News and Events

Arie M. Dubnov, George Washington University
Hegeman 106  4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Three pivotal terms— "refugee," "return," and "repatriation" — played an exceptionally significant role in shaping international planning and discourse after World War II.  Exploring the interconnections of international history and the history of political and religious concepts, the talk examines how these terms acquired distinct meanings within the framework of international policies and how they echo to this day in the context of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.  

Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. He was a G.L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a participant in the National History Center’s International Decolonization Seminar, and recipient of the Dorset Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Chloe Bordewich, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Digital Humanities, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto
Hegeman 204A  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In the late 19th century, an explosion of communication technologies and mass media made it possible to transmit more information across greater distances than ever before. State authorities panicked as older forms of official secrecy frayed, and began developing new forms of information control. For citizens, urgent questions emerged: What did people have a right to know? What was the state entitled to conceal? In Cairo, Egypt, these questions burst into the public eye at the 1896 trial of a telegraph operator and a celebrity publisher who were accused of spreading a military leak. The watershed case exposed rising anti-colonial fervor, government officials’ inability to grasp technology, and profoundly different ideas of the public good. This episode demonstrates the urgency of studying information in its own right—its flow, its obstacles, its ephemeral forms. It also introduces a new lens for understanding the 20th-century Middle East that can help us explain the myths and silences that have haunted frustrated struggles for justice for over a century.

Dahlia El Zein, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
Hegeman 204A  5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
As a system of social differentiation in the Middle East and North Africa during colonialism and postcolonialism, race defied fixed categorizations, while also moving across time and space. This fluidity was exemplified by the increasing presence of Lebanese Syrians in colonial French West Africa (1895-1958) during French mandate rule (1920-1946) in the Levant. Although the economic prowess of this Levantine community in West Africa has been studied—emphasizing their role as an entrepreneurial trader class leveraging the colonial economy for upward mobility—the Lebanese Syrian diaspora in West Africa has been notably absent from histories of race-making under French colonialism, despite the enduring legacies of such processes in the Levant, broader Middle East, and North Africa.

In this talk, I discuss the main findings of my research, which traces the movement of Lebanese Syrians across the French empire in the early-to-mid 20th century. I show how racialization transformed as people moved from Beirut to Marseille to Dakar and back, influencing the shifting racial positionalities of this mobile group as well as those in the places through which they moved. Using diverse sources that include official documents, travelogues, memoirs, periodicals, family papers, cemeteries, and novels in Arabic, French, and English from Beirut, Dakar, and Paris, I argue that mobile processes of racialization were also gendered. Women faced the lion’s share of biopolitical regulation from French colonial authorities and Levantine and West African communities, while men became the visible face of this control as key bodies for the making of racialized subjects across the Empire and in the polities that would replace it.
 

Benan Grams, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Loyola University, New Orleans 
Hegeman 204A  5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Since the second half of the 19th century, there has been a global recognition of the crucial role of hygiene and clean water in combating diseases that historically plagued humanity. Sanitary water systems became integral to a worldwide movement aimed at enhancing public health and minimizing waterborne illnesses. The 1903 Fijeh Water Project in Damascus was an Ottoman measure initiated to elevate hygienic standards and improve public health within the Syrian province, particularly amidst recurrent cholera outbreaks. It constituted part of the Ottoman Empire's efforts to develop its public health sector. However, the funding challenges the project encountered and the diplomatic tensions it sparked underscore the political nature of public health. The case demonstrates how the Ottoman public health sector was subject to influences from hygienic modernity imperialism, intricately linked to global imperialist and capitalist endeavors of major powers. The Ottoman government's ability to sustain hygiene services in certain communities was contingent upon not conflicting with the capitalist interests of influential entities. The narrative of the Damascus Fijeh water project elucidates how the Ottomans' endeavors to modernize public health were undermined by the same powers that criticized their inadequate public health measures.
 

Hegeman 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Find out about Spring 2024 history courses and connect with history faculty and students at the Historical Studies open house. Food and refreshments will be served. Hegeman 102, 5:00–6:30 pm, Tuesday, December 5. 

  Hegeman 204A  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Hamas’ attack on October 7 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza have had a profound impact on Israel, Palestine, and far beyond. How might we consider these events in the context of the history of Zionism, of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and of antisemitism?  

We hope that an important part of the discussion will be questions from those attending about current events and the long, complex evolution that produced them. We will respond as best we can from our various perspectives.

Cecile E. Kuznitz, Patricia Ross Weis '52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture
Joel Perlmann, Professor, Bard College and Senior Scholar, Levy Institute
Shai Secunda, Jacob Neusner Professor of Judaism, moderator

Lu Kou
Columbia University
Olin 102  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Court officials in early medieval China conducted their “work” in and for the imperial bureaucracy: they drafted and revised documents in the office, traveled for business, inspected cities and frontiers, and managed lawsuits and infrastructure as local governors. While an empire always needs clerks and scribes for its operation and expansion, the early medieval period in Chinese history, spanning from the 3rd to the 7th centuries CE, saw the court elite’s increasing awareness of their work and themselves being working persons within the aristocratic political structure that determined the perimeter and limit of their social mobility. This is especially shown in poems composed by courtiers that describe their thoughts and feelings when they are fulfilling the duties required by their office, which this talk will focus on. These poems accent the poets’ longing for leisure, human connection, and camaraderie, as well as their confrontation with the faceless bureaucracy that separates them from, and unites them with, other members of the court community. Issues such as friendship, mobility, and value become contested in these texts. By investigating poetry on work and working in the office, this talk delineates a poetics of bureaucracy in early medieval China that centers around a dialectical relation between tong 通 and se 塞, connecting and blocking. This study shows that lyricism is co-constitutive with bureaucracy, as the former would not exist without the systematic control of aesthetic forms, bodies, and identifications, and the laboring persons’ coming to terms with these constraints. In the end, poetic representations of work do not lead to the imaginary of liberated selves that shun work but the formation of a community of working subjects who negotiate with their work and value prescribed by the imperial center and seek to find lyrical moments in the mundane.

  Naiima Khahaifa, Guarini Fellow
Departments of Geography and 
African and African-American Studies
Dartmouth College 
Olin 102  5:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Mass incarceration, characterized by unprecedented prison population growth in the US and a disproportionately large representation of Black men, has garnered much scholarly attention; however, a parallel increase in the proportion of Black correctional officers (COs) has not yet received the same consideration. During the early 1970s, demands made by the Prisoners’ Rights Movement led to the recruitment of thousands of Black men and women into the US correctional workforce over the following decades. Thus, focusing on New York State, I argue that as correctional workforce integration redefined the state’s prison system and broader carceral geography, the racialized process of mass incarceration came to depend on the labor of Black COs. Based on a qualitative analysis of life/occupational history interviews with Black COs in Buffalo, NY, recruited between the late 1970s and early 1990s, I find that dynamics of race, class, and gender shape relationships between Black COs and incarcerated individuals as their day-to-day encounters cultivated cooperation and consent in an otherwise volatile prison environment. Deriving from notions of community policing and fictive kinship, I developed the concept of carceral kinship, which refers to the formation of familial-like bonds that appeared the strongest between Black women COs and Black incarcerated men. This concept matters because it reveals the intricate dynamics and micro-politics of prison spaces and how carceral geographies rely on intimate, empathetic, and emotional care work that is profoundly raced and gendered.  

Lecture by Yuliya Yurchenko
Avery Art Center; Ottaway Theater  10:10 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer in political economy at the Department of Economics and International Business and a researcher at the Political Economy, Governance, Finance, and Accountability Institute, University of Greenwich, UK. She will speak about her book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital (Pluto, 2017).

Walk/Hike
Montgomery Place Estate  10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Long before there was online shopping, there were print catalogs; before the internet there were journals; before social media there were social circles; and before podcasts there were dinner parties. Meet some of the visitors and residents who made significant contributions to life at Montgomery Place while also shaping a wider worldview of their special field of interest. Highlighted personalities will include: A. J. Downing, landscape designer and founding journalist; A. J. Davis, architect and A-list invitee; Alexander Gilson, descendent of slaves, businessman, and groundbreaking gardener; Violetta White Delafield, scientist, pioneering mycologist, and outdoor wellness advocate. Walk will be postponed until October 8 only if heavy rain is forecast. Wear comfortable walking shoes and long pants. Difficulty: Moderate. Not suitable for children under age 7.

Walk/Hike
Montgomery Place Estate  10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
From farmland to pleasure ground, from national historic site to college campus, much has changed at Montgomery Place over its most recent 220 year history. We’ll walk the trails, meander through the meadows, and stroll the gardens while observing modernization’s impact on the land and water, and learning about the diverse peoples whose history here really goes back thousands of years. Enjoy a ramble through the remnants of a once romantic morning walk. Take in spectacular views of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains while exploring the wilderness trails in the ravine formed by the Sawkill Creek. Historical highlights include cascading waterfalls and the hydropower station, the allée of the arboretum through the east lawn, the coach house, and the rough and formal gardens. Walk will be postponed until September 24 only if heavy rain is forecast.

Montgomery Place Estate  2:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us for an in-person community event with author Jane Delury for the launch of her novel, Hedge. This celebration will include cookies, lemonade, an author talk, book signing, and house tour (depending on your ticket tier)! This event is being hosted by Zibby Books, Jane's publisher, and Bard College: Montgomery Place Campus. Montgomery Place was the location for many scenes in Hedge and excerpts from the book will be displayed around the property. Finally, local bookstore Oblong Books will be onsite selling copies of Hedge!

In this “sharply drawn portrait of anguish, loneliness, fear, and desire” (Kirkus) from the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, garden historian Maud Bentley packs up her daughters to spend a summer at a Hudson Valley estate, leaving her husband behind in California. More about Hedge

Get Tickets

Ketaki Pant '06, Assistant Professor of History, University of Southern California
Hegeman 106  3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Despite their centrality to Mauritius’s plantation economy, merchants from Gujarat (western India) remain in the shadows of histories of slavery and indentured labor migration on the island. This talk takes stock of these erased histories by retelling the story of one plantation, Bel Ombre, which was variously owned by French planters and Gujarati merchants in the nineteenth century. Moving between the space of Bel Ombre today, records in the Mauritius National Archives, and old ports in Gujarat, I analyze the archival processes through which Gujarati mercantile intimacies were recorded and obscured. I argue that the archival segregation of records about plantation property ownership and indentured labor was central to the erasure of Gujarati merchants from histories of racial capitalism on the island. I show that the colonial state enacted gendered violence on indentured women whose sexuality was policed and pathologized while Gujarati merchants were able to marry across racial lines through sanctioned property and marriage arrangements. These silences were amplified by Indian anticolonial nationalists who arrived on Mauritius in the twentieth century to take up the cause of Indian indentured workers but who, ironically, papered over racial capitalism in favor of a pan-Indian identity. In old ports in Gujarat, merchant families built and maintained houses (havelis) which were scrubbed clean of these messy intimacies across the ocean. Reaching across the ocean from Gujarat to Mauritius and back, this talk suggests that these are haunted houses and histories.

Ketaki Pant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on South Asia and the Indian Ocean arena from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Her current projects examine interlinked histories of racial capitalism, gendered belonging, minoritization, and displacement centered on Gujarat. Recent publications include an article in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism.

  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.

  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.

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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

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.

Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Bard’s new Carceral Studies speaker series launches with a visit from the NYU Prison Education Project. Their recently published book Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality explores how the car, despite its association with American freedom and mobility, functions at the crossroads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility– the American debt economy and the carceral state. We will be joined by four of the Lab members, a group representing formerly incarcerated scholars and non-formerly incarcerated NYU faculty. 

  Olin 101  1:45 pm – 2:45 pm EST/GMT-5
Please join us for the Historical Studies Open House to meet your faculty and learn about new courses.

  Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for a reception to celebrate journalist Alvin Patrick's exhibit of selected first editions and rare books from his private collection. This exhibit, Faces of the Struggle: Frontispiece Portraits in African American Literature (1834 to 1949), features the portraits of some of the greatest civil rights activists of the 19th and 20th centuries including, Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Gwendolyn Brooks. 


Download: APatrick-digital.pdf

  Henderson 106 (Mac Lab)  4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In February 2022, Russia launched an unprovoked, genocidal attack against the Ukrainian people. This lecture will review the origins of the conflict, how the United States and our NATO allies are likely to respond and what possible outcomes are on the horizon.

Scott Licamele ’91 is a Russia expert with over 20 years of experience dealing in the former Soviet Union. He has worked in various Russia-related capacities, including capital markets (at Sberbank CIB, Troika Dialog, and Alfa Bank) and government-related activities (at an NGO in Russia which was funded by the United States Information Agency in the 1990s). Licamele has lived and worked in Russia and Ukraine for seven years and is fluent in Russian. He is a graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he studied Russian political economy. He received his BA in European History at Bard College. Licamele is currently unaffiliated with any Russia-related business or political entities.

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung 
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities,
Stanford University


This event is presented on Zoom.
11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4
Olympic design needs to express the universal values that the Olympic Movement promotes, and it should be understood easily by a global audience; at the same time, it needs to set the host apart from other nations visually and highlight the uniqueness of its culture. This is a particularly difficult task for non-Western countries, whose national culture and identity can easily fall victim to Orientalism when presented on the world stage. This lecture examines the design style and strategies chosen for the 1988 Summer Olympics and how this design project, which is deemed successful by many, “spectacularly failed” to understand the concepts such as universalism, modernity, modernist design, and Orientalism.

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung studies politics and aesthetics of modern design with a focus on South Korean and Silicon Valley design. She received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2020. Trained in graphic design, Gabrielle also writes on the issues of design and feminism. Her book project, Toward a Utopia Without Revolution: Globalization, Developmentalism, and Design, looks at political and aesthetic problems that modern design projects generated in South Korea, a country that has experienced not only rapid economic development but also immense political progress in less than a century, from the end of the World War II to the beginning of the new millennium. In Fall 2022, she will join the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine as Assistant Professor of Korean Art History.

E. Tammy Kim (New York Times)
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
When the U.S. military finally withdrew from Afghanistan, an old tally reappeared in the news. Our “forever wars” were not only the live military operations we’d pursued in the Middle East since 9/11; they also encompassed some 500 U.S. bases and installations all over the world, stretching back to the early 20th century. Some call this “empire;” some call it “security,” even “altruism.” In East Asia, the long arm of U.S. power reaches intimately into people’s lives. 

South Korea has hosted U.S. military personnel since World War II and remains a primary base of operations in the Asia Pacific. Some thirty thousand U.S. soldiers and marines are stationed there, on more than 70 installations. In 2018, U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys opened in the city of Pyeongtaek, at a cost of $11 billion. Humphreys is now the largest overseas U.S. military base by size and the symbol of a new era in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Meanwhile, South Korea has become the tenth-richest country in the world and has one of the largest militaries—thanks to universal male conscription and an extraordinary budget. The country’s arms industry is also world-class, known for its planes, submarines, and tanks.

This talk will draw on reporting and family history to explore the evolving U.S.-South Korea alliance. How do the martial investments of these historic “allies” affect the lives of ordinary South Koreans—and Korean Americans? And if the two Koreas are still technically at war, what kind of war is it?

E. Tammy Kim is a freelance magazine reporter and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, covering labor issues, arts and culture, and the Koreas. She cohosts Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast on Asia and Asian America, and is a contributing editor at Lux, a new feminist socialist magazine. She holds fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Type Media Center. In 2016, she and Yale ethnomusicologist Michael Veal published Punk Ethnography, a book about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary world music. Her first career was as a social justice lawyer in New York City.

This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series.

For more information, please contact Nate Shockey: [email protected].

Andre Haag, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Hawaii, Manoa
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
The field of post/colonial East Asian cultural studies has recently rediscovered the transpacific potential of the theme of ethnic passing, a problematic that is deeply rooted in North American racial contexts but might serve to disrupt global fictions of race and power.  Although tropes adjacent to ethnonational passing frequently appear in minority literatures produced in Japan, particularly Zainichi Korean fiction, the salience of the phenomenon was often obscured within the avowedly-integrative and assimilative cultural production of Japanese colonialism. This talk will challenge that aporia by demonstrating how the structural possibility of Korean passing left behind indelible traces of racialized paranoia in the writings of the Japanese colonial empire that have long outlived its fall.  Introducing narratives and speech acts in Japanese from disparate genres, past and present, I argue that paranoia was as an effect of insecure imperial modes of containing the passing specters of Korea and Korean people uneasily absorbed within expanding Japan by colonial merger. I trace how disavowed anxieties of passing merge with fears of treachery, blurred borders, and the unreadability of ethnoracial difference in narrative scripts that traveled across space, from the colonial periphery to the Japanese metropole along with migrating bodies, between subjects, and through time. If imperial paranoia around passing took its most extreme expression in narratives of the murderous 1923 “Korean Panic,” popular Zainichi fiction today exposes not only the enduring structures of Japanese Koreaphobia (and Koreaphilia) but the persistence of shared anxieties and precarities binding former colonizer and colonized a century later. 

This meeting will be on Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89025574917

As China sets to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, we look at the games
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
China will host the 2022 Winter Olympics amid controversy—the worsening Covid-19 pandemic and a diplomatic boycott of the games over China's treatment of the Uyghur Muslims. Should the games go on? Jules Boykoff says no—for reasons that go beyond COVID and genocide. The Olympics create serious problems for local populations. Join us for a discussion that looks at why the Olympics are broken.

RSVP here

Magda Teter
Fordham University
 
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The twentieth century, as scholar George M. Fredrickson has noted, brought both the “climax and retreat” of racism and antisemitism. The murder of six million Jews during World War II forced a reckoning with ideas that made this unprecedented crime possible and contributed to broader reconsideration of social and religious values dominating western society. It also forced, as the editor of Ebony would later write in the introduction to the special issue on “The White Problem in America” “a re-examination of the Christian faith which brought forth the idea that skin color was not a true measure of a man’s humanity.” This talk will seek to explain the modern rejection of equality of both Jews and Black people in the West by tracing Christianity’s claim to superiority that emerged in a theological context in antiquity but came to be implemented in a legal and political context when Christianity became a political power. I will argue that the Christian sense of superiority developed first in relation to Jews and then transformed to a racialized superiority when Europeans expanded their political reach beyond Europe, establishing slaveholding empires in the early modern period, culminating in the Holocaust and forcing an ongoing reckoning in the post-WWII era. 

