Faculty

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Richard Aldous

Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature. Ph.D. University of Cambridge. Richard is the author and editor of eleven books, including most recently Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian. He has written widely on Anglo-American relations (Reagan and Thatcher, Macmillan Eisenhower and the Cold War), Irish history (Tony Ryan; Great Irish Speeches) and British history (The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli, Tunes of Glory: The Life of Malcolm Sargent). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was for many years Chair of the History Department at University College Dublin. Richard comments regularly on TV and radio on both sides of the Atlantic and writes for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many others. He is a Contributing Editor to The American Interest magazine and hosts its podcast. At Bard since 2010.

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Myra Young Armstead

B.A., Cornell University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago. Specialization: U.S. social and cultural history, with emphasis on urban and African American history. Fellowships: Danforth-Compton, Josephine de Karman, University of Chicago Trustees, and New York State African-American Research Institute. Frederick Douglass Award, Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History (Sullivan County, New York, chapter). Author of Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America (2012); Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (2003); "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August": African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs (1999). Speaker in the Humanities, New York Council for the Humanities (2003–11). Member, New York Academy of History (since 2006). NEH Fellow/Schomburg Center Scholar-in-Residence (2014–15). At Bard since 1985.

Interests:
Research:  urban history, African-American history, public history, African-American and American church history

Teaching:  urban history, African-American history, public history, 19th and early 20th century U.S. social and cultural history

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Leon Botstein

B.A., University of Chicago; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University, Department of History. Lecturer, Department of History, Boston University (1969); special assistant to the president, Board of Education, City of New York (1969–70); president, Franconia College (1970–75). Editor, The Musical Quarterly (1992– ). Music director and conductor, American Symphony Orchestra (1992– ) and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra/Israel Broadcasting Authority (2003– ). Conductor, Hudson Valley Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra (1981–92). Coartistic director, Bard Music Festival (1990– ). Guest conductor, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Bern Symphony, Bochum Symphony Orchestra (Germany), Budapest Festival Orchestra, Düsseldorf Symphony, Georg Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra (Bucharest), Hudson Valley Philharmonic, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Madrid Opera, NDR Symphony Orchestra (Hamburg), New York City Opera, ORF Orchestra (Vienna), Philharmonia Orchestra (London), Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, Romanian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Wroclaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Recordings with the American Symphony Orchestra (Arabesque, Vanguard Classics/Omega, Koch/Schwann, New World Records, Telarc); BBC Symphony Orchestra (Chandos, Telarc); Hanover Radio Symphony Orchestra (Koch International Classics); London Philharmonic Orchestra (IMP Masters, Telarc); London Symphony Orchestra (Telarc, Carlton Classics); National Philharmonic of Lithuania (Arabesque), NDR Radio Philharmonic (Koch International); NDR Symphony Orchestra (New World Records); Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston (CRI); Royal Scottish National Orchestra (Arabesque). Honors include membership in the American Philosophical Society, the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, Austrian Cross of Honor First Class, Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Frederic E. Church Award for Arts and Sciences, National Arts Club Gold Medal. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Trustee emeritus, Central European University (board chair, 2007–2022; board member, 1991–2022); board member, Open Society Institute, Foundation for Jewish Culture. Member, National Advisory Committee for Yale–New Haven Teachers, National Council for Chamber Music America. Past chair, Association of Episcopal Colleges, Harper’s Magazine Foundation, New York Council for the Humanities. Articles in newspapers and journals including Christian Science Monitor, Chronicle of Higher Education, Gramophone, Harper’s, Musical Quarterly, New Republic, New York Times, 19th-Century Music, Partisan Review, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Salmagundi, Times Literary Supplement. Essays and chapters in a number of books about art, education, history, and music, including the Cambridge Companions to Music series and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Contributor to volumes in the Bard Music Festival series on Bartók, Beethoven, Brahms, Copland, Debussy, Dvoˇrák, Elgar, Haydn, Ives, Janáˇcek, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Schumann, Shostakovich, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, published by Princeton University Press. Editor, The Compleat Brahms (W. W. Norton, 1999). Author, Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (Doubleday, 1997); Judentum und Modernität: Essays zur Rolle der Juden in der Deutschen und Österreichischen Kultur, 1848–1938 (Böhlau Verlag, 1991; Russian translation Belveder, 2003); The History of Listening: How Music Creates Meaning (forthcoming, Basic Books); Music and Modernism (forthcoming, Yale University Press). (1975– ) Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities.

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Omar Youssef Cheta

Professor Cheta specializes in the social history of the modern Middle East and the Ottoman Empire, with particular attention to the history of law and capitalism. He has received research fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, Social Science Research Council, Mellon Foundation, and NYU Center for the Humanities. Cheta is the recipient of the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences (2014); a founding member of the Economic and Business History Research Center in Cairo; and co-organizer of the AUC Forum on the Economic and Business History of Egypt and the Middle East (2010). Publications include articles and reviews in International Journal of Middle East Studies, History Compass, Review of Middle East Studies, New Middle Eastern Studies, and Arab Studies Journal.

