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“The Real Developmental Engine​:” Jeannette Estruth on the Relationship between Silicon Valley and the Military-Industrial Complex for The Drift

“Despite the persistent myth that Silicon Valley was built by rogue engineers in Palo Alto garages, federal funding — especially from the military — has long been the real developmental engine of the American technology sector,” writes Assistant Professor of History Jeannette Estruth for The Drift. Estruth traces the history of Silicon Valley and its innovations, both software and hardware, outlining the longstanding partnerships between the technology sector and the federal government.

“The Real Developmental Engine​:” Jeannette Estruth on the Relationship between Silicon Valley and the Military-Industrial Complex for The Drift

“Despite the persistent myth that Silicon Valley was built by rogue engineers in Palo Alto garages, federal funding — especially from the military — has long been the real developmental engine of the American technology sector,” writes Assistant Professor of History Jeannette Estruth for The Drift. Estruth traces the history of Silicon Valley and its innovations, both software and hardware, outlining the longstanding partnerships between the technology sector and the federal government. “High tech’s value has long been in producing war-making technology for the federal government,” Estruth writes, a relationship that, she argues, has historically gone both ways. With public criticism of “Big Tech” on the rise, “the public is falling out of love” with Silicon Valley and its ilk. The question now, she writes, is “whether Washington could be persuaded to do the same.”
Read More in The Drift

Post Date: 02-28-2023

Myra Young Armstead Spoke with the Times Union about the Life and Legacy of James F. Brown, “One of the Country’s First Black Master Gardeners”

While slave narratives—“first-person retellings of the enslaved experience”—were persuasive to white abolitionists and widely distributed, quieter but no less important details about the early years of emancipation can be found in the diaries of one of the country’s first Black Master Gardeners, James F. Brown. Myra Young Armstead, vice president for academic inclusive excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies, spoke with the Times Union about Brown’s life and legacy.

Myra Young Armstead Spoke with the Times Union about the Life and Legacy of James F. Brown, “One of the Country’s First Black Master Gardeners”

While slave narratives—“first-person retellings of the enslaved experience”—were persuasive to white abolitionists and widely distributed, quieter but no less important details about the early years of emancipation can be found in the diaries of one of the country’s first Black Master Gardeners, James F. Brown. Myra Young Armstead, vice president for academic inclusive excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies, spoke with the Times Union about Brown’s life and legacy. “In the period before the Civil War, freedom in the most obvious sense for a runaway meant emancipation,” Armstead said. “It also meant freedom from wage slavery, and freedom to operate in the civic sphere. We can explore the many meanings of freedom in the antebellum period through James’s diary.”
Read More in the Times Union

Post Date: 02-14-2023

Professor Richard Aldous Explores Parallels between a Cold War Spy Plane Crisis and China’s Balloon Incident for the Washington Post

A diplomatic dispute over an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon seen over Montana echoes a similar Cold War event, writes Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, for the Washington Post. In the U-2 crisis of 1960, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, reversing years of progress in relations between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “Lessons from that crisis tell us two things,” writes Aldous. “That unexpected events can destroy years of diplomatic effort; and that the Chinese are likely now scrambling in a panic to get their story straight.”

Professor Richard Aldous Explores Parallels between a Cold War Spy Plane Crisis and China’s Balloon Incident for the Washington Post

A diplomatic dispute over an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon seen over Montana echoes a similar Cold War event, writes Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, for the Washington Post. In the U-2 crisis of 1960, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, reversing years of progress in relations between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. “Lessons from that crisis tell us two things,” writes Aldous. “That unexpected events can destroy years of diplomatic effort; and that the Chinese are likely now scrambling in a panic to get their story straight.” In a statement analogous to China’s current response, NASA had claimed that the plane was used for weather research and gone off course, which Eisenhower was obliged to renounce when he later took responsibility for the spy planes used for information gathering. “The concern about the historical parallel with 1960,” Aldous continues, “Is that the U-2 crisis marked the beginning of one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.”
Read more in the Washington Post

Post Date: 02-07-2023
More History News
  • Five Bard College Students Win Prestigious Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

    Five Bard College Students Win Prestigious Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

    Five Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 452 U.S. colleges and represent 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 81 countries through October 2023.
     
    Written Arts major Havvah Keller ’24, from Montpelier, Vermont, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Valparaíso, Chile, on CEA’s Spanish Language and Latin American Studies program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, for spring 2023. “Receiving this scholarship means that I will be able to fulfill my dream of studying Spanish in total immersion, living with a local family in an art-filled, exuberant city, and studying Latin American and Chilean poetry and literature, as well as many other subjects such as Latin American history, Indigenous dances and arts of the Mapuche people, and making international friends of all backgrounds. I am eternally grateful to Gilman for helping me plant the seeds which will open many incredible doors for me in my life this spring, and beyond,” said Keller.
     
