2008 Fall Bardian

Bardian Bard College Fall 2008

Reviving New Orleans Human Rights: A Path to Action The $3 Trillion War Bard High School Early College Opens Second Campus

above Members of the Class of 2012 arriving on campus cover A scene from Karol Szymanowski’s pastoral dance Harnasie, one of the highlights of Bard SummerScape 2008

Dear Bardians, A Commencement 2008 highlight for me was Chevy Chase ’68 sitting in on piano with the house band after the fireworks at Blithewood. Like Chevy, some of our most active and dedicated alumni/ae did not actually graduate from Bard, but everyone who attended Bard is considered a proud member of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association.

Take a look at the names listed underneath this letter. It’s likely that you overlapped at Bard with some of them. These are the members of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association, a group of volunteers who work to motivate their fellow alumni/ae to take an active role in Bard’s future. We have a terrific group of new members this year, and we are excited to be working with the indomitable Jane Brien ’89 in her new role as director of alumni/ae affairs. Together we are focusing our efforts to strengthen the alumni/ae community, assist the College in recruiting a diverse student body, and support the College financially.

Alumni/ae volunteers devote time and resources to Bard because we know that our support is leveraged in ways we cannot imagine. We want to give back so that others will have the benefit of the core values of cross-disciplinary education and critical thought that have always been Bard’s foundation, and, at the same time, experience all the new opportunities that are now available.

Read on to learn how students in Annandale are learning the vital role that the visual arts can play in halting human rights violations. Find out how the popularity of Bard High School Early College resulted in its expansion to a second site, in Queens, with Valeri Thomson ’85, a microbiologist, as principal. Perhaps you will see yourself in the journey that Richard Ransohoff ’68 made, from writing his Senior Project on Jorge Luis Borges to receiving the John and Samuel Bard Award for Medicine and Science in 2002 for his pathbreaking research on the connection between stroke, muscular dystrophy, and Alzheimer’s disease. Take a few minutes to read the transcript of Joseph Stiglitz’s remarks on campus on the cost of the Iraq debacle, and reflect on how much better off we might be if critical thought had been applied more judiciously.

You—Bard’s alumni/ae, and parents of current students—are an essential element of what makes Bard great. Thank you so much for doing your part. Enjoy!

Walter Swett ’96 President, Board of Governors, Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Walter Swett ’96, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Roger Scotland ’93, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary Olivier te Boekhorst ’93, Treasurer Jonathan Ames ’05 Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 David Avallone ’87, Oral History Committee Chairperson Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69 Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Joshua Bell ’98, Communications and New Technologies Committee Chairperson Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Carla Bolte ’71 Erin Boyer ’00 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Pia Carusone ’03 Charles Clancy ’69 Peter Criswell ’89 Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Chairperson

Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, ’05, Young Alumni/ae Committee Chairperson Kirsten Dunlaevy ’06 Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52 Joan Elliott ’67 Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Eric Warren Goldman ’98, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Rebecca Granato ’99 Ann Ho ’62, Career Connections Committee Cochairperson Charles Hollander ’65 Dr. John C. Honey ’39 Elaine Marcotte Hyams ’69 Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71 Richard Koch ’40 Erin Law ’93, Fund-raising Committee Chairperson Larry Levine ’74 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Isaac Liberman ’04 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 Peter F. McCabe ’70 Mollie Meikle ’03 Steven Miller ’70 Jennifer Novik ’98

Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Susan Playfair ’62 Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Allison Radzin ’88, Career Connections Committee Cochairperson Emilie Richardson ’05 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Joan Schaffer ’75 Donna Shepper ’73 Barry Silkowitz ’71 George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochairperson Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69 Andrea J. Stein ’92 Paul Thompson ’93, Diversity Committee Chairperson Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, MFA Liaison Samir B. Vural ’98 Brandon Weber ’97 Barbara Crane Wigren ’68 Ron Wilson ’75 Matt Wing ’06 Sung Jee Yoo ’01

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FALL 2008 FEATURES 4 NO BREACH OF FAITH Bard Student Volunteers Are Committed to Reviving New Orleans 10 FROM RUSSIA, WITH VERVE Summer Festivals Paid Homage to Prokofiev and His World 12 ASTOUNDING PRECISION Richard Ransohoff ’68, Researcher and Reader 14 A PATH TO ACTION The Bardian Takes a Course 22 BARD HIGH SCHOOL EARLY COLLEGE OPENS NEW CAMPUS 24 ON THE ROAD WITH OBAMA Oregon Delegate Andrew Simon ’10 Attended Democratic National Convention 26 THE THREE TRILLION DOLLAR WAR 30 BUILDING GREEN IN NEW YORK CITY

DEPARTMENTS 34 BOOKS BY BARDIANS 40 ON AND OFF CAMPUS 48 CLASS NOTES 68 FACULTY NOTES

NO BREACH OF FAITH Bard Student Volunteers Are Committed to Reviving New Orleans

Before Katrina, it was known to revelers from all over the world as the “Big Easy.” Since the catastrophic storms of 2005, however, nothing has been easy for New Orleans, which nearly three years later is still struggling to get back on its feet.

Soon after the disaster, thousands of volunteers—from all over the country and around the world—flocked to the beleaguered city when the federal government was slow to respond. Among them were 126 Bard College students, mobilized by New Orleans native Stephen Tremaine ’07, who traveled down during winter break that January.

Unlike many others, the Bard volunteers have maintained a consistent presence in the city; to date, 355 Bard students have lent their time, energy, and expertise to various recovery projects. More important, they have made—and continue to make—a significant, quantifiable difference.

“They’ve accomplished an enormous amount,” says Hal Roark, executive director of the Broadmoor Development Corporation, who has worked with successive arrivals of Bard volunteers in his section of the city. “I’ve been incredibly impressed, not just by how smart they are, but by how they apply themselves to any cause or goal that we need to further the neighborhood along. Their contributions have run the gamut from the intellectual work of policy planning to hands-on house gutting.

I rely on them; I know I can really depend on them.”

The residential neighborhood of Broadmoor was so badly damaged by flooding that city officials initially considered razing its 2,400 homes and reducing it to a public park. Determined to prove their neighborhood’s viability, Broadmoor residents organized. In June 2006, the Broadmoor Improvement Association reached out to Bard volunteers,

Stephen Tremaine ’07

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Harvard Kennedy School graduate students, and PlanReady, a software company in Silicon Valley, to develop a geographical information systems (GIS) map and digital database to track the status of each Broadmoor property. Bard students conducted interviews with residents, took damage reports, and photographed every building and lot in the district. The data bank they assembled included minutely detailed information that was vital to community organizers, city and government officials, and agencies and businesses that were willing to provide funding.

Broadmoor has since become a beacon of grassroots community revitalization, with approximately 70 percent of its homes restored and repopulated.

“Bard students have made a tremendous difference in the recovery of Broadmoor,” says Douglas Ahlers, director of The Broadmoor Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. “The information they have collected is critical to the Broadmoor leadership’s ability to identify the areas in the neighborhood that have the most need, and to develop strategies to target resources appropriately.”

Quite impressive, considering that it all started with a coffee can for donations in the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

“Yes, it was nothing more strategic than that,” says Tremaine, who spearheaded Bard’s volunteer and fund-raising efforts in 2005. “Standing on tables in the campus center, trying to collect whatever pocket change people had. In the first couple of months we raised $16,000.”

But when that first wave of Bard students arrived in the ruined city in January 2006, they gradually came to realize that, although they could raise money indefinitely and physically take part in the clearing away of rubble and debris (which they did), it would be far more effective to respond with the unique resources of an academic institution than as simply a coalition of well-meaning individuals.

“Sure, we could help somebody fix their home in a devastated neighborhood, but that is not the last stage in the process,” says Tremaine, who now directs the Bard Urban Studies in New Orleans Program. “The government has to approve the rebuilding of that home. In many cases, we worked on properties for six days, and on the seventh day the city inspector would come by and red-tag it to be bulldozed even though it seemed to be in perfectly fine shape. So there really seemed to be another problem there. It brought up questions less of individual properties than of neighborhoods and communities, and the ecological and sociological stature of certain places. Why were communities with lower tax bases receiving fewer resources in the recovery? Why were communities in which the need was demonstrably greater receiving fewer resources to come back?”

These were precisely the kinds of questions that needed to be considered for any rebuilding efforts to be meaningful, and precisely the kinds of questions that a liberal arts college and its students were qualified to address. By examining the depth and complexity of New Orleans’ recovery process from an academic point of view, Bard volunteers understood that they needed to work in a way that was systemic, one that would draw upon their intellectual capital and achieve something more effective and longer lasting than a Band-Aid. That led to their involvement in the creation of the GIS map in Broadmoor.

Every six months, Bard volunteers resurvey the district and update the GIS map data. Their work has now expanded into individual case management for residents in need of social services and other aid.

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“I saw how information is an agent in community service, how it empowers neighborhood associations,” says SongSoo Kim ’09, who collected data for the map.

“As college students who deal with reading and information all the time, this is our specialty, what college has trained us to do . . . to share this information in discussions and dialogues with community members was probably the most fitting work we could do.”

Not that Kim and her fellow volunteers were unaware of some of the ironies, subtleties, or complications of their relationships with the locals.

“It was easy to just think about it in an academic setting; it’s much harder to be in New Orleans, thinking critically and doing work that’s productive for both the community and yourself,” says Kim. “You can think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna save the world!’ and get into that kind of bleeding-heart humanitarianism that’s blinded by one’s privilege. But you’ve got to look at your romantic notions versus concrete reality.”

Those sentiments are echoed by Ari Braverman ’08, who plans to stay in New Orleans “indefinitely” after having made a third trip down this summer. Of her initial visit in 2006, she says, “Going in there as a college student was kind of a fraught thing for me. The dangerous mind-set is, ‘Oh, we’re here to save you’— the thing is to not have some savior mentality, to listen to what other people have to say. I tried to be as mindful as possible, and not make assumptions about people.”

Fortunately, in Broadmoor the students found a well-organized community that was willing to take charge of its own narrative—a community that was able to exercise its autonomy and tell the volunteers what it needed. And the successive rounds of Bard contingents responded in ways that were helpful and appropriate.

“The Bard students are well liked, well received, and thoroughly embraced by the community,” says Ahlers. “The genuine desire to listen to the residents has become the basis for trust, and also for friendship.”

“They set a very high bar here,” Roark concurs. “I hope we can have Bard students coming down here for the next 10 years.”

(Left) Hal Roark, executive director of the Broadmoor Development Corporation; (center) Shannon Wells, case manager for the Broadmoor Development Corporation; (right) Tonya Foster, teaching Bard High School Early College courses in New Orleans

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These students were among the group that made the trip from Bard to New Orleans in the summer of 2008: (standing, left to right) Dave Polett ’10, Dev Castra ’09, Emily Wolff ’10, Anna Putnam ’09, Elizabeth Crawford ’10, Cassie Pruyn ’10, and Kathleen “Kaycee” Filson ’11; (kneeling, left to right) Rebekah Radna ’09, Allison Reeves ’09, Thomas “Alex” Davis ’09, Lindsay St. Onge ’11, and Alison Sickler ’09.

That may well prove to be the case, as Bard’s presence in New Orleans shows no sign of abating. In addition to their close collaboration with Broadmoor, Bard students have been active throughout the Crescent City, organizing and/or participating in myriad programs and activities. Among these have been the launching of an urban studies program at Xavier University; the introduction of an accredited early college program, modeled on Bard High School Early College in New York, in several public schools; and Bard-sponsored, student-organized courses to explore the academic issues surrounding post-Katrina recovery—including a seminar in Annandale with guest lecturer Kristina Ford, former director of city planning in New Orleans. (See facing page.)

“Once you’ve gone there, you have a connection to the place,” asserts Grace Dwyer ’10, who helped to gut an abandoned elementary school in Broadmoor and returned as a teacher’s aide the following winter. “It’s important that Bard students keep on working to maintain their relationship with New Orleans—not only for the communities we work in, but for our own education as well.”

—Mikhail Horowitz and Jennifer Wai-Lan Huang Contributors to the Bard in New Orleans programs include Caroline Keller Winter, Theodosia Nolan, John W. and Bertie M. Deming Foundation, Broadmoor Development Corporation, Amacord Foundation, Kenneth McCarthy, and several anonymous donors.

Other support has come from Bard students, faculty, and staff assisting the visiting students each January, and numerous members of the Board of Governors of the Bard– St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association, who supported four fellowships in the Urban Studies Program at Xavier University during the summer of 2008 in honor of Louisiana native Jessica Kemm ’74 and her service to Bard as director of alumni/ae affairs, 1999– 2008. Visit www.bard.edu/neworleans to learn more about Bard’s projects in New Orleans and how to donate.

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Bard’s New Orleans Initiatives These are some of the projects and activities that Bard students, faculty, and staff are coordinating and/or participating in.

