Faculty Activities

Faculty Highlights & Accomplishments

• Peggy Ahwesh was awarded a grant by The National Film Preservation Foundation. She presented the installation “Warm Objects” at the James Gallery of The Graduate Center, CUNY. In August, she was the subject of a retrospective at NeMaf Newmedia Festival, in Seoul, Korea.  She screened a new short film in the Views from the Avant-Garde, a sidebar of the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, New York.  In November 2009, Ahwesh is a judge at the Zinebi International Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain and is having a 3 program retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
• James Bagwell’s appointment as Music Director of The College Chorale was announced with an AP story which can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/13/arts/AP-US-Collegiate-Chorale-Music-Director.html
• Thomas Bartscherer published “To Read What Has Never Been Written” in Lothar Baumgarten: Seven Sounds, Seven Circles (Kunsthaus Bregnez, 2009) and was recently appointed consulting editor of “The International Literary Quarterly” and was named to the editorial board of “The Point.”
• Oxford University Press recently announced the publication of a new reader, Ethnonationalism in India, edited and introduced by Sanjib Baruah.
• Laura Battle participated in two group exhibitions in the summer of 2009 at Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York City. The first was called, “Artists Choice” and included participation from former Bard student, Sam Bornstein. The second was called “Intricacies”. She also exhibited work in September at the Philadelphia College of Art and Design in a show called “Drawing Atlas”.
• Celia Bland taught a workshop in Summer 2009 at the Keene State College Writers Conference in New Hampshire. She has published in recent issues of Field Notes, Writing on the Edge, and Boston Review.
• Leon Botstein was recognized with a 2009 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award. The awards recognize higher education leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in undergraduate education, both teaching and research; the development of major interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs that aim to bridge the gulf between the theoretical and the practical; university outreach to their respective communities and cooperative efforts with business, civic, and education leaders on initiatives such as K-12 school reform; and, international initiatives.
• Jonathan Brent’s article “Inside the Gulag Museum” was published in the May 2009 issue of “The New Criterion.” He was recently appointed executive director and CEO of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.
• Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, will be published in November 2009 by Fordham University Press, edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan.
• “Approaching Infinity: Reflections on Dignity in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon,” an essay by Roger Berkowitz, appears in the October issue of Philosophy and Literature.
• Paintings and drawings by Ken Buhler will be on exhibit at the Lesley Heller Gallery, 16 east 77th Street in New York City from October 24 to December 5. The opening reception is Saturday, October 4 from 5 – 7p.m. He was also recently awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
• Over the summer Mary Caponegro was hosted by the U.S Department of State as a participant in the Study of the U.S Institute of Contemporary Literature in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in which professors from fifteen foreign countries read the work of selected American authors. Her latest book, All Fall Down, was published by Coffee House Press and fall readings are scheduled in Soho at McNally Jackson Books, in Chicago at Bookslut, in Iowa at Prairie Lights, and in Minneapolis at The Loft.
• Rebecca Chace finished filming her second novel, “Capture the Flag,” and she co-wrote the screenplay that will be submitted to short film festivals in 2010. Bard students, Lola Kirke and Eduardo Quevedo were involved in the production.
• Jonny Cristol’s article “Two States, One Capital: A Proposal for the Israeli/Palestine Conflict” was published on the home page of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and it was featured in “Carnegie Ethics Online” in April and in “Global Policy Innovations.” The Israel Policy Forum published his article “Judge Lieberman by his Actions, Not His Words” on their Middle East Peace Pulse website.
• Robert Culp received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for “New Perspectives in Chinese Culture and Society.”
• “The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means,” Mark Danner’s sequel to his article on the political implications of the torture debate, appeared in the New York Review of Books.
•  In July, Richard Davis presented the keynote lecture for a symposium at the University of Heidelberg, entitled "Objects on the Move: Circulation, Social Practice and Transcultural Intersections."  His talk was entitled "A Tale of Two Bronzes: From India to Los Angeles and Back Again."
• Timothy Davis’ solo show of photographs called “The New Antiquity,” will be in New York in September and October 2009 at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery. The monograph of the same title is being published by Damiani Grafiche. His MY LIFE IN POLITICS is on exhibit this fall at the University of Virginia, and a project organized by the Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, called “Seeing through Huguenot Street” opened in New Paltz in September.
• “You are Not I”, recent work by Barbara Ess, is on exhibit at Thierry Goldberg Projects, 5 Rivington Street in New York City from October 18 – November 15.
• Peter Filkins was named a Top Ten Finalist in NARRATIVE Magazine's First Annual Poetry Contest for his poem “The Wild Boar”. He also recently published poems in The Iowa Review, Salamander, and The American Arts Quarterly. In September he read from his translation of Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry at the exhibition "Ingeborg Bachmann: Writing Agianst War" at the University of Montana, and will do so again when the exhibition travels to Worcester Polytechnic Institute in January. In March he will visit the Translation Seminar at Boston University to talk about his translation of H.G. Adler's The Journey.