    Philosophy and German Studies joint major Bella Bergen ’24, from Broomfield, Colorado, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman Scholarship allows me to pursue studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. I have never left the country despite a deep desire to do so, and the Gilman Scholarship helps me finally accomplish this goal. As a joint major in Philosophy and German Studies, my studies and language proficiency will both benefit greatly from my time in Germany. Ich freue mich auf Berlin,” said Bergen.
     
    Art History and Visual Culture major Elsa Joiner ’24, from Dunwoody, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman scholarship will enable me to study the subject of my dreams, sound art, in the city of my greatest fantasies, Berlin, Germany. With the scholarship, I plan to explore the role of sound in identity formation and develop my skills as a deep listener, eventually returning to America with the strongest ears in the world and, perhaps, the sharpest mind,” said Joiner.
     
    Art History and Visual Culture and Film Studies joint major Sasha Alcocer ’24, from New York, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “As a first-generation American, I am incredibly honored and humbled by the support from the Gilman scholarship to pursue this unique opportunity to learn from and connect with like-minded international students and Berlin-based creatives. Having grown up in New York City, I’ve always been interested in artistic communities and cultural history, therefore Berlin could not be a better place to be immersed in for my studies abroad,” said Alcocer.
     
    Asian Studies and GIS joint major Kelany De La Cruz ’24, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship, in addition to a $5,000 Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman ASIA scholarship, to study in Taipei, Taiwan, on the CET Taiwan program for spring 2023. “To me these scholarships mean encouragement to follow my academic and professional dreams because I would not have been able to study abroad without them,” said De La Cruz.
     
    Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 36,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 
     
    As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
     
    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 U.S. 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
    Read more

    Post Date: 12-20-2022
  • Richard Aldous Hosts Bookstack, a Weekly Podcast on American Purpose

    Richard Aldous Hosts Bookstack, a Weekly Podcast on American Purpose

    On his weekly podcast Bookstack, Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture, has discussed the demonization of women in power, right-wing narratives and their internet success, and American foreign policy. Speaking with authors like Eleanor Herman, Francesca Tripodi, and Michael Mandelbaum, Aldous engages writers in conversation around their new books. On the latest episode, Aldous spoke with Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, about the American-Israeli relationship, how America sees the world, and Mead’s new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.
    Listen Now

    Post Date: 10-04-2022
  • Bard Professor Drew Thompson Curates Exhibition on Hudson Valley Artist Ben Wigfall

    Bard Professor Drew Thompson Curates Exhibition on Hudson Valley Artist Ben Wigfall

    Professor Drew Thompson curates an exhibition dedicated to Ben Wigfall, artist, printmaker, and SUNY New Paltz’s first Black professor of art. Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village opens at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz on September 10. The exhibition surveys Wigfall's multimedia work over four decades, including pieces from the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Hampton University, as well as display prints, photographs, and other ephemera documenting Communications Village, the printmaking facility he founded in the 1970s that trained and employed local youth to assist distinguished, mostly Black printmakers. Communications Village played an essential role as an alternative space enabling artists of color to make and show their work, says Professor Thompson. “This was a subversive space, not recognized by the mainstream American art scene,” he says. The exhibition runs through December 10 at the Dorsky Museum and then travels to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Drew Thompson is associate professor of Africana and historical studies at Bard College. He has been a member of the faculty since 2013. (Chronogram)
    Read the Article in Chronogram
    More about the Exhibition

    Post Date: 09-06-2022
  • Bard Faculty Members Robert Culp and ​​Lu Kou Awarded Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grants

    Bard Faculty Members Robert Culp and ​​Lu Kou Awarded Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grants

    Robert Culp, professor of history, and ​​Lu Kou, assistant professor of Chinese, have been awarded Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar grants in support of their individual professional work. Culp was awarded a $15,000, one-year grant in support of his book project, Circuits of Meaning: Book Markets and Knowledge Production in Modern China, 1900-1965, which explores “how changing systems of book distribution in modern China shaped knowledge production and the formation of reading communities from 1900 to 1965.” Kou received a $20,000, one-year grant to support War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China, his book project that “examines the ‘discursive battles’ fought among rival states in China's early medieval period, specifically, how rhetoric—the art of verbal persuasion—constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity.”
    Read More

    Post Date: 07-19-2022
  • Five Bard College Students Win Fulbright Awards

    Five Bard College Students Win Fulbright Awards

    Five Bard College students have won Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, graduate study, 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 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.