TLS New Orleans Project: This Trustee Leader Scholar project coordinates Bard student volunteers traveling to New Orleans every winter intersession and summer.

McDonogh 35 High School Tutoring: A summer remedial program, designed to stabilize a school in danger of closing, for students at risk of failing standardized testing.

Broadmoor GIS Mapping: Bard students, in collaboration with the Broadmoor Improvement Association and Harvard Kennedy School of Government volunteers, created a comprehensive geographic information systems (GIS) map to detail the revitalization of the neighborhood. Working with Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab, Bard students produced and distributed a guidebook for community mapping projects in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Children’s Expressive Arts Project (CEAP): Biannual arts-based workshops with children in grades K through 8 at the James M. Singleton Charter School in Central City.

Andrew Wilson Elementary School: Rehabilitation of a neglected elementary school in Broadmoor. When the school was successfully reopened, Bard students worked in classrooms as teachers’ aides.

New Orleans Neighborhood Data Forum: In conjunction with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, this forum provided neighborhood associations and recovery groups across New Orleans with resources, information, and guidance on issues of data collection, analysis, and usage. More than 80 neighborhood leaders attended the event.

Bard–Broadmoor Fellowships: Each year, three exceptional Bard student volunteers will be provided with stipends to work on case management and advocacy for Broadmoor residents in need.

John Driebergen ’10 and Christina Marcantonio ’11, participants in the Bard/Broadmoor Community Development Fellowship

Bard New Orleans Summer Camp: In collaboration with CEAP, Bard Men’s Basketball, and YMCA, this day camp at the Wilson Elementary School operated for five weeks in July and August, run by Bard volunteers.

Bard Urban Studies in New Orleans Program: Housed at Xavier University, this intensive eight-week academic program investigates notions of urbanism, ecology, and social policy. Students take two seminar-style courses and intern up to 40 hours per week.

Bard Early College in New Orleans Program: A series of tuition-free, college credit–bearing courses offered in New Orleans public schools. Classes meet weekly for a 10-week period.

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From Russia, with Verve Summer Festivals Paid Homage to Prokofiev and His World The prolific life and turbulent times of Sergey Prokofiev provided the theme for this year’s Bard SummerScape and Bard Music Festival, which took place on campus in July and August.

Highlights were many. Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare, the resurrection of Prokofiev’s ballet in its intended form—which featured choreography by Mark Morris, performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group—was an event of culturally historical significance.

Much painstaking research and inspired collaboration went into the realization of this lost masterpiece, and SummerScape’s audience was amply rewarded with a performance that had “a distinctly bracing quality,” according to the Washington Post.

Another high point was a double bill of sumptuous stage works by Karol Szymanowski, a Polish contemporary of Prokofiev. With Leon Botstein conducting the American Symphony Orchestra and two choruses, Szymanowski’s opera King Roger (The Shepherd) and his pastoral dance Harnasie were exemplary reminders of one of the summer festival’s prime directives—to rediscover engaging and challenging works that have been overlooked or forgotten.

“I expect many ears pricked up for a score that I am not alone in believing on par with the Stravinsky, Ravel, and Prokofiev ballets,” said Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times.

Also enlivening the SummerScape boards were an affecting Uncle Vanya, starring Peter Dinklage in the title role, and a frothy revival of 1931’s still relevant satiric musical comedy, Of Thee I Sing. The annual film festival celebrated Prokofiev’s powerful collaborations with Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II, along with Depression-era musicals and comedies, and the Spiegeltent was packed to the canopies four nights a week with riotous cabaret and circus acts and the New Albion new music festival.

The difficult juggling between artistic imperatives and political realities that distinguished the musical careers of Prokofiev and his Russian contemporaries was well illuminated by the 19th Bard Music Festival, directed by Botstein, Robert Martin, and Christopher H. Gibbs, with Simon Morrison serving as this year’s scholar in residence. Among the many memorable concerts were performances of two Prokofiev symphonies, No. 1 in D Major and No. 3 in C Minor; his denounced and suppressed Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution; and his children’s classic Peter and the Wolf, charmingly narrated by Michael York. Great works by other Russian, European, and American composers were also heard, as were rarities by Joseph Achron, John Alden Carpenter, Samuil Feinberg, and other unjustly neglected figures.

A third weekend of programs, which contrasts Prokofiev’s time in the United States with his return to Russia and his subsequent contretemps with Soviet censors, takes place on October 24 and 25.

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Uncle Vanya

King Roger (The Shepherd)

Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare

Of Thee I Sing

Harnasie

Epitaph (Mandelstam), Dina Kuznetsova, soprano

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astounding precision Richard Ransohoff ’68, Researcher and Reader

Richard Ransohoff ’68, M.D., is director of the Neuroinflammation Research Center at the Lerner Research Institute and staff neurologist at the Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis Treatment and Research, both at the Cleveland Clinic. In 2002 he received the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science. Yet as a Bard student, Ransohoff had embraced the humanities, without a thought to a future in medicine or an inkling of the research scientist he would become. He majored in literature and wrote his Senior Project on Jorge Luis Borges. Today, his groundbreaking work with chemokines, the small proteins that direct leukocytes (white blood cells) to places of inflammation or injury, has engendered a new understanding of the cellular mechanisms of multiple sclerosis (MS)—an inflammatory and possibly autoimmune disease of the central nervous system—and offers promising implications for its treatment.

Describing the correlation between the science of chemokines and his deep immersion in reading and writing at Bard, Ransohoff recalls Hsi-Huey Liang, associate professor of history. Liang “would sit holding a Parliament, balancing a cigarette lighter between two fingers, turning the lighter over and over” as he lectured, perhaps on the Berlin police force anthem as a microcosm of the Weimar Republic. “He would swirl through all these complicated currents of things that seemed unrelated, and at the end, he would snap open his lighter, light his cigarette, and bring everything to a conclusion. He gave me an appreciation for how the details that were not obviously related to the big questions could be used to address and answer those questions.”

Inspired as well by Heinrich Bluecher, “a formidable intellectual,” Ransohoff envisioned becoming an academic. He also studied with Elizabeth Stambler, with whom he read André Gide’s translation of Hamlet. “Going back and forth between the English and the French, seeing how different this story was, purely as a reflection of the way the language worked to tell it,” he says, “was my introduction to detailed hard work and intense fun.”

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Ransohoff set out to do graduate work in the humanities at San Francisco State, but the riots of 1968 shut down the campus and he returned to New York in need of a job.

He worked the night shift in the admitting department of Lenox Hill Hospital and served as poetry editor of Corpus, a literary magazine edited by Pierre Joris ’69. Against his expectations, Ransohoff found the hospital a fascinating place to work. He began taking premed courses at Hunter while still a night clerk—“to biopsy my interest,” he says, and went on to earn his M.D. from Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in 1978.

During six years of residencies in internal medicine and neurology, Ransohoff discovered that he was “overwhelmed by curiosity about what was going on with my patients, well beyond what was useful to them. In medicine, if you try something and it works, you’re done.” But Ransohoff wanted to know “why something worked and what it meant, and if it didn’t work, why not.”

In 1989, after almost five years of postdoctoral research in advanced molecular biology and virology under the auspices of Dr. Tim Nilsen at Case Western Reserve, Ransohoff set up his own lab at the Cleveland Clinic, which had established the Mellen Center and a new Department of Molecular Biology. Early on, he says, “I was lucky to happen upon a particular biological problem involving chemokines that I’ve studied ever since.” A pilot project involving research on a multiple sclerosis model in mice and a specific pair of genes that “turned out to be a key part of the inflammatory cascade” demonstrated for the first time that the cells of the nervous system generated chemokines during inflammation. “The authentic communication between the nervous system and the leukocytes was especially evocative and enticing as a field of study,” says Ransohoff, and his lab changed direction in response to this discovery. Later, his group and others found that chemokines also help orchestrate the elaborate ballet of nervous system development and function. The Neuroinflammation Research Center was established in 2006, to help apply this knowledge to other disorders including stroke, muscular dystrophy, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Chemokines help regulate inflammation. What’s key about them, says Ransohoff, is their specificity and the precision with which they function, and what this tells us about the pathogenesis of a whole battery of diseases including diabetes, HIV-1, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. Natalizumab, a relatively new drug for the treatment of multiple sclerosis that suppresses leukocyte entry into the central nervous system, is one of a series of treatments that evolved in the context of Ransohoff’s advances in the study of chemokines and leukocyte migration through the bloodstream and into the nervous system. Although safety concerns still surround Natalizumab, the drug offers hope and has the potential to provide insights into the disease. “Inflammation and deterioration coincide within the nervous system of persons with MS,” says Ransohoff. “We act on the belief that inflammation causes damage, but we don’t know for sure. The inflammation may be secondary. The only way to ask the question is to get rid of the inflammation and see if the degeneration stops. Not only might we have the most important treatment yet, but we might be able to solve an incredibly fundamental problem.”

Ransohoff, whose summer reading included Diary of a Bad Year, by J. M. Coetzee, has never lost the appreciation for literature that he discovered as a student—“for what is beautiful and true . . . and astoundingly precise.” Like his experience with the humanities at Bard, “in biology,” he says, “if you get deep enough, almost anything you study is going to bear on the important questions.”

—Stephanie Fleischmann

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access to life is a project organized by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in collaboration with Magnum Photos, a New York–based cooperative of photographers. Gilles Peress, visiting professor of human rights and photography, is one of the eight Magnum photographers who went to nine countries—Haiti, India, Mali, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, and Vietnam—to chronicle the positive effect that free antiretroviral drugs are having on AIDS patients around the world. The resulting photography exhibition, Access to Life, opened at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in June. The show travels to Mexico City, Paris, London, and other cities around the world over the next year; a catalogue will be published in time to accompany the European stages of the exhibition. While he was teaching at Bard last spring, Peress finalized his part of the project—photographs of AIDS patients in Rwanda, where free lifelong treatment has been made available to 44,000 Rwandans in just five years. The photographs by Peress that accompany this article were selected from the Access to Life exhibition.

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A Path to Action The French-born photographer Gilles Peress has observed and recorded evidence of human rights violations in many places over the past several decades, including Northern Ireland, Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, Bosnia during the civil war in the 1990s, and Rwanda during the 100-day war and genocide in 1994 that resulted in the deaths of more than 800,000 people. Last spring Peress taught Observation and Description, a course offered by Bard’s Human Rights and Art History Programs. His goal for the course was to help his students acquire the observational tools they need in order to think critically about human rights and human rights reporting and, eventually, to plan their own paths toward taking action.

Peress’s love-hate relationship with language, which he calls “being on both sides of the barricade,” led him to photography and made him a critical reader and an articulate speaker. As a teacher, he tries to imbue his students with these skills.

“When it comes to human rights, the language can be very automated,” he said. “It’s like a machine; it functions by itself, and that can be disconcerting. But if you are rooted in methodologies for observing and describing reality, then you are able to parse out fact from fiction.”

From the start, Peress challenged his students to think about their relationship to the world. “It’s a bottom-up approach, rather than top-down,” he said. He worked with his students to look at human rights from the perspective of the disciplines they were studying—the sciences, anthropology, philosophy, and visual arts—to “help them feel safe with the rhetoric and the theory.” Empathizing with the intellectual challenges his students face in their rigorous undergraduate academic experiences (Peress studied political science and philosophy in the highly charged atmosphere of Paris in the late 1960s and early 1970s), he was conscious that they were receiving theory from all quarters. “They’re studying theory that involves relativity, postmodernism, and the impossibility of accurately representing the world and the dangers of representation of others,” he said. “This theory has a lot of taboos.

It makes them cautious about what they can and can’t do, what they can look at, what they can represent.”

At the same time that Peress taught his students to be comfortable with theory, he helped them to understand the implications of what he calls the “doctrine of unintended consequences,” which is familiar to anyone who works in the human rights field. Unpredictable outcomes are all but inevitable, he explained, and so they must also learn to bring a “healthy consciousness” to their work. “I made sure they were grounded, that they had contemplated human rights through various theoretical angles, and then we moved on to figuring out the path to action.”

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Early in the semester, Peress told students they would work together to create a reader (see sidebar). Each student was to bring in 10 pages of text that they wished they had written about any of the three subjects that they would study during the semester: history and consciousness of history; methodologies of observation and description; and definitions and theoretical boundaries of human and universal rights.

The discussion about the reader led to a lively conversation about what it means to make culture. After class that afternoon, one of the students said, “Maybe our generation has a problem with making our own culture, with shaping it for ourselves, because ever since we were kids, every one of our desires has been commoditized.”

This comment inspired Peress, who decided to have the class create and maintain a blog. “I realized that the best way for them to get involved with the world was to create their own newspaper, and contribute content and ideas from current events that interest them as students of human rights.” He asked the students to post articles, photos, links, and their own thoughts about human rights issues in the news. The project was wildly successful. “We made our own culture,” Peress said.