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006); Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), which was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize; and Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), which won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award; and the forthcoming Enduring Marks of Servitude: Christianity’s Stamp on Antisemitism and Racism in Law and Culture. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2020-2021, Teter was the NEH Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Jewish History.

NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

Chapel of the Holy Innocents  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
A panel discussion with artists John Ruppert, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak and EH Media Corps member Nikki Goldberg. Facilitated by curator, Danielle O'Steen.

This panel coincides with the closing of the 2021 Wilderstein Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, which highlights the work of artists who experiment with not only unexpected materials but also curious scale and unfamiliar viewing modes as tools for creating new, site-responsive installations. Curated by Krista Caballero, Co-Director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College and Julia B. Rosenbaum, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College.

Please note: all visitors to Bard campus must be fully vaccinated and wear a mask while inside. For questions, please contact: [email protected]. RSVP here: https://forms.gle/Qt52E52d8t4abamC6

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies.

Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. 

  Panel I: Arts of Resistance, 10:00am - 12:00pm
Panel II: Systems and Power, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Finberg House  Panel I: Arts of Resistance, 10:00am - 12:00pm

Mie Inouye, “W.E.B. Du Bois on ‘The Art of Organization’”

Rohma Khan, "Tipping Point: Immigrant Workers' Activism in the Taxi and Restaurant Industries"
 
Jomaira Salas-Pujols, “Black Girl Refusal: "Acting Out" Against Discipline & Scarcity in Schools”
 
Pınar Kemerli, “Muslim Nonviolence in an Age of Islamism: War-resistance and Decolonization in Turkey”

Panel II: Systems and Power, 2:00pm - 3:30pm

Rupali Warke, “The Zenana that incited war: Maharajpur, 1843”
 
Lucas Pinheiro, “Data Factories: The Politics of Digital Work at Google and MTurk” Yarran Hominh, “The Problem of Unfreedom”
 

Katherine Sorrels
University of Cincinnati 
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This talk will discuss the Camphill movement, an international network of intentional communities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that was founded in Scotland during World War II by Austrian Jewish refugees. It will focus on the antisemitism and ableism that forced Camphill’s founders to flee Nazi Central Europe, the antisemitic and ableist immigration policies that they confronted in the US and Britain, and the way their response to these overlapping forms of prejudice informed the mission and identity of the movement they founded. Drawing on her forthcoming book On the Spectrum: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability in the Britain and North America, Sorrels will use Camphill to reconstruct the larger story of how Jewish refugees transformed British and North American approaches to disability and, in the process, reshaped the tradition of Viennese curative education. 

Katherine Sorrels is Associate Professor of History, Affiliate Faculty in Judaic Studies, and Chair of the Taft Health Humanities Research Group at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Outsiders: Imperial Inclusion, National Exclusion, and the Pan-European Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes, Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, and Culture (Camden House, 2022) and Ohio under COVID: Lessons from America's Heartland in Crisis (under review with the University of Michigan Press). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Fellowship Program, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

Jonathan Judaken
Rhodes College
Preston  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This presentation will first consider the recent debate whether anti-Semitism should be considered a form of racism or a unique form of hatred. Framing this discussion within a historical overview, we will consider how Judeophobia was entangled with Islamophobia and what Fanon called Negrophobia. We will unpack the origins of the terms “anti-Semitism” and “racism” and consider how many theorists in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during anti-colonial struggles understood the linkages between these terms. These theorists were opposed by scholars and writers who insist upon the singularity of anti-Semitism. I will suggest that the root of these claims stem from notions of Jewish choseness, Zionist understandings of anti-Semitism, and claims about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I will argue that the assertions of uniqueness do not hold up to scrutiny, make a case for why exceptionalist arguments lead to a dead-end in efforts to fight anti-Semitism, and conclude that the struggle today demands that we be clear that anti-Semitism is racism and must be combatted as part of the broader anti-racist struggle. 

Jonathan Judaken is the Spence L. Wilson Chair in the Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Nebraska, 2006) and the editor of Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (SUNY 2008) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge 2009). He recently edited a round table in the American Historical Review titled, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism” (October 2018) and co-edited a special issue of Jewish History (with Ethan Katz) on “Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher” (September 2018). He has just finished co-editing The Albert Memmi Reader (with Michael Lejman), a compendium of the Tunisian Franco-Jewish writer’s work (Nebraska, 2020). 
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

A Virtual Panel and Discussion with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Although white supremacist movements have received renewed public attention since the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they need to be placed in deeper historical context if they are to be understood and combated. In particular, the rise of these movements must be linked to the global war on terror after 9/11, which blinded counterextremism authorities to the increasing threat they posed. In this panel, two prominent sociologists, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee, trace the growth of white supremacist extremism and its expanding reach into cultural and commercial spaces in the U.S. and beyond. They also examine these movements from the perspective of their members’ lived experience. How are people recruited into white supremacist extremism? How do they make sense of their active involvement? And how, in some instances, do they seek to leave? The answers to these questions, Miller-Idriss and Blee suggest, are shaped in part by the gendered and generational relationships that define these movements.
 Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).  
Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  If you would like to attend, please register here.  Zoom link and code will be emailed the day of the event. 

 

Foreign Policy in the Digital Age
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Foreign policy is among the things that the Internet has revolutionized. No longer is diplomacy confined to oak-paneled rooms and gilded corridors. This change, as New York Times reporter Mark Landler noted, “happened so fast that it left the foreign policy establishment gasping to catch up.” Author Adam Segal joins us for a conversation about how technology has changed diplomacy, geopolitics, war, and, most of all, power. 

 

For rising seniors preparing to do historical research for their Senior Project.
https://bard.zoom.us/j/93119544946?pwd=QkJ2bzFqQjJPUFc0SEFpSXRZVklldz09  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This Zoom workshop is designed for rising seniors who are planning to do historical research for their senior projects next year. This session will focus on identifying types of sources needed for historical research and strategies for finding primary and secondary sources, with a focus on navigating physical and digital archives. Students should rsvp here.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/93119544946?pwd=QkJ2bzFqQjJPUFc0SEFpSXRZVklldz09

Meeting ID: 931 1954 4946
Passcode: 845552
One tap mobile
+16465588656,,93119544946# US (New York)
+13017158592,,93119544946# US (Washington DC)

 

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Donald Trump and Brexit shook up the liberal world order and the notion of global cooperation. The Covid-19 crisis further diminished the leadership role that the US and UK have long held. How does the rest of the world see these two countries? BGIA professor and award winning journalist Suzy Hansen and award winning novelist Kamila Shamsie have both written extensively about the US and UK from abroad. Join us for a conversation about seeing countries from afar on Thursday, April 22 at 12pm EST/6pm Vienna. RSVP required. 

A Talk with Kelly Midori McCormick, Assistant Professor of History at UBC
Online Event  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Japanese photographer Yamazawa Eiko’s (1899–1995) life history can be read as explicit forms of refusal: owning her own commercial portrait studios, running a community photo school, dedicating herself to abstract still-life photography in rejection of the photo-realism boom, and destroying all of her personal archive. Focusing on the many “refusals” around which Yamazawa built her life, this talk approaches her work and life as an example of the possibilities for defiance within everyday practices. Yamazawa’s life lived as a refusal of the “categories of the dominant” within the photography world, social norms, and regulatory power of art critics and business leaders are an example of striving for a future not yet lived by women photographers in mid-20th century Japan. From acting as a mentor and model to many young women photographer-entrepreneurs to routinely destroying her personal archive of the evidence of her working process, Dr. McCormick explores how Yamazawa created the conditions necessary to make a life through photography as a woman in Japan from the 1930s to 1970s.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/88678329023

Meeting ID: 886 7832 9023

  Online Event  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join students from across the OSUN International Network in a screening of Moolaadé, a 2004 film by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène telling the story of a woman, Collé, who uses Moolaadé to protect her daughter from female genital mutilation. 


Download: moolaade.pdf

Fahad Bishara (University of Virginia)
Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this talk, Fahad Bishara charts out an Indian Ocean microhistory grounded in the voyages of a particular Arab dhow - the Fateh Al-Khayr - and the writings of its captain. It is from the deck of the dhow, he argues, that we can see the limits of political and metageographical categories like the Middle East, and we can begin to write the histories of other Arab worlds.
 Fahad Ahmad Bishara is the Rouhollah Ramazani Associate Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. His first book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the J. Willard Hurst Prize (awarded by the Law and Society Association), the Jerry Bentley Prize (awarded by the World History Association), and the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award (given by the American Society for Legal History).
 Join via Zoom: 
https://bard.zoom.us/j/82970591846?pwd=ZTlyenlFcGkreUw1Z1pEeU4zeG9qdz09
Meeting ID: 829 7059 1846
Passcode:  528381

  Edith Chen
Ph.D. Candidate Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
 
Online Event  10:00 am – 11:30 am EST/GMT-5
After the Mongol conquests, we witnessed what would appear to be a “clash” of legal customs as unbelieving rulers came to rule over a majority-Muslim population in 13th century Iran. This triggered a debate among Muslim jurists, who disagreed on whether a land occupied for foreigners could still be counted as “dār al-islām”. However, some Hanafi jurists at this time redefined the terms that would allow occupied territories to still be considered as Islamic lands by insisting that what mattered was that certain features of Islamic life were allowed to continue, such as prayer, celebrating the feast days, and maintaining an Islamic judiciary. This line of reasoning was adopted by 19th century Indian social reformers for its application to British India. However, they would be challenged by Hanbali jurists, whose narrow definition of what constitutes “dār al-islām” would have reverberations during the modern period.

Using Persian local history, I argue that the state of self-rule in the Muslim vassal states in southern Iran (Fars, Shabankara, Kirman, Yazd) helped explain why Hanafi jurists during this period adopted their particular style of reasoning to permit a looser definition for what constitute “dār al-islām” even when under a government of unbelievers. I explore the evolution of this issue in Hanafi law from the founder Abu Hanifa’s time, its development during the 11-13th centuries when the Islamic lands in Transoxiana began to experience invasions from the steppes, and the definition that ultimately emerged in 19th century India. Within the semi-autonomous states, Mongol law or yasa had a very limited presence. This separation of jurisdiction created a scenario where Islamic life was allowed to continue and flourish during the decades before the Ilkhanid rulers converted to Islam.

Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 883 4741 3127 / Passcode: 006784

  Edith Chen
Ph.D. Candidate Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
Online Event  10:00 am – 11:30 am EST/GMT-5
After the Mongol conquests, we witnessed what would appear to be a “clash” of legal customs as unbelieving rulers came to rule over a majority-Muslim population in 13th century Iran. This triggered a debate among Muslim jurists, who disagreed on whether a land occupied for foreigners could still be counted as “dār al-islām”. However, some Hanafi jurists at this time redefined the terms that would allow occupied territories to still be considered as Islamic lands by insisting that what mattered was that certain features of Islamic life were allowed to continue, such as prayer, celebrating the feast days, and maintaining an Islamic judiciary. This line of reasoning was adopted by 19th century Indian social reformers for its application to British India. However, they would be challenged by Hanbali jurists, whose narrow definition of what constitutes “dār al-islām” would have reverberations during the modern period.



Using Persian local history, I argue that the state of self-rule in the Muslim vassal states in southern Iran (Fars, Shabankara, Kirman, Yazd) helped explain why Hanafi jurists during this period adopted their particular style of reasoning to permit a looser definition for what constitute “dār al-islām” even when under a government of unbelievers. I explore the evolution of this issue in Hanafi law from the founder Abu Hanifa’s time, its development during the 11-13th centuries when the Islamic lands in Transoxiana began to experience invasions from the steppes, and the definition that ultimately emerged in 19th century India. Within the semi-autonomous states, Mongol law or yasa had a very limited presence. This separation of jurisdiction created a scenario where Islamic life was allowed to continue and flourish during the decades before the Ilkhanid rulers converted to Islam.





Meeting ID: 883 4741 3127

Passcode: 006784



 

  Rupali Warke, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In 1707, after the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb died, the power and authority of the Mughal dynasty, which ruled over a substantial part of South Asia for about two hundred years, started to disintegrate. The imperial center's weakening emboldened the nascent regional powers to assert themselves in the emerging political vacuum. The Maratha empire established by Shivaji Bhosale in 1674 was one such important post-Mughal state. It posed a formidable challenge to the political ambitions of the British East India Company in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Conventionally, historians of early colonial and modern India have viewed the rise of Shivaji and the Maratha state as an assertion of Hindu religious orthodoxy. It has been argued that symbolic acts such as the coronation ceremony of Shivaji popularized the notion of caste and Brahmanical caste hierarchy in an unprecedented way which led to the hardening of caste and religious boundaries. This paper will critique the historical interpretations that associate Maratha polity with religious orthodoxy and the Brahmanization of Indian society by highlighting a parallel tradition of Indo-Islamic Sufi discipleship and Dargah worship practiced and patronized by the Maratha aristocracy.

Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 881 5887 5393 / Passcode: 407988

  Sarina Kuersteiner
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Columbia University
Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Merchants who shipped goods across the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages faced many risks. Damage in transit was the most common. The loss of goods was another. Not knowing where and when goods would arrive was a third. Warfare and piracy were big risks too, but they occurred less often. In response, merchants employed sophisticated mechanisms to limit and cope with risk. They distributed their merchandise on several boats. They paid careful attention to packing and loading goods carefully. And they invested with various partners. But not all of these merchants—among whom we find Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Hindu traders—understood risk, the probable outcome of their undertakings, in the same way. “Cultures of Risk” examines and explains the different conceptions of risk in medieval commerce, as seen in various types of sources: Latin contracts, Arabic letters and formularies, and the rich corpus of Geniza documents, but also devotional objects, images, charms and amulets, travel accounts, histories, and biographies. These sources allow us to investigate a global commercial network that featured diverse languages, geographies, and religions. I argue that differences that I see in conceptions of risk are partly explicable by the different assumptions these traders had about divine providence and how to access it in this world. Looking at how they connected risk to the sacred will, I hope, reveal how risk appears to be shaped quite distinctly among the traders from different religious communities.

Combining approaches of cultural history, the history of religion, and art history with economic history, I endeavor to open up new avenues of interpretation. Through comparative studies such as “Cultures of Risk,” financial techniques that are currently explained from European perspectives only become explicable in unexpected ways.

Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 860 0894 6638 / Passcode: 596381

Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. 

Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST
Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. 

Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST 
Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style.

Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09
Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188
Passcode: 178132

Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness

Online Event  1:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. 

Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST
Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. 

Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST 
Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style.

Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09
Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188
Passcode: 178132

Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness

  A Conversation with Professor Alaina Morgan, University of Southern California, and Professor Jeannette Estruth
Online Event  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
An historian of the African Diaspora, Professor Morgan's research focuses on the  utility of religion, in particular Islam, in racial liberation and anti-colonial movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century Atlantic world. Please join her for the inaugural event in Jeannette Estruth's Muslim Ummah Speaker Series. With the support of the Office of the Dean of the College, the Bard Lifetime Learning Institute, and the Academic Program Inclusion Challenge, this event is free and open to the Bard Community, the OSUN Network, and the public of the Hudson Valley.  
 Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/84036603419
Zoom Meeting ID 840 3660 3419

Online Event  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
All of us work and study on a large campus and live in a thinly populated rural area. We tend to inhabit virtual bubbles where we are surrounded by people who see things the way we do. And whether we are newcomers to the Mid-Hudson Valley or longtime residents, we do not always understand the “signs” we encounter. What do yard signs in election season or “thin blue line” flags tell us about the landscape in which we live? What do colonial estates-turned-museums reveal about enduring inequalities? What murals and monuments “hide” in plain sight because they do not match our pre-set ideas about the place we may (or may not) feel we belong to? Who harvests the local crops but cannot afford to shop at the farmers’ market?
 
In an effort to shine some light on systemic racism and anti-racist alternatives in our everyday surroundings, the Division of Social Studies is organizing a “Reading the Signs” roundtable over Zoom as well as an accompanying online archive. The roundtable will also offer Bard community members an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the election on November 3rd, whatever the outcome happens to be.

Call for Contributions!
What signs do you think need reading? What is an image, flag, space, mural, monument, memorial, item of clothing, word/phrase, etc. that points to instances of systemic racism in the past or present? What is a sign that points to anti-racist precedents in the past and/or emancipatory possibilities for the future?
 
In the days leading up to the roundtable, the Social Studies Division invites all Bard community members (students, staff, and faculty) to send photos, videos, audio recordings, and other documents of systemic racism and anti-racism to [email protected].
 
All contributions must be accompanied by a brief written statement (anything from a few sentences to a substantial paragraph) that provides initial context, explanation, and interpretation.
 
The roundtable will feature many of these contributions, which can be made anonymous upon request. The Division of Social Studies will also maintain an online archive of signs that will be available to Bard community members before and after the event.

Join via Zoom 
Meeting ID: 863 8920 3500
Passcode: 583480

Dr. Swetha Regunathan, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, in Conversation with Professor Jeannette Estruth
Online Event  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Prof. Jeannette Estruth will interview filmmaker Dr. Swetha Regunathan of New York University's Tisch School of Arts to discuss her short films, "Hasim October", about an Indian-American teen whose anthrax prank goes awry in the shadow of 9/11, and "Forever Tonight", about an Indian-American girl grappling with her otherness in high school. Regunathan will also discuss "If There is Light", a short documentary she produced about a New York City family struggling in the homeless shelter system, and her feature in development, "Sundarbans", a magic realist ecological film about the delta region in India that is currently eroding due to climate change. This conversation will explore identity through the lenses of immigration, racism, code-switching, and climate change, and what it means to represent identities that have been historically under or misrepresented on the American screen. 

Join webinar via Zoom
Passcode: 296685



 

  A two-part research workshop series for juniors who have moderated into Historical Studies.
Online Event  9:00 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
Join us via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/98981490993?pwd=TGpuSFd3NXA5dFJpL2ZTdHljU0owdz09

Stevenson Library is please to offer a workshop series on advanced history research skills for students who have moderated into the Historical Studies program or who are planning to do historical research for their senior projects.

Session 1: Introduction to History Research Skills
Wednesday, October 21,  9–11 am 
In this workshop, students taking their major conference course will begin to develop research strategies and skills to prepare for their senior project. We will consider the types of sources used in historical research, practice navigating library resources to find academic and nonacademic resources, and discuss strategies for evaluating different types of sources.