    Mercer Greenwald ’22, a German Studies major from Williamstown, MA, has won a Fulbright Research and Teaching Assistantship Award in Austria for the 2022–23 academic year. As a Combined Research and Teaching Fulbright Scholar, Greenwald will spend the year immersed in the cultural life of the city of Vienna, where she will teach English and write an independent research project on the topic of “concomitant being” in the work of Austrian writer and thinker Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). Greenwald will begin doctoral study in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in the fall of 2023.

    Maya Frieden ’22 (they/them), an art history and visual culture major, has won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to support graduate study in the Netherlands for the 2022–23 academic year. Frieden will spend the year in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures. “I have often questioned the sustainability of the current pace at which the design industry is progressing. Embedded within every designed element--from object design to urban design--are intentions that can be sensed, even subtly, by those encountering them, and they frequently symbolize and materialize exclusionary or prohibitive ideologies,” says Frieden. “The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures, understands the significance of historical, sociological and environmental research within the field of design, training students with the skills to interpret, discuss and interact with the discipline, so that we will be equipped to contribute in quickening the pace. By studying in this Master’s program, I will develop additional strategies for noticing the presence or absence of sensitivity within design, while also improving my capabilities for communicating such analyses, and working with those in positions that influence how our world is designed.”

    Paola Luchsinger ’20, a Spanish major from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Greece for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend the year in Athens teaching English elementary through secondary students at Athens College–Hellenic American Educational Foundation. “As an English Teaching Assistant in Greece, I hope to gain an idea of Greek perceptions of American culture while also representing a positive image of the United States. I have chosen Greece as my destination because a year in Greece will give me the opportunity to become fluent in Greek through immersion and improve my knowledge of modern Greek society,” says Luchsinger.

    Lance Sum ’21 (BHSEC Manhattan ’19), an anthropology major from Brooklyn, NY, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Taiwan for the 2022–23 academic year. He intended to teach English and participate in intensive outdoor adventures, explore large influential cultural institutions in the major cities of Taiwan, host peer review writing and poetry sessions, and educate his Taiwanese community members about his experience in growing up in New York City. “I think Taiwan could offer me a more magnified perspective of a community who has preserved their own culture through much political and colonial pressure, an experience that would help me develop my cultural understanding for others,” says Sum.

    Jordan Donohue ’22, a historical studies major, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Brazil for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend in the year teaching English and deepening her knowledge around music and farming. Continuing her past work with Indigenous groups internationally, she plans to engage with and learn from the Indigenous populations of Brazil. Additionally, Jordan has studied Portuguese for seven years and will utilize her time as a Fulbright scholar to advance her fluency and prepare for further academic research on the language and culture of Brazil.

    The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

    Post Date: 04-19-2022
  • Bard Conservatory Sophomore Samuel Mutter Premieres “Incarceration,” Composition Inspired by Soviet Dissident Memoir He Read in Bard Common Course

    Bard Conservatory Sophomore Samuel Mutter Premieres “Incarceration,” Composition Inspired by Soviet Dissident Memoir He Read in Bard Common Course

    Samuel Mutter ’25 was so inspired by reading Vladimir Bukovsky's book To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter as a Bard first-year that he composed “Incarceration,” an original piece of music that premiered at the Atlantic Music Festival over the summer. Mutter read Bukovsky's Soviet prison dissident memoir last year in Alternate Worlds: Utopia and Dystopia in Modern Russia, a common course taught by Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture. In an interview with Soviet History Lessons, a historical archive chronicling the human rights movement in the USSR, Mutter comments on the book and Bukovsky's life as an activist: “What could be a more important battle than a battle for life, for liberty, for basic human rights and freedoms?” He goes on to describe the inspiring experience he had last semester teaching piano lessons to young people in a local juvenile detention center through the Bard student–led Musical Mentorship Initiative. Mutter is a double-degree student in the Conservatory majoring in music composition and global and international studies with a concentration in historical studies.
    Read the Interview