“I saw their passion for the text rise. I encouraged them to push it—I wanted them to learn not to have an automated, mechanistic relationship with text.”

One of the texts in the “Being in History” section of the Observation and Description reader is a chapter from Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel, The Fixer, a fictionalized version of a true story about Jakov, a Jewish man in czarist Russia who was accused of murdering a Christian child. Jakov is interrogated by a police official. “In the interrogation,” said Peress, “the official asks, ‘So, what do you think of it all?’ Jakov says, ‘Me, think?’ The official then asks, ‘Well, what do think of what’s happening?’ ‘What’s happening?’ asks Jakov. ‘All this stuff, all this history,’ says the official. ‘History? Am I part of it?’ Jakov asks. And then the interrogator explodes: ‘How do you dare to think that you’re not part of history?’ If you think about it, what happens during Jakov’s interrogation is similar to what’s happening at Guantánamo.

Jakov’s crime is thinking of himself as ahistorical. No matter what, we are in history.”

When the class discussed possible paths to action, Peress encouraged several students who expressed interest in attending law school or medical school. “I see strong interaction between the law and human rights, and medicine and human rights,” he said, reminding the students of a lecture transcript they had read, by Paul Farmer, a founding director of the international charity Partners in Health. Farmer talked about the role that such organizations as Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders] and Physicians for Human Rights have played in human rights over the past 20 years. As for the law as a career, Peress said, “Becoming a lawyer is definitely a path to action—that’s how you can take governments to task.” He also talked about the connections between the sciences and human rights, which he said he considers “very relevant to Bard. The science students I’ve come to know here are committed to goals of a higher moral order, and Bard encourages them to embrace those goals as part and parcel of an ethical program. It’s a rich relationship.”

Peress told his Bard students that they were wise to begin studying human rights “upstream, at the college level, rather than having to play catch-up later at the graduate level.” Over the course of seven years in the 1990s, he taught human rights to graduate and postgraduate students at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Most of his students were attending or had just finished law school, medical school, or a Ph.D. program in geography; for all of them, human rights was a new interest, one they hadn’t studied as undergraduates. “They had to

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do a lot of catching up on the theoretical side of things,” said Peress. “For example, it’s helpful for a geography Ph.D. who is involved with creating physical maps to learn about narrative maps and cultural maps.” Some of Peress’s Berkeley geography students combined their interests in a project in the Amazon region of Brazil, where they taught indigenous people to use GPS [global positioning systems] devices so that they could map their land in order to claim it from oil companies that were attempting to take it from them.

As the semester drew to a close, Peress reflected on why he is so passionate about teaching in a human rights environment, and why, during the Observation and Description class, he shied away from talking about the career that introduced him to the field of human rights and made him famous. “It’s about them, not me.

This generation is inheriting a complex and chaotic world, where things are not what they seem to be. There are lots of mysteries: extraordinary renditions, secret tribunals. These students are going to have to figure out a lot more than we had to, in the pre–9/11 or even the pre–1989 [fall of the Berlin Wall, and the effective end of Communism in Europe and Russia] world, when, by and large, things were what they seemed to be. One has to be more cautious these days. I think they intuit that, and this is why I wanted to listen to them and to their concerns, to give them the tools they need. This institution—human rights—is in their hands. They have their work cut out for them.”

—Kelly Spencer Bard is grateful to the Scorpio Rising Fund for its support of the Human Rights Program and Peress’s visiting professorship.

Selections from the Course Reader Human rights is a relatively new subject in cultural history. Its literature borrows substantially from other genres that range from the novel to anthropology textbooks and ethnological treatises. Following is a selected list from the course reader that Peress and his students developed as a collaborative project.

James Agee and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida Robert A. Georges and Michael O. Jones: People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of People Marcel Proust: Swann’s Way Robert C. Tucker, editor: The Marx-Engels Reader John Van Maanen: Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography James Clifford: The Predicament of Culture: 20th-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art Erik H. Erikson: Childhood and Society Eugene Richards: The Knife and Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History Seymour M. Hersh: “Annals of National Security: Torture at Abu Ghraib”; The New Yorker, May 10, 2004 Jane Mayer: “A Reporter at Large: The Black Sites”; The New Yorker, August 13, 2007

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Valeri Thomson ’85

bard high school early college opens new campus In seven short years Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) has become one of the most sought-after public high schools in New York City. To channel that demand, and further its commitment to developing an innovative early college alternative to traditional high school programs, Bard has partnered once again with the New York City Department of Education to open BHSEC II this fall in a brand-new school building in Elmhurst, Queens. Like the first school, BHSEC II will use a high school– college model. In four years students can progress from ninth grade through the first two years of college, graduating with an associate in arts (A.A.) degree from Bard College and a New York State Regents diploma.

The Queens location has several benefits. The borough has a richly diverse population, with many recent arrivals from around the world opting to live there. Due to the vagaries of the New York subway system, students from Queens face some of the longest commutes to the first campus. “We liked the idea of accessibility for an underserved population. We also value diversity in our student body, and there’s a large immigrant population in Queens,” says Valeri Thomson ’85, principal of BHSEC II. The push to expand owes the most, however, to the original school’s intense popularity as well as Bard’s desire to show that BHSEC could be replicated as a model early college program. In order for students to continue to benefit from a seminar-based early college education, “we want to keep BHSEC the size it is,” says Ray Peterson, principal of BHSEC. Yet the school receives so many applications that “the numbers alone” justify the second campus, he says.

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Peterson and Thomson explain that the BHSEC model attracts New York City parents by offering both a demanding program and a special profile. “We treat students as adults,” says Thomson, and, conversely, the students “expect that everyone in the building will go to college. They are trained to think and behave in seminar style. They learn to build a logical argument and express it, to respect other students and hear them out.” As a result, 96 percent of BHSEC graduates go on to a four-year college.

Thomson, a microbiologist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, looks to replicate some of the teaching models she used as director of ISROP—the Immediate Science Research Opportunity Program—which she created at Bard. ISROP let students, even if they did not have a science background, participate as research assistants as part of their class work. BHSEC II is also collaborating with the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), an association that brings together scientists in various disciplines. NYAS regularly provides speakers to BHSEC II who complement students’ course assignments.

The city’s Department of Education singled out BHSEC II’s approach to teaching science as a key reason to support the expansion. “Bard wants to create a school that melds writing and scientific thinking,” says Julian Cohen, director of new school development.

“The early college idea is enormously attractive too.

It allows really rigorous college-level work and lets the students get credit for it.” BHSEC II is the third of seven additional selective high schools that the Department of Education has committed to opening in the next two years.

BHSEC II’s first location is not permanent— next year the school will move to another building, in Long Island City, a Queens neighborhood across the river from Manhattan.

Thomson earned a master’s degree in education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She completed the Summer Principals Academy, which involved two intensive summer sessions plus a yearlong apprenticeship as an intern in Peterson’s office.

Thomson’s time with Peterson at BHSEC, where she also taught a course last semester, proved invaluable. She particularly admires the way in which the school fosters careful and thoughtful reasoning. “I’ve seen the students encouraged in their ability to make an argument and support it with evidence across all the disciplines,” she says. “From their very first day through all four years, the kind of logical and linear thinking is present that’s at the heart of the teaching I’ve been doing in the science laboratory.” One of her goals is to re-create that approach at BHSEC II. Peterson knows the BHSEC ethos will thrive in the new setting. “The spirit of starting a new school, with not quite everything in place, and students coming in to take a chance, brings with it the chemistry and energy that we have here,” he says.

“You can sense that feeling in our students, and Valeri is excited about this model, this design, which stems from the way teachers treat students in the classroom, as adults.

All of that will be present at BHSEC II.” —Hanna Rubin

This newly renovated building in Elmhurst, Queens, is the home of BHSEC II for the 2008–09 academic year.

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On the Road with Obama Oregon Delegate Andrew Simon ’10 Attended Democratic National Convention

Andrew Simon is a junior from Portland, Oregon. An American studies major, he examines U.S. politics, foreign policy, religion, and literature. He is spending the fall 2008 semester at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City.

At Bard, Simon serves on the Student Judiciary Board and is the president of the Bard Political Union, an organization dedicated to presenting public forums in which Bard students and national opinion leaders debate contemporary political and cultural issues. After Bard, he hopes to attend law school and enter public service.

In June, Simon was elected to serve as a pledged delegate from Oregon to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. A longtime supporter of Senator Barack Obama, he played a major role in organizing the Bard for Obama campaign. Shortly before the convention, the Bardian interviewed him regarding his candidate. Our questions and his replies follow.

What attracted you to Obama’s candidacy?

Senator Obama frequently speaks about bipartisanship. That’s what initially led me to support his candidacy. There are some big issues that my generation will have to deal with—addressing climate change, fighting poverty, and redefining America’s role in the world. These issues are too important for us to stick in the middle of political dogfights. I think that President Obama will be a lot like President Lincoln, who often sought advice from political opponents. Even though we’re Democrats, we can’t afford to disregard the other half of the country. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the Bush administration, it’s the value of criticism. I want leaders who engage, rather than ignore, their critics. I hope that the Obama administration gives Senator McCain a place at the table.

One of the major concerns regarding Obama, voiced even by some of his fellow Democrats, is his lack of experience. Do you feel that this is a valid criticism?

It’s a valid criticism. I won’t spin the facts by saying Senator Obama has more experience than Senator McCain. But I disagree with the notion that experience is more important than judgment. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, two of the most experienced people in American government, orchestrated a horribly flawed foreign policy. I’m confident that the Obama administration will be led by individuals with both experience and judgment.

As the campaign enters the home stretch, how much of an issue do you think that race will play?

None, I hope. But this is a strange election at a defining moment in American history.

So who knows what will happen? All we can do is continue to work hard for the causes we believe in and try not to let the distractions get in our way.

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Energy is a crucial issue of this campaign. In light of that, how do you feel about Obama’s recent about-face on offshore drilling?

Senator Obama said that he will support limited offshore drilling only if it’s part of a comprehensive energy package. I’m not an expert and I don’t know the short- and long-term economic and environmental implications. But I do know that some of his supporters will disagree with him on this one and I hope they voice their concerns. I also hope they don’t turn away from his campaign. You know, Bard professors do a great job of teaching criticism—not just of others, but of ourselves.

They try to teach us that we aren’t always right. We can be misinformed, biased, and just plain confused. I’m often all three. So it’s frustrating when people, especially those who know the value of critical thinking, stick to one perspective and refuse to vote for any candidate who slightly differs. You want to vote for someone who you agree with all of the time? Run for office and vote for yourself. But even then, the chances that you’ll always agree with yourself are slim to none. So just learn to compromise!

Do you think that the promises proffered by Obama’s campaign can realistically be met in a four- or even eight-year term under the present political system?

I don’t know. This game of holding our public officials to their campaign promises is one of the greatest absurdities of American politics.

Public officials will inevitably flip-flop. But that’s not always bad. Facts change daily. There are always new developments and new ways of thinking about the developments. We can’t keep the wrong answers because they were the first answers. And the truly unfortunate part of the campaign-promises game is that no politician could get elected if he said that. No one would vote for a candidate who says, “I don’t know what I’ll do when I get in office.” President Obama will have the right values and priorities. So instead of holding him to old answers, let’s hope he comes up with new, better answers. I think he will.

Andrew Simon ’10

The Democratic National Convention is sure to be one of the more charged such events in recent decades. What are your personal expectations for the convention?

I’m expecting a lot of noise and bright lights. But the sensory confusion isn’t limited to the convention; it’ll likely continue through the general election. In my limited observation of American politics, I’ve noticed something endlessly chaotic and, at times, circus-like. But when we follow our candidates and watch and analyze their every move, when every word has an implication and when every association or friendship is questioned, what can we expect? And maybe I’m young and naive, but I have faith that from the chaos emerge public servants who really care about making people’s lives better and communities stronger and healthier. Walt Whitman has a great poem about the 1884 election. He looks at the wild commotion of American politics and concludes, “These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships / Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.” In other words, America keeps moving forward.

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THE THREE TRILLION DOLLAR

Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz spoke on April 24, 2008, to a standing-room-only crowd at a talk sponsored by The Levy Economics Institute, the Bard Economics Program, and the Economics Club. He was introduced by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college, president of the Levy Institute, and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics. The following is an edited transcript of Stiglitz’s remarks.

One of the big debates in the coming election is whether the war or the economy is the most important issue. In fact, the two are closely related: the war has contributed to the weaknesses in our economy.