Session 2: Finding Primary Sources Online
Wednesday, October 28, 9–11 am
This session will help students prepare to do archival research and work with primary sources. We’ll discuss different types of physical and digital archives, where to look for them, and how to navigate and understand their contents. 

Zoom info:
https://bard.zoom.us/j/98981490993?pwd=TGpuSFd3NXA5dFJpL2ZTdHljU0owdz09
Meeting ID: 989 8149 0993
Passcode: research
One tap mobile
+16465588656,,98981490993# US (New York)
+13126266799,,98981490993# US (Chicago)

  A two-part research workshop series for juniors who have moderated into Historical Studies.
Online Event  9:00 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
Join us via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/98981490993?pwd=TGpuSFd3NXA5dFJpL2ZTdHljU0owdz09

Stevenson Library is please to offer a workshop series on advanced history research skills for students who have moderated into the Historical Studies program or who are planning to do historical research for their senior projects.

Session 1: Introduction to History Research Skills
Wednesday, October 21,  9–11 am 
In this workshop, students taking their major conference course will begin to develop research strategies and skills to prepare for their senior project. We will consider the types of sources used in historical research, practice navigating library resources to find academic and nonacademic resources, and discuss strategies for evaluating different types of sources.

Session 2: Finding Primary Sources Online
Wednesday, October 28, 9–11 am
This session will help students prepare to do archival research and work with primary sources. We’ll discuss different types of physical and digital archives, where to look for them, and how to navigate and understand their contents. 

Zoom info:
https://bard.zoom.us/j/98981490993?pwd=TGpuSFd3NXA5dFJpL2ZTdHljU0owdz09
Meeting ID: 989 8149 0993
Passcode: research
One tap mobile
+16465588656,,98981490993# US (New York)
+13126266799,,98981490993# US (Chicago)

Online Event  1:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This workshop is designed to introduce Al-Madaq and provide a walk-through of the platform’s capabilities. Al-Madaq is a digital history website that presents historical research to a broad audience and features an open access cartographic archive containing some of Cairo’s most significant historical maps, from the French Expedition (1798–1801) to the year 1920. The workshop will 1) introduce the research questions and the motivations behind the project, 2) go over the digital map collection and the control tools, and 3) discuss the use of maps as sources for historical research.
Workshop attendance is limited to 15 students. Registration via email is required ([email protected]) by Sunday, October 11. Students should familiarize themselves with the website beforehand. https://www.almadaq.net/en/
 Shehab Fakhry Ismail is a historian of the modern Middle East who specializes in the history of technology and urban history. His research examines engineering sanitary infrastructures in Cairo during the British colonial period (1882–1922). In March 20202, he launched the digital history project Al-Madaq: A Virtual Tour of Cairo’s History. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany).
 This event is cosponsored by the Historical Studies and EUS programs and the Human Rights Project. 

Online Event  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for a brief meeting of history faculty and students. We'll briefly introduce the faculty and senior history majors along with their research projects. We'll outline program requirements as well as career opportunities available to history majors.

Join via Zoom

Meeting ID: 392 535 2678
Passcode: 454338

Book Talk by Author Dr. Julia Rose Kraut, in Conversation with Professor Jeannette Estruth 
Online Event  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Julia Rose Kraut's Threat of Dissent is the first legal, political, and social history of ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States. The New York Times praises the book, describing how "Kraut writes about what she calls 'ideological exclusion' — the effort to block and even deport noncitizens because of their ideas and beliefs.... [From 1798 to the present,] Kraut traces how different ideologies would be considered intolerably dangerous according to the dominant fears of a given era." This interview with the author will be a deep exploration of her motivating questions and historical methods, and promises to shed light on contemporary conversations about immigration and censorship, political activism, state repression, and First Amendment protections. 
 VIA ZOOM
meeting code: 914 7558 2392

For rising seniors preparing to do historical research for their Senior Project.
https://bard.zoom.us/j/93119544946?pwd=QkJ2bzFqQjJPUFc0SEFpSXRZVklldz09  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
These workshops are designed for rising seniors in Historical Studies or area studies programs preparing to start their Senior Project in the fall. In this two-part series, students will learn strategies for finding, accessing, and evaluating primary and secondary sources for history research.

Session 1: Identifying Sources (Wednesday, May 6,  5–7 pm)
This session will focus on identifying types of sources needed for historical research and strategies for finding secondary sources such as reference material, books, and journal articles.

Session 2: Archival Research (Wednesday, May 13,  5–7 pm)
This session will focus on locating and navigating archival collections (digital and physical) to find primary source material.

Join Zoom Meeting Here
Meeting ID: 931 1954 4946
Password: 845552
One tap mobile
+16465588656,,93119544946# US (New York)
+13017158592,,93119544946# US (Germantown)

For rising seniors preparing to do historical research for their Senior Project.
https://bard.zoom.us/j/93119544946?pwd=QkJ2bzFqQjJPUFc0SEFpSXRZVklldz09  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
These workshops are designed for rising seniors in Historical Studies or area studies programs preparing to start their Senior Project in the fall. In this two-part series, students will learn strategies for finding, accessing, and evaluating primary and secondary sources for history research.

Session 1: Identifying Sources (Wednesday, May 6,  5–7 pm)
This session will focus on identifying types of sources needed for historical research and strategies for finding secondary sources such as reference material, books, and journal articles.

Session 2: Archival Research (Wednesday, May 13,  5–7 pm)
This session will focus on locating and navigating archival collections (digital and physical) to find primary source material.

Join Zoom Meeting Here
Meeting ID: 931 1954 4946
Password: 845552
One tap mobile
+16465588656,,93119544946# US (New York)
+13017158592,,93119544946# US (Germantown)

  Manor House Dining Room  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join Experimental Humanities Food Lab and the Human Rights Program for an interactive dinner workshop with Viven Sansour, a Palestinian writer and conservationist dedicated to preserving seed heritage and bringing it to the table in order to “eat our history rather than store it away as a relic of the past.” Sansour uses images, sketches, film, seeds, and soil to tell old stories with a contemporary twist. 

RSVPs required. Free for students; $10 for faculty and staff.
annandaleonline.org/eatinghistoriesdinner

Study Away in NYC! Experience International Affairs First-Hand
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Meet with BGIA Director Elmira Bayrasli and Associate Dean of Civic Engagement and Director of Strategic Partnerships Brian Mateo for an overview about the program based in NYC, including:

- BGIA faculty and course offerings
- Internships and student projects
- Our dorms in NYC
- How to apply to BGIA
- Q&A

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Anna Rosmus, an author and researcher whose high school essay exposed the Nazi past of her home town, will speak about her research and experiences, the importance of historical truth, and the challenges of being labeled a traitor, following the showing of The Nasty Girl, a film based on Anna’s life. Cosponsored by Center for Civic Engagement, German Studies, Hannah Arendt Center, Historical Studies, Political Studies.

Nick Crowson; Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Using Orwell's Down and Out to understand and write histories of homelessness then and now 
 What does George Orwell's classic account of homeless living in London during the interwar years offer the historian? Where should we locate this semi-fictionalised account in the tradition of the incognito social investigator? Professor Crowson's lecture will address these questions and ask how Orwell helps us understand the physical manifestations of homelessness in modern Britain. In doing so, he shows how historians can play a crucial role in facilitating better, historically-informed public discourse around homelessness.

Nick Crowson holds the Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The author and editor of many books, including Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–40; Britain and Europe: A Political History since 1918; and A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945, he is writing a new history of homelessness in modern Britain seeking to integrate the lived experience with the policy responses. His research is widely used by a range of policy and cultural organisations, including Crisis, Shelter, the Museum of Homelessness and the Cardboard Citizens Theatre Company.

This annual lecture forms part of the endowment of the Chair in British History and Literature that was established in 2010 to commemorate Eugene Meyer (1875–1959)—the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first President of the World Bank. The endowment has given Bard the opportunity to extend its commitment to teaching and research in modern British studies. 

Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Please join us for the opening reception on Tuesday, February 18, 4:00-5:30pm, Library Lobby. Exhibition on view through March 30.

Abolition/Resistance offers a chance to view rare and extraordinary works on slavery and racial oppression: first editions of the Narratives of Douglass, Ball, and Equiano, Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, stunning images from William Still’s Underground Rail Road. This exhibit also includes works by women abolitionists, Stowe, Child, and Grimké along with Black Power movement luminaries: Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Curated by Kristin Waters '73.

Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library  Abolition/Resistance offers a chance to view rare and extraordinary works on slavery and racial oppression: first editions of the Narratives of Douglass, Ball, and Equiano, Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, stunning images from William Still’s Underground Rail Road. This exhibit also includes works by women abolitionists, Stowe, Child, and Grimké along with Black Power movement luminaries: Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Curated by Kristin Waters '73.

Please join us for the opening reception on Tuesday, February 18, 4:00-5:30pm, Library Lobby

Zoe Griffith, Baruch College (CUNY)
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The French invasion and occupation of the Ottoman province of Egypt from 1798 to 1801 is an oft-cited (if misplaced) turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. But just over a decade earlier, another, lesser-known military campaign in Egypt made Napoleon’s invasion possible and thinkable. From 1786 to 1787, the Ottoman central government itself launched a campaign of imperial “reconquest” in Egypt, whose military ruling caste had posed serious challenges to Ottoman sovereignty. These two occupations are rarely discussed in tandem, despite important commonalities. Both occupying powers justified their actions in the language of benevolent “regime change” for the proclaimed benefit of peasants, merchants, and religious scholars. Both the Ottomans and the French used these justifications to extort wealth from Egyptian commercial networks in order to finance the country’s “liberation.” Attention to the networks of debt and obligation incurred during both of these campaigns brings otherwise invisible actors and social categories into the grand narratives of Mediterranean geopolitics and Egypt’s “encounter” with European modernity at the end of the 18th century. 

Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Featuring 

Dr. Whitney Slaten
T.K. Blue Quintet
Souleymane Badolo / Kongo Ba Téria
and the art of James Ransome

1619: A Commemoration in Sound is a remembrance event to mark the 400th anniversary of the first arrival of enslaved people from Africa in the North American British Colonies—the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States of America. 

African descendants’ virtuosic negotiations with Western tonality and forms, as well as cosmopolitan explorations of different sounds, aesthetics, and cultures, have shaped vital contributions to the art, music, and dance of America. Dr. Whitney Slaten, Assistant Professor of Music, brings together virtuosic jazz artist T.K. Blue, choreographer and Visiting Artist in Dance Souleymane Badolo, and lauded illustrator and Dutchess County resident James Ransome for an exploration of history, memory, legacy, and gestures between the U.S. and Africa. 

Presented in partnership with the Difference and Media Project, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and the Ethnomusicology Area, with support from The Music Program, Historical Studies, Art History, Africana Studies, American Studies, The Arts Division, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Center for Experimental Humanities.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Tootie’s Last Suit is an awarding-winning documentary about the famed Mardi Gras Indian Chief of New Orleans, Allison Montana, a.k.a. Tootie, who died in 2005. The historical and biographical film explores the history and performative culture of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the segregation that ensued around carnival. The film has received recognition from the Society for Visual Anthropology and a special honor from the Margaret Mead Film Foundation at the Tribeca Film Festival. 
 
Lisa Katzman is highly-accomplished film director, whose films include Flamencos: Here at There (Aquí y Allí), 9/11’s Unsettled Dust and its sequel Hiding BP’s Oil (currently in post-production). She is currently working on a screenplay titled “Rachel and Gerard” with the director Charles Burnett, and an adaptation of Dorien Ross’ novel Returning to A. 

  Yinon Cohen, Columbia University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk, Yinon Cohen demonstrates that the strategies Israel has deployed to dispossess Palestinian land and settle Jews in the West Bank have been uncannily similar to those used in Israel proper. After briefly analyzing the Judaization of space from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, he focuses on territorial and demographic processes in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) since 1967.  He Shows how the settler population has flourished demographically and socioeconomically, thereby enhancing Israel’s colonial project in the West Bank.

Yinon Cohen is Yosef H. Yerushalmi Professor of Israeli and Jewish Studies in the department of sociology at Columbia University.  Before moving to Columbia in 2007, he was a professor of sociology and labor studies at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on labor markets, social demography, ethnic inequality, and immigration. His most recent publications are on Israel’s territorial and demographic politics (Public Culture, 2018), Ashkenazi-Mizrahi education gap among third-generation Israelis (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2018), and rising inequality in fringe benefits in the US (Sociological Science 2018).
 

  Dr. Geoff Bil, Visiting Assistant Professor History, University of Delaware
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
From the Enlightenment era forward, the Pacific has served as a crucial touchstone for European speculation on differences between indigenous and Western cultures. My paper examines the role played by botanists in these considerations, with particular reference to social factors that shaped observations by European naturalists in Tahiti. Following a preliminary discussion of European-Tahitian botanical interactions over the course of James Cook’s Endeavour voyage (1768–71), I proceed to examine the heightened attention to epistemological contrasts between Tahitian and European environmental worldviews given in published accounts authored by Johann (1729–1798) and Georg Forster (1754–1794), who served aboard James Cook’s HMS Resolution (1772–75). I attribute this shift to the Forsters’ relative lack of acquaintance with Tahitian cultures and te reo Tahiti (the Tahitian language), owing largely to the more itinerant nature of the Resolution voyage. The second part of this presentation turns to HMS Bounty expedition’s (1787-1790) unprecedented length of stay at Tahiti to collect breadfruit trees en route to the Caribbean, which encouraged cross-cultural intimacies palpably—even dangerously—at odds with Forsterian dichotomizing. In bringing these case studies together, I reflect on a paradox: namely, that while some grasp of indigenous knowledge was fundamental to global botanical endeavors, it could also prove their ruination.

Dr. Bil received his PhD in history from the University of British Columbia in 2018. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Institute, LuEsther T. Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden from 2018 to 2019. He has published most recently in the British Journal for the History of Science, and his manuscript. Indexing the Indigenous: Plants, Peoples and Empire is under contract with John Hopkins University Press.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
A talk with Dr. Christina Yi, Univ. British Columbia

With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan officially embarked on an enterprise of territorial expansion. Acquisition of Taiwan occurred in 1895, soon followed by the annexation of Korea in 1910.The unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied Powers in 1945 signaled not only the end of the Asia-Pacific War but also the end of the Japanese empire, as one of the conditions of surrender was the redrawing of national borders. In the years following Japan's war defeat, critics and scholars came to retrospectively schematize the literary texts produced during the colonial period within new paradigms of national literature. Meanwhile, the term zainichi(lit: “residing in Japan”) came to be applied to the Korean diasporic community in Japan, and zainichiliterature roughly defined as texts written in Japanese by ethnically Korean writers living in Japan. This talk will illuminate the effect of these postwar changes – as well as some prewar continuities – by looking at the Japanese-language writings of zainichiKorean writers, focusing in particular on Yi Yangji (1955–1992) and Kim Sŏkpŏm (b. 1925). It will also consider the interactions that took place between those writers and their Japanese peers in order to provide a more complex picture of the politics and literatures of postwar Japan. 

Christina Yi is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018. 

 

Bard Hall  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join Africana Studies for its new year kick off. The evening festivities will feature a performance by three South African Jazz greats, vocalists Nonhlanhla Kheswa and Melanie Scholtz and pianist Hilton Schilder. Their visit to Bard College is made possible through a longstanding partnership with Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is hosting "The South African Songbook" in celebration of 25 years of democracy in South Africa.

No tickets are required. Refreshments will be served. 

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This presentation narrates and analyzes the struggle for women’s suffrage in Lebanon between political independence in 1943 and the first parliamentary elections in which women participated in 1953. In doing so, it takes into account the views expressed and strategies pursued by different women’s organizations. Of particular interest is the 1950 formation of the Executive Committee of Women’s Organizations in Lebanon, which served as the key node around which Lebanese women sought to secure their suffrage rights, including issuing statements, organizing demonstrations, and building alliances with politicians, political parties, and select constituencies. A key concern of the analysis presented is the changes and continuities between the 1943–53 mobilizations for women’s suffrage and women’s activism in the colonial period. It therefore accounts for the contexts and contingencies that revived mobilizations for women’s suffrage in 1943 (after years of dormancy) and secured it in 1953. Rather than an inevitable consequence of independence, women’s suffrage emerges as the product of women’s agency and strategic decision-making within a complex set of contexts and contingencies involving postcolonial state building, intra-elite rivalries, and shifting norms of development, governance, and citizenship.

Blithewood  10:00 am – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us as a distinguished roster of historians, IR scholars, and economists discuss the legacy of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which brought an end to World War I. Far from ending the “war to end all wars,” Versailles saddled the world with debts, imbalances, and festering geopolitical problems that helped lead to the Second World War, many of which are still with us today.

Speakers include: The Lord Skidelsky, Baron of Tilton, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, Warwick University, and Member of the House of Lords, UK Parliament Dr. Nick Lloyd, King’s College London, and author, Passchendaele and Hundred Days Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History, Bard College Nur Bilge Criss, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Bilkent University David Woolner, Professor of History, Resident Historian of the Roosevelt Institute Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature, Bard College Pavlina Tcherneva, Economics Program Director and Associate Professor, Bard College Jan Kregel, Director of Research, Levy Economics Institute L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics, Bard College, and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute Jörg Bibow, Professor of Economics, Skidmore College, and Research Associate, Levy Economics Institute
Please click on this link to register for the event by April 29th: Registration form
 Schedule: 10:15 AM Welcome Remarks from Dimitri Papadimitriou, President of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM The First World War and the Versailles Treaty Dr. Nick Lloyd “The Hundred Days. How World War I Ended.” Sean McMeekin “Unfinished Business. 1918 on the War’s Eastern Fronts.” David Woolner, Nur Bilge Criss, and Richard Aldous Panel Discussion 12:00 - 12:30 PM Lunch 12:30 PM Eugene Meyer Lecture by Lord Robert Skidelsky “Could Germany have paid? John Maynard Keynes’s lesson for Britain and the Eurozone. ” with an introduction by Pavlina R. Tcherneva 1:30 - 2:00 PM Coffee break and student poster presentations 2:00 - 3:15 PM The Economic Consequences Moderator: Pavlina R. Tcherneva Jan Kregel “Keynes on International Relations: Gunboat Diplomacy, Free Trade and Capital Controls” L. Randall Wray “How To Pay for the War (against neoliberalism)” Jörg Bibow “Learning the Wrong Lessons: How Germany’s anti- Keynesianism has brought Europe to its knees”

Featuring the voices of three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen and Academy Award winner Adrien Brody
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars, and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper. Now, for the first time, their story is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced, and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage, and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon—the truth—and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not.

