Faculty

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Robert Culp, Director

BA, Swarthmore College; MA, University of Michigan; MA, PhD, Cornell University. Rob Culp is the author of The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism (Columbia University Press, 2019); Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007); and numerous book chapters and articles. He was also coeditor of Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities (UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies Publications, 2016) and The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Brill, 2007). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Spencer Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, American Philosophical Society, and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. His current research focuses on book distribution and knowledge production as well as youth culture in 20th-century China.  At Bard since 1999.

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Richard Aldous

Richard teaches British, American, and international history. He is the author of eight books, two coauthored books, and three coedited volumes, with recent publications including The Dillon Era, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian, Reagan, and Thatcher, and (coedited with Nigel Ashton) a festschrift in honor of David Reynolds, who was his PhD adviser at the University of Cambridge. Richard is a contributing editor at American Purpose and hosts its Bookstack podcast. He writes regularly for publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and has made numerous appearances on CNN, Spectrum News, the BBC, RTÉ, and other broadcasters. Richard is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has held the Eugene Meyer Chair 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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Victor Apryshchenko

Primary Academic Program: Historical Studies

Victor Apryshchenko is a visiting scholar at Bard College. He is a historian by training but has now applied his scholarship to contemporary issues as well. His research focuses on the political history of Europe, including Russia, historical memory management in Europe and Russia, and theories of nation and nationalism. In previous years he was a fellow of Carnegie Foundation, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Paulsen Fellowship (LSE, London) and other international foundations. He was head of international network programs including Jean Monnet Network and Jean Monnet Chair for researching European memory politics. He's the author of monographs and articles on collective memory and European intellectual culture published by Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge and other publishing houses.

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Nathanael Aschenbrenner

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Historical Studies

Biography: Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a historian of cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. His research also focuses on the political thought of Byzantium and its connections with late medieval and early modern Europe. Professor Aschenbrenner completed his undergraduate studies at the US Naval Academy, and served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the Navy before pursuing his MA and PhD degrees in history. He is coeditor of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (2022) and is currently working on Empire Beyond Rome: Antiquity, Legitimacy, and Power in the Mediterranean, 1200–1500, a monograph about political and ideological competition over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world. He has also published articles on the history of scholarship, Byzantine oratory, and late medieval politics.

BS, United States Naval Academy; MA, Georgetown University and King’s College London; PhD, Harvard University; postdoctoral research fellow, Princeton University. At Bard since 2023.

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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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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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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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Valentina Grasso

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Historical Studies, Medieval Studies

Biography: Valentina Grasso comes to Bard from Catholic University of America, where she taught in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures. She previously taught at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and was an affiliate member of the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity” and the Cambridge Silk Road Program. Grasso has participated in archaeological projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, Sicily, Ethiopia, and Jordan; and pursued additional study in Classical Armenian, Coptic language, Ethiopian and Eritrean manuscripts, Moroccan Arabic, and Islamic archaeology, among other subjects. Professor Grasso’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge was published as a monograph, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2023). A second monograph is in preparation. Publications also include the forthcoming “Indian Ocean Figures that Sailed Away,” proceedings of the ISAW Roundtable Seminar Series; journal articles, book chapters, reviews, and reports in, among others, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Journal of Late Antiquity, Millennium, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, and Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia.

BA, University of Catania; MA, University of Naples; PhD, University of Cambridge. At Bard since 2023.

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Lloyd Hazvineyi

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Historical Studies

Biography: Lloyd Hazvineyi teaches African History at Bard College. Hazvineyi received his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2023 and his dissertation is titled “Forced Removals, Migration, and Human-Nature Relations in Colonial Buhera, Zimbabwe, 1925–1980.” He has taught at the Catholic University of Zimbabwe and at Wits, where he was also a research fellow in the Emancipatory Futures Research Program in the School of Social Sciences. Publications include co-authored chapters in Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa (Wits University Press, 2021) and The Life and Music of Oliver Mtukudzi: Reconstruction and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His research interests include histories of radio broadcasting in Africa and environmental histories of rural communities in Southern Africa. 