The title of my and Linda J. Bilmes’s book is The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (W. W. Norton). Three trillion is a number that is so large that it is hard to fathom. To try to explain it, we talk about what we could have purchased with a fraction—an hour or a day—of the Iraq War. For instance, we could have put Social Security on sound financial footing for the next 50 to 75 years or more for approximately one-sixth of the cost of the Iraq War. Congress passed a bill to provide health insurance for poor children, and the president vetoed that bill, saying we could not afford it. The cost of that insurance was equal to just a few days of fighting in Iraq.

There’s an epidemic of autism in America. We don’t understand why the instances have increased or what to do about it. But, for about four hours of fighting, we could have doubled the research on this subject. These are just a few of the ways of seeing that $3 trillion is a lot of money.

The Bush administration has not responded enthusiastically to our book; they have suggested that the numbers are exaggerated. On the contrary, we believe that the numbers are very conservative: a more reasonable number is actually closer to $4 trillion or $5 trillion. It should be clear why the administration wants to hide the true cost: its arguments for the war were false. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no connection with al Qaeda. But not only did it mislead the American people about the reasons for going to war; it also misled them about the costs of the war—it claimed that they would amount to less than $50 to $60 billion.

In Iraq alone, we are spending over $12 billion a month, but that is the up-front amount, which is only about half of what this war is actually costing us per month. The way we calculated $3 trillion was by adding up the current and future costs of the war.

Congress has so far appropriated around $800 billion for the war. However, they continue to use emergency appropriations that are not subjected to the same kinds of scrutiny as regular appropriations, which is one reason the cost of the war has been so high. Until we started our work, many in Congress did not know the total that they had appropriated because it was done piecemeal.

But how do you get from the $800 billion that has been appropriated to the $3 trillion to $5 trillion that we believe is the true cost? There are costs hidden in the regular Department of Defense budget, which over the last five years has increased by half a trillion dollars. We estimate that about a quarter of the increase is attributable to the war. As an example, because the war is so unattractive, we have had to pay higher salaries to servicemen and servicewomen and larger enlistment and reenlistment bonuses. Yet this cost is not included in calculations of the Iraq War’s cost.

These are the amounts already spent, but there is much yet to be paid. So long as the war goes on, we will continue to have to pay for operations.

The second big item of bills yet to be paid is the cost of restoring the military.

Most senior officers believe our military is less equipped to meet any challenge today than it was five years ago. It will cost several hundred billion dollars to restore the military to its prewar strength.

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But the biggest chunk of money yet to be paid involves costs associated with veterans. Think back to 1991, when we had a very short war in the Persian Gulf. Today we are paying $4.3 billion a year in disability benefits to the veterans of that short, 100-hour war. The ratio of injuries to fatalities in the current war is much, much larger than in any previous war. In this war, including noncombat injuries, the ratio is 15 to 1, compared to just over 2.5 to 1 for the Vietnam and Korean Wars and less than 2 to 1 for World War I and World War II. About 30 percent of those returning will have brain injuries or psychological problems. Soldiers report an average of five to eight separate disabilities, as opposed to three to five in previous wars. We estimate the cost of caring for our veterans in the future to be in excess of $600 billion. However, the government has put no money aside for these costs.

A further budgetary item comes from the fact that this is the first war in American history that has been financed totally on credit. When we went to war, we had a deficit.

Months into the war, the administration passed a tax cut for upper-income Americans. In other words, every dollar spent in Iraq has been borrowed. It’s like buying a car by borrowing: the total payments will be twice as much as if you had paid cash up front. This war, we estimate, will add $2 trillion to our national debt by 2017.

Adjusting for inflation, previous wars have cost about $50,000 per troop. This war is costing $400,000 per troop.

One reason is that no war has been privatized to the extent that this one has. This is one effect of trying to hide the true cost of the war. We did not want to increase the size of the military, but without an increased military, we had no choice but to turn to contractors. In many cases, these contractors charge more than twice what it would have cost to have the military do exactly the same thing.

However, the war’s costs go beyond the budgetary cost to the microeconomic and macroeconomic costs to our economy. The microeconomic costs encompass those borne by individuals and families, which are not reflected in the federal budget. For instance, much of the cost of caring for returning injured veterans rests with the families. In one out of five cases where a veteran is seriously injured, someone in the family has to give up their job. The problem has been made worse because of underfunding of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); many families who can afford it have turned to private care. The administration has consistently underfunded the VA. As late as 2005–06, it was funding the VA on the basis of projections made in 2002, before we went to war. That has meant Iraq War veterans have not been able to get the benefits to which they are entitled.

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Before we examine the macroeconomic costs, it is important to dispel the view that wars are good for the economy. This idea originated because many people thought World War II played an important role in getting the world out of the Great Depression. But since the time of John Maynard Keynes, we have known how to stimulate the economy in ways that lead to long-term increases in productivity and living standards. Wars, on the other hand, do not do that.

This war has been particularly bad for the economy.

The most important reason has been what it has done to the price of oil. It is not a coincidence that the price of oil began to soar in 2003. At that time, it was $23 to $25 a barrel.

Futures markets expected the price to remain at that level for a decade or more. They understood that there would be an increase in demand, but they thought there would be a concomitant increase in supply, especially from the lowcost providers in the Middle East. The war changed that equation. The Bush administration thought that the war would lead to lower oil prices or more secure oil, but that was just naïve oil geopolitics.

Why did the American economy not seem as badly off as our calculations suggested it should be? All this money was going to the Middle East and to other oil-producing countries. As a result, the economy was weakened, and the Fed had to take action. The combination of a flood of liquidity, lax regulations, and low interest rates led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom.

But we were living on borrowed money and borrowed time. Savings rates in the United States plummeted to zero.

The bubble has now burst.

The general consensus is that monetary policy will not reinflate the economy. The Bush administration’s stimulus package gives very little bang for the buck, and its focus is on the one thing America does not need: more consumption.

The most effective policy would be to provide increased unemployment benefits and aid to states and localities.

We are going to have a serious downturn. The International Monetary Fund estimates that we will not recover until 2010. If you calculate the gap between U.S. potential output and actual output, the loss in GDP is between $1.5 and $2 trillion.

This book began as a paper analyzing the economic costs of the war. The paper was presented at the 2006 American Economic Association conference under the auspices of Economists for Peace and Security, which has its headquarters at the Levy Institute. As we worked on the book, it turned into more than just a matter of economic and

budgetary analysis. Scandals kept turning up—some of which gave insight into why the war was going so badly.

For instance, Halliburton pays workers through an offshore subsidiary so that it does not have to pay Social Security and Medicare. You would think the government would not encourage tax evasion, but the Bush administration looks the other way, as it wants to keep the cost of the war down. We will ultimately have to pay those Medicare and Social Security costs, but they are not showing up on the books now.

Another shocking practice we found involves sign-up and reenlistment bonuses and soldiers who are injured. Say a soldier signed up for a four-year period of service. What happened if, in the first month of service, he was injured so badly that he could not return to duty? The military then demanded that he repay his enlistment bonus on a prorated basis because he did not finish his tour of duty. [As attention got drawn to this particular abuse, Congress put an end to it.]

In the book, we propose 18 reforms: half deal with accounting and budgetary issues and the remaining half with our veterans.

One issue is accounting reform. Every major American firm has to use accrual accounting. Firms take into account future liabilities and put aside money to cover them. The Department of Defense, however, uses cash accounting, and, as we have noted, has not set aside money to provide either health care or disability benefits for the returning disabled veterans. If a company handled its accounting the way the Department of Defense does, its executives would be in prison.

Bad accounting practices lead to bad decisions. The president said that he would give the military anything that it needed, but our research showed that this was not true.

Military officers requested MRAP [mine-resistant ambushprotected] armored vehicles as early as 2005. They are more expensive than Humvees, which are what the military was using in Iraq, but they save lives and prevent injuries. However, [then–Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld refused to order them. Not because they are ineffective—there is a long record of their effectiveness—but because Rumsfeld was trying to keep the up-front costs of the war down. Instead, because our soldiers were not as protected as they could be, the overall cost, particularly from those injured, increased.

The other set of recommendations has to do with the treatment of our troops. We ought to give them the benefits they have been promised. For example, the VA has not even hired enough psychiatrists to take care of the 100,000 peo-

Joseph Stiglitz signs his book after his talk at Bard.

ple who have already come back with severe psychological problems.

What is our exit strategy? Do we leave now or, say, in four years? I think we need to exit as rapidly as we can. The surge in the level of troops may have succeeded in reducing violence—though there is some controversy about the role of the surge versus other contributing factors—but there has been no real progress in achieving a political solution.

Without a political solution, it is hard to see the possibility of real stability in Iraq. If we wait four years, we will have spent another $1.2 trillion. Will the difference between what it would be like if we leave now or in four years be worth that? I think there is a growing consensus that the answer is no.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and chair of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought. He is cofounder and president of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. In 2001, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, then became a senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank.

He is an honorary alumnus of Bard, having received the Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 2001, and a member of the Board of Governors of The Levy Economics Institute.

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BUILDING GREEN IN NEW YORK CITY Robert F. Fox Jr., a partner at Cook+Fox Architects in New York City, is one of the most respected leaders in the green building movement. In an address at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy in April, he spoke about his groundbreaking sustainable design for the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, a high-rise office complex scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2009. A summary of his remarks follows.

We privileged Americans occupy a small fraction of the globe, yet we are consuming resources at an incredible rate compared to the rest of the planet. At the same time, 16 million people in the People’s Republic of China move from rural areas to cities every year. They’re building the equivalent of two New York Citys annually. The people moving to these cities want what we have, and you don’t need an advanced degree to know that’s not going to work.

In 400 thousand years—a period that has seen three ice ages—the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere never passed 300 parts per million. It’s now up to about 385 parts per million. As the level of carbon dioxide rises, so does the Earth’s temperature. Climate scientists tell us that carbon dioxide levels of 500 parts per million—a tipping point after which human intervention in halting climate change will become much more difficult—may be reached by the year 2025.

What does an architect have to do with this?

A significant amount of the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere comes from buildings, so if we’re going to make a difference, we might want to start there. This brings me to the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park.

The U.S. Green Building Council has a rating system called LEED [Leadership and Energy Environmental Design] that evaluates a building’s environmental performance. The certification levels are silver, gold, and platinum. If you had asked me two years ago if a high-rise building in New York City could get a platinum rating, I’d have said, “No way.” When we were designing One Bryant Park, the charge from our clients, the Durst family and Bank of America, was to create the highest-performing—that is, the greenest— building that we could, period. They didn’t say anything about LEED. But when we went through the points, there we were, at platinum.

How did we get our platinum rating? A big part of it is our planning for energy generation. A typical power plant in New York State loses about

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two-thirds of its energy right at the smokestack and another 7 percent of its energy in transmission. It’s a system that’s about 27 percent efficient—not very good when fuel’s cost is rising and its amount diminishing. The natural gas–fired five-megawatt cogeneration plant we’re putting in the building will be 77 percent efficient, much more efficient than what Con Edison can deliver. It will produce about two-thirds of the building’s annual energy.

Bank of America is also funding an anaerobic digester plant in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where we will take the food waste from the building’s cafeterias, create methane, and use that methane to create electricity. What’s more, the compost that results from this—compost of the highest quality—will go to New York City parks, including Bryant Park, and to the building’s roof garden.

Using recycled content in the construction process is also very important in green building. We found that we could take blast furnace slag—a waste product of the steel

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industry—grind it up, and substitute it for cement at a ratio of 45 percent. The resulting concrete sets up better and is stronger. Using blast furnace slag in every batch of concrete that went into this building saved 56 thousand tons of carbon dioxide.

Rainwater—hopefully, as much as four feet a year—will be collected in a series of cascading tanks that flow down into a holding tank in the building’s cellar. We’ll add to that the water collected from the sinks where occupants wash their hands, and the steam condensate from the air conditioning system. This combined water will be

The natural gas–fired five-megawatt cogeneration plant we’re putting in the building will be 77 percent efficient, much more efficient than what Con Edison can deliver. It will produce about two-thirds of the building’s annual energy.

treated slightly and used to flush the toilets and for the cooling tower. Since cooling towers work on an evaporative process, this water will go back into the environment, instead of down the city sewer system.

When they travel to work, our building’s occupants will generate about onetwentieth of the carbon dioxide generated by commuters traveling to a typical suburban campus. The major reason for this is that no building in New York is better located for public transportation. It’s a five-minute walk from Grand Central Terminal, ten minutes from Penn Station, and about three minutes from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The design for the site includes a new pedestrian passageway that connects the Sixth Avenue and Broadway subway lines.

You might ask what the “greening” of One Bryant Park will cost. On the high side, our estimate is less than $40 million. If we can help Bank of America employees increase their productivity, the client’s payback period will be short. How can we do that? By creating an environment that attracts and retains the best employees. For example, the air that this building’s occupants breathe will be filtered so well that it will be cleaner than a hospital’s. In our design we’ve also taken into account a science called biophilia, which is how we relate to nature. Your ability to look out the windows during the day, to rest your eyes, to see something outside—even just the sky when it’s raining outside—makes a tremendous difference in how good you feel and, therefore, in how productive you can be. In One Bryant Park, everyone working in the building will have a view outside.