Eric Goldfischer, University of Minnesota
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the 1990s, the well-known tactic of "broken-windows policing" targeted homeless people by removing them from core areas of New York City and other global mega-cities. Yet today, with a progressive administration and softer policing in place, homeless New Yorkers still find themselves unable to exist comfortably in public space. How should we understand this shift? In this presentation, I argue that the regime of anti-homelessness in New York has shifted to what I call "ecological development," and present evidence from an ethnographic study to show how green spaces, linear parks, and urban plaza areas have taken up the mantle of anti-homelessness, and how homeless activists resist these nefarious tools of urban planning and development.

Event with Marcus Moore, Charmel Lucas, and Nikita Price (Picture the Homeless, USA) and Ayala Dias Ferreira (MST- Landless Workers Movement, Brazil)
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the US and Brazil alike, the housing crisis sweeps millions into its grasp each year, producing homelessness, destroying public space, and forcing people to migrate long distances. But homeless activists have powerfully resisted this trend through community organizing, collective action, and legislative change. Landless activists have occupied plantations, successfully resettling hundreds of thousands of people on land that used to be controlled by big agriculture. Come hear from housing organizers in New York City and landless organizers in Brazil. Learn more about how we can create new models of land and public space so that all have a right to a home.

Jia Lynn Yang, Deputy National Editor, The New York Times
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk will trace the current immigration debate back to the Supreme Court fight in 1922 over whether a Japanese-born man could naturalize, and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which established ethnic quotas favoring “Anglo-Saxons.” Because immigration debates have long been predicated on who counts as sufficiently “white,” the current system—in which there are far more Asian and Hispanic immigrants than European—challenges traditional notions of who counts as American. Yang will discuss how the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act set us on this current course, but left much unfinished work around race and national identity that we confront today during the Trump administration. The talk will also address media coverage of Trump’s immigration policies as well as how to infuse journalistic work with a sense of history.

Jia Lynn Yang is a deputy national editor at the New York Times, where she helps oversee coverage of the country. Previously, she was deputy national security editor at the Washington Post, where she was an editor on the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2018 for its coverage of Trump and Russia. She is writing a book on the history of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, Un-American Elements, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2020.

  Roger T. Ames
Peking University
Berggruen Research Center
Olin Humanities, Room 205  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the introduction of Chinese philosophy and culture into the Western academy, we have tended to theorize and conceptualize this antique tradition by appeal to familiar categories. Confucian role ethics is an attempt to articulate a sui generis moral philosophy that allows this tradition to have its own voice. This holistic philosophy is grounded in the primacy of relationality, and is a challenge to a foundational liberal individualism that has defined persons as discrete, autonomous, rational, free, and often self-interested agents. Confucian role ethics begins from a relationally constituted conception of person, takes family roles and relations as the entry point for developing moral competence, invokes moral imagination and the growth in relations that it can inspire as the substance of human morality, and entails a human-centered, a-theistic religiousness that stands in sharp contrast to the Abrahamic religions.

Roger T. Ames is humanities chair professor at Peking University, cochair of the academic advisory committee of the Peking University Berggruen Research Center, and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Hawai’i. He is former editor of Philosophy East and West and founding editor of China Review International. Ames has authored several interpretative studies of Chinese philosophy and culture: Thinking Through Confucius (1987), Anticipating China (1995), Thinking from the Han (1998), and Democracy of the Dead (1999) (all with D. L. Hall); Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011); and, most recently, “Human Becomings: Theorizing ‘Persons’ for Confucian Role Ethics” (forthcoming). His publications also include translations of Chinese classics: Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare (1993); Sun Pin: The Art of Warfare (1996) (with D. C. Lau); the Confucian Analects (1998) and the Classic of Family Reverence: The “Xiaojing” (2009) (both with H. Rosemont), Focusing the Familiar: The “Zhongyong” (2001), and The “Daodejing” (with D. L. Hall) (2003). Almost all of his publications are now available in Chinese translation, including his philosophical translations of Chinese canonical texts. He has most recently been engaged in compiling the new Sourcebook of Classical Confucian Philosophy, and in writing articles promoting a conversation between American pragmatism and Confucianism.

Joshua Kopin '12
PhD Candidate, The University of Texas at Austin
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Part of a larger dissertation project, this talk makes a connection between the subjects of early comics, which often included immigrants and their children, like the Irish-American Yellow Kid; and political cartoons about immigration and American imperialism from the periods of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Spanish-American War. Drawing on his long-established connection to yellow journalism and noting that, while explicitly Irish, the Yellow Kid is drawn in the visual idiom of anti-Chinese caricature, this talk posits that caricature is a technology of empire and inclusion that, through ideas about immigrants and expansionism that were often clothed in metaphors of childhood, served to differentiate acceptable, if unruly, white citizen subjects from imperial others. 

  Tejasvi Nagaraja
Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies
Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In examining the intersecting ties across foreign and domestic realms, scholars have considered how warfare infrastructures interact with social diversities, opportunities, and inequalities in each country. Americanist scholarship has evaluated the complex relationship between the “hard” power of national security, with “soft” realms such as the welfare state and civil rights. Yet historians have yet to adequately interpret the ties across the two spheres of “hard” power, foreign policy and criminal justice. How does our story of U.S. global power and security statecraft change when we attend to contestations over policing and incarceration, particularly as they affected service members?

From the Second World War into the early Cold War—the signal era of mass citizen-soldiering—diverse GIs and their loved ones grappled with experiences of military policing, courts-martial, incarceration, and execution as well as the civilian justice system’s treatment of service members. This talk considers popular concerns about crime and punishment, as they made a fundamental mark on American experiences of military service and foreign policy. These cases and causes took place across the U.S. South, U.S. North, and overseas, affected individuals from all three spheres, and inspired popular advocacy across all three too. This talk situates this carceral through line in the context of a larger book project—about labor, race, and international relations within the process of midcentury U.S. global militarization. This book presents U.S. service members and their loved ones as protagonists within American and transnational debates about economic, criminal justice, and geopolitical affairs. It argues that U.S. foreign policy’s statecraft was deeply entangled and embattled in relation to intersecting “domestic” social movements.

  Jeannette Alden Estruth
Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The Harvard University Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society
Olin Humanities, Room 102  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The late 20th century saw the meteoric rise of the high-technology industry in the United States. Synonymous with this growth was the region that came to be known as California’s Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley, however, did not just represent a place or an industry. It also encompassed a new set of ideas about American prosperity and the country’s future. Jeannette Estruth’s research traces the genesis of these ideas, and finds them in the early community movements that fought the material challenges presented by the technology industry’s rapid economic expansion. She shows that the industry’s encounters with dissenting voices produced new visions about what work meant, how economies functioned, and what democracy should look like. In doing so, Estruth argues that the local technology sector revolutionized American political thought in the late 20th century, creating a new economic era by the turn of the 21st.

  Chris Suh
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Stanford University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk will examine the history of race, empire, and inequality during the Progressive Era in the transpacific context by focusing on the life of an American-educated Korean reformer named Yun Ch’i-ho (1865–1945), best known today as a “collaborator” during Korea’s colonial period under Japan. Drawing on archival sources from South Korea and the United States, this talk will explain the process through which the United States came to include Japan in the “family of civilized nations,” and the ways in which American ideas about racial “progress”—often articulated with reference to African Americans in the South—both contributed to and challenged the imperial order in the Pacific, precisely at the moment when the United States began to emerge as a Pacific power.

A Photo and Film Exhibit
Campus Center, Gallery 
A panel discussion, followed by a reception, will take place in Weis Cinema on Thursday, February 28, 5:00–6:30 p.m.

  Juliet Nebolon
Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies
The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History
Harvard University
Olin Humanities, Room 205  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Juliet Nebolon’s talk will focus on her book manuscript, “Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai‘i and the Making of U.S. Empire,” which is a history of the World War II period of martial law in Hawai‘i (1941–44). The project analyzes the overlapping regimes of  settler colonialism and militarization during this period, as well as the logics of race, indigeneity, and gender that intersected within these regimes. Her talk will explore these dynamics at work in the domains of public health and blood donation, domesticity and home economics campaigns, and internment across Hawai‘i and the Pacific Islands.

Aspinwall  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
We will tour new campus signage designed to encourage critical reflection on community practices of public memory, recognition, and forgetting through geographical markers.Walk beginning outside Aspinwall Hall, Bard College, on Monday, December 3, at 3:00 pm.

Reception following in the Campus Center Multipurpose Room will feature student art and performances.

This is a project of students in Professor Myra Young Armstead's "Inclusion at Bard" course, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course sponsored by Bard's Center for Civic Engagement. This event is part of the Difference and Justice Symposium, and is underwritten by a grant from the Lumina Foundation.
 

A Symposium Marking the 75th Anniversary of the Tehran Conference
Olin Hall  9:00 am – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Organized by the Bard College Center for Civic Engagement, in association with the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny) of St. Petersburg State University, Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

For most Americans, the most controversial—and famous—summit meeting of the Second World War remains the Yalta Conference, where, in the minds of many conservative critics, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt essentially handed over control of Poland and much of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. What is often overlooked, however, is that most of the agreements achieved at Yalta were first discussed over a year earlier at the Tehran Conference. Viewed from this perspective, the Yalta Conference represents the moment at which “the Big Three” put the finishing touches on what was already agreed at the Tehran gathering.

The aim of this joint U.S.-Russian symposium is to gain a deeper understanding of the Tehran Conference and what impact the decisions taken at this first, all-important summit meeting had on U.S.-Russian relations, not only during the Yalta Conference but also in the years that followed. The event will include presentations from leading historians and political scientists from the United States, Russia, and Great Britain, touching on historical topics such as Poland, the Second Front, future of Germany, postwar planning, shifting balance of power, Soviet entry into the war against Japan, as well as the current state of Russian-American relations.

The symposium will be accompanied by an exhibition of key documents and photographs from the FDR Presidential Library and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library at the Stevenson Library at Bard College from November 26 to December 24, 2018.

The symposium is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
We will be webcasting via Facebook Live on the Bard Center for Civic Engagement Facebook page, beginning at 9:00 am on November 30.

You can download the symposium program via the link at the bottom of this page.Symposium Schedule9:00-10:00 a.m. Conference Opening: Understanding Tehran and Yalta A Moment in U.S.–Russian Relations - Jonathan Becker, Bard College What Tehran 1943 and Tehran 2018 Tell Us about Russian-American Relations - Darya Pushkina, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russian Federation [via video-feed] New Documentary Evidence Regarding the Organization of the Tehran and Yalta Conferences – Olga Golovina, Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, Russian Federation [via video-feed]10:00–11:00 a.m. Keynote Address The Soviet Union in U.S. Strategic Planning during World War II – Mark Stoler, University of Vermont11:00–11:15 a.m. Coffee Break

11:15–12:45 p.m. Tehran in Retrospect: The Turning Point of the Second World War? Chair and Discussant – Yana Skorobogatov, Williams College Tehran and Stalin’s Grand Strategy - Sean McMeekin, Bard College At the Peak of Friendship: Soviet-American Perceptions from Tehran to Yalta – Ivan Kurilla, European University at St. Petersburg, Russian Federation Tehran as the Foundation of the Postwar World – Andrew Buchanan, University of Vermont12:45–2:00 p.m. Lunch Break

2:00–3:30 p.m. Yalta in Retrospect: Start of the Cold War? Chair - Richard Aldous, Bard College Looking Beyond Victory: FDR and the Russians at Yalta – David Woolner, Roosevelt Institute/Marist College/Bard College “I don’t think I’m Wrong about Stalin:” Churchill’s Strategic and Diplomatic Assumptions at Yalta - Richard Toye, University of Exeter, United Kingdom Stalin’s Victory at Yalta – Harold Goldberg, Sewanee–The University of the South Discussant – Yuri Rogoulev, Moscow State University, Russian Federation3:30–4:00 p.m. The Student Perspective Presentation of the Bard College Student-Curated Digital Exhibition on the Tehran and Yalta Conferences4:00–4:15 p.m. Coffee Break

4:15–5:45 p.m. The State of U.S.-Russian Relations Today Chair and Discussant – Robert Person, United States Military Academy, West Point The Puffer Fish and the Eagle: Russia and the United States since the End of World War II – Timothy Naftali, New York University A New Yalta? Is There an Affirmative Project in Russian Foreign Policy and Are We to Take It Seriously? – Artemy Magun, European University at St. Petersburg, Russian Federation Putin and America: U.S.-Russian Relations Today - Nina Khrushcheva, The New School5:45 p.m. Closing Remarks – David Woolner


Download: SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM.pdf View the program

Jon K. Harper, Senior Vice President and Provost, Professor of Classics & Letters, University of Oklahoma
RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This lecture will explore the ways in which the natural sciences, particularly paleogenomics, are providing us exciting new insights into important questions about the ancient past such as the fall of Rome. And it will consider how the study of human history can deepen our understanding of health, disease, and the evolution of pathogens like smallpox and plague.

  Stephen J. Trejo, Department of Economics, University of Texas at Austin
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
We document generational patterns of educational attainment and earnings for contemporary immigrant groups. We also discuss some potentially serious measurement issues that arise when attempting to track the socioeconomic progress of the later-generation descendants of U.S. immigrants, and we summarize what recent research has to say about these measurement issues and how they might bias our assessment of the long-term integration of particular groups. Most national origin groups arrive with relatively high educational attainment and/or experience enough improvement between the first and second generations such that they quickly meet or exceed, on average, the schooling level of the typical American. Several large and important Hispanic groups (including Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) are exceptions to this pattern, however, and their prospects for future upward mobility are subject to much debate. Because of measurement issues and data limitations, Mexican Americans in particular and Hispanic Americans in general probably have experienced significantly more socioeconomic progress beyond the second generation than available data indicate. Even so, it may take longer for their descendants to integrate fully into the American mainstream than it did for the descendants of the European immigrants who arrived near the turn of the twentieth century.

  Thomas A. Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies, George Washington University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the World War II–era U.S. military likely knows that it was segregated. Less well known, surprisingly, is who was segregated from whom, exactly, and how the military made these decisions. Neither was simple or straightforward. My talk will explore a long-forgotten chapter of this larger story: the fraught and complex struggle over inductees’ “proper” racial classification and placement in the segregated World War II–era military. Drawing on a variety of federal records from the army, the Selective Service System, and the courts, I trace the stories of an eclectic mix of Americans —Waccamaw Siouans, Chickahomines, Creoles, Puerto Ricans, Cape Verdeans—who fit neatly into neither of the military's catchall categories of “white” and “colored.” In the process, I shed light on the evolving meaning and boundaries of race—from official state policy down to ordinary people’s attitudes and actions.

  Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Based on demographic projections, most Americans believe that their society will transition soon to a majority-minority one. But the projections fail to adequately account for a major social and demographic phenomenon of the early 21st century: the rise of a group of young Americans with mixed minority-white ancestry. In a departure from the one-drop regime of past racism, these individuals appear to be growing up in mixed family settings, but because of the binary, zero-sum rigidities that still guide our thinking, they are mostly classified as minorities in demographic data. Without this classification, however, the emergence of a majority-minority society in the foreseeable future is far from certain. Moreover, the evidence we possess about the characteristics, social affiliations, and identities of mixed individuals contradicts an exclusively minority classification, except for partly black individuals, who suffer from high levels of racism. Taking into account the ambiguous social locations of most mixed minority-white persons, I suggest that, even should a majority-minority society appear, it will not look like we presently imagine it.

Professor Greg Moynahan
Olin LC 210  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

A talk by Professor Greg Moynahan on “The Political Culture of Schubert's Vienna: Metternich and Domestic Life,” followed by a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D 956, “Two Cellos”
Bitó Conservatory Building  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Due to popular demand, the lecture and concert program that was presented in March at Montgomery Place will be repeated at the Conservatory Performance Space. The program features an expanded, illustrated talk by Professor Greg Moynahan on “The Political Culture of Schubert's Vienna: Metternich and Domestic Life,” to be followed by a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D 956, “Two Cellos,” performed by Conservatory students and director Robert Martin.
 No reservations required. Free and open to the public.

Simon J. Ball
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Simon Ball is professor of international history and politics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of five books and in recent years has been one of the leaders of the Anglo-German Cultures of Intelligence project. Professor Ball’s Eugene Meyer lecture will explore how Britain developed Intelligence as a distinctive field of action in both fact and fiction.

Inaugural Conference, History of Capitalism at Bard 
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  10:00 am – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Speakers include:
Kevin Duong (Bard)
David Kettler (Bard)
Zak Rawle (Bard)
Jane Glaubman (Cornell)
Joseph Sheehan (Bard)
Simon deBevoise (Bard)
Zeke Perkins (SEIU)
Ed Quish (Cornell)
Maggie Dickinson (CUNY)
Joy Al-Nemri (Bard)
Ella McLeod (Bard)
Laura Ford (Bard)
Holger Droessler (Bard)
 

Cynthia H. Conti-Cook '03

Staff Attorney, Special Litigation Unit

Legal Aid Society

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:40 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Governments have swiftly embraced automated decisions about policing and criminal justice despite very little evidence that these tools are fair or accurate. We will survey the various stakeholders investing in, using, and subject to these tools, as well as the types of decisions that are being automated, and examine how these tools are created. The discussion will then move to the training data that these tools are built on, how human bias gets baked into the automation, and how competing stakeholders’ definitions of fairness struggle to define success.

Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, 47-49 E 65th St, New York, New York 10065  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The first hundred days of FDR's presidency are justly famous, often viewed as a period of political action without equal in American history. Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the last hundred might very well surpass them in drama and consequence.

Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR called on every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue what mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, and the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We see a president shorn of the usual distractions of office, a man whose sense of personal responsibility for the American people bore heavily upon him. As Woolner argues, even in declining health FDR displayed remarkable political talent and foresight as he focused his energies on shaping the peace to come.

David B. Woolner is senior fellow and resident historian of the Roosevelt Institute, professor of history at Marist College, and senior fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College.

This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, cosponsored and hosted by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and supported by Foreign Affairs magazine. It is free and open to the public by RSVP.

