News and Events

Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson

In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous calls James Graham Wilson’s America’s Cold War Warrior on the life and legacy of statesman Paul Nitze “a brilliant political biography, elegantly written, rich in archival material.” Nitze was an expert on military power and strategic arms and served as negotiator and diplomat in several administrations from the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

The Dillon Era, a new book by Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The book, which explores the political career of C. Douglas Dillon, the 57th US secretary of the treasury, offers a new perspective of Dillon as an overlooked but deeply influential figure in the presidential administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

New York Times Opinion: Bard Professor Sean McMeekin’s Book on Stalin Is Recommended Reading for Historical Context on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

According to New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, of all the reading one can do to put the events of the film Oppenheimer into historical and political context, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, is the one that will restore “a corrective to the movie’s final act, in which the spirit of a simplifying anti-anti-communism prevails over the political complexity that Nolan carries off for most of the film.”

More History News

Book Review: Professor Richard Aldous Reviews Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman

Book Review: Professor Richard Aldous Reviews Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman

For the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous reviews author, columnist, and professor Samuel G. Freedman’s most recent book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, calling it “a powerful and captivating read.” Examining Humphrey’s early life and political career, Freedman asserts that Humphrey’s 1948 speech, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, advocating for civil rights legislation and racial equality made the Democratic Party confront its position on civil rights, and “set into motion the partisan realignment that defines American politics right up through the present”—also marking the beginning of the civil rights movement in America long before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision desegregating schools and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Aldous writes: “This is a big claim to make of the man and the moment, so it is to Mr. Freedman’s credit that by and large he makes his case thoughtfully and persuasively.”

Read more in the Wall Street Journal

Post Date: 07-17-2023

Three Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

Three Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

Three Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. This cohort of Gilman scholars will study or intern in more than 80 countries and represents more than 520 US colleges and universities in all 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

Dance major Zara Boss ’25, from Portland, Maine, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, via CIEE for spring 2024. Boss also received a $5,000 Freeman-ASIA award, which provides scholarships for US undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need to study abroad in East or Southeast Asia. “Being a Gilman scholarship recipient is an incredible honor, as it will allow my life-long aspiration of studying in Japan to come to fruition. I am very grateful for the opportunity to be immersed in the language and culture and am immensely looking forward to studying literature and dance in Tokyo this upcoming spring,” said Boss.

Historical Studies major Chi-Chi Ezekwenna ’25, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea via tuition exchange from fall 2023 to spring 2024. “Receiving the Gilman scholarship has allowed for a dream that has been fostering since I was 12 years old to finally become a reality. I used to believe that the chance to visit Korea would only come much later down the road, yet I was positively proven wrong, as being a Gilman recipient has allowed me the chance to go during my college career,” said Ezekwenna.

Bard College Conservatory and Economics dual major Nita Vemuri ’24 has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Paris, France for summer 2023. “I am beyond thrilled to learn more about French music and its relationship to the French language in Paris with the help of the Gilman scholarship,” said Vemuri.

Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 38,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded more than 3,600 Gilman scholarships during the 2022-2023 academic year.

As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

Post Date: 05-23-2023

Bard College Division of Social Studies Announces Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor in Historical Studies

Bard College Division of Social Studies Announces Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor in Historical Studies

Bard College’s Division of Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor of History. His tenure-track appointment will begin in the fall of the 2023–24 academic year.

Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a historian of cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He is co-editor of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Dumbarton Oaks Press, 2022), and has published articles on the history of scholarship, Byzantine oratory, and late medieval politics. Aschenbrenner is also currently working on a monograph about political and ideological competition over the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world titled Empire Beyond Rome: Antiquity, Legitimacy, and Power in the Mediterranean, 1200–1550, under contract with Princeton University Press. His other projects investigate the collection and interpretation of Byzantine material culture in the early modern Mediterranean and unrecognized intersections between scholarship and colonialism's materials and mentalities.

Aschenbrenner earned a BS from the United States Naval Academy in 2000 and served as a US Navy Special Operations Officer until 2009. He studied global and medieval history at Georgetown University and King's College, London, finishing his joint MA in 2012. He received his PhD in medieval history from Harvard University in 2019.

Post Date: 05-11-2023

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

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

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

Read More in The Drift

Post Date: 02-28-2023

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

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

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

Read More in the Times Union

Post Date: 02-14-2023

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

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

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

Read more in the Washington Post

Post Date: 02-07-2023

Historical Study Events

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2021

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

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

Friday, November 19, 2021

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Friday, November 5, 2021

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

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

Monday, October 18, 2021

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

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Friday, February 26, 2021

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

Friday, February 26, 2021

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

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

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

Saturday, February 20, 2021

Friday, February 19, 2021

News and Events

Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson

Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson

Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

New York Times Opinion: Bard Professor Sean McMeekin’s Book on Stalin Is Recommended Reading for Historical Context on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

New York Times Opinion: Bard Professor Sean McMeekin’s Book on Stalin Is Recommended Reading for Historical Context on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Book Review: Professor Richard Aldous Reviews Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman

Three Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

Bard College Division of Social Studies Announces Nathanael Aschenbrenner as Assistant Professor in Historical Studies

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

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

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

Historical Study Events

2021

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