• Elizabeth Holt defended her dissertation early in September and was recommended for the Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University
• Last spring, Peter Hutton presented three Hudson River films—“Study of a River,” “Time and Tide,” and “Three Rivers,” at the Jacob Burn Film Center in Pleasantville, NY. He was also awarded a grant this summer in Filmmaking from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. On Halloween night, the NYU Institute for the Humanities will present Hutton’s Icelandic film, “Skagafjordur”, in a program titled “Wonder Cabinet”, organized by Lawrence Weschler. He will also make a presentation at the National Film Theater in Prague, The Czech Republic, in November.  
• Philip Johns’ paper "Non-relatives inherit colony resources in a primitive termite” was accepted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious journals in science. See the NSF's press release at http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115680 and read the paper at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/02/0907961106.abstract.
• ”Xun Dao: Seeking the Way Spiritual Themes in Contemporary Chinese Art” an exhibit curated by Patricia Karetzky was presented at the Frederike Taylor Gallery in New York May 22 – June 28. She recently published an article in Yishu, “Conroy Sanderson: Two Heads are Better than One.”
• As principal investigator, Felicia Keesing received a National Science Foundation grant entitled “Investigating a rapidly emerging epidemic of babesiosis in upstate New York”; co-investigators of the project are Richard Ostfeld and Michael Tibbetts. She was also one of five specialists to be interviewed by the New York Times for a July 27 article about the tick problem, “More Ticks, More Misery.”
• Barbara Luka received a grant from the Northeast Center for Special Care to fund two student research internships to study recovery from traumatic brain injury.
• Joe Luzzi’s recent book “Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in June 2009.
• Medrie MacPhee was among six contemporary artists who exhibited this summer at Sadler’s Wells Theater in London in a show reflecting Alberto Savino’s painting “Objects in the Forest”.
• This summer, Marka Gustavsson performing as part of the Colorado Quartet premiered a new string quartet written by Keith Fitch, and premiered a piano quartet by Daniel Godfrey at Bennington’s Chamber Music of the Northeast and a string sextet by Eric Chasalow at the Portland Chamber Festival.
• Affinal member of our community Charlotte Mandell (Kelly) ’90 was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant in the category of Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects. Her translation project is the French novel Zone by Mathias Énard.
• Norman Manea recently received France’s highest cultural honor, the prestigious title of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of “great talent” and a literary work “without concession, vigilante, humanistic.” This year, he was also awarded the annual prize for letters by the Foundation of French Judaism.
• During the Summer of 2009, Robert McGrail, James Belk, and Japheth Wood organized a weekly Bard – West Point collaborative seminar on Self-distributive Algebraic Structures.
• Emily McLaughlin received an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Undergraduate New Investigator grant entitled “Development of novel methods toward the synthesis of non-proteinogenic amino acids and other biologically relevant nitrogen containing scaffolds.”
• Daniel Mendelsohn’s article, “Who was Susan Sontag?” appeared in the April issue of The New Republic.  His translations of poems by C. P. Cavafy have been published in two volumes, Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems (Knopf.)
• Thomas Bradshaw ‘02 was among the first group of graduates from the new playwriting program designed by Chiori Miyagawa at Bard, and he has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as a playwright for 2009 - 2010. A review of his latest production can be found at: http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/theater/reviews/15bereaved.html
• Bradford Morrow gave the keynote address at the Willa Cather International Symposium at the Chicago Public Library in June which was broadcast by NPR.
• Judith Muir received a grant from the Dutchess Community Foundation for her “Sing Out! Reach Out!” program that she teaches at a Poughkeepsie Montessori during the summer.
• Jacob Neusner received a grant from Carey Wolchok to finance the development of an undergraduate/faculty seminar “The Social Vision of Early Christianity and Judaism” which will involve a seminar with Bruce Chilton and a possible conference.
• A collaborative project in which Keith O’Hara was involved at Georgia Tech has recently been awarded an NSF grant to study further the use of robotics as a context for leaning introductory computing. Keith will be able to use a portion of the grant for research at Bard.
• Lothar Osterburg was recently awarded a New York Foundation of the Arts grant in the category of Printing/Drawing/Artists Books. A show of his works will be at the Lesley Heller Gallery, opening on September 9.