Wakako Suzuki
PhD Candidate, UCLA
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
How and why did the political discourse of “little citizens” become a rhetorical tool enabling both national mobilization and social contestation in modern Japan? Despite the print media’s celebration of children’s citizenship and their status as subjects in Meiji Japan, the rights bestowed upon children were inconsistent, as were expectations of their actions as “little citizens” with a political identity. In this talk, I discuss how the development of formal education and the circulation of children’s magazines, such as The Boy’s World (Shōnen sekai, 1895–1933), created the historical conditions necessary to mobilize children as “little citizens.” At the same time, heterogeneous configurations of linguistic and literary practices in different cultural settings demonstrated various ways in which the vernacular conventions of childhood occasionally deviated from the operation of the state apparatus, functioning as a subversive force against the standardization of childhood. To exemplify such power dynamics, this talk highlights a series of literary works called shōnen-mono (stories about children and childhood), which emerged right after the First Sino-Japanese War (1864-1865) as a site of poetic imagination to resist social normalization and negate children’s subjection as imperial subjects under state power. By unpacking various symbolic constructions of “little citizens,” I demonstrate how the multilayered representation of children, as a part of discursive practices, lead to a complex interplay between standardization and decentralization in the politics and poetics of childhood in a modern capitalist society. 

Murat C. Yıldız
Assistant Professor of History, Skidmore College
Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5

By the early 20th century, gymnastics, athletics, and team sports, particularly soccer, had developed into a wildly popular set of activities and pastime for many residents of the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Because of the global popularity of sports during the period and the diverse threads through which they spread throughout Istanbul, sports were envisioned as a shared civic activity. At the same time, young men from an expanding middle class treated these civic activities as the means through which they could build a fraternity of like-minded (and bodied) men from the same ethnoreligious community. Sports clubs, which were almost exclusively male spaces, were ethnically and religiously homogeneous private institutions. Muslims, Christians, and Jews joined them in order to train their bodies, exercise, and compete, as well as to socialize and build ethnic-based solidarity. Multilingual periodicals projected both civic and ethnoreligious ties, too. Together, the institutions and discourses of sports demonstrate that civic and exclusive ties were often mutually constitutive rather than exclusive in the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on a diverse array of primary sources, such as sports club records, memoirs, novels, government reports, newspapers, periodicals, and unpublished letters, written in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, French, English, German, and Greek, this talk will focus on the implications of using sports as a lens through which to study urban centers, communal boundaries, public space, and fun in the Middle East.

Murat C. Yıldız is assistant professor in the department of history at Skidmore College. He is currently working on a book manuscript that focuses on the making of a shared physical culture among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in late Ottoman Istanbul.

  Finberg Library  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Ebony Coletu
Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Penn State
“Chief Sam and the Undocumented Origins of African American Migration to Ghana” Carina Ray
Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University
“Africa as a Refuge” Abosede George
Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, Barnard College
“Death of a Building: Unearthing the Politics of Modernity and Migration Histories in Architectural Conservation Projects in Lagos”

Please join us for the workshop and lunch. Due to limited space, RSVP is required. RSVP to [email protected].
 

The Bard Fiction Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Karan Mahajan reads from his work.
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

On Monday, February 26, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, novelist Karan Mahajan reads from his work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

Karan Mahajan studied English and economics at Stanford University before earning an M.F.A. in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. His first novel, Family Planning (2012), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and the NYPL Young Lions Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, in addition to being named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and others. In 2017, Mahajan was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
 


PRAISE FOR KARAN MAHAJAN
 “The Association of Small Bombs is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable, and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. . . . Mahajan is the real deal.” —Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review

“A voracious approach to fiction-making . . . Mahajan has a cinematic attunement to the spectacle of disaster.” —New Yorker

“Mahajan is an incredibly assured stylist. . . . Hugely promising.” —Jay McInerney, Daily Beast

“Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and a clarity of vision.” —London Review of Books

“Mahajan . . . has already developed an irresistible voice with a rich sense of humor fueled by sorrow.” —Washington Post Book World

David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English, Yale University
RKC 103  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Aesthetic judgment presumes that there is such a thing as bad art, and that it warrants careful description and analysis; with examples from 19th- and 20th-century poetry, didactic criticism and its opponents, and one or two recent Hollywood films.

William Marotti, Associate Professor of History, UCLA
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
By 1968, the area around Tokyo's massive Shinjuku Station had become a site for conflict over visions of the future. The Japanese government sold international investors on the city's first designated skyscraper zone while moving millions of commuters—and millions of gallons of jet fuel for American air bases—through the station on a daily basis. Around the station, a growing youth culture lived and imagined a different future via tent theater, street performance, guerrilla folk music, and conspicuous idling. Targeted by media panics, undercover cops and riot police alike, these youth nonetheless created a space of possibility and even revolution against demands for conformity and collusion with the Vietnam War.

William Marotti is an Associate Professor of History at UCLA and author of Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan. This talk draws from his current book project, The Art of Revolution: Politics and Aesthetic Dissent in Japan’s 1968, which analyzes cultural politics and oppositional practices in Japan, with particular emphasis on 1968 as a global event.

  Marc Silverman
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Janusz Korczak (1878, Warsaw; 1942, Treblinka) is known for the heroic stand of non-violent opposition he took in response to the Nazis’ decision to liquidate the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw (July-August, 1942) and to deport everybody there, including all children, to the death camp of Treblinka. Korczak refused numerous offers to escape into safety from the ghetto. He stayed with the children (over a hundred) and staff of the Jewish orphanage he had long headed, accompanying them through to death.

However, the exclusive focus on Korczak’s dramatic end is a disservice. He was one of the twentieth century's outstanding moral educators. This talk focuses on his child-centered humanism as well as his identification with Poles and Jews in the expression of this humanism.
 
American born and raised,  Marc Silverman received his BA, MA and doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served for over 30 years as Senior Lecturer in the Hebrew University School of Education.  He has published in the fields of educational philosophy and Jewish culture and education.   He is the author of A Pedagogy of Humanist Moral Education: The Educational Thought of Janusz Korczak (2017), published by Palgrave Macmillan Press.    

Charles B. Potter, Professor of History at the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4

Charles B. Potter, Professor of History at the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence and former professor of NYU, in a conversation with Elizabeth Frank, Division of Languages & Literature at Bard College, about his recent book The Resistance, 1940: An Anthology of Writings from the French Underground (LSU Press 2016). Translated from French into English for the first time.

Free and open to the public.
 

  Lerna Ekmekcioglu
Associate Professor of History, Massachussets Institute of Technology
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Katherine Benton-Cohen
Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University
Olin Humanities, Room 101  4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
“Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Progressive-Era America,” examines the enormous impact of the largest study of immigrants in US History. From 1907 to 1911, a staff of 300—over half of them women--compiled 41 volumes of reports and a potent set of recommendations that shaped immigration policy for generations to come. The talk will discuss the Commission’s surprising origins in US-Asia relations, its enthusiasm for distributing immigrants throughout the United States, and its long-term effect not just on federal policy, but on how Americans think about immigration in general.
 Katherine Benton-Cohen is associate professor of history at Georgetown University. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
She is the author of Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2009), as well as her forthcoming book on the history of the Dillingham Commission.

Kline, Faculty Dining Room  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come celebrate the end of the year with fellow MESers. Meet faculty, hear about exciting new courses, study abroad programs, senior projects, and a number of incredible iniatives MES students are working on. Snacks will be served. All are welcome.

Yellow Room in the campus center and RKC 103  1:15 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
I. New Connections: The Talmud and the Contemporary Humanities - a Workshop
Location: The Yellow Room in the Campus Center (1:15-4:45pm)

Featuring leading scholars of Jewish studies in dialogue with Bard students and faculty.

II. "Make it New": Classical Jewish Texts and Artistic Imagination
Location: RKC 103 (4:45-6:15pm)

Nicole Krass: Novelist, author of The History of Love (2005) and Great House (2010)
Adam Kirsh: Poet and critic
Galit-Hasan-Rokem: Scholar, poet, and translator.

III. Jewish Studies and the Liberal Arts: Institutional Possibilities
Location: RKC 103 (6:30-7:30pm)

Featuring President Leon Botstein, Bruce Chilton, and Alan Avery-Peck.

Dr. Benjamin A. Talton
Associate Professor, Temple University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

The 1980s was the highpoint of African American political power and direct political engagement with Africa.    A small group of African American lawmakers in the 1980s brought the radical activism of the 1960s and early 1970s to Congress.  Through their protests, legislation and coalition building African Americans achieved their greatest influence on U.S. foreign policy in U.S. history.  Within this brief political moment, their efforts helped transform the relationship between the United States and Africa.  ​

Jessica Pabon 
Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
SUNY New Paltz
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In cities across the globe, graffiti grrlz (women who write graffiti art) enact the quintessential principles of feminist movement such as collectivity, support, and empowerment. They do so, however, without claiming a feminist identity; some emphatically rejecting a feminist mantle. In her talk, feminist graffiti scholar Dr. Jessica N. Pabón asks: do we need to call ourselves feminists in order to enact feminist change in the world? Incorporating the ethos of “action above words” that defines graffiti subculture, Pabón argues that the question of who is or is not a feminist becomes secondary to how feminism is being enacted through everyday performance.
Case studies are drawn from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Brazil as well as the United States.
 

John Hooper, Italy correspondent of The Economist magazine and the author of The Italians (Viking, 2015 & 2016)
RKC 103  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
How did a nation that spawned the Renaissance also produce the Mafia? What exactly is bella figura? And why do Romans eat their gnocchi on Thursdays? Having spent more than 15 years reporting on Italy, John Hooper set out to write a book that answers these and many of the other puzzles that confront outsiders in a society that can be as baffling as it is alluring.  The result is The Italians, published by Viking, which has featured in the bestseller lists of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. In his talk, Hooper will discuss the challenges and rewards of trying to explain a society in which paradox is the norm and in which much is hidden, or coded or left unsaid.

Note the new location.

The inaugural event of the First 100 Days, a college-wide initiative combining civics and public media
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Mark DannerJames Clarke Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities

in dialogue withLeon BotsteinPresident, Bard College

introduced byAriana Gonzalez Stokas '00Dean of Inclusive Excellence

Free and open to the public; seating is first come, first servedLive WebcastTo view a live webcast of the event please visit: Watch Live!Give to the Bard Sanctuary Fund



Press Release: View

  Rockwell Stensrud
Olin Humanities, Room 202  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
In his long life, during one of the most dynamic periods in English history, Roger Williams (1603-1683) altered the values and the direction of the New World, and he did it with flair. After being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 for sedition, Williams founded Providence with the help of Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians. He insisted that Rhode Island break with the past and honor freedom of conscience for all inhabitants, and that church and state remain separate. By the early 1640s, those dangerous tenets had become a legislative possibility; two decades later they were a reality. The nation that emerged a century and a half later as the United States of America was a direct descendant of Roger Williams’s Rhode Island revolution.

Rockwell Stensrud is the author of Newport: A Lively Experiment 1639-1969 and Inventing Rhode Island: Six Lives. He wrote and co-produced the ABC News series The History of the Eighties; James Cagney for A&E “Biography”; and the series American Women of Achievement.

Dr. Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina
Yarshater Assistant Professor of Avestan and Pahlavi at the University of Toronto
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This conversation, moderated by Shai Secunda (Religion), will probe the efforts of Zoroastrian theologians to make sense of their ancient Iranian tradition; the distinction between theology and critical scholarship in the study of Zoroastrianism; and the sociology of knowledge in a field where  Orientalism, minority identity, and related factors collide. 

Participants are strongly encouraged to read Dr. Vevaina's article “Theologies and Hermeneutics,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015), 211-234, in advance.  

Contact Shai Secunda for a pdf of the article.  

  John Logan, Professor of Sociology at Brown University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Recent highly publicized police violence has been widely described as "misbehavior."  This presentation will argue that issues of policing need to be tackled within a wider context of the spatial containment of disadvantaged and minority communities that reinforces the privilege of others, in other words, ghettoization.  The  issue was identified by the famous National Commission on Civil Disorders in the 1960s: America's division into two societies, separate and unequal.  The responses proposed by that Commission fifty years ago -- community policing, civilian review boards, better training and more sensitivity -- were not implemented then, and they would have little impact now.
 
After the talk and an intermission for refreshments, Professor Logan will offer an introduction to the user-friendly website on which the talk was based and which could also be used for student and faculty research papers and projects
 
Data Resources on Urban Inequality: The American Communities Project

This presentation will introduce a series of data resources that are readily available through Brown University's American Communities Project.  Some of these cover recent decades: measures of neighborhood-level racial/ethnic and income segregation, school segregation and disparities in school quality.  The Longitudinal Tract Database (LTDB) provides census data for 1970-2010 estimated within 2010 tract boundaries, facilitating studies of neighborhood change and neighborhood effects.  Other data sets in the Urban Transition HGIS provide mapped data for the period 1880-1940.  
See https://www.brown.edu/academics/spatial-structures-in-social-sciences/american-communities-project 
 
John Logan is professor of Sociology at Brown University and Director of its Research Initiative on Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4).   He is the author or editor of numerous books and many scores of articles, including recently (co-authored), “Emergent Ghettos: Black Neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880-1940” American Journal of Sociology, 2015.

  Nancy L. Green
 
Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
 
Over the last four decades, research has moved from the “discovery” of the history of immigration – initially seen largely as a story of male workers – to a “discovery” of female migrants.  Closer attention to the gender composition of migration streams has become an increasingly important aspects of migration studies. Using the United States and France, two major historical sites of labor immigration, as examples, I will show how gender studies bring new questions – and answers – to the understanding of the history of migration.  How have gender regimes in the countries of origin affected emigration and how has immigration affected gender relations?

Nancy Green is professor of history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.   She is the author of several books in French and English including Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York and The Other Americans in Paris : Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941.    She recently also co-edited (with sociologist Roger Waldinger) the collection of essays, A century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and Their Homeland Connections.
 

Discussion & Snacks
Olin Humanities, Room 102  7:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come watch Shtisel, an Israeli television drama series that follows the intersecting story-lines of a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish family living in the present-day Jerusalem, followed by comments from Yuval Elmelech (Sociology), Cecile Kuznitz (History), and Shai Secunda (Religion). Meet other Jewish Studies faculty and students, hear about spring courses, and enjoy a snack.  

A Lecture by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University

"Her body in the air looked like an abstract sculpture," Griffin writes of Pearl Primus's dance in the 1840s.  

"In her book “Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II,[2013]” Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor at Columbia University, delves into a largely underexplored aspect of Harlem’s rich history: the years just before, during and immediately after World War II, a period of optimism, creativity and turmoil. Moreover, Griffin uses the lives of three female artists — the choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, the writer Ann Petry and the composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams — as signposts through an era, in a work that paints the “greatest generation” in a much less flattering light than do the usual jingoistic accounts."  ~The New York Times

Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
 
Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4

  Muhsin al-Musawi
Professor of Arabic Studies, Columbia University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
 
Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4

Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
 
Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4

Paul Strohm, Columbia University and Queen Mary, University of London
Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
What is to be made of the poet’s and fiction writer’s invented “I” and the potentially bogus details in which it is arrayed?  With respect to matters of biographical truth, the normal and sensible answer is normally: nothing at all.  Yet the pre-modern literary biographer—limited by a paucity of available material—can hardly afford to neglect this tantalizing source of potential life-evidence.  Author of a recent Chaucer biography, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (2014), Paul Strohm will speak about the interpretative temptations posed by the author’s elusive “I.”  He will pursue this question in writings by Chaucer, and, more briefly, in contemporary instances from gangsta rap and the “non-fiction novels” of Karl Ove Knausgaard.
        
Paul Strohm is the author of Social Chaucer (Harvard, 1989,1994); Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992); England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and Textual Legitimation, 1399-1422 (Yale UK, 1998); Theory and the Premodern Text (Minnesota, 2000); Politique: Languages of Statecraft Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, 2005); and Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (Viking, 2014).  He has been J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.  He is currently Honorary Research Professor at Queen Mary, University of London.

  Interested in tutoring for the Bard Prison Initiative? Come join us for pizza!
Campus Center, Red Room 203  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Bard Prison Initiative is looking for tutors for the spring semester, particularly students who are majoring in Math, Science, and Computing and Foreign Languages.  Please join us for pizza and refreshments to learn more about the process of becoming a tutor!

  Derek Penslar
Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Toronto
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Israel-Palestine conflict is highly visible and contentious in student politics. Academic teaching and research on Israel/Palestine is less visible but is a vital component of university life. This talk will illuminate the potential of what scholars do in the classroom and library to not merely replicate the Israel-Palestine conflict on campus but rather to build bridges between students with diverse disciplinary and political orientations.

  Derek Penslar
Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Toronto
Kline, College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
During this brown bag lunch Prof. Penslar will discuss his current research on journalistic writings by Theodor Herzl that flesh out ideas about colonialism, race, and empire. His work juxtaposes Herzl's diaries, written in private but intended for a public audience, with his journalism, which was produced for the public yet at times expressed deeply private feelings. The textual interplay reveals that Herzl was deeply embedded in fin de siècle racial and colonial discourse, thought of colonized peoples with a complex mixture of sympathy and antipathy, and held starkly divergent views about Africa and the Orient.

  Campus Center, Red Room 203  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come meet old and new faculty, hear about our courses, learn about the Historical Studies program and eat pizza!

Henderson 106 (Mac Lab)  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Experimental Humanities Workshop Series
On Mapping
Spring 2016
This workshop series will offer participants introductions to a range of tools for mapping projects in the classroom and in research. All workshops will begin at 3:00 pm in Henderson Annex 106. Experimental Humanities Open Labs follow immediately after in this space where you are welcome to stay to continue working on the mapping tutorials.Sign up for one or all of the workshops at http://goo.gl/forms/9BlZfDpyWj


April 5
Designing a Mapping AssignmentThe first workshop will introduce strategies for planning a mapping project in your course. Introduction to a few web-based platforms that are user-friendly, intuitive, and great for short-term assignments. Hands-on training for using StoryMap JS (including using Gigapixel), ThingLink, and Timescape.


April 19
Neatline (Omeka)Introduction to Neatline, a mapping and annotation tool available via the Omeka web publishing platform. Hands-on training for creating a Neatline exhibit including adding records, creating waypoints, incorporating a timeline and working with image layers.


May 3
Historic MappingHands-on training for georeferencing historic maps, using Map Warper, adding historic data, and instruction for different publishing outputs, including CartoDB and DH Press (a WordPress plugin).