Recently, I attended a discussion with Edward O. Wilson, a professor emeritus at Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment and an internationally known biologist. He said that over the millennia, there have been five extinction periods, mainly caused by meteorites, and we are now in the beginning of the sixth era. But Wilson also said, “I have hope, because I know that Americans are going to figure it out.” That’s the reason I was eager to speak to the students here today. Those of us who are older have less to lose; we need a little push [to engage in the green movement]. It is your generation that can make a difference. I encourage you to do that.

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B OOK S B Y B A R D I A N S

Vertov from Z to A edited by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn, translations by Sanborn ediciones la calavera Dziga Vertov—or “Spinning Top,” the nom de film adopted by David Abelevich Kaufman—was a Russian-Jewish maker of newsreels and documentaries during and immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. His Man with a Movie Camera is still regarded as a definitive modernist statement in film. Editors Peggy Ahwesh, associate professor of film and electronic arts, and Keith Sanborn, faculty in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, have assembled 40 essays by noted critics, poets, and filmmakers, each responding to a single frame of Vertov’s cinematic magnum opus.

The Writer’s Toolbox

by Jamie Cat Callan ’75 chronicle books This toolbox—for it contains cards, a timer, and “Non Sequitur Sticks” in addition to an instruction book—is for anyone who needs “a little jump start into creativity,” says Jamie Cat Callan. The games for which she provides directions are visual and tactile, so she also encourages dancers, scientists, and “anyone who wants to think outside the box” to use them. Callan is a teaching artist with the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and lives in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Trick of the Mind: A Mystery

by Cassandra Chan ’78 st. martin’s minotaur From her home in Port St. Lucie, Florida, Cassandra Chan transports her readers to London and Paris. Trick of the Mind is her third mystery featuring the team of Scotland Yard Sergeant Detective Jack Gibbons and man-about-world Phillip Bethancourt, who shadows his friend on Gibbons’s more interesting cases. In this book Gibbons has been injured in a shooting he doesn’t remember, and Bethancourt must retrace his friend’s steps, which may put him, too, in the line of fire.

Abraham’s Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

by Bruce Chilton ’71 doubleday Theologians and laypeople alike have struggled with the implications of the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac as a show of faith. Bruce Chilton, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion and chaplain of the college, examines ideas of sacrifice and martyrdom in three religions. He seeks to discover how understanding the binding of Isaac could lead to confronting a source of the violence that still plagues our societies, and what is needed to end the brutality.

Spanish Politics: Democracy after Dictatorship

by Omar G. Encarnación polity Introducing his latest book, Omar Encarnación notes that his Bard course on contemporary Spanish politics inspired it. In nine chapters, with numerous figures and tables, Spanish Politics looks at the remarkably successful process of democratization of Spain since the regime of Francisco Franco and presents a lucid, essential text for students of comparative politics. Encarnación is associate professor of political studies.

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Heart Matters

by Jonathan Greene ’65 broadstone books Poems commenting on nature, culture (from Tennessee to Japan and China), and, as the title suggests, matters of the heart populate the latest collection from Jonathan Greene.

In poems that often are short and direct (“During the barn dance/ the barn/ dances”), Greene explores memory, sensory perception, war, and social injustice. Greene, an award-winning book designer and publisher, lives and works in Kentucky.

Part, Part Euphrates

by Arpine Konyalian Grenier MFA ’98 neo pepper press Images of Turkey, Lebanon, and other parts of the Middle East appear throughout this chapbook of poems like shards of pottery washed up on a beach: “a Salonica pebble,” “the wall between east and west Beirut.” Arpine Konyalian Grenier, who was born in Beirut and studied there, explores her relationships to people and places in surrealistic, impressionistic terms. The author of several poetry collections, Grenier lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Death Notices

by Meg Hamill ’01 factory school Many of the poems in this collection appear as unpunctuated, nonstop newspaper death notices for victims of the war in Iraq, military and civilian alike, with and without names. “i want to create a bridge between all the different types of humans,” Meg Hamill writes, her style conveying urgency and a frantic need to try to repair the damages of war.

Hamill is assistant education director at LandPaths, a land advocacy group in Santa Rosa, California.

Priestess of the Forest: A Druid Journey

by Ellen Evert Hopman ’74 llewellyn publications This historical fantasy focuses on a woman living at the time of transition from the Celtic Europe of the Druids to the era of Roman-influenced Christianity. Ellen Evert Hopman calls the love story a “Bardic teaching tale,” as it involves Druidic rituals, herbology, and lore and contains a Celtic glossary. Hopman, an herbalist and homeopath involved in American Druidism, lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems edited by Richard S. Ostfeld, Felicia Keesing, and Valerie T. Eviner princeton university press Examples of environmental effects on the transmission of a range of diseases, from Rift Valley fever in Kenya to Lyme disease in the northeastern United States, have proliferated in recent years. Felicia Keesing and her coeditors here collect essays by 40 experts on the ecological links between ecosystems and disease, essays that examine causes and “preemptive” alleviating actions. Keesing is associate professor of biology.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS | 37

Threads

by Robert Kelly first intensity press Poet Robert Kelly calls Threads “my fealty to the tyranny of the sentence,” and nearly every one of its poems is one sentence long. Sentences are “the bones of meaningfulness on which scraps of flesh or silks might drape for a moment,” Kelly writes in a short foreword that precedes poems that twist and turn back on themselves “to meet/ the meaning of encounter.”

Kelly is Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature.

Fantasies

by Lisa Kereszi ’95 damiani Photographer Lisa Kereszi examines the seamier side of sex, sexuality, and the female body in her latest book, which focuses on strip clubs and other nocturnal haunts. She portrays the burlesque showgirls, as she calls them, on and off stage, in poses ranging from powerful to poignant. In an afterword, Kereszi describes being “drawn to the bravery of these girls of all sizes.” Kereszi lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Yale University School of Art. Obedience

by Will Lavender MFA ’02 shaye areheart books This debut novel begins in the Logic and Reasoning 204 class at Winchester University, taught by the mysterious Professor Williams. He posits a puzzle that demands the use of logic: solve the disappearance of a hypothetical 18-year-old named Polly within six weeks, or she will be murdered. The plot twists ominously, and as supposedly fictional characters begin to appear in students’ lives, the lines between theory and reality become dangerously blurred.

Will Lavender teaches writing and lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Lemoine Affair

by Marcel Proust, translated by Charlotte Mandell ’90 melville house publishing This book marks the first appearance in English of Proust’s novella, which is based on the true story of a notorious French con artist who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal. Each chapter spoofs the style of a different French writer; Balzac, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, and St. Simon, among others, are all nimbly skewered. Charlotte Mandell, a preeminent translator of French poetry and prose, is best known for her award-winning translations of the novels and essays of Maurice Blanchot.

The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures

by F. W. J. Schelling, translated by Bruce Matthews state university of new york press Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was a scholar and philosopher “whose long life was dedicated to the continuous development of his philosophy,” according to Bruce Matthews, who translated this book and wrote its introduction and notes. Schelling’s Berlin lectures, beginning in 1842, highlighted his view of the “positive science” that intrigued Marx, Kierkegaard, and Bakunin, among others. Matthews is a faculty member in philosophy at Bard High School Early College.

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Life in Paradox: The Story of a Gay Catholic Priest

by Paul Murray ’71 o books “Homosexuality and Catholicism provide the texts and contexts of my life’s story,” writes Paul Murray in this memoir that examines his life against the backdrop of sea changes in Catholic thought and practice since Vatican II. Murray, accused of heresy for his “divergence” from church teachings, says that he tells his story out of a desire to reach others in analogous circumstances. He is visiting assistant professor of religion.

John Maynard Keynes: Hyman P. Minsky’s Influential Reinterpretation of the Keynesian Revolution

by Hyman P. Minsky, introduction by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray mcgraw-hill Economist Hyman Minsky, writing about Keynes’s economic theories in the 1970s, determined that the theories were still relevant, even while they were being abandoned. In their new introduction, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray say the current financial crisis might cause economists—whose interest in Minsky’s writing “has reached an all-time peak”—to reexamine Keynes. Papadimitriou is Jerome Levy Professor of Economics and president of The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and Wray is a senior scholar at the Levy Institute.

Stabilizing an Unstable Economy

by Hyman P. Minsky, introduction by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray mcgraw-hill First published in 1986, this most comprehensive of Hyman Minsky’s works has “no equal,” write Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray in their introduction. What’s more, interest in Minsky’s work has increased in light of the recent meltdown in mortgage-backed securities. Papadimitriou, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics and president of The Levy Economics Institute, and Wray, a senior scholar at the Institute, point out how Minsky’s proposals to reduce financial instability and encourage full employment have policy implications for today’s economy.

Meditations on Rising and Falling

by Philip Pardi university of wisconsin press This first collection, winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham Prize in Poetry, looks at reality through flights of imagination. Philip Pardi, director of college writing and visiting instructor of writing, examines birds, angels, dying men, and falling roofers with strong but contained emotion, and he offers solace even in the most painful moments (“those who fear joy / will be found by it”).

My Brother’s Madness: A Memoir

by Paul Pines ’64 curbstone press Paul Pines has written the story of life with his younger brother, Claude, a sensitive boy who gradually descended into delusion and paranoia. In flashbacks from his adult life as a screenwriter visiting Paris, Pines, tortured by Claude’s cryptic phone calls and disappearances, describes their troubled childhood in Brooklyn and their father’s remarriage. Pines, a poet and psychotherapist, lives in Glens Falls, New York.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS | 39

Gertrude Stein: Selections edited by Joan Retallack university of california press This edition of Gertrude Stein’s work from the decades between 1905 and 1936 is prefaced by Joan Retallack’s comprehensive introduction that begins with Stein’s triumphant tour of the United States in 1934. Retallack examines the critical and popular reaction—“a combination of acclaim and puzzlement”—to Stein’s abstruse writing and speaking style, and sheds light on the life of the woman who claimed intellectual kinship with Einstein. Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities and director of the Workshop in Language and Thinking.

Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It

by Elizabeth Royte ’81 bloomsbury In her latest comprehensive and lively inquiry, Elizabeth Royte examines bottled water as the focus of environmental, as well as political, attention. While multinational corporations jockey for our thirst dollars (Nestlé, the world’s largest food-processing company, owns Poland Spring), questions arise about who has rights to water and how those ubiquitous plastic bottles affect our landfills and lives. Royte, who lives in Brooklyn, received Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service in 2007.

Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005

by Luc Sante yeti Cultural critic Greil Marcus, in his introduction to this book, calls Luc Sante “hard-boiled,” as in a detective “poking around in a place where something happened.” In these essays, Sante revisits the Lower East Side of the 1970s; New Jersey, the “ampersand” of a state where he grew up; the rise and fall of mobster John Gotti; and the writings of Bob Dylan, viewing these people and places (and many others) with an eye to descriptive truth without hyperbole.

Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography.

Schapiro’s Heroes

by Steve Schapiro ’55 powerhouse books Renowned documentary photographer Steve Schapiro here features his 1960s photographs of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and others who changed the course of American politics and culture. Arresting images—from Muhammad Ali in his parents’ living room to Andy Warhol lifting weights—are accompanied by Schapiro’s recollections about that hero’s personality and impact. Schapiro, based in Chicago, is represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian Institution.

In the Theatre of Dionysos: Democracy and Tragedy in Ancient Athens

by Richard C. Sewell ’56 mcfarland & company Richard Sewell, a founding director of The Theater at Monmouth in Maine, examines the parallel lives of Greek democracy and drama from the viewpoint of a theatrical practitioner, not a historian. He considers the elements of religion, philosophy, competition, and poetry that fused to create Athenian tragedy, and imagines the authors, performers, backers, and audiences that forged the new dramatic form. Sewell writes and directs in Maine.

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A Road Trip Journal

by Stephen Shore phaidon Stephen Shore’s latest book of photographs commemorates the 35th anniversary of his landmark drive across the country in 1973. The book documents that trip in a comprehensive time capsule. Postcards, yellowed receipts, handwritten lists, and newspaper clippings accompany Shore’s hundreds of photographs of daily life in America. Shore is Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Watching for the Morning: Selected Sermons

by Sheila Shulman ’58 pronoun press When she entered rabbinical school at the age of 48, Sheila Shulman endured hurdles such as age discrimination and objections to her lesbianism and radical feminism. As founding rabbi of Beit Klal Yisrael, a liberal congregation in London, she has discovered ways—as these sermons indicate—to render her experiences into occasions for compassion and insight.