BA, magna cum laude, American University in Cairo (AUC); AM, University of Chicago; PhD, New York University (NYU). At Bard since 2013.

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Christian Ayne Crouch

B.A., Princeton University; M.A., M.Ph., Ph.D., New York University.  Grants from the Ford Foundation, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the William L. Clements Library. Member, Academic Advisory Board, David Library of the American Revolution (2010-2013). Author, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France (Cornell University Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize. Chapters in Atlantic Biographies (Brill, 2013); The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History (Princeton University Press, 2015); France, Ireland, and the Atlantic in a Time of War (Ashgate, forthcoming).  Specialization in early modern Atlantic history and colonial America, Native American and borderlands history, comparative slavery, and Atlantic French empire. At Bard since 2006.

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Robert Culp

B.A., Swarthmore College; M.A., University of Michigan; M.A., Ph.D., Cornell University. Grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, Spencer Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Committee for Scholarly Communication with China. Articles and reviews in Modern China, Twentieth-Century China, and Journal of Asian Studies. At Bard since 1999.

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Jeannette Alden Estruth

Jeannette Alden Estruth is Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College, where she teaches American History. She also holds affiliation with the Harvard Law School Berkman- Klein Center for Internet and Society.

She received her doctorate in History, with honors, from New York University in 2018. From 2018-2019, Estruth was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2019, her book project was a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Estruth’s work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the University of Virginia Miller Center, the Hagley Library, the Huntington Library, the NYU Henry MacCracken Fellowship, and the Fulbright Program, among others. She was formerly the Associate Editor of the Radical History Review, and an Editorial Assistant at Harvard University Press. She is a proud alumna of Vassar College.

She is currently working on her book manuscript, The New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States.

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Tabetha Ewing

Tabetha Ewing, Associate Professor of History at Bard College; former Dean of Studies, Bard High School Early College (June 2009- June 2014) is author of Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014). She serves as co-chair of Columbia University Seminar “Beyond France.” She is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her teaching and research interests are in the socio-cultural and socio-political history of 18th-century France, early-modern media, early-modern city, early-modern women and gender, old-regime borders, old-regime police, francophone black diasporic thought, and négritude.

Her current work-in-progress, provisionally titled “Rights Over Persons: France and Extradition in the Age of Kings,” is on runaway wives, clandestine marrieds, fugitive slaves, dissident writers, counterfeiters, identity thieves, and spies. It explores the confluence of emergent state and individual sovereignty and international policing before the era of modern extradition treaties and national borders. Using diplomatic correspondence and the supplication letters of the detainees, this book will show political subjectivity unfolding, not only in the world of ideas or revolutionary events or among a special class of subject, but also in the confrontation of states around often marginal subjects who transgress and, in doing so, invent political boundaries.

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Cecile E. Kuznitz

A.B., magna cum laude, Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D., Stanford University. Awarded fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies (1997–98); Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (1999–2000); National Foundation for Jewish Culture (1999–2000); Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania (2002); Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2004); United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2007): YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2014).  Has lectured at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Harvard University, University of Maryland, University of Washington, University of Pennsylvania University of Vilnius. Author of YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Articles published in The Yivo Encyclopedia of the Jews in Eastern Europe; S. Ansky at the Turn of the Century; The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies; Yiddish Language and Culture: Then and Now. Visiting assistant professor of Jewish history/Jewish studies, Georgetown University (2000– ). At Bard since 2003.

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Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann was the Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education at Harvard University before joining the Bard faculty. A historian of education, Lagemann is a former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former president of the Spencer Foundation, in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author or editor of many books, articles, reviews, and reports. Lagemann has been president of the National Academy of Education and of the History of Education Society. She is a former trustee of the Russell Sage, Greenwall, and Markle Foundations, and a former vice chair of the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Stanford University. She is also a former president of the board of Concord Academy, Concord, Massachusetts, and, from 2005 to 2011, she chaired the National Research Council's Committee on Teacher Preparation.  She currently sits on the board of FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, and is president of the board of the Hawthorne Valley Farm Association, in Columbia County, New York. 

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Mark H. Lytle

B.A., Cornell University; M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University. Fulbright Scholar: Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History, University College Dublin (2000, 2004). Author, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (2007); America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (2006); After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (6th ed., 2009); Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past (9th ed., 2013); US: A Narrative History (3rd ed., 2014); The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1940-1953 (1987). Consultant, McGraw-Hill, Oxford and Yale University Presses. Member, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Scholars Panel. External examiner in American studies, University of Nottingham, and in history, University of Limerick. At Bard since 1974.

