshop focuses on a particular form of writing—the essay, academic paper, creative nonfiction—or on writing-based teaching in a particular subject area, such as history, science and math, or grammar.
 
The workshops offer a retreat in which participants learn new writing practices, read diverse texts, and collaborate with teachers from around the world on Bard’s campus. The luxury of time helps participants explore how to adopt these new practices by adapting writing prompts, accommodating collaborative learning in larger classes, and incorporating new readings. Attendees will also explore how different forms—such as poetry—might inspire students from diverse backgrounds.
 
To learn about all of the workshops offered this summer and register, visit: https://iwt.bard.edu/july/

Standard Rate: $3,000
Group Rate: $2,700
Commuter Rate: $2,700

Early-Bird Rate: $2,500                         
Early-Bird Group Rate: $2,250
Early-Bird Commuter Rate: $2,200
The deadline for registering for Early-Bird discounted rates is June 9, 2023.

Post Date: 06-06-2023

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Bard Playwright-in-Residence Daaimah Mubashshir Awarded Three Residencies

Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright-in-residence at Bard College, has been awarded three residencies to support the development of their professional works.

Mubashshir has received a Bau Institute Art Residency Award, hosted by the Camargo Foundation at its Cassis campus in France, a MacDowell Fellowship in MacDowell’s Artist Residency Program for fall 2023 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Catwalk Art Residency for fall 2023 at the Catwalk Institute, Catskill.

The BAU residency will enable Daaimah to continue their work on the libretto and book of Emily Black, a bluesy-rock musical about a Black domestic worker in NYC. Emily Black also received a Fisher Center LAB Commission and Residency in the spring of 2022. The MacDowell residency will support their work on a new play about their great grandmother, Begonia Williams Tate, who defied all odds in Mobile, Alabama, in the late 19th century. The Catwalk Art Residency will support the beginning of a new work of creative nonfiction.

Post Date: 06-05-2023

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Alma Guillermoprieto Joins Bard Faculty in the Division of Languages and Literature

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Alma Guillermoprieto as distinguished visiting professor in the Division of Languages and Literature for the fall 2023 semester. 

Alma Guillermoprieto, a Mexican reporter and writer, began her English-language career in journalism in 1978, and broke the story of the 1981 El Mozote massacre by the army in El Salvador. She has written extensively about Latin America, including for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and National Geographic Magazine, and her writings have been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world. She has published eight books in both English and Spanish, including The Heart That Bleeds, and Looking for History. 

Guillermoprieto is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a George Polk Award, and an International Womens’ Media Foundation lifetime achievement award, among many others. In 2018 she was the recipient of Spain’s Princess Asturias Award in the Humanities. 

Guillermoprieto began teaching at the age of 20, when, on the recommendation of Merce Cunningham, she traveled to Cuba to teach Cunningham and Graham dance techniques, which she recounts in her memoir Dancing with Cuba: a Memoir of the Revolution. In 1995, at the request of Gabriel García Márquez, she taught the inaugural journalism workshop at the Foundation for New Journalism, in Cartagena, Colombia, and taught the first workshop of the year there through 2010. She has been a visiting professor in both Latin American history and journalism, at Chicago University, Harvard, USC-Berkeley, and Princeton.

Post Date: 06-01-2023

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Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, Memoir by Poet Jane Wong ’07, Reviewed in the New York Times and Boston Globe

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, a new memoir by Bard alumna and poet Jane Wong ’07, documents her childhood growing up as a second-generation working class American, falling asleep on bags of rice in her immigrant parents’ Atlantic City Chinese restaurant, which her father eventually loses to his gambling addiction. “The poet Wong’s book is reminiscent of an abstract watercolor, free-flowing, nonlinear, without clear borders,” writes Qian Julie Wang for the New York Times. Ultimately a love song, Wong’s memoir “explore[s] the many forms of hunger that come with being Asian in America.” Wong’s memoir was also reviewed in the Boston Globe, and she was interviewed about her book for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Lit Hub.

Interviews:
LA Review of Books: “Tenderness and Ferocity Go Hand in Hand: A Conversation with Jane Wong”
Lit Hub: “Jane Wong: How Non-Linearity Mirrors the Experience of Migration”
 

Post Date: 05-31-2023