Shulman delivered most of the discourses collected in this book on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis

by Suzanne Vromen oxford university press Personal reasons entered into Suzanne Vromen’s choice of research topic: she and her family fled Belgium in 1941, a year into the Nazi occupation. When she returned to her native country in 2004 and 2006, she interviewed, with a sense of mission, adults who had been hidden as children and the nuns who had protected them. The adults, who as children had to switch identities and religions, tell moving stories, and the nuns provide many insights documented here for the first time. Vromen is professor emeritus of sociology.

Pernicious Tolerance: How Teaching to “Accept Differences” Undermines Civil Society

by Robert Weissberg ’65 transaction publishers Educators are teaching tolerance in an attempt to transform the United States into a paradise where everyone is respected and no one is stigmatized, but those efforts are “utopian,” Robert Weissberg argues in his latest book. The exercise, even in early grades, underestimates the “inherently quarrelsome” nature of humanity, he writes, adding that “positive results” do nothing to improve overall social relations among contentious groups. Weissberg is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

From Dust to Diamonds: Stories of South African Social Entrepreneurs

by Beulah Thumbadoo and Gretchen L. Wilson ’97 pan macmillan Nineteen South African social entrepreneurs—activists who implement vital social change through innovative solutions—are profiled in From Dust to Diamonds. A “Lessons Learned” section at the end of each profile and overall insights detailed in the conclusion make this book as useful as it is inspiring. Wilson is a radio and print journalist who covers sub-Saharan Africa for international news outlets.

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ONANDOFFCAMPUS

New Faculty on Board An international roster of scholars and artists joined the Bard College faculty this fall. Following is a sample.

In the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing: Christian Bracher (Ph.D., Technische Universität München, Germany), assistant professor of physics, includes among his areas of research quantum ballistic motion and its applications, and the sojourn time problem in quantum mechanics. He taught at California State University, Long Beach, and Bryn Mawr College, and conducted postdoctoral research at The College of William and Mary and at Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.

Emily McLaughlin (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania), assistant professor of chemistry, held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Maryland. Her research interests lie in the development of new methods for organic synthesis that will bring about a greater understanding of chemical reactivity. She is interested in manipulating these methods so that they will be applicable to what is known as “green” chemistry, with a focus on sustainability and low environmental impact, such as using water instead of harsh organic solvents.

In the Division of the Arts: Mark Franko (Ph.D., Columbia University), visiting professor of the humanities and performing arts, is a dancer who does research in dance history and theory from early modern to contemporary, performance studies and literatures, and dance and visual culture.

He edited Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2007) and chairs the Theater Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kristin Lucas (M.F.A., Stanford University), assistant professor of studio arts, creates video, digital, performance, and installation art.

Her solo exhibitions include a show earlier this year at And/Or Gallery in Dallas.

In the Division of Social Studies: Beth Gershuny (Ph.D., University of Missouri-Columbia), associate professor of psychology, comes to Bard from Skidmore College. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and is a research affiliate with the Victims of Violence Program at Harvard Medical School. She took part in multisite research, “Genetics of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

In the Division of Languages and Literature: Elizabeth M. Holt (Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University), assistant professor of Arabic, has teaching and research interests that include Arabic language and modern literature, history of the Arabic press, and Francophone literature and culture. She has received two grants from the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures program at Columbia for study in Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon.

Njabulo S. Ndebele (Ph.D., University of Denver), Senior Scholar in Residence, is a South African novelist, poet, and essayist. He is the author of several books, former president of the Congress of South African Writers, and current vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Cape Town.

At the Chinua Achebe Center for African Languages and Literatures, Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan author and journalist, has been appointed director, a position that also has a teaching component.

Wainaina is the founding editor of Kawani? a leading East African literary magazine, and was cited in 2006 as one of the 50 Best Artists in Africa by the British newspaper The Independent.

The Bard Center Fellows have been augmented by two. Stephen Graham (Ph.D., Columbia University) includes among his interests fiction and poetry of the Victorian period. Philip B. Kunhardt III (M.Div., Episcopal Divinity School) is an author (Looking for Lincoln, forthcoming this year from Knopf, and scheduled for PBS in 2009) and a writer and producer of numerous PBS specials.

Botstein and BPI Honored The Pipeline Crisis/Winning Strategies Initiative honored Leon Botstein, president of the college, for his stewardship of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). The honor was presented at a July symposium in New York City that was attended by more than a thousand academics, activists, and political leaders.

The Pipeline Crisis/Winning Strategies Initiative is a national effort aimed at identifying ways to reduce the many barriers that limit the number of young black men in the pipeline to higher education and professional careers. Charles J. Ogletree, a legal scholar who directs and teaches at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, is the driving force behind the initiative and the annual symposium.

BPI was founded in 1999 by Max Kenner ’01, who is now the program’s executive director. BPI offers a Bard College education

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inside five New York state prisons, enrolling nearly 200 incarcerated men and women in rigorous liberal arts courses. The 2008 Commencement, held at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in June, was BPI’s fourth and the first at which Bard College B.A. as well as A.A. degrees were awarded.

The Pipeline Crisis/Winning Strategies Initiative was launched in 2006 by Sullivan & Cromwell LLP; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; and Harvard’s Houston Institute. It calls on the legal, financial services, and business communities to partner with the public sector to address the needs of young black men in target areas: early childhood and public school education; employment and economic development; criminal justice, prison reform, and reentry; and opportunities for youth with high potential.

SEEN & HEARD JUNE 5—Gerard C. Wertkin presented an illustrated lecture, “Visions Made Tangible: Shaker Gift Drawings,” at the New York City campus of The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture.

7—The Bard Center and the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle presented a concert by the Tokyo String Quartet at Olin Hall. The renowned quartet performed works by Franz Joseph Haydn, Anton Webern, and Beethoven.

14—A program by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio featured works by Rachmaninoff; Katherine Hoover; Tchaikovsky; and Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard.

19—Karen Finley performed Impulse to Suck, a new work about the Eliot Spitzer scandal, at Weis Cinema. The presentation was part of Voice & Vision Theater’s ninth ENVISION retreat at the College.

27—The opening concert of Aston Magna’s season at Bard, “The Young Mendelssohn,” featured String Symphony No. 10, which Mendelssohn composed at the age of 12. The concert took place in Olin Hall.

28—The 2008 Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle concert series concluded with a performance by the Trio con Brio Copenhagen.

JULY 4—Aston Magna celebrated the Fourth of July with music from Thomas Jefferson’s library, including selections from The Beggar’s

Here Comes the Class of 2012

Opera, and other works by American and European composers.

The 518 students who matriculated at Bard this fall comprise the College’s most select class to date. Chosen from nearly 5,500 applicants, the members of the Class of 2012 hail from 36 states, and 17 percent are either non–U.S. or dual citizens from 37 countries. In addition to the languages they were required to learn in high school, on their own they have studied Finnish, Hebrew, Norwegian, Esperanto, Aramaic, Swedish, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Danish, Russian, Vietnamese, Swahili, and ancient Greek. Among the successful candidates selected from this year’s applicant pool are more than 50 editors of high school newspapers and literary magazines, several dozen athletes who were team captains, and, notes Mary Backlund, director of admission, “many students with good intern and work experience” gained at places such as a Quaker hospital in Africa, a leprosy clinic in Nepal, an AIDS clinic in Venezuela, law offices and U.S. government agencies, and a Russian orphanage. Over half of the members of the incoming class served as class officers and club presidents and held positions in activist organizations. In keeping with the recent trend of students who apply to Bard intending to study math and the sciences, “there are quite a few science fair winners and finalists in this group,” says Backlund. The Class of 2012 also includes concertmasters, conductors, composers, playwrights, Eagle Scouts, volunteer firefighters, and a student who is training to be a pilot.

Featured performers included soprano Sharon Baker, harpsichordist John Gibbons, and violinist and musical director Daniel Stepner.

11—“J. S. Bach: The Art of the Fugue” was performed by Aston Magna at Olin Hall. Musicians included Daniel Stepner, David Miller, Loretta O’Sullivan, Laura Jeppesen, Christopher Krueger, Stephen Hammer, Michael McGraw, and John Gibbons.

18—Aston Magna performed a selection of English consort songs for its Olin Hall program,“Awake, Sweet Love.”

20—The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts presented an exhibition of works by third-year M.F.A. students at the Bard College Exhibition Center in Red Hook, New York.

AUGUST 1—The Conductors Institute of The Bard College Conservatory of Music presented a program of new works written by Institute composers in the Composer-Conductor Program. The morning concert took place at Olin Hall.

1—The Aston Magna concert series at Bard concluded with “The Operatic Art of Monteverdi’s Late Madrigals.” The Olin Hall program featured a performance of the minidrama Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 43

Kevin O’Connor (left) and Gary Lai use the Fisher Center roof as a stage in Rapture, choreographed by Noémie Lafrance.

Dancers on a Hot Steel Roof When Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts was still under construction, it was a revelation to watch the roped workers deploy themselves in the peaks and valleys of Frank Gehry’s rippling roof. At times they seemed like Sherpas, negotiating the slopes and crevasses of a steel glacier; at other times they evoked surfers on a frozen wave.

For choreographer Noémie Lafrance, the fluid roof of the Fisher Center suggested the perfect place to stage a dance. Her Rapture, a site-specific aerial work involving six dancers suspended in midair and following the contours of Gehry’s architecture, concluded two weeks of thrilling, eerily beautiful performances on October 5. Commissioned by the Fisher Center,

the dance, a world premiere, was made possible by the generous support of Tiffany & Co. “To me, Gehry’s buildings feel alive; they seem to be in motion, constantly adapting to the light, your vantage point, and the natural landscape,” said Lafrance, the artistic director of Sens Production and choreographer of Karol Szymanowski’s Harnasie at this year’s Bard SummerScape. Her hope is to adapt Rapture for site-specific dances on other landmark Gehry buildings, such as Disney Hall in Los Angeles and the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago.

Another of Lafrance’s alfresco dance works, Manor Field, took place in the eponymous expanse adjacent to the Fisher Center preceding each performance of Rapture. The work, an “exploration of topology and time,” was performed by Bard dance students.

New Book Studies James, Brother of Jesus The research of a group of biblical scholars leads them to believe that Jesus had four brothers and that the eldest, James, merits special attention as the first leader of the early Christian movement.

This opinion challenges two traditional views: that Mary was a lifelong virgin, and that Peter was Jesus’s immediate successor.

Bardians who wish to learn more about James may read Retrieving James/Yakov, the Brother of Jesus, a new book by renowned biblical scholar Sean Freyne, visiting professor of early Christian history and literature at Harvard Divinity School and director of the Centre for Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. The book is published by the Center for the Study of James the Brother at Bard College, part of the Institute of Advanced Theology (IAT). The text is adapted from the Center’s inaugural lecture, which Freyne gave in Weis Cinema last fall.

Cofounded by Frank T. Crohn, the Center collects and provides scholarship regarding James and explains his distinctive teaching. The book’s preface is by Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion, and executive director of IAT. Bard College thanks Frank T. and Helene Crohn for their outstanding support of the Center for James the Brother.

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Track and Field Takes Off

SEPTEMBER

Bard’s first-ever varsity track and field team hit the ground running last spring, with 14 men and eight women competing in four meets during its opening season. Head coach Fred Pavlich began training student athletes in February. Their first meet—held in April at Misericordia University in wind, rain, and bitter cold— resulted in some top-five finishes.

The team hit its stride in the final invitational meet of the season, at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Pitted against vigorous competition from more established track teams, Raptor runners clocked their best times of the year. Both of Bard’s polevaulters cleared opening heights and placed well. William Sarno ’10 made the finals for javelin. In the 5000m run, Charles Barnes ’08 passed the lead runner from Hofstra University with only one-anda-half laps to go, winning Bard a first-place finish and crowning the College’s inaugural varsity track and field season with a victory.

“This season was a great start,” said Erica Ball ’11, who runs 5000m, 1500m, and the 4x800m relay for the women’s team. “The runners that carried over from cross country held the team together, and we gained excellent athletes in the field events. This season’s success will be measured further by the strength of the team next spring and our ability to improve from year to year.”

As the team ended its first season on a high note, Coach Pavlich looked to double its roster for the spring 2009 season.

8—The Bard Graduate Center presented “White-Muslined Misses and Mamas: Women’s Fashionable Dress in France and England, 1789–1815,” a discussion by clothing historian and assistant professor Michele Majer and BGC researcher Michelle Hargrave.

9—Violinist Arnold Steinhardt conducted a master class at Olin Hall with students from The Bard College Conservatory of Music.

16—The Institute of Advanced Theology presented a book signing and lecture by Father Paul Murray ’71, Catholic chaplain at Bard and author of Life in Paradox: The Story of a Gay Catholic Priest. The event was held at Weis Cinema.