    Post Date: 11-02-2021

Historical Study Events

  • 3/29
    Wednesday

    Wednesday, March 29, 2023

    The Ambivalent Reception of Turkic Refugees in Early Twentieth Century Japan

    Dr. Noriko Kanahara '04, Waseda University-Tokyo
    Olin 102 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This talk explores how in the 1920s through the early 1940s, Japanese state officials determined whether or not to accept Turkic Muslim refugees from the former Russian Empire. Though at most 1000 in number, the refugees left a significant impact not only on how Japanese state officials understood Islam and the power of Muslim networks in global politics, but also on how these officials formed national consciousness in contradistinction to them. Analysis of the journals of the Japanese intelligence police reveals that although the police considered the refugees' religion as an important marker, the refugees’ political interests were most significant in determining whether or not to accept them in Japan. This talk demonstrates that religion and ideology, particularly Islam and Communism, impacted how the refugees established transnational relationships and how Japanese state officials demarcated the nation during the interwar and wartime periods following the Russian Revolution and throughout the Second World War. More specifically, religious and ideological ties—precisely because they were considered powerful tools of transnational mobilization—served as grounds for the Japanese state’s ambivalent reception of refugees.
     
    Bio: Noriko Kanahara graduated from Bard College in 2004 with a BA in Anthropology. She has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago, an M.Phil. in Migration Studies from Oxford University, and an MA in Area Studies from Tokyo University. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Tohoku University and Waseda University in Japan. She is currently a research fellow at the Ryusaku Tsunoda Center of Japanese Culture at Waseda University. 

    This event has received generous support from the Anthropology, Asian Studies, and Global & International Studies programs.

    5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olin 102
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2023

Friday, February 24, 2023
  Matthew Delvaux, PhD, Lecturer in History and the Humanities, Princeton University
Olin 102  9:30 am – 10:30 am EST/GMT-5
Vikings are known for ravaging Europe for plunder and slaves during the early Middle Ages, but little is known of what happened next—once they slipped beyond the view of Western chroniclers and into the north where nothing was written. Archaeologists have found Christian trophies in graves across Northern Europe, but captives and slaves are harder to see. This talk will investigate what can be said about people taken captive by viking raiders, especially during the peak period of raiding in the 800s.

In addition to a few eyewitness accounts, annals and chronicles help paint a broader picture, but Western writers were simultaneously engaged in debates about the place of slavery in their own societies. Reading these texts requires attention to how ideas about slavery affected how viking slave raiding was recorded, and how viking raiding in turn transformed Western attitudes toward enslavement. This talk will conclude with consideration of how material evidence can further the scope of this study, ultimately reaching into the frontiers of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate. At the same time, attention to archaeology helps place this research in productive dialogue with current work on the later transatlantic slave trade.

Matthew Delvaux is a Lecturer in History and a member of the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. He holds a PhD in History from Boston College and an MA with a Certificate in Medieval Archaeology from the University of Florida. He has excavated at sites in Florida, Massachusetts, and Sweden, and has worked in museum collections across Scandinavia. He previously received a BS in History and Foreign Languages from the United States Military Academy and served as a cavalry officer in the United States Army.


Thursday, February 23, 2023
Weis Cinema  4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Prof. Michel DeGraff is a leading linguist known as one of the most prominent Haitian creolists. He is a professor at MIT and the  founder of the MIT-Haiti Initiative promoting learning of science and technology in Kreyòl. His New York Times opinion piece, "As a Child in Haiti I Was Taught to Despise My Language" (published in October 2022), will be an entry point to this lecture where he will provide an analysis of some of the long-lasting nefarious impact of colonialism in Haiti, especially in the realms of education. The eventual objective is to enlist lessons from history in order to help usher better futures for those sufferers whom Fanon calls the “Wretched of the Earth” and whom Jean Casimir calls the “ Malere ”—better futures in Haiti and beyond.


Tuesday, February 21, 2023
  Jake Ransohoff, PhD, Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University
Olin 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Byzantium is unique in the post-Roman trio of Mediterranean “sibling cultures.” Outside both Latin West and Islamic East but influenced by and influential to both, Byzantium’s marginality makes it prey to essentializing discourses. This talk reexamines a case in point: the gruesome Byzantine punishment of blinding. From the eighth century to the fourteenth, blinding served as the penalty par excellence in Byzantium for crimes of high treason and rebellion. Yet historians have not so much explained this fact as exoticized it, presenting the punishment’s longevity as proof of Byzantium’s alien otherness. Blinding is often, incorrectly, considered a cultural borrowing from Persian Iran. Older scholarship lamented the “oriental delight in cruelty” that replaced Roman virtue; newer works appeal to foreign Byzantine sensibilities, horrid to us but reasonable to them, that cast blinding as an act of mercy.