• Francine Prose’s book Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife was discussed in the Wall Street on September 25, featured on NPR on September 26, and reviewed in the New York Times on September 30. For the New York Times review, see:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/books/01maslin.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
• Keith Sanborn’s translation of essays on Paoli Gioli from Italian and French into English were published by Cineteca Nazionale (Rome); his translation of Russian intertitles of The Death Ray by Lev Kuleshov will be presented with a lecture in New York on September 8 at Light Industry; he will participate in a public conversation with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Florian Wüst on September 28 on Super-8 film in the 1980’s in connection with an exhibition called “Screaming City: West Berlin 1980s” at Goethe Institute, New York.
• Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930, by Luc Sante, will be published in September by Yeti Books/Verse Chorus Press.
• Sigrid Sandström’s show of works at “The Company” in Los Angeles was reviewed by Art Review this summer. The National Museum of Sweden will be presenting a show of eight artists including Sandström whose works reflect influences of Caspar David Friedrich.
• 303 Gallery in New York hosted an exhibit of lesser-known black and white works by Stephen Shore during June and July.
• Recent graduate, Jessica Sirkin’s ’10 novella, “Changes,” written in Mona Simpson's “Advanced Fiction: Writing the Novella” class will be published in the October 2009 issue of Reflections Edge.
• Eric Trudel published an article entitled, “La poésie précaire de Georges Perros”, in The French Review, volume 83, number 2 (December 2009).

Faculty Highlights & Accomplishments

• In November, The Library of Congress hosted a symposium and celebratory evening in honor of Chinua Achebe upon the 50^th anniversary publication of Things Fall Apart.
• Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn edited Vertov from Z to A, published by Ediciones la Calavera, a volume of essays by noted critics, poets, and filmmakers, as a Special Jubilee Edition in honor of the 90^th anniversary of the October Revolution
• JoAnne Akalaitis directed The Play of Daniel in New York City in December at The Cloisters and at Grace Church.
• As a visiting fellow, Sanjib Baruah was the guest of the University of Heidelberg in Germany in November where he gave a public lecture and a workshop for faculty and graduate students working on a project “Citizenship as Conceptual Flow: Asia in Comparative Perspective.” Baruah’s latest book as editor and contributor, Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India, will be published in February by Oxford University Press.
• During the summer of 2008, Laura Battle exhibited work in an invitational exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New York where she received the Academy’s Charles Loring Elliot Award and Medal.
• Jonathan Becker’s review article, “The Perfect Storm. George W. Bush and the American Press,” appeared in Vol. 23, No. 2 of the European Journal of Communication.
• Recent published articles by Daniel Berthold include “Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness” in Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology and “The Golden Rule in Kant and Utilitarianism” for Analyzing the Golden Rule, edited by Jacob Neusner.
• Jonathan Brent’s new book, Inside the Stalin Archives, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Book Review. A documentary based on his book, Stalin’s Last Crime, will be released in January by Roche Productions in France for likely broadcast on the BBC.
• During the year in his Rome Prize fellowship, Tim Davis created “Kings of Cyan”, a show of his photographs centering on political posters in Italy which was featured at Galerie Mitterand and Sanz in Zurich, May 30 through October 18. A large-scale catalog of his works accompanied the exhibit.
• Two Mark Danner essays relating to the fall elections were featured in the New York Review of Books in October: “Sweet Potato Pie in Philly: Watching Obama” and “2008 and the Weight of the Past.”  His essay “Weapons of Mass Destruction and Other Imaginative Acts” which was about Ron Suskind’s new book The Way of the World appeared in the August 27^th New York Times.
• Yuval Elmelech’s book Transmitting Inequality: Wealth and the American Family was published in May by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
• Omar Encarnación’s latest book “Spanish Politics: Democracy After Dictatorship” was published last July. His essay “Reconciliation after Democratization: Coping with the Past in Spain was published in the fall 2008 issue of Political Science Quarterly.
• Peter Filkins’ translation of the H. G. Alder’s novel, The Journey, was published in November by Random House.
• Larry Fink was guest lecturer at the School of Visual Arts Amphitheater in New York, sponsored by the Camera Club of New York.
• A translation from Bulgarian by Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova of Angel Wagenstein’s Isaac’s Torah, was published in October by Other Press.
• Jacqueline Goss’s animated documentary Stranger Comes to Town, which was completed in 2006 with support from a Bard Research Fund Grant won the Gus Van Sant Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Best Experimental Work prize at the Onion City Film Festival. It has been reviewed in the Village Voice and Time Out magazines and has been screened at over forty festivals, museums and colleges.
• Sam Hsiao co-authored “Enumeration in convex geometries and associated polytopal subdivisions of spheres” which appeared in the twentieth anniversary issue of Discrete & Computational Geometry.
• Among venues that have hosted Peter Hutton presenting film programs and/or have screened his films during fall 2008 year are Cornell University, Ithaca College, Harvard University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain
• Philip Johns received a Research Opportunity Award from the National Science Foundation for his study, "Pleiotropy and sex-biased gene expressions for sexually selected traits in the stalk-eyed fly, Cyrtodiopsis dalmanni".