—Students at The Bard College Conservatory of Music performed the first of their fall series of noontime concerts at Olin Hall.

18—Ted Sorensen, adviser to President John F. Kennedy and author of Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, gave the first lecture in the fall 2008 James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series. The talk, “Leadership in International Affairs,” was sponsored by the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA) and held at the Levin Institute in New York City.

19— Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion, kicked off the Institute of Advanced Technology’s fall lecture series with his talk “Child Sacrifice in the Legacies of the West.”

19, 20—Leon Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra in a Fisher Center program celebrating Grammy-winning composer Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, on the occasion of her 70th birthday. “Tower, Beethoven, Strauss” featured Tower’s 2001 percussion work Strike Zones.

22—Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, spoke about values-based foreign policy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City as part of the BGIA’s James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.

Team captain Aaron Ahlstrom ’10 (right) runs his third race of the day, the 4x800m relay, at Misericordia University last April. Ahlstrom was this year’s Skyline Cross Country individual champion for Bard; he also won the North Eastern Athletic Conference Cross Country championship in his first year.

26–28—“Music and Torture,” a conference sponsored by the Human Rights Project, Bard Music Festival, and Musical Quarterly, featured panel discussions, lectures, and a concert at Olin Hall.

27—The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art, an exhibition featuring work by more than 50 artists, opened at the CCS Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art. Curated

by Maria Lind, director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, the show runs through February 1, 2009.

OCTOBER 2— The BGIA presented a talk by Robert J. Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the Clinton administration and author of Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Arriving in the rain at Misercordia University in Pennsylvania last April for Bard’s first varsity track meet were (left to right): Samantha Root ’11, Erica Ball ’11, Mariam Alshagra ’11, assistant coach Jack Powers, Kevin Powell ’11, Tavin Weeda ’11, William Sarno ’10, Charles Barnes ’08, Eric Mulholland ’11, David Silberberg ’11, Sam Share ’11, Maka Geller ’11, and Lionel Barrow ’11.

Absent from photo: head coach Fred Pavlich and Aaron Ahlstrom ’10.

Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work. Held at the Levin Institute and simulcast to the Annandale campus, the lecture, “Implications of Globalization,” was part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 45

Fulbright to Simon’s Rock Graduate Ann Burchfield, who graduated this year as a linguistics major from Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, received one of 24 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantships (ETA) to Taiwan. The ETA Program, which has grown rapidly over the last two years, is part of the broader Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. Burchfield, of Uvalde, Texas, is spending a year teaching English to elementary school children in Yilan County in northern Taiwan and consulting with local teachers on English teaching materials and U.S. cultural issues.

She also plans to deepen her Chinese skills in a way that she believes would be impossible to do at home.

Burchfield, who studied Chinese and Arabic at Simon’s Rock, fell in love with languages in college. Her passion went beyond pure words to encompass a wider educational purpose. For her senior thesis, she developed a user-friendly Arabic language primer for children in elementary school. “Students are not able to study these languages until college, when they are far past the age when language is easily acquired,” she says. Her thesis addressed that problem and underscored her belief in the importance of Arabic language learning in the current global climate.

Winning the prestigious Fulbright ETA, which pays a monthly stipend and aims to integrate its U.S. recipients fully into their host communities, allows Burchfield to continue breaking down language barriers. “Even though I have never spent more than a day outside of the United States,” she says, “languages have been my window into other cultures.”

Smolny Inaugurates Human Rights Center

Opening the Smolny Human Rights Center (left to right): Vincent McGee, trustee of the Gagarin Trust; Maria Gagarina; and Andrej Gagarin, her father and a cousin of Andrew Gagarin

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Smolny College inaugurated the new location of its Andrew Gagarin Center for Human Rights in June. Located in a large, welllit room in the freshly renovated fifth wing of the Bobrinskiy Palace in St. Petersburg, the new center provides a home for Smolny’s growing human rights archives and informal meeting space for civil society groups engaged in human rights–related activities. The ceremony was attended by more than 60 wellwishers representing Smolny College, Bard College, the Gagarin family and foundation, and local human rights organizations.

The Center was made possible by a generous grant from the Gagarin Trust, a California-based foundation created from the estate of Russian-born businessman Andrew Gagarin, whose family home was located only a few blocks from Smolny. At the opening ceremony, Vincent McGee, a trustee of the Gagarin Trust, congratulated Smolny on its success in simultaneously creating Russia’s first academic program in human rights and launching an active program of human rights activities open to the larger community. McGee, a founder of Amnesty International, also serves on the Board of Advisors of Bard’s Institute for International Liberal Education and Smolny College’s international Board of Overseers.

Smolny’s human rights activities include teaching, research, a fellowship program, lectures and presentations, student internships, and conferences. With the additional support of the Ford and MacArthur foundations, Smolny Collegium-International Interdisciplinary Institute of Advanced Sciences is also critiquing the content of history teaching in contemporary Russia and developing online human rights courses with other Russian universities and civic organizations.

BGC and Met Collaborate in ’Twixt Art and Nature

A visualization by Olafur Eliasson of The Parliament of Reality, which he is creating on the Bard campus

Eliasson Island a New Part of Bard Imagine an island, in a circular lake, in a meadow on the Bard campus. Imagine this island as a place where people gather to eat, relax, talk, and give performances. Olafur Eliasson, the renowned Icelandic-Danish artist (who created The New York City Waterfalls on the East River), realizes this vision at Bard through The Parliament of Reality.

“Eliasson creates great visual effect by very simple means,” says Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture (CCS) at Bard. “He works with natural processes—water, waterfalls, light—that are in some way tweaked by human influence. What was natural becomes unnatural.”

The Parliament of Reality consists of an island of cut granite in a round lake surrounded by trees. The bridge leading to the island is made of a stainless-steel latticework that becomes denser as one crosses, so that arrival on the island is experienced as passage through an aperture. Construction on Parliament began in August, with an opening scheduled for 2009.

The installation is funded by the Luma Foundation, which was founded in 2004 by Maja Hoffman, a member of the CCS Board of Governors. The Luma Foundation supports international and interdisciplinary projects that explore the relationship between art and culture, advance and enforce human rights, protect the environment, and promote education and research.

“Like CCS and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, The Parliament of Reality becomes another point of destination at Bard,” says Eccles.

English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca.

1580–1700: ’Twixt Art and Nature is the third in a series of collaborative exhibitions organized by The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The shows examine underexplored aspects of the Metropolitan’s permanent collections.

On view at the BGC Gallery at 18 West 86th Street in Manhattan from December 11 through March 15, ’Twixt Art and Nature highlights a selection of significant Tudor embroideries, many of which have not been on public view since the 1960s. The co-curators are Melinda Watt, assistant curator of textiles at the Metropolitan, and Andrew Morrall, professor at the BGC, who developed the exhibition with students in the Center’s History and Theory of Museums concentration.

Organized thematically to convey the relevance of embroidered textiles in the everyday life and culture of Tudor England, the show also reveals the complex technical skill and iconography behind the embroideries. Juxtaposing these thematically rich and technically complex objects with contemporary prints, books, and other materials allows viewers to examine the objects’ significance within the social and cultural economy of 17th-century domestic life in England.

Before ’Twixt Art and Nature opens in December, New York– area Bardians have the opportunity to catch the last few weeks of the critically acclaimed exhibition, Thomas Hope: Regency Designer, on view at the BGC Gallery until November 16.

Casket embroidered with scenes from the story of Esther, late 17th century

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 47

A New Look: CCS Summer Shows Experiencing the traditional white-cube box of a gallery space in a fresh way was the goal of the two summer exhibitions presented in the galleries at the Center for Curatorial Studies. Personal Protocols and Other Preferences: A Collective Exhibition with Work

by Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, and Kirstine Roepstorff was on view at the CCS Bard Galleries. I’ve Got Something in My Eye, a new project by the artist team Bik Van der Pol, was exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art. For Personal Protocols, curated by Maria Lind, director of the CCS graduate program, the three Berlin-based artists thought of the exhibition not as a group show but as a collective one, and made decisions about the installation together. Beutler produced 9-foot walls of colorful paper. The new walls altered the gallery space, in which Ersen showed a documentary video she had made with street children in her hometown of Istanbul. Roepstorff’s textile-like collages, some of which were made directly on the wall, could be viewed in part from a tower constructed by Beutler.

I’ve Got Something in My Eye presented more than 80 works by 40 artists in the Marieluise Hessel Collection; selections from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; works by Rotterdam-based Bik Van der Pol; and ephemera from the CCS Bard curatorial archive. Bik Van der Pol (Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol) sought to have visitors consider the parallels and divergences between the Hessel and the Abbemuseum collections, and the institutions that house and interpret them.

Part of Personal Protocols and Other Preferences was Woven Walls by Michael Beutler, a site-specific installation constructed of paper, reed, and wood.

The Greening of Bard

Congratulating each other at their Bard High School Early College Commencement in June were (left to right) Francisco Feliz Jr., now a student at Yale University; Lisa Hoyte, who attends Long Island University in Brooklyn; and Susie Flores, who is at Syracuse University.

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Bard is one of only 10 colleges to be chosen for a national pilot project to help campuses save energy. Bard became eligible for the pilot after Leon Botstein signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, agreeing to a comprehensive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on campus.

The program is a partnership between the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) and American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) to retrofit campus buildings with energy-saving technology.

The Clinton initiative allows colleges to pay for the installation of large-scale energy-efficient equipment through guaranteed savings in utility bills, rather than upfront payments from capital budgets or increases in operating budgets. ACUPCC signatories can lower their project costs through arrangements with financial institutions, energy providers, and product manufacturers with which the CCI has established relationships.

Those chosen as pilot schools are institutions “with experience in executing building retrofits or with the ability to proceed quickly through the contracting process, and who have identified new potential campus energy efficiency projects,” according to a Presidents Climate Commitment statement. “This initiative will help control rising utility bills and help us modernize our buildings and improve comfort—all while we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” said Laurie Husted, Bard environmental resources auditor.

ICP Turns Lens on History Images from 19th-century tintype studios and photographs of war and political upheaval are the subjects of current exhibitions at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan. The School of the ICP awards an M.F.A. degree in photography in collaboration with Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Selected from the ICP’s permanent collection, the 150 tintypes on view in America and the Tintype offer a startlingly candid record of American life during the four decades following the Civil War, when the tintype was the most popular photographic medium in the United States. W. Eugene Smith and World War II presents the compelling photographs that Smith shot on assignment in the Pacific theater from 1943 to 1945.

Cornell Capa: Concerned Photographer is a retrospective of work by the ICP’s founding director, who died in May. Susan Meiselas: In History is the first U.S. overview of the work of this major American documentary photographer.

Covering several of her long-term projects, including the enduring political upheavals in Nicaragua and Kurdistan, the exhibition also examines Meiselas’s ongoing questions about her relationship to her subjects and the roles that images play in history and memory. Meiselas is a member of the Magnum photographers collective; see page 14 for an article about her Magnum colleague Gilles Peress, who teaches at Bard. All four exhibitions are open through January 4.

ICP’s winter and spring exhibitions, open January 16 – May 3, are: Edward Steichen: In High Fashion; Fashion Now! and This is Not a Fashion Photograph: Selections from the ICP Collection.

New Director of Alumni/ae Affairs

©Susan Meiselas/Magnum

Jane Brien ’89 became director of alumni/ae affairs in July.

Brien, originally from London, first came to Bard as a student in 1985. She majored in history with a concentration in women’s studies and did research on immigrant women entering the U.S. workforce in the mid-19th century.

In 1998 Brien began working at Bard in the Admission Office. There she took on stewardship of the growing population of international applicants and eventually became the director of international recruitment. For six of her 10 years in admission, Brien traveled extensively to recruit students from underrepresented parts of the world. Her commitment to financial assistance for international students has made Bard’s current group the most economically and geographically diverse to date.

Today Brien is excited about making the crossover to the Alumni/ae Office. “Having been intimately involved in the creation of the student body for the last 10 years, I wanted the opportunity to continue to work with them after they left Bard,” she says. “I also wanted to share what is happening at Bard now with the older alumni/ae. Despite the physical changes on campus and the increased applicant pool, Bard students are still handpicked for the qualities that make them stand apart. I assure all my fellow alumni/ae that the Bard student of today would be instantly recognizable to you—as interesting, smart, enthusiastic, and innovative as always.”

A photograph of Kamaran Abdullah Saber is held by his family at Saiwan Hill cemetery. He was killed in July 1991 during a student demonstration against Saddam Hussein in Kurdistan, northern Iraq.