BA, MA, University of Zimbabwe; PhD, University of the Witwatersrand. At Bard since 2023.

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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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Sean McMeekin

Sean McMeekin teaches courses in modern European, Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history. Born in Idaho and raised in Rochester NY, McMeekin received his Ph.D. and M.A. in History from UC Berkeley and his B.A. from Stanford. He has also taught at Koç University, in Istanbul; at Yale; at Bilkent, in Ankara; and at NYU. He is the author of Stalin’s War (2021); The Russian Revolution (2017); The Ottoman Endgame. War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Penguin, 2015), awarded the Arthur Goodzeit Book Prize; July 1914: Countdown to War (2013), reviewed on the cover of the NY Times Sunday Book Review; The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011), which won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize; The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010), winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize; History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (2008); The Red Millionaire (2004); and numerous articles and essays. McMeekin also reviews books regularly for the Sunday Times, The Literary Review, American Historical Review, History Today, the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and the Journal of Cold War Studies. 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

Drew Thompson is a historian of art and visual culture and an independent curator. His historical and curatorial research currently focuses on African, African-American, and Black Diaspora visual and material culture from the 19th century to recent times. For over 10 years, his work focused on the history of photography in Southern Africa and culminated with the book Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Currently he is at work on a second monograph provisionally titled Coloring Black Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality, which draws connections between the invention of instant color photography, the U.S. anti-apartheid struggle, and the use of Polaroids in U.S. prisons. Art curating is a critical component of his professional work. Recent exhibitions include Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village at The Dorsky Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and SIGHTLINES at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. 
 
From 2017 to 2020, he directed Bard’s Africana Studies Program. In this capacity, he developed the speaker series Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today, featuring painter Amy Sherald, writer and public intellectual Elizabeth Alexander, curator Thelma Golden, and the filmmakers Charles Burnett, Bradford Young, and Julie Dash. 

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Ali M. Uğurlu

Ali M. Uğurlu is a historian of the Late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. He works between intellectual history, social theory, and critical political economy, with a focus on the relationship between conceptual change and capitalist social transformation. He is completing a dissertation on the intellectual history of freedom with a focus on intellectuals who wrote in (and sometimes between) Ottoman-Turkish and Arabic at the historical junction of imperial-dissolution and nation-making (1860s-1910s), when a sea-change in Ottoman freedom imaginaries prompted a concern with a central paradox of modern life: capitalism as bearer of both novel emancipatory possibility and boundless suffering. Sharing a family resemblance of concerns, his second project is on Marxism’s transfiguration into an aesthetic across the newly-formed borders of the post-Ottoman world in the early 20th century. His research has been made possible by the support of the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and his writing has appeared in the Arab Studies Quarterly. Ali holds a BA from Rutgers, an MA from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and is finishing up his PhD at Columbia.

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Wendy Urban-Mead

MAT Program: https://www.bard.edu/mat/ny/people/ 

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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Daniel Wortel-London

Daniel Wortel-London is a visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bard College, where he teaches American History. He received his doctorate in History from New York University in 2020. Daniel is currently under contract with the University of Chicago Press for his manuscript The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1875-1981. He was a fellow at the Urban Democracy Lab at New York University in 2022, served as a research co-lead at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance from 2022-2023, and served as a policy specialist at the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy from 2023-2024. His research focuses on the development of economic thought and policy in modern American history. 

Daniel has served as a Jefferson National Fellow and a Louis Galambos National Fellow in Business and Politics. His work has been supported by Cornell University's City and Regional Planning Program, the NYU Henry MacCracken Fellowship, and the New York State Archives, among others. His research has been featured in edited collections published by Columbia University Press and Pittsburgh University Press, peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and popular outlets like Metropole, Jacobin, Slate, and the Washington Post. More information can be found on his personal website www.publicspaced.com