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Sean McMeekin

A.B., Stanford University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; also studied at University of Paris 7, Moscow State University, Humboldt University, and Mezhdunarodny Universitet, Moscow. Previously taught at Koç University, Istanbul; Bilkent University, Ankara; and Yale University. He is the author of The Russian Revolution (forthcoming, 2017); The Ottoman Endgame.  War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923" (forthcoming from Penguin Press, 2015).  Countdown to War, which was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review; The Russian Origins of the First World War, which won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize and was nominated for the Lionel Gelber Prize; The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918, winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize; History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks; The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West; and numerous articles and book chapters. Notable recent reviews have appeared in The American Historical Review, History Today, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review; Slavonic and East European Review; and Journal of Cold War Studies. Additional awards and fellowships include a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, 2015; Henry Chauncey Jr. '57.  Fellowship at Yale; postdoctoral fellowship at the Remarque Institute, New York University; German Chancellor’s Fellowship, Humboldt Foundation; FLAS award for Russian language study in Moscow; and various fellowships and prizes from Stanford and UC Berkeley. At Bard since 2014.

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Gregory B. Moynahan

B.A., Wesleyan University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Recipient, Bundeskanzler/Humboldt, DAAD, and Foreign Language Area Studies (Czech) fellowships. Specialization in modern European intellectual and cultural history and the history of science and technology. Research interests include history of the social sciences, systems theory, and computing/cybernetics in the two Germanys. Author, Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899–1919 (2013, Anthem Press/London). Articles in Perspectives on Science, Science in Context, Simmel Studies, and Qui Parle. At Bard since 2001.

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Joel Perlmann

Research grants from NIMH, NEH, NSF, NIE, Spencer and Russell Sage Foundations, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Author of Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (winner of the Willard Waller Award, American Sociological Association); Woman’s Work?: American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (with Robert Margo); Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immi­grant Origins and Second-Generation Progress, 1890–2000. Coeditor, Immigrants, Schooling, and Social Mobility: Does Culture Make a Difference? and The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals. Papers in numerous journals, including Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, The Annals, Historical Methods, International Migration Review, The Public Interest. At Bard since 1994.

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Miles Rodriguez

B.A., Rice University; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University. Postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Previously taught at Rice and Harvard. Teaching interests include the Mexican Revolution, modern Mexico, modern Latin America, social movements, industrial and labor history, and rural and agrarian history. Recipient of grants from Harvard and the Woodrow Wilson and Mellon Foundations. At Bard since 2012.

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Drew Thompson

B.A., Williams College; Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Previously taught at Williams, where he was Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellow in History and Art. Other fellowships received from the Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Getty Foundation, Smithsonian Institute, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He also received a Thomas J. Watson fellowship in 2005, and traveled to Botswana and Uganda to study the use of visual arts in addressing HIV/AIDS. Coeditor of special issues of Critical Interventions and Kronos (forthcoming, winter 2014). Work published in African Arts, Dictionary of African Biography, and JSTOR/Aluka’s Struggles for Freedom digital archive. At Bard since 2013.

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Wendy Urban-Mead

B.A., Carleton College; M.A., University at Albany; Ph.D., Columbia University. She is the author of The Gender of Piety: Faith, Family, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland Zimbabwe  (Ohio University Press, 2015). Areas of interest include African history, with emphasis on southern Africa; European imperialism; history of Christianity in Africa; religion and gender. Taught secondary school social studies for five years in Red Hook and Arlington, New York, school districts. Member, American Historical Association, African Studies Association, Britain Zimbabwe Society. Awards: German Academic Exchange Service Grant (1984-85), Richard Hofstadter Fellowship (1995-2000), Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Grant (1999). Co-Editor, Social Sciences & Missions (Brill). Articles in Journal of Religion in Africa, Women's History Review, and a chapter in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960 (Duke, 2010), "Gender and the Limits of Ndebeleness: Abezansi Churchwomen's Domestic and Associational Alliances," in Gendering Ethnicity in African Women's Lives, ed. Jan Bender Shetler (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).

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Rupali Warke

Professor Warke’s research and teaching interests in South Asian history include colonialism, gender, political economy, contemporary politics, modern vernacular and print culture, cinema, and popular culture. Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin addressed “Secluded Capital: Baizabai Shinde and the Transnational Opium Trade in Nineteenth-Century South Asia.” Academic presentations and guest talks at various conferences and symposia covered subjects such as “Pilgrimage as a Mode of Political Diplomacy”; “Indian-American Immigrants Post 1965: Moteliers and IT Professionals”: and the significance of Tarabai Shinde in Gender History. Works in progress include “Royal Power and a Piece of Bread: Sufi Discipleship and Dargah Worship in the Maratha Empire,” an article for South Asian Studies; and “Baizabai (1784–1863): Queen-Regent and the Transnational Opium Trade.” Teaching assistantships at the University of Texas included the courses An Introduction to Asian American History; The United States 1492–1865; and The United States since 1865.

BA, Ramnarain Ruia College, Mumbai; MA, MPhil, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi; PhD, University of Texas at Austin. At Bard: 2021–23.