The present talk challenges these essentializing approaches. Based on the first comprehensive study of judicial disfigurement in Byzantium, the Slavic world, and the medieval West, it shows how clustered bursts of blinding intersperse with long periods during which Byzantine authorities abandoned this practice. Such volatility reveals that the disfigured body was an unstable site of meaning: whether it revealed the injustice of the state or the iniquity of the condemned remained an open question. Meanwhile, visual and literary analysis, manuscript evidence, and archaeology all demonstrate that the Byzantines were not unique in their culture of blinding. In fact, judicial blinding emerged among Rome’s western European heirs before it first appears in Byzantium. By centering the disfigured body in our approach to authority and justice in the Middle Ages, this talk seeks to rescue Byzantium from what one expert has called “its habitual exceptionalism,” while also revealing the changing values of this medieval society. The result is a dynamic new picture of imperial legitimacy, punitive culture, and bio-politics across the medieval Mediterranean.


Thursday, February 16, 2023
  Nathanael Aschenbrenner, PhD, Lecturer in History, University of California San Diego
Olin 202  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
476 CE conventionally marks the fall of the Roman Empire. Yet the empire did not cease to exist in the centuries after—it was just ruled from Constantinople, the empire we call Byzantium. Byzantine emperors still structured the passage of time in medieval chronologies, stamped their image on coins traded across the Mediterranean, and received prayers in sonorous Christian liturgies. Yet Byzantium has largely been effaced from Roman imperial history. This paper aims to decenter myopically Western histories of the medieval Roman Empire by focusing on a critical moment at the end of the Middle Ages. After centuries of polemics alienating the eastern empire from the legitimacy of ancient Rome, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 prompted Europeans to reconsider older animosity toward Byzantium. Drawing on oratory, genealogy, visual art, and humanist historiography, this paper reconstructs Byzantium's restoration to Roman imperial history in the 16th c. It argues that these dynamics re-Romanized Byzantium in early modern Europe, but they also signal an early and unrecognized stage of Europe's intellectual colonization of the East.


Monday, February 13, 2023
  Valentina Grasso, PhD, Assistant Professor of Semitics at the Catholic University of America
Olin 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
It is a recurrent trope for “early Medieval” hagiographies and histories to ascribe the evangelization of a region to the arrival of a lone itinerant figure who abruptly converted its entire population. However, group conversions were the cumulative result of socio-economic networks and migrations, as the exchange of ideas followed that of resources. Traders played an essential role in spreading their faith across the “Early Middle Ages”. For instances, trading diasporas and the establishment of a Christian Commonwealth formed by communities partnered with Rome created a social network of commerce. Thriving communities of Christian merchants established themselves in Iran, India, East Africa, and South Arabia as rulers pragmatically exploited the spread of cults to fill gaps in regions which lacked firm ethnic boundaries. While the world became increasingly globalized in the sixth century through its intertwining trade routes, people not only exchanged goods and ideas but also illnesses such as the bacterium Yersinia pestis. This pandemic contributed to a widespread crisis exacerbated by ecological factors and constant warfare. As the eclipse of centralized power in China led to the formation of political systems in Manchuria, the Arabians reacted to the tiresome war between Rome and Iran and the collapse of the Red Sea Kingdoms by transforming their tribal system into an imperial confederation. The emergence of Islam, the  Muslim conquests, and the subsequent appearance of the Muslim Commonwealth smashed established geopolitical borders. Yet, it also created new mental challenges, exacerbating existing cultural divisions, reinforcing fears of otherness and leading to the rise of new frontiers built around faith. My presentation will explore identity formation during this period by focusing on the intersection of trade and faith. In doing so, I will offer a  comparative analysis between the political entities of the Red Sea and those of Central Asia, to counter reductive mappings of peripherality in the “Early Middle Ages” and demonstrate the extent to which these entities were far from marginal.


Wednesday, February 1, 2023
Panel discussion at Bard College with Masha Gessen (Bard/New Yorker), Anna Nemzer (TVRain/RIMA), Archie Magno (Bard)
Moderated by Ilia Venyavkin (RIMA)

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In his recent Nobel Prize lecture Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov called independent journalism “the antidote against tyranny” and promised that Russian journalists would never give up. Still, if we look at the history of independent media in Russia, we will see that the hope that unbiased media coverage would protect society from relativism, conspiracy theories, propaganda and — at the end of day — from dictatorship, has proven unjustified. Or has it?

The panel will discuss the history of the past 20 years of Russian independent journalism: How did dictatorship in modern Russia become possible? What did independent media do wrong? Have we learned anything new about freedom of speech that we did not know before? 

At the panel we will also present the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) — a joint digital initiative of Bard College and PEN America to protect the work of Russian journalists from censorship.

The event is sponsored by Center for Civic Engagement, the Gagarin Center at Bard College, and PEN America.


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