Learn more at the Unconference
Reem-Kayden Center  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Experimental Humanities Initiative invites faculty from across Bard College to apply for up to $6,000 in funding to start an innovative process-driven humanities laboratory. In this pilot project, we are open to, and encourage, multiple ideas and proposals about what a humanities lab can be.Applicants can propose to run their laboratory for any specified period between two weeks (appropriate for an intensive laboratory over a college break) and twelve months (appropriate for an extended laboratory that runs Summer 2016 to Spring 2017).

For more information come to our info session during the Unconference on Saturday, April 30th from 12:30-1:30. 

Join us on Tuesday, April 26th in Olin 102 at 7PM for a talk with David Rieff on his new book "In Praise of Forgetting"
Olin Humanities, Room 102  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
David Rieff is the author of many books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, and, most recently, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the 21st Century. He lives in New York City.In his Book "In Praise of Forgetting", He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, “inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds—whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces—neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget.Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times—the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11—Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.We Hope to see you there!!

Henderson 106 (Mac Lab)  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Introduction to Neatline, a mapping and annotation tool available via the Omeka web publishing platform. Hands-on training for creating a Neatline exhibit including adding waypoints, incorporating a timeline and working with image layers.
 Experimental Humanities Workshop Series
On Mapping
Spring 2016
This workshop series will offer participants introductions to a range of tools for mapping projects in the classroom and in research. All workshops will begin at 3:00 pm in Henderson Annex 106. Experimental Humanities Open Labs follow immediately after in this space where you are welcome to stay to continue working on the mapping tutorials.Sign up for one or all of the workshops at http://goo.gl/forms/9BlZfDpyWj
Upcoming Workshop
May 3
Historic MappingHands-on training for georeferencing historic maps, using Map Warper, adding historic data, and instruction for different publishing outputs, including CartoDB and DH Press (a WordPress plugin).

Eminent Cambridge historian David Reynolds delivers the 2016 Eugene Meyer Annual Lecture.
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
David Reynolds is Professor of International History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College. He is the author of eleven books, including the Wolfson Prize-winning In Command of History: Churchill Writing and Fighting the Second World War. He has written and presented thirteen historical documentaries for BBC TV, ranging across the international history of the 20th century, including a trilogy on Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, as well as the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series America, Empire of Liberty.

Eugene Meyer (1875-1959), for whom the annual lecture and the Eugene Meyer Chair are named, was the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first president of the World Bank. Previous Eugene Meyer speakers include Sir David Cannadine, Andrew Roberts, Fintan O'Toole, Mark Lytle and Colm Tóibín. The Eugene Meyer Chair, held by Professor Richard Aldous, was endowed at Bard in 2010.

  Malick W. Ghachem
Associate Professor of History, MIT
Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Malick W. Ghachem is a historian and lawyer. His primary areas of concentration are slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He is the author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a history of the law of slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) between 1685 and 1804. The book received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize for the best work in English on French history and was co-winner of the Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book published in the field of Caribbean studies over the past three years. He teaches courses on the Age of Revolution, Slavery and Abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics.

Professor Ghachem earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University and his doctorate in history from Stanford. He clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Miami, FL in 2004. A member of the Massachusetts bar, Professor Ghachem practiced law in Boston from 2005 to 2010 for two law firms: Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. For part of that period (2006-2007) he served as a lecturer in MIT’s Political Science Department. Between 2010 and 2013, he taught at the University of Maine School of Law in Portland, ME, where he is now a Senior Scholar.

  Rebekah Klein-Pejšová '94
Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Purdue University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
It is not difficult for us to imagine the sight of Budapest’s railway stations crowded with refugees after the summer of 2015. One hundred and one years earlier, in the early days of the First World War, Budapest’s train stations served as sites from which Galician Jewish refugees were sent to Vienna in transports arranged and financed by the Budapest Jewish Community. This talk probes why the Budapest Jewish community cooperated with the Hungarian wartime administration in clearing Austrian – that is, Galician Jewish – refugees from Hungarian territory, against a backdrop of the wider Hungarian Jewish response to the Jewish refugee crisis in Austria-Hungary. It offers insight into the often hasty and improvisational nature of wartime refugee assistance during the first mass civilian displacement crisis of the twentieth century.

Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, a 1994 graduate of Bard College, is the author of Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (Indiana University Press, 2015).

Katherine Zoepf
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur’anic schools—and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring.  In Syria, before its civil war, Zoepf documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who’ve found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising.  This reading will illuminate some of the voices Zoepf showcases in her book.  Katherine Zoepf lived in Syria and Lebanon from 2004 to 2007 while working as a stringer for The New York Times; she also worked in the Times's Baghdad bureau in 2008. Since 2010, she has been a fellow at New America. Her work has appeared in The New York Observer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the London School of Economics. 

April 7-8, 2016 at Bard College
a two day symposium exploring the place of sound in the arts, sciences, and humanities
Blum  9:00 am EDT/GMT-4
Friday, April 8 @Blum

9am Prelude
Georgian Polyphony Workshop with Carl Linich

10am  Aurality
A panel discussion with Tomie Hahn (RPI), Brian Hochman (Georgetown University), Julianne Swartz (Bard College), & Amanda Weidman (Bryn Mawr College)
Chaired by Alex Benson (Bard College0

11:30am  Interlude
Physics of Sound with Matthew Deady
Soundwalk with Todd Shalom

1:00pm  Transmission
A panal discussion with Masha Godovannaya (Smolny College), Tom Porcello (Vassar College), Drew Thompson (Bard College0, and Olga Touloumi (Bard College0
Chaired by Danielle Riou (Bard College)

2:30pm Interlude
Oral History Workshop with Suzanne Snider
Soundwalk with Todd Shalom

3:30pm  Resonance
A panel discussion with Marie Abe (Boston University), Emilio Distretti (Al-Quds), Erica Robles-Anderson (NYU), Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College), & David Suisman (University of Delaware)
Chaired by Laura Kunreuther

5:00pm  Deep Listening Workshop
with Pauline Oliveros

6:00pm  Closing Remarks
 **This event is free and open to the public. 
Registration is required for all interludes**

 

  April 7-8, 2016 at Bard College
a two day symposium exploring the place of sound in the arts, sciences, and humanities
Bitó Conservatory Building  2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Thursday, April 7 @Bito

2:30pm Opening Lecture
Emily Thompson (Princeton University)
Sound Theory as Sound Practice

4pm  Exhinition Opening
Featuring work by Lesley Flanigan, Tristan Perich, Natalia Fedorova, and Bard College faculty and students

5:30pm Keynote Lecture
Jonathan Sterne
Professor and James McGill Chair in
Culture & Technology, McGill University
Audile Scarification:
Notes on the Normalization of Hearing Damage
 **This event is free and open to the public. 
Registration is required for all interludes**

 

Henderson 106 (Mac Lab)  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Experimental Humanities Workshop Series
On Mapping
Spring 2016
This workshop series will offer participants introductions to a range of tools for mapping projects in the classroom and in research. All workshops will begin at 3:00 pm in Henderson Annex 106. Experimental Humanities Open Labs follow immediately after in this space where you are welcome to stay to continue working on the mapping tutorials.Sign up for one or all of the workshops at http://goo.gl/forms/9BlZfDpyWj


April 5
Designing a Mapping AssignmentThe first workshop will introduce strategies for planning a mapping project in your course. Introduction to a few web-based platforms that are user-friendly, intuitive, and great for short-term assignments. Hands-on training for using StoryMap JS (including using Gigapixel), ThingLink, and Timescape.


April 19
Neatline (Omeka)Introduction to Neatline, a mapping and annotation tool available via the Omeka web publishing platform. Hands-on training for creating a Neatline exhibit including adding records, creating waypoints, incorporating a timeline and working with image layers.


May 3
Historic MappingHands-on training for georeferencing historic maps, using Map Warper, adding historic data, and instruction for different publishing outputs, including CartoDB and DH Press (a WordPress plugin).

Montgomery Place, Stevenson Library  10:00 am – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This day-long event commemorates the1841 scenic preservation agreement between the owners of Montgomery Place and Blithewood, two historic estates now part of the Bard campus. Louise Livingston, the owner of Montgomery Place, and Robert Donaldson, the owner of Blithewood, agreed to purchase industrial mills along the Saw Kill from John Church Cruger and demolish them to preserve the scenic beauty of the Saw Kill. It is perhaps the earliest conservation agreement in the nation

To focus attention on this historic event, there will be an  exhibit, symposium, and walking tours on ecology and archaeology of the Saw Kill, and the landscape and architectural features of Montgomery Place and Blithewood, which are significant for their rare surviving examples of the  work of noted 19th-century Romantic-era landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing and architect A. J. Davis.

For the event, the historic house will be open for tours on the half hour between 1:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Lunch will be available for purchase. Space is limited and must be reserved. Please RSVP: [email protected]

For more information and a complete schedule of events, click here.

This program is sponsored by the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard, Bard Environment and Urban Studies, American Studies, Historical Studies, and Landscape and Arboretum Studies Programs, Historic Red Hook, and Saw Kill Watershed Community.

Bard Hall  7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Award-winning author Luc Sante, Bard’s visiting professor of writing and photography, reads from his most recent book, The Other Paris.

The Other Paris offers a panoramic view of the shadow city within the great French metropolis, drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses, from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps. Sante scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city. A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.

“This brilliant, beautifully written essay is the finest book I have ever read about Paris. Ever. Thank you, Luc Sante.” —Paul Auster

“The Other Paris is a heartbreaking spectacle, immense in intellectual and political scope and emotional reach. Peopled by crooks and movie stars, gamblers and thinkers, the world’s premier city of dreams is rendered, through Luc Sante’s fine hand, historian’s eye, and poet’s heart, into a place we hardly knew-a world of hitherto unknown mysteries and realities. A grand journey in an epic work.” —Hilton Als

The reading takes place on 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 25th, in Bard Hall, and is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books will be available for sale and signing from Oblong Books & Music.

Mostafa Minawi
Assistant Professor of History, Cornell University
Olin Humanities, Room 203  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
As the inter-imperial competition for territorial expansion in Africa heated up in the last 20 years of the 19th century, Istanbul devised a complex strategy that allowed it to give its imperial counterparts a run for their money. This talk will focus on one aspect of this strategy, which involved building a partnership with the local power brokers in the Eastern Sahara and the Lake Chad Basin.

Mostafa Minawi is Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Initiative (OTSI) at Cornell University. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Remarque Institute, NYU. His book, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and The Hijaz, will be published by Stanford University Press in May 2016.

a lecture by Julia Scarborough
Olin LC 208  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Why do Virgil’s shepherds stop singing and start killing?  In his heroic epic, the Aeneid, we might expect the poet to leave behind the pastoral world of his Eclogues, where peaceful shepherds devote themselves to song.  Instead, at crucial junctures, shepherds enter the action – with catastrophic results, culminating in war between Aeneas’ Trojans and the Italians with whom they are fated to merge in a new Roman nation.  The clash of pastoral and epic has troubled both ancient and modern critics.  Does Virgil simply not know how to start an epic war?  Are the Italian shepherds innocent victims of an imperialist invasion, or are they violent rustics in need of civilizing leadership?  I argue that the key to understanding the role of pastoral in the epic is recognizing a third genre at work: tragedy.  Shepherds in Attic tragedy bring disruption onto the stage; their good intentions combined with inexperience make them dangerous.  This role offers a paradigm for the part played by shepherds in the Aeneid – including the poem’s most important shepherd: Aeneas himself.  Invoking tensions inherent in the figure of the shepherd in tragedy, Virgil transforms the Homeric metaphor of the hero as shepherd of his people to explore the tragic ironies in which Aeneas is implicated as he struggles to fulfill his destiny.

  Stephanie Hinnershitz
Assistant Professor of History
Valdosta State University
Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
During the early-to-mid twentieth century, principals and superintendents of segregated schools in the South faced a perplexing question: Were Asian American children white or colored? The question was important for deciding where the small number of Asian American students should attend school and a firm answer was necessary for upholding racial segregation and maintaining social order. Asian Americans were just as concerned with the question of their racial identity in, as one Chinese American student explained, a “two color” society. While laws pertaining to school segregation for Asian Americans varied throughout the South, battles between school districts and Asian American parents over their right to send their children to white schools resulted in local, state, and federal courts determining the “correct” race of Asian Americans for segregation purposes. Asian Americans did not readily accept the courts’ decisions, however, and actively pursued their rights to send their children to white schools through lawsuits and appeals. The Lum v. Rice Supreme Court decision and the Bond v. Tij Fung Supreme Court of Mississippi case (both from 1927) highlight the fascinating legal strategies that Asian Americans used in fighting school segregation in Mississippi and expose the understudied connections among Asian immigration, citizenship, and Jim Crow prior to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Miriam Posner,
Program Coordinator & Core Faculty,
Center for Digital Humanities, UCLA
RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Between 1936 and 1967, Walter Freeman, a prominent neurologist, lobotomized as many as 3,500 Americans. Freeman was also an obsessive photographer, taking patients’ photographs before their operations and tracking them down years — even decades — later. In this presentation, Miriam Posner details her efforts to understand why Freeman was so devoted to this practice, using computer-assisted image-mining and -analysis techniques to show how these images fit into the larger visual culture of 20th-century psychiatry.

a lecture by Jacqueline Michelle Arthur-Montagne
Olin LC 208  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The destruction of the city of Thebes by Alexander the Great in the Greek Alexander Romance is unlike any other account of the event in ancient histories. In the fictional Romance, Alexander engages in a sophistic debate with the flute-player Ismenias on whether the Thebes of the tragic imagination should be preserved. In this presentation, Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne will investigate how this debate reflects on the value and vitality of Athenian tragedy in Imperial Greece, and why prose fiction becomes the genre in which this tragic legacy is contested.

Rachel Gross
Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
For outdoorspeople and residents of cold climates, layering clothing to avoid overheating might seem like common sense. If it does, that is in part because a group of clothing experts pushed their vision of bodily safety in cold weather over seventy years ago.
 
During World War II, the U.S. Army and expert mountaineers designed and tested new uniforms and equipment for American soldiers. Between 1941 and 1945, the Army organized expeditions to the continent’s tallest mountains, built sealed rooms that simulated arctic winds and jungle heat, and taught hundreds of thousands of soldiers how to wear clothes. The military’s goal was to build a better soldier who would be warm, comfortable, and effective in combat. But the team of military scientists and outdoorspeople serving as consultants clashed over how to determine the right products for American bodies. Would war-tested clothing win out? Or the clothes developed in stateside laboratories?
 
The best way to master the outdoors mattered desperately, for there were millions of soldiers whose lives depended on the Army’s choices about what they should wear. Innovations such as down sleeping bags and nylon tents had consequences far beyond the war itself. The intimate, sweaty details of soldiers’ day-to-day lives and the lessons they learned while in service—lessons like layering clothing or wearing a hat to keep extremities warm—shaped their recreational interests and practices in the postwar period.
 

a lecture by Robert Cioffi
Olin Humanities, Room 205  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
NOTE: New location 
Griffins, giraffes, giants, and gymnosophists (naked sages): these are just a few features of the exoticism on display in Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story (Aethiopica, written 3rd/4th century CE). The latest, longest, and grandest of the Greek novels, the Aethiopica has won many fans, from the renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano to Racine to Cervantes. Heliodorus’ narrative shows us how the literary horizons of the Roman empire ignited a very particular Greek fictional imaginary about the edges of the earth, and, long before the likes of Said, it leads us to the heart of an exoticizing ethnographic discourse and a discussion of cultural difference. Focusing on the narrative of the tenth and final book of the Aethiopica, I argue that this book represents both the heights of the genre’s exoticism and also, paradoxically, its undoing. The conclusion of the novel, I propose, marks an end in more than one sense, completing a ritual, completing a narrative, and, in a way, completing a genre by transforming its paradigms. As this novel traverses—and writes—the Mediterranean world, I show that it constructs the identity of humans, cultures, and genres, all the while creating social, cultural, and literary networks in the Roman imperial period.

  Betsy Beasley
PhD Candidate, American Studies, Yale University
Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
How can we explain the fact that Houston-based oilfield services companies, like Halliburton and Schlumberger, operate on every oilfield in every oil-producing country around the world except China—even in countries that are explicitly antagonistic to U.S. capital? This talk argues that answering that question requires not just economic or geopolitical analysis but the methodological tools of transnational cultural history. After World War II, Houston-based oilfield services companies established themselves culturally, politically, and economically as the providers of logistical, engineering, and technical support to oilfields worldwide. This business strategy helped to transform Houston, both materially and culturally, from a blue-collar to a white-collar city, with a profound impact on conceptions of race, gender, and work. At the same time, oilfield services companies promoted an ideal of U.S. global power with the white-collar expert at its center, a new imperial vision that sought to make U.S. capital safe in a postcolonial world while also offering a triumphalist explanation for the nation's transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. Tying together evidence from popular culture, print media, corporate annual reports, and the papers of labor unions and company managers, this talk examines how the oilfield services industry reshaped the space of Houston as well as labor politics in oilfields across the globe. 

A talk by Rebecca Granato, Assistant Dean, Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  12:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In the past several weeks, hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested or administratively detained by Israel. This technique of mass arrests is not new to Israel. Since the Occupation's inception in 1967, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have cycled through the Israeli prison system, many of them more than once. This talk will trace the evolution of an organized prisoner movement in the 1970s and 1980s and will look at how different the situation is amongst prisoners today. Rebecca Granato, Bard class of 1999, is the Assistant Dean and a founding faculty member of Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences. She has since been a Palestinian American Research Center Fellow, faculty associate of the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, and PhD candidate of Middle Eastern History at the University of Waterloo.

  Glenna Gordon
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5

Matthew Ellis
Assistant Professor of History, Sarah Lawrence College

Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
co-sponsored by
Historical Studies and Africana Studies

The Gender of Piety: Family, Faith, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe
Finberg House  Light refreshments will be served

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Corto Circuito was formed eleven years ago in to showcase short films made by filmmakers from Latin America, Spain and the United States in Spanish and Portuguese. Since then, it has grown exponentially, becoming a reference in the film festival scene of New York City and the country at large. Each year, their selections have included animated and fictional short films, as well as documentaries and experimental works, many of which were United States and New York premieres.The Best of Corto Circuito: A Mini Festival of Short Films will consist of a screening of selected short films from the festival, with an emphasis on human rights and immigration. To complement the film program of The Best of Corto Circuito, there will be a Q&A with a surprise filmmaker guest, and a panel discussion with Diana Vargas and Laura Turégano, Co-founders of Cortocircuito.