• Felicia Keesing, co-edited a volume of essays entitled Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems published by Princeton University Press.One of her co-authors, Richard Ostfeld, will be in residence at Bard during the spring 2009.
• Robert Kelly will be reading from his book, The Book from the Sky published by North Atlantic Books, at a faculty book celebration to be held at Finberg House, 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, February 3, 2009.
• Philip Kunhardt’s book, Looking for Lincoln, written with Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., was published by Knopf Publishing Group in November 2008. The New York Times review appeared in the October 13 issue, written by Thomas Mallon.
• Ann Lauterbach’s essay “The Thing Seen: Reimagining Arts Education for Now,” will be published this spring by MIT Press in What is Art Education? Ann has also had recent poems published in Conjunctions, No Magazine of the Arts and Glitterpony. Her eighth collection of poems, Or to Begin Again, is due out this spring from Penguin Press.
• CNN reported on a exhibition of “On the Subject of War” by An-My Lê at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The exhibit, running from October 17, 2008 through January 25, 2009, includes a dozen new photographs as well as a film installation.
• Published locally by Friends of Clermont, Bob’s Folly: Fulton, Livingston and the Steamboat was co-edited by Nancy Leonard and included short essays by Greg Moynahan and Myra Armstead.
• Mark Lytle co-authored the sixth edition of the textbook, Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Public, published by McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
• Joseph Luzzi’s book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, was published in November 2008 by Yale University Press.
• The Keith Talent Gallery in London featured the exhibit All of the Parts, None of the Pieces, new work by Medrie MacPhee, in October and November.
• During 2008, Norman Manea received two honorary degrees in Romania, from the University of Bucharest and from the University of Cluj. He also participated in a launching at the Romanian Cultural Institute of his complete work in 22 volumes; new translations of his work have been published in Israel, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Italy.
• Bill Mullen presented a paper “Q Lightning” at a conference in Paris this past summer sponsored by the Center for Quantavolution and is the recipient of a grant from the Mainwaring Archives Foundation which supports writing within the same general paradigm.
• Jacob Neusner edited The Treasury of Judaism: A New Collection and Translation of Essentials, Volumes One (The Calendar), Two (The Life Cycle), and Three (Theology), all published last year by University Press of America.
• Susan Osberg’s choreography “Rhinoceros” was performed in October at Cabaret Einstein in Gøteborg, Sweden. This dance, which is a big event for a small space, was originally performed in her studio at Beacon Studios for ten people at a time.
• Lothar Osterburg screened a new video in October at a concert performed by composers Elizabeth Brown and Frances White at the TheTimesCenter in New York City.
• Francine Prose’s book, Goldengrove: A Novel, was published in September by Harper.
• Dimitri Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray (senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute)  wrote the introduction to two books by Hyman P. Minsky. John Maynard Keynes: Hyman P. Minsky’s Influential Reinterpretation of the Keynesian Revolution was published in April of this year, as was the hard-cover edition of Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, which was first published in 1986.
• JUDY PFAFF: PAPER, an exhibition of recent works in mixed medium and paper, can be viewed at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art in New York City from January 15 to February 21, 2009
• In October, John Pilson premiered his new video “A Thousand Miles Away” as part of Prospect 1.New Orleans at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Center.
• Susan Fox Rogers’ book Antarctica: Life on the Ice won a silver award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation.
• One of the major galleries of contemporary art in Sweden, Galleri Thomas Wallner in Malmö is currently hosting “Mock-ups”, an exhibit of work by Sigrid Sandström through December 17. Sigrid is the recent recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation: 2008 Painters & Sculptures Grant (see Swartz below).
• Julianne Swartz was also chosen by The Joan Mitchell Foundation for a 2008 Painters & Sculptures Grant. The Foundation give grants annually to about twenty recipients in recognition of their artistic merit to further their artistic careers.
• Commemorating the 35^th anniversary of his 1973 journey across the country, Stephen Shore’s A Road Trip Journal, was published in June 2008 by Phaidon Press Inc.
• During summer 2008, Richard Teitelbaum was in residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice Italy, composing a new work for Da Capo Chamber Players to be premiered this summer at Merkin Hall in New York. Richard also performed three works at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and in November, he performed at the All Frontiers Festival in Gorizia, Italy.
• Jean Paulhan on Poetry and Politics, edited and with an introduction by Jennifer Bajorek and Éric Trudel, translated by J. Bayorek, E. Trudel and C. Mandell, was published this year by University of Illinois Press. He also contributed a chapter to Chris Marker. L’imprimerie due regard, a book devoted to the French filmmaker, published by L’Harmattan. 

Dean of the College
January 2009

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