This event is a collaboration between Bard College and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University. Organized by Prof. López-Gay, Spanish Studies. All films are in Spanish with English subtitles. Free and open to the public.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Monday, September 28th, 2015 at 6pm in Olin Room 102In recent years, architectural conservation has become a field of knowledge and a practice able to reframe our understanding of aesthetics, cultural heritage, and history. For some, architectural conservation was understood mainly as a discipline that froze time, space, and culture, reducing buildings to lifeless objects for contemplation. Today, however, it has evolved into an operative field that includes thinking about material and immaterial cultures, the preservation of social and identity structures, and the negotiation of contested spaces where national identities are constructed and demolished.Architectural preservationists started to identify and protect structures built centuries ago. Later on, we discovered that modernism, which claimed to be ahistorical, needed to be preserved as part of an historical narration of the city. Now we are at a moment when rough industrial zones can be thought of as places of national heritage, and refugee camps become sites of heated discussions about what should and should not be remembered, or perhaps more importantly, what should and should not  be forgotten.

If we look at refugee camps through the lens of architectural preservation, how might our understanding of camps change?Refugee camps are considered temporary spaces to be quickly dismantled. But how are we to understand the Palestinian refugee camps that are now almost 70 years old? Can we consider them cultural sites to be preserved?For many, being asked to look at refugee camps from this perspective may be a disturbing proposition. But this is the reality that is in front of our eyes, and therefore one that we cannot negate. One of the urgent questions becomes: do Palestinian refugee camps have history? And how might this history be mobilized for the right of return, instead of being perceived as a threat? And at the same time how does the concept of architectural heritage change when applied to refugee camps?
For the workshop we would like to examine these questions and explore the political implications of challenging existing categories of nation, camp, and heritage. In collaboration with the Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation and in the framework of the Riwaq Biennial, we have just started work on the documentation that will support the inscription of a group of buildings in refugee camps as World Heritage Sites under the protection of UNESCO.Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are both architects and artists. Together they direct Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program based in Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine. They are also co-founders, along with Eyal Weizman, of the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency  in Bethlehem.

A lecture by Ruth Ben Ghiat
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2015) by Prof. Ruth Ben Ghiat (New York University) is the first in-depth study of the feature and documentary films made during Mussolini’s dictatorship about Italy’s African and Balkan occupations. The fruit of research in military and film archives, it focuses on the dramatic years between the invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936) and the loss of the colonies (1941-43) during World War Two. Promoted and created at the highest levels of the regime, empire films were Italy’s entry into an international marketplace of colonial and exotic offerings, and engaged many of Italy’s emerging filmmaking talents (Roberto Rossellini) as well as its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini).  Shot partly or wholly in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies: their sets were sites of violence and of interracial intimacies. Like the imperial histories they recount, they were largely forgotten for most of the postwar period.Ben Ghiat will present her recent study which restores these films to Italian and international film history, and offers a case study of the intertwining of war and cinema and of the unfolding of imperial policy in the context of dictatorship.Respondent: Joseph Luzzi
Moderated by Franco Baldasso

Olin Humanities, Room 202  Join a conversation about the Syrian challenge and the European Union facilitated by Nesrin McMeekin and Greg Moynahan.

This event is sponsored by Bard Model United Nations and The Center for Civic Engagement.

  Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  Bard College's Traditional Chinese Instrument Collective in collaboration with the GCC invites the EastRiver Ensemble from the Mencius Society to perform a concert for the local community!

Come join us for an early evening of traditional Chinese music. There will be food and drink!



Download: EastRiver Ensemble Ad.pdf

  Emily Brissette, PhD
SUNY Oneonta
RKC 102B   The movement against the Vietnam War began modestly, but grew in both size and intensity as the years and the war dragged on. The movement against the Iraq War, in contrast, came together quickly and massively in the space of months and then largely receded from public view. Although the presence (and then absence) of the draft is often invoked as an explanation for the different trajectories of these movements, military recruitment practices are not the most important thing to have changed since the Vietnam era. Drawing on original archival work, this talk will trace how basic understandings of the nature of the state and citizenship (what I call “state imaginaries”) have also changed, and argue that this had profound consequences for antiwar activism in each moment by shaping how and where activists located responsibility for war.

Kristen Block
Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee
Olin Humanities, Room 201  In the early decades of the eighteenth century, a supposed outbreak of leprosy in Guadeloupe spurred a flurry of activity and many pages of manuscript reports.  Leprosy itself had become a very rare condition in 18th century Europe, and so medical professionals resident in Guadeloupe and Martinique debated the patterns of its transmission (cohabitation, heredity, wet-nursing, or even prolonged contact through daily interaction [conversation]), its cure, and even its very definition. But all were certain that the disease had spread from Africa via the Atlantic slave trade, which led to fears of its communicability across racial lines.  Colonists’ libertine attitude towards interracial social and sexual contact were already seen as leading to dangerous contagions (like syphilis, which was seen by many to be more prevalent in Africa, where yaws, another leprosy-like disease, was endemic).  This paper discusses how the uncertainty surrounding this disease, as well as the fact that leprosy caused so little pain, brought up fears of the “sensibility” involved in the colonial project.  

Kristen Block is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose first book, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean (Georgia 2012), examines the entangled histories of Spain and England in the Caribbean during the long seventeenth century as both colonial powers searched for profit and attempted to assert their own version of religious dominance.  Her second book project is exploring how Caribbean residents defined disease, contagion, and how conflict and hybridity affected their attempts at healing. 

Nixon and Kissinger: Transatlantic Relations, the Nixon Doctrine, and Detente
Preston  Eminent historian Professor Mark Lytle, who retires from Bard at the end of the 2014/15 academic year after forty years of distinguished service, delivers the 2015 Eugene Meyer Annual Lecture. He will speak on President Nixon, Henry Kissinger and their influence on America in the world.
Professor Lytle is the author of 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); United States: A Narrative History (3rd ed., 2014); The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1940-1953 (1987). 
Eugene Meyer (1875-1959), for whom the annual lecture and the Eugene Meyer Chair are named, was the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first president of the World Bank. Previous Eugene Meyer speakers include Sir David Cannadine, Andrew Roberts, Fintan O'Toole and Colm Tóibín. The Eugene Meyer Chair was endowed at Bard in 2010. 

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Bard College’s Human Rights Project, Middle Eastern Studies , EUS, History Departments Present:Omar Tesdell: Nature Reserves, Territory, and the Question of Palestinian CultivationTUESDAY, 14 April, 5-7pm. Olin 304.Beginning mid-nineteenth century, first French and Ottoman officials, and later British officials set aside significant tracts of land for environmental conservation in the Arab world. The convention was continued under subsequent Jordanian administration of the West Bank. In fact, nature areas remain one of the largest classifications of land in the Palestinian West Bank today, covering more than 30 official reserves, or about 5 percent of the land area. This little-known legacy reveals the enduring and contested status of protected conservation areas in Historic Palestine. Recent scholarship on the topic has elucidated the establishment of forest and nature reserves in Palestine and connections with other British colonial sites. However, little is known about the relationship between conservation programs and affected Palestinians. This paper explores the contested status of protected areas through the articulation of official conservation programs and Palestinian cultivation practice in the West Bank.Overview of Omar Tesdell’s Work and Achievements: Annoucing the fourth recipient of the Ibrahim Abu Lughod Award in Palestine Studies, Omar Imseeh TesdellThe Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University is pleased to announce the fourth recipient of the Ibrahim Abu Lughod Award in Palestine Studies, Omar Imseeh Tesdell . The award recognizes and seeks to foster innovative and ground-breaking scholarship on issues related to Palestine and Palestinians.Omar Imseeh Tesdell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Birzeit University. He will spend Spring 2015 at Columbia working on a book project based on his dissertation, Shadow Spaces: Territory, Sovereignty, and the Question of Palestinian Cultivation . A spatial history of Palestinian environmental and agricultural practice, the book explores the relationship between the work of cultivation and claims to land. Cultivation in the conventional sense is understood to be an abstract concept that allows institutions like the state to deploy technologies of control, whether through law, coercion, or agricultural development. Yet generally overlooked is an understanding of cultivation as the longstanding concrete practice of farmers to uphold collective claims to land. In contrast to a self-evident concept of cultivation, the practice of cultivation thus emerges as a flashpoint to consider the question of territory and sovereignty. As such, the book offers a spatial history of cultivation in Palestine and develops a theoretical understanding of it as constituted by both colonialism and oppositional political community arrayed around it.Two works emerging from his research are forthcoming in edited volumes, one entitled “Land and the Question of Palestinian Cultivation” in New Directions in Palestinian Studies , and another entitled “On Naming and Being” in Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora from Edinburgh University Press. Tesdell completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota in 2013. His research has been supported by the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS), Social Science Research Council (SSRC), an NEH-funded grant from the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), and the University of Minnesota.This award has been made possible by the generosity of Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan, through the A.M. Qattan Foundation, in honor of his friend, the Palestinian scholar and intellectual, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929-2001). Their close friendship began in the aftermath of the Nakbah of 1948 and evolved into a shared commitment to justice for Palestinians to be realized in part through support for excellence in higher education and scholarship.Omar Tesdell, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Birzeit University and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-doctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies.

  Olin 304  Beginning mid-nineteenth century, first French and Ottoman officials, and later British officials set aside significant tracts of land for environmental conservation in the Arab world. The convention was continued under subsequent Jordanian administration of the West Bank. In fact, nature areas remain one of the largest classifications of land in the Palestinian West Bank today, covering more than 30 official reserves, or about 5 percent of the land area. This little-known legacy reveals the enduring and contested status of protected conservation areas in Historic Palestine. Recent scholarship on the topic has elucidated the establishment of forest and nature reserves in Palestine and connections with other British colonial sites. However, little is known about the relationship between conservation programs and affected Palestinians. This paper explores the contested status of protected areas through the articulation of official conservation programs and Palestinian cultivation practice in the West Bank.

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Hazem Jamjoum, PhD candidate at NYU, will be speaking about apartheid as a legal category and how it applies to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He will eleborate on the international divestment movement and why it is important to support.

Preston  The Persian Gulf region is never quiet, and the start of 2015 has been no exception: the death of the Saudi King; the collapse of the Yemeni government; the continued expansion of ISIS; and the new necessity of collaborating and negotiating with Iran, all foreshadow a year of major change, turmoil, and power shifts.

Join James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities Walter Russell Mead, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA) Director Jonathan Cristol, and Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern & Historical Studies Omar Cheta for a discussion of the current/latest instability in the Persian Gulf and its impact on both American grand strategy and specific policy decisions in the region.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier
RKC 101A  This talk will address the discovery of Jamaican writer Claude McKay’s last novel, Amiable with Big Teeth, and show how its subsequent authentication—via extensive archival research—enabled the historical reconstruction necessary to properly contextualize and appreciate anew the final phases of McKay’s incredible intellectual and literary journey.

Liora Halperin
Assistant Professor of History & Jewish Studies
University of Colorado–Boulder
Olin Humanities, Room 204  Liora Halperin is an Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado--Boulder. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history, Jewish-Arab relations in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, language ideology and policy, and the politics surrounding nation formation in Palestine in the years leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Her first book, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 was published last November by Yale University Press. 

Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
A panel on Academic Freedom organized by the Human Rights Project and co-sponsored by: The Hannah Arendt Center, the Center for Civic Engagement, Students for Justice in the Middle East, Political Studies Program, History Program, and the Language and Literature Program

Organized and moderated by: Michiel Bot (Hannah Arendt Center) Omar Cheta (History) Connor Gadek (Students for Justice in the Middle East)

Panelists include:

Andrew Ross is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His most recent books include Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (2014), Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (2009), and, as co-editor, The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace (2007). He has also written about academic freedom and overseas campuses of U.S. universities such as NYU Abu Dhabi.

Steven Salaita was “de-hired” from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of his tweets about Israel’s assault on Gaza this past summer. Before that, he was an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech. His books include Israel’s Dead Soul (2011), Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (2007), Anti-Arab Racism in the USA (2006), and The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (2006).

Katherine M. Franke is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University. Her recent publications include “Dating the State: The Moral Hazards of Winning Gay Rights” (2013), “Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Afterlife of Homophobia” (2011), and “Eve Sedgwick, Civil Rights, and Perversion” (2009). She has been at the forefront of the academic boycott against the University of Urbana-Champaign and has been advising Steven Salaita’s lawyers.

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  There will be a provocative discourse on issues concerning mass incarceration and the prison system. 

  Olin Humanities, Room 201  Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, conceptualist, director, writer, and installation artist. He describes his talk as "about my work (art experiments) with Walter Carter (1907-2009), my centenarian collaborator from Little Yazoo City, Mississippi. Purportedly the oldest man in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Fifty years or so shy of being a full-time slave. But he was an ex-sharecropper, carpenter, gardener... his longest job was planting cedar trees. We had an 8 year "discussion" about our whereabouts, our bodies (and race of course), our belief systems, and mortality, through the most ineffable of languages, his and mine. It ultimately became speculative fiction. A complete collapse of past, present and future time. Something like that."

Followed by a conversation with literary scholar Sarah Nuttall
Bard Hall 

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Join us for a panel discussion of incarceration in the United States with guest speakers Keith Reeves, Richard Smith, and Jed Tucker.
Part of the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement series of events.

  A Talk By Keith Reeves, Swarthmore College
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Professor Reeves will present work from his current project examining the effects of incarceration on Black males, followed by a Q&A session.

Part of the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement series of events.

  Constantin lordachi
Associate Professor of History, Central European University
Olin Language Center, Room 115 

  "Two Cheers for Corporate Social Responsibility"
A Talk in the Social Studies Divisional Colloquium
Olin Humanities, Room 102  As “corporate social responsibility” enters the mainstream, itsinitials "CSR" have become a dirty word for a broad segment of the
engaged public.  The voluntariness, vagueness, and uncertainty of
enforcement  – not to mention blatant propaganda by companies –
overwhelm any positive value, they argue.  At the other end of the
spectrum, CSR enthusiasts insist that it is leading to a new paradigm,
even challenging traditional forms of corporate governance. Oft
overlooked in the debate over CSR is the way in which public campaigns
have driven change and, even more importantly, shaped the mechanisms
that emerge. CSR continues to be as much the story of savvy activists
leveraging global networks as it is the monitoring mechanisms and
codes of conduct -- maybe more so.  Peter Rosenblum will explore the
current debate, drawing on his recently completed research on Indian
Tea plantations and a soon-to-published chapter addressing advocates
and critics of CSR.

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Want to learn more about Cuba and U.S.-Cuban relations? Please join us for this special opportunity to discuss with a former high-ranking diplomatic official with experience in international relations since the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Visiting directly from Havana, Pepe Viera will talk about the past, present, and future of Cuba and its relations with the U.S. and will offer unique perspectives from Cuba itself. Viera has served in many high posts in the Cuban government since the 1960s, especially in Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including in the Cuban embassies in several countries and the Cuban Mission to the UN, but also in relation to the sugar and tourism industries. Please welcome Pepe and his wife Cecilia to Bard as they visit their grandson who graduated from Bard last semester.

  Olin Humanities, Room 101  Paul McMahon's new book, Feeding Frenzy, traces the history of the global food system and reveals the underlying causes of recent turmoil in food markets. Supplies are running short, prices keep spiking, and the media is full of talk of a world food crisis. The turmoil has unleashed some dangerous forces. Food-producing countries are banning exports even if this means starving their neighbors. Governments and corporations are scrambling to secure control of food supply chains. Powerful groups from the Middle East and Asia are acquiring farmland in poor countries to grow food for export — what some call land grabs. This raises some big questions. Can we continue to feed a burgeoning population? Are we running out of land and water? Can we rely on free markets to provide? His book reveals trends that could lead to more hunger and conflict. But Paul McMahon also outlines actions that can be taken to shape a sustainable and just food system.

Paul McMahon, who holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, has authored reports on sustainable food systems as an advisor to The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit and to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. He cofounded SLM Partners, a business that invests in sustainable agriculture in Australia and across the world. He lives in London.

  2014 Eugene Meyer Lecture
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, is the Leonard L. Milberg '53 Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton for spring 2014.

Eugene Meyer (1875-1959), for whom the annual lecture and the Eugene Meyer Chair in British History and Literature are named, was the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first president of the World Bank. Previous Eugene Meyer speakers include Sir David Cannadine, Andrew Roberts and Colm Tóibín.

In this year's Eugene Meyer Lecture, Mr. O’Toole will talk about three Irish works of art that responded in important ways to the First World War and how each of them was suppressed or censored.

Arthur Bahr, Associate Professor of Literature, MIT
Olin Humanities, Room 102  In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero’s chivalric virtue is initially symbolized by the pentangle that he bears on his shield, which the poet calls an “endless knot” because of its geometric perfection and absolute unseverability. At the end of the poem, however, Sir Gawain has associated himself instead with a feminized girdle, or sash, that is more malleable in shape and whose erotic potential was premised upon the potential of untying. “Untying” is also a literal translation of the literary concept of “denouement,” namely the concluding portion of a complex narrative. In this talk, Bahr will look closely at how the poem’s literal knots relate to its literary denouement, as well as at images from the manuscript in which the poem is contained and a related poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, in order to argue for a more expansive understanding of speculation as a form of “close looking” allied with the “close reading” that literary scholars traditionally perform—and as such a more intellectually rigorous activity than the idle guesswork or mere supposition with which speculation is usually associated today. Arthur Bahr is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, where he specializes in Old and Middle English literature; the structure and interpretation of medieval books; formalism(s); aesthetics; and the idea of the literary. His first book, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, has recently been published by University of Chicago Press. Using compilations from fourteenth-century London as case studies, Fragments and Assemblages argues that we can productively bring comparable interpretive strategies to bear on the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. By situating itself at the intersection of material history and aesthetic theory, this form of manuscript studies offers insights both on the literary culture of the past and on how the past continues to mean in the present.

  An info session on Ukraine ft Human Rights Watch
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Do you find yourself wondering what has happened/is happening/will continue to happen in Ukraine? The news has consistently been flooded with stories of the Ukrainian revolution and the president (? impeached? maybe? no.... viktor?) of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich.
This is a lovely opportunity provided to you by the Russian Club and Student Government, an opportunity for you to ask questions like:
What was the political background of Ukraine before this revolution?
How was it kickstarted?
What the heck is happening with Viktor Yanukovich???
And other questions, as entry level or advanced as you'd like to ask. 

We have a lovely panel consisting of:
RACHEL DENBER- Deputy Director, Europe and Central Asia Division, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
http://www.hrw.org/bios/rachel-denber

OLEG MININ- Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian 

GENNADY SHKLIAREVSKY- Professor of (Russian and Soviet) History 

We are also awaiting confirmation from a member of our Human Rights faculty. 

ASK WHATEVER YOU'D LIKE ABOUT UKRAINE
EDUCATE YOURSELVES ON THESE CURRENT EVENTS
IT WILL BE FUN
BARD COLLEGE
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
FUN



Download: ViktorYanukovichPoster.pdf

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  “Inscribing Nature” presents aspects of a longer book project, Collecting Empire in Revolutionary Russia: Museums, Lives and Politics in Siberia. The book argues that regional knowledge and politics were co-produced in late imperial Siberia in a way that later served as a model for early Soviet ideas about making people and space Soviet. One of two cases in the book in which rocks play a central role in uniting or dividing people, “Inscribing Nature” describes change over time in this relationship between local knowledge and political subjectivity between approximately 1905 and 1929. As the title indicates, the talk focuses particularly on people’s inscription of political action into forests and rocks, and their endeavors to inscribe natural wonders onto their own bodies and minds. Since one of the particular episodes described in this talk spurred the direction of the author’s interests for a future project, the talk concludes with brief thoughts on a history of eating and empire in Russia/the USSR, 1905-2005.

  Nancy Bisaha, Vassar College
Hegeman 204  Prof. Bisaha wrote Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (UPenn Press), which examines the ways in which humanists created an intellectual discourse depicting the Ottoman Turks as a cultural and religious other. She recently published a translation of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's De Europa in collaboration with Robert Brown. Bisaha is currently working on project exploring the early roots of human rights theory.

A talk by Sean Jacobs, Assistant Professor of International Affairs, The New School
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Sean Jacobs is a founding member of blog Africa Is a Country, which is a widely-used news source and which also offers commentary on political and social affairs related to the continent of Africa and its global representation. Jacobs, who was born in South Africa, is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the inter-relationship between mass media, globalization and democracy in South Africa. He has published numerous articles in Mail & Guardian (South Africa), The Nation (United States), and The Guardian (United Kingdom) on a range of topics, from contemporary South African politics to the recent death and legacy of Nelson Mandela.

Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  Professor Wilder’s most recent book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). He is also the author of In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2001/2004); and A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000/2001). His recent articles include, “‘Driven . . . from the School of the Prophets’: The Colonizationist Ascendance at General Theological Seminary,” which was the inaugural essay in the fully digital journal New York History. 

Professor Wilder is a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he has served as a guest lecturer, commencement speaker, academic advisor, and visiting professor. For more than a decade, this innovative program has given hundreds of men and women the opportunity to acquire a college education during their incarcerations in the New York State prison system. 

He has advised and appeared in numerous historical documentaries, including the celebrated Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon film, The Central Park Five; Kelly Anderson’s highly praised exploration of gentrification, My Brooklyn; the History Channel’s F.D.R.: A Presidency Revealed; and Ric Burn’s award-winning PBS series, New York: A Documentary History.

Professor Wilder has directed or advised exhibits at regional and national museums, including the Brooklyn Historical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Chicago History Museum, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s BLDG 92, the New York State Museum, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the Weeksville Heritage Center. He was one of the original historians for the Museum of Sex in New York City, and he maintains an active public history program.

(from MIT's History Department webpage)

***Brought to you by The Difference & Media Project, with co-sponsorship from The Arendt Center, The Human Rights Project, Africana Studies, and Historical Studies at Bard College.

Thoughts on Artistic Decision-Making in the Early 21st Century
Olin Hall  A contemplation and contemporary contextualization of processes and impact of selection in music as revealed in the moral dilemma of contemporary African-American commercial music.

ANTHONY M. KELLEY BIOGRAPHYAnthony Kelley joined the Duke University music faculty in 2000 after serving as Composer-in-Residence with the Richmond Symphony for three years under a grant from Meet the Composer. His recent work (like his soundtracks for the H. Lee Waters/Tom Whiteside film "Conjuring Bearden" [2006] Dante James's film, "The Doll" [2007], Josh Gibson's "Kudzu Vine" [2011]) explores music as linked with other media, arts, and sociological phenomena. 
In 2011, Kelley was the winner of Duke's Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. 
He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Duke's Department of Music since his appointment to the post in Fall, 2012.

  Elemendorph Inn * Red Hook  Transportation provided.

Questions and RSVP to Cynthia Koch at [email protected].

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Paul Weinberg, who is currently the Senior Curator of the Visual Archives at the University of Cape Town, was a founding member of the photographic collective Afrapix, which documented firsthand South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s and early 1990s. Tim Davis, an Associate Professor of Photography at Bard, is a highly-acclaimed American photographer who has participated in many collective and solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States.

Photographs of speakers:Tim Davis '91www.davistim.com/

Paul Weinberg
paulweinberg.co.za/

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  The Belo Monte hydroelectric facility, located in the Brazilian Amazon, will be the world’s third largest dam when completed in 2019. This energy project is touted as a sustainable development initiative, but its construction is bringing rapid social and environmental changes to the urban centers closest to the construction site, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities through displacement, rising prices, and inadequate government services. In this context, I examine the factors that enable and constrain dam-affected people as they make demands for their rights, highlighting the importance of collective imaginations of the future. I argue that effective translation, or the reframing of these imagined futures into language and demands that can be understood and acted upon by others, is a necessary step in addressing the needs of the most marginalized.

  a lecture by Elliot Sperling
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Organised by Students for a Free Tibet, Asian Studies, Historical Studies and Asian Students' Organisation

The Tibet Question has been discussed from many different angles: as an issue of religious freedom, human rights, cultural preservation, and so on. At the core, however, is a contested history that has provided fuel for quite divergent interpretations of Tibet’s relationship with China and indeed for the basic understanding of Tibet’s past. This talk will take up this contested history and discuss the ways different parties have brought the past into play as justification for actions and policies in the present.

  Reem-Kayden Center 103  Daniel Klaidman, journalist and author, will deliver an inside look at the early years of the Obama administration. Klaidman will speak about the choice to use drones as a primary instrument of counter-terrorism and the personal struggles of individual policy-makers within the administration over the moral and ethical dimensions of this strategy.

Klaidman is author of "Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Administration," a landmark publication that shaped much of the popular understanding of the targeted killing campaign. The book features extensive interviews with high-ranking administration officials that reveal the internal battle over the use of drones.

Klaidman is a special correspondent for Newsweek and writes for The Daily Beast. He is formerly the managing editor for Newsweek and led the magazine during it's award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and aftermath.

Reem-Kayden Center 115  Adam Sitze
Amherst College
Assistant Professor of Law, Jourisprudence, and Social Thought

  RKC 103  Richmond Virginia, erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, is a city that memorialized in its built landscape the ideology of the “Lost Cause.” This lecture will provide a preliminary sketch for the ways that local history and art museums with national stature have responded and continue to respond to this troubling heritage as they try to create a more salutary urban imagined community. These museums are leaders in a wider movement among US cities of a certain size to explicitly link cultural development to urban renewal. As such they must attract a national audience while not alienating local communities which, for their part, are often polarized along all too familiar racial and ideological lines.


Eric Gable is a professor of anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. He is a managing editor for the journal Museum and Society and the associate editor for book reviews for American Ethnologist.

Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center  In this film Bill Emmott teams with Filmmaker Annalisa Piras to explore Italy’s political, economic and social decline over the past 20 years, the product of a moral collapse unmatched anywhere else in the West. Emmott’s quest to understand both “Mala Italia” and “Buona Italia” includes Interviews with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco, film director Nanni Moretti, women’s rights activist Lorella Zanardo, FIAT’s outspoken Canadian-Italian CEO Sergio Marchionne, the author of Gomorrah Roberto Saviano and many others.

Bill Emmott is an international journalist and consultant, having been editor-in-chief of The Economist from 1993-2006. The author of a dozen books, most of them about Japan and Asia, his latest book was Good Italy, Bad Italy: Why Italy must Conquer its Demons to Face the Future (Yale University Press 2012). His documentary Girlfriend in a Coma has been seen by more than two million people. Bill is also chairman of the trustees of the London Library, a trustee of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and a member of the Swiss Re Chairman’s Advisory Panel. With Annalisa Piras, he is now working on a new documentary about the threats to the European Dream, and has co-founded The Wake Up Foundation, dedicated to research and communication about the decline of the West.



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Bard Hall  Following on Wofford College’s successful Fall 2012 Thinking Like a River Conference, Thinking Like a River moves north—to Bard College. John Lane—poet, naturalist, southern nature writer and river rat—launched the first Thinking Like a River weekend and he will be on campus to lead discussions and canoe outings over the course of the weekend. With him will be poets, writers, activists, naturalists and river lovers discussing rivers in an interdisciplinary manner. The weekend will kick off on Thursday September 26 at 6 in Bard Hall with music, poems and local food!  Bard graduate Chris Rubeo will sing river songs in the tradition of Pete Seeger and Betty and the Baby Boomers and talk about his environmental work. Art from Lisa Sanditz’s art class will grace the walls along with photographs from Tim Davis’s color photography class.  Guests John Lane and Elizabeth Bradfield will read poems and they will be joined by Bard College faculty Celia Bland and Phil Pardi. Come think about rivers and learn more about Bard’s Environmental and Urban Studies Program.

  Bard College Campus  Bard's Hannah Arendt Center and Center for Civic Engagement in collaboration with the Roosevelt Institute and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, announce Annalia 1933—a three-day festival including 20 short talks and a student-led cabaret exploring major events from the historically transformative year of 1933. 

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  The Levy Institute of Economics is starting it's Master of Science in Economic Theory and Policy program from the Fall of 2014. The program emphasizes theoretical and empirical aspects of policy analysis through specialization in one of four Levy Institute research areas: macroeconomic theory, policy, and modeling; monetary policy and financial structure; distribution of income, wealth, and well-being, including gender equality and time poverty; and employment and labor markets.

The Master of Science program draws on the expertise of an extensive network of scholars at the Levy Economics Institute, a policy research think tank with more than 25 years of economic theory and public policy research. During the two-year M.S. program, students are required to participate in a graduate research assistantship carried out by Levy Institute scholars and faculty. Undergraduates in economics or related fields have an opportunity, through a 3+2 program, to earn both a B.A. and the M.S. in five years.

  Campus Center, Lobby  A rep from study abroad program IES Abroad is on campus today with information about their programs worldwide. Drop by to see if one of their programs might be for you!

Thinking about Study Abroad but don't know how it works at Bard? It's never too early to start planning where/when/how. Contact Study Abroad Adviser Trish Fleming at 845-758-7080 or [email protected] to make an appointment.

  Barbara Sukowa reteams with director Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg) for her brilliant new biopic of influential German–Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt.


Olin Hall  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Arendt’s controversial reporting on the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann in the New Yorker introduced her now-famous concept of the “Banality of Evil.” Using footage from the actual Eichmann trial and weaving a narrative that spans three countries, von Trotta turns the often invisible passion for thought into immersive, dramatic cinema.

An official selection at the Toronto International and New York Jewish Film Festivals, Hannah Arendt also co-stars Klaus Pohl as philosopher Martin Heidegger, Nicolas Woodeson as New Yorker editor William Shawn, and two-time Oscar Nominee Janet McTeer as novelist Mary McCarthy.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film's writer Pam Katz, the film's star, Barbara Sukowa, who plays Hannah Arendt in the film, and Roger Berkowitz, the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

Admission to this event is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are necessary.

Campus Center, Weis Cinema 
Nicholas Platt, long-time China specialist, three-time U.S. Ambassador (Pakistan, Zambia and the Philippines), and author of the published memoir China Boys, will share his experiences and insights gained from a long and distinguished career in the diplomatic service and as President of the Asia Society in New York for 12 years.As a young diplomatic officer in the early 1960s, when Communist China was firmly closed to the west, Nicholas Platt took the unusual step of studying Mandarin. This put him in a key position when U.S. relations to China suddenly opened.  Platt was one of the State Department officials chosen to accompany President Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972. The following year he and his family were stationed in Beijing with the opening of a U.S. Liaison Office, the forerunner of the U.S. Embassy in the PRC.Showing some of his 'home movie' footage of the Nixon trip, and film of family and diplomatic events, and reading from his memoir, Ambassador Platt will talk about life in China. As a former president of the Asia society, which oversees numerous contacts and exchanges with China, and a frequent visitor and lecturer in the PRC, Nicholas Platt is in a unique position to compare those early days of diplomatic contact to relations with the West today, as China now emerges as a major player on the world stage and an economic power house. 

  "The struggle against antisemitism, holocaust denial and neo-nationalism in Hungary and Eastern Europe."

Arendt Center  12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In 1951, László Z. Bitó and his family were deported from Budapest to a small village near the Soviet border by the Hungarian Communist regime. Three years later, Bitó was sent to a forced labor unit in the coal mines of Komlo, Hungary. During the revolution of 1956, he organized the takeover of the labor camp. After Russian tanks crushed the uprising in November, he escaped to Austria and from there immigrated to the United States when he was 22 years old. He was granted asylum in the United States and came to Bard College in the winter of 1956–57. He graduated from Bard College in 1960 as a pre-med biology major and went on to obtain his doctorate from Columbia University in medical cell biology. His research led to the development of Xalatan, a drug that has saved the sight of millions of glaucoma sufferers. He has published more than 150 scientific articles and received, among many other honors, the highest recognition in the field of eye research, the Proctor Medal. Upon retiring from Columbia University as an emeritus professor of ocular physiology, he returned to Hungary and his first love of writing. Of his 14 nonscientific books—novels, essays, and three anthologies of some of his more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles—some have appeared in translations in half a dozen countries.The moral blindness, the acceptance of aggression and violence has always been the central question of his literary works. The answers to these questions Bitó is exploring in two roles - as a successful writer, and also as a man who has known much suffering.

  Part One: Coercion, Collusion and Creativity: Music of the Terezin Ghetto & the Central European Experience
Olin Hall  7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is presenting a special series of concerts titled, “Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism,” featuring music composed and performed by Jewish prisoners in Nazi territories during World War II. Three concerts will feature an introduction by a noted scholar in the field placing the music within the context of the larger social, historical and political background out of which it developed.

These events are made possible through the generosity of a grant from the Bertha Effron Fund of the Community Foundation of the Hudson Valley. The first concert in the series “Coercion, Collusion, and Creativity: Music of the Terezin Ghetto and the Central European Experience” takes place on Saturday, February 23, and will focus on music composed and performed in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) Ghetto, a ghetto/concentration transit camp that served as a showplace in which leading European-Jewish composers and performers were interned. Theresienstadt waspart of a vast Nazi propaganda ploy for international investigative bodies, such as the Red Cross, which provided the appearance of autonomy and privileged treatment of Jewish prisoners in the “model settlement.”  

The performance component of the evening will feature selections from the work of Victor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, and Ilse Weber, performed by  soprano Charlotte Dobbs with Renana Gutman, piano, and Liam Wood, guitar. Erwin Schulhoff’s violin sonata will be performed by Helena Baillie and Michael Bukhman. Leoš Janáček's piano sonata 1.x.1905 will be performed by Michael Bukhman.

The lecture by Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss will discuss the unique nature of the Theresienstadt Ghetto, the developments that led to the creation of a Jewish musical and cultural elite in interwar Central Europe, and the legacy of the music composed and produced in this ghetto.



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  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Judith Carney Professor of Geography, UCLA This talk highlights the role of the transatlantic slave trade for the circulation of African plants, animals, and natural knowledge in the Atlantic World. Emphasis is on the significance of slave ships for their circulation and the New World sites where the species were established. Slave ships carried African foodstaples and food animals along with enslaved peoples familiar with their cultivation and husbandry. The discussion illuminates the ways that African introductions and knowledge systems shaped the foodways and environmental history of tropical America.

  Confessions of European Travel-Writers Molested by Tsetse Fly, 1830s-80s
Olin 102 
by Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Assistant Professor of History and STS at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chakanetsa Mavhunga is an STS scholar of Africa interested in historicizing and theorizing the role mobility plays in everyday life. He researches and teaches on African Mobilities and Mobility in Africa; Science, Technology and African Societies; Energy, Environment, and African Society; and (African) Indigenous Knowledge Production and Practice. Mavhunga is finishing his first book, The Mobile Workshop, which traces the role of mobility in human-nature-technology interactions in Zimbabwean history. He is also co-editor of the Inside Mobility: A Kaleidoscopic Overview volume for MIT Press. Mavhunga has also published over a dozen articles and book chapters, including: “A Plundering Tiger with its Deadly Cubs?: The USSR and China as Weapons in the Engineering of a ‘Zimbabwean Nation,’ 1945-2009,” in Gabrielle Hecht (ed.),Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, editor (MIT Press, 2011) and “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game,” Social Text 106 (Spring 2011), an article that anticipates his second book project.

  Reem-Kayden Center  JOAN CONNELLYProfessor of Classics and Art History, New York University
Director, Yeronisos Island Excavations, Cyprus

The visual culture of ancient Greece has left a record rich with information concerning the active role of women in the organization and administration of the religious life of their cities. Images from vase painting, portrait sculpture, votive reliefs, and funerary monuments, show that women were far more visible than has previously been acknowledged, an active and public force within the social, cultural, and religious arenas of their communities.  Connelly investigates the ways in which their images in architectural sculpture may reflect the ritual circulation of women in procession and dance within the sacred space, and follows women on their paths through priesthood, from their social origins and acquisition of office, to how they dressed, the rituals they performed, the political power they wielded, their systems of patronage and compensation, to how they were honored, including at death. 
Prof. Connelly is the author of
Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton 2007)

  Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?
THE SCIENCE, CULTURE
AND POLITICS OF REASON

Monday, December 1st
4:30 p.m.
Sosnoff Theater
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

Christian Crouch
Bard College

Defining "Empire":  Enlightenment and Colonialism in the Eighteenth Century