Levy Institute Launches eNewsletter The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has launched an electronic newsletter as part of its education and outreach program. The newsletter features articles about upcoming events and new research initiatives, as well as synopses of the Institute’s latest publications. These publications, all of which are available at the Levy Institute website, include analyses of U.S. economic performance, conference and symposium proceedings, a book series, and policy statements on a wide range of issues. The newsletter includes links to the full texts as well as a syndicated news feed. To subscribe, go to www.levy.org.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 49

CLASSNOTES

Thanks from the Alumni/ae Office Thank you to all of the alumni/ae who completed the 2007 Alumni/ae Survey. It was great to read so many reminiscences from across the decades.

Your assistance was invaluable in helping us to evaluate our programs. Ten percent of Bard’s undergraduate alumni/ae responded to the survey, 85 percent of them online. We were thrilled to learn that 94 percent of the respondents read the Bardian. The finding that 81 percent read our e-newsletter—in contrast to the 44 percent who regularly visit the Bard website—was instrumental in an in-depth examination of our e-communications. As a result, we revamped our e-newsletter and now send it out more frequently. In addition, we are investigating new technologies that we want to use and services we hope to launch during this academic year.

The survey also helped us identify alumni/ae who would like to participate in various alumni/ae programs. Information about what types of events, in which areas, alumni/ae prefer will also help us to create programs in different areas of the country. The number of class correspondents is growing, and the survey results have provided staff and reunion committee leaders with numerous candidates for upcoming reunion committees.

BARD–ST. STEPHEN’S ALUMNI/AE ASSOCIATION HOLIDAY PARTY DECEMBER 12 LOCATION Weiss Café, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York City TIME 6:00–9:00 p.m.

AFTER PARTY O’Flanagan’s, 1215 First Avenue (between 65 and 66 Streets), New York City

Bardians in New Orleans Alumni/ae, watch your e-mail for a Bard alumni/ae trip to New Orleans in January 2009.

Join current students in their efforts to help rebuild the city, listen to local community leaders discuss the issues involved, and get a chance to experience the sights and sounds of the “Big Easy.” Tentative dates are January 11–19.

Do you remember studying sculpture with Harvey Fite, or working at Opus 40?

David Kaminski, a documentary filmmaker, is gathering information for a film about Harvey Fite and Opus 40 and is looking for any of Fite’s students or associates who could contribute memories of him or provide any photographs. At this time, Bob Bassler ’57 is Kaminski’s primary Bard contact. If you can offer memories of your association or experiences relating to Harvey Fite, contact David Kaminski at 22 White Avenue, Nyack, NY 10960; 845-353-5495 (h), 845-548-9042 (cell); davidekaminski@yahoo.com.

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Harvey Fite (1903–76) discusses a student’s work in the Bard sculpture studio during the fall of 1966. “They’re apparently in an introductory course in sculpture that initially required all to execute a life-sized self-portrait in clay,” says Bob Bassler ’57, who majored in sculpture under Fite.

This bright corps of current students and alumni/ae worked diligently, devotedly, and at times deliriously to make this year’s SummerScape a rousing success.

Assembled in front of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts are (in alphabetical order) SummerScape staffers Nadia Arginteanu ’09, Glenna Broderick ’09, Jesse Brown ’10, Jack Byerly ’10, Vincent Chiarito ’08, Grace Converse ’09, Valerie Ellithorpe ’09, Emily Gildea ’11, Allegra Gilfenbaum ’10, Scott “Wren” Gould ’09, Joseph Guerin ’09, Xian He ’10, Anatole Hocek ’12, Mary Knapp ’10, Carl Kranz ’08, Ashleigh McCord ’08, Austin Miller ’06, Diana Pitcher ’12, Melissa Revell ’10, Ruth Shannon ’08, Phillip Meir Siblo-Landsman ’09, Raissa St. Pierre ’87, Amy Strumbly ’11, and Tobe Tsuchiya ’08.

’08

’06

Lanya Snyder organized an exhibition titled One Week Only! at White Columns, a New York City gallery. The show, which ran from July 31 to August 2, featured work by five artists, including two of Snyder’s classmates, Beny Wagner and Clara Jo. Snyder showed a series of large-format color photographs that explore the nature of image construction; Jo’s contribution was an installation that employed imagery, sound, and light to playfully examine ideas of intimacy; and Wagner showed a series of abstract paintings that consider history as an ever-evolving process.

Class correspondent Kirsten Dunlaevy, kdunlaevy@gmail.com

’07 Nicholas Risko is cofounder of TUPO International, a nonprofit agency that finds sustainable funding solutions for Tanzanian orphanages. After working on a project to improve primary health care in Massachusetts, he has decided to pursue a master’s degree in international health systems at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He began his studies there in August.

After graduation Alejandro “Ahli” Heredia Santoyo moved to Cozumel, Mexico, where he cofounded a small villa rental business. He also works in the office of Duende Tours, a multisport, Mayan jungle ecotourism organization. He is preparing to take the LSAT and hopes to begin law school in the fall of 2009. If any Bardians are interested in visiting Cozumel, Ahli would be happy to hear from them at ahliexodus@yahoo.com.

Christophe Chung lives and works in New York City. This past spring he interned with the Equator Initiative, one of the United Nations’ development programs. By night, he waits tables at Morimoto, with the Iron Chef.

Kirsten Dunlaevy has been working for Saatchi & Saatchi Consumer Health+Wellness in New York City since graduation, and has acquired several accounts for the agency as part of the new business team. In the summer of 2008 she sailed from Bermuda to New York—some 700 miles—and also participated in an international team-racing event.

Kate Myers continues to pursue her passion for music: to date she has made several national tours, and last year she was featured as a Billboard Underground Artist. She has recorded her third album, and plans to move to Los Angeles this fall. For more information, visit www.katemyers.com.

Doug O’Connor published his first work of short fiction in April 2008 in the Tusculum Review.

’05 Alex Klebanoff is an intern at Christie’s in New York City in the Post-War & Contemporary Art department. He wrote the catalogue

CLASS NOTES | 51

Friends at the wedding of Ursula Arsenault ’01 and Bob Adams included (left to right) Theresa Santopolo ’01, Ashley Kammrath ’01, Caitlin Nusser ’01, Danielle (Debroux) Mattei ’01, Rachel Ebert ’01, Ursula, Hannah Adams ’01, and Matt Lucas ’01.

essays about three recent lots on offer: Warhol’s Energy Power; a Donald Judd Stack; and Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ.

Earlier this fall Alex entered the master of arts degree program in visual arts administration at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He plans to continue working at Christie’s while he is in graduate school.

Kendra Rubinfeld saw a dream become reality in early 2008 when her brainchild, a film festival of Washington, D.C.–based documentaries, came to fruition in February. The Our City Film Festival, presented by the Jewish nonprofit group Yachad, for which Kendra works, was featured in the Washington Post. In the article Kendra is quoted as seeing the festival “not only as a way to generate interest among young people in her organization’s work, but as an opportunity to showcase documentaries that present aspects of life in the nation’s capital that are rarely explored.” For more information about Yachad, visit www.yachad-dc.org/.

2006 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Leonora also writes, plays poker, and strums on the guitar occasionally. Please visit her at www.babbosbooks.com.

Brian Yanity received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2006 from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in Arctic engineering from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, in December 2007. Brian is now an engineer based in Anchorage, working on renewable energy systems for rural villages in northwest Alaska for NANA Pacific LLC, a division of the Northwest Arctic Native Association (NANA). NANA is a “regional native corporation” for the Inupiaq Eskimo of Alaska’s Northwest Arctic Borough (http://www.nana.com). The Northwest Arctic Borough is larger in land area than Portugal. It is on the coast of the Chukchi Sea north of the Arctic Circle, only 200 miles or so from the mainland of Asia.

’03 ’04 5th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663 or whitmore@bard.edu Daniyel Grancich has begun her graduate studies at Oxford University, working toward a master’s degree in film aesthetics.

Leonora Stein had completed the City Year service program and was job-searching when she opened Babbo’s Books in October

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Trumpeter/composer Samantha Boshnack lives in Seattle, where she makes a living playing and teaching music. She toured with her band Reptet in April 2008, performing in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Boston, Trenton, Chicago, Kalamazoo, Portland (Maine), and the campus center at Bard. In 2006 Reptet released the album Do This! which received critical acclaim. Samantha received funding from 4Culture to record five compositions on her new album Chicken or Beef ? which is now available. For more

information, visit www.reptet.com. She can also be heard on the Picoso album Vamonos Pal Mole, available at www.picoso.net.

l’Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, Centre Pompidou. He can be contacted at betweenfloors@gmail.com.

Jacob Cottingham is a freelance writer and lives in Austin, Texas.

Composer David Homan had works premiered at Weill Hall in New York City; as part of a Joyce Soho Dance performance with choreographer Davis Robertson; at the ImageMovementSound Festival in Rochester, New York, with choreographer Missy Smith; and at the Miami City Ballet Studio Theatre with choreographer Letty Bassart. To listen to his music, visit www.homanmusic.com.

’02 Laura Gordon and Greg Roman are moving to South Hadley, Massachusetts, this fall. Greg has taken a position in the department of chemistry at Mount Holyoke College. He will be starting a small undergraduate research program in biotechnology that is specifically aimed at neuroscience studies of addiction, pain, and sleep. Laura has received her doctor of veterinary medicine degree and practices on dogs, cats, and small ruminants. She hopes to expand her practice to good-tempered pleasure horses and happy New England dairy cows.

’01 Class correspondent Sung Jee Yoo, sujeyo@gmail.com Ursula Arsenault lives in Chicago with her husband, Bob Adams.

They were married on September 1, 2007. Ursula is the retail projects manager for Threadless/skinnyCorp (www.threadless.com), opening the first brick-and-mortar stores of what has been a strictly online business for the last seven years.

Adina Ba (Estreicher) is a foundation analyst at the Pitney Bowes Literacy and Education Fund. She also volunteers for global and United States–based human rights organizations. You can find her articles on www.raceintheworkplace.com. Adina offers ecotourism vacation packages with her partners in Senegal, West Africa, and travels there often. Feel free to get in touch: adinaba@hotmail.com.

Melanie M. Brookes is an attorney at Berchem, Moses & Devlin, P.C., in Milford, Connecticut, where she represents public boards of education, primarily in the areas of special education and student discipline. Before entering private practice, she served as a deputy attorney general for the state of New Jersey after receiving her juris doctor degree from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 2004.

Katy Crile married Aaron Mason on October 13, 2007, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is working on a master’s degree in social work at New York University.

This year James Curcio published a novel, Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, and cofounded Mythos Media, a new-media production company dedicated to generating and sustaining modern myths.

He is working on a screenplay for an interactive film with the acclaimed UK–based theater group Foolish People. For more information, visit http://fallennation.mythosmedia.net.

Bernard Geoghegan is a doctoral candidate in the screen cultures program at Northwestern University. He spent 2007–08 as a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is finishing his dissertation in Paris, where he is also working at

Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, a nautical rock musical with puppets, premiered Off Broadway in May 2008 at Ars Nova. Jollyship was written by Nick Jones with music directed by Raja Azar ’00. Both also perform in the piece, with Keith Fredrickson ’00 and Dan Kutcher. They have created music and theater since their time at Bard, and have been working together as a group for more than five years, based out of Brooklyn.

Blanca Lista has been living in Los Angeles for almost two years, working as a director’s assistant. She is immersed in the production of a live-action feature film adaptation of a manga (Japanese comic book). She writes that sunny California’s cozy, slow-paced rhythm fits her like a glove.

Susanna Low-Beer lives in Portland, Oregon, and graduated with a master of science degree in Asian medicine in June. In addition to studying herbal medicine, acupuncture, and tai chi, Susanna has busied herself converting cars to run on waste vegetable oil, building houses out of straw and mud, and learning about permaculture.

For more information on sustainable living education in Portland, visit http://www.cityrepair.org. You can contact Susanna at susannalb@gmail.com.

Margarett Newton (Reynolds) lives in Westchester, New York, with her husband and two-year-old son, and works in a small family office: office@rinsey.org.

Anthony Rivera instructs drama classes for inner-city youth in community centers and after-school programs throughout New York City. He is dedicated to giving the city’s youth a well-rounded theatrical experience.

Jorge A. Santana works at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a master’s degree at the Fels Institute of Government in August 2008. He spends his free time building his consultancy practice, Better Capital Group.

Noah Sheola lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he has written and produced several original plays at the Players’ Ring Theater. He performs with the improvisational comedy troupe Stranger than Fiction (strangerthanfiction.us). He also works in an antiquarian book and map shop.

Erin Weeks-Earp married Vladimir Averyanov in St. Petersburg, Russia, in July 2005. Erin enrolled at Teachers College, Columbia University, in September 2006 and is now a part-time student and proud mom of David Alexander, born February 8, 2008. Erin, Vladimir, and David live in Jersey City, New Jersey.

CLASS NOTES | 53

Sung Jee Yoo became engaged to Michael C. Mamaril (who went to Rutgers University) in November 2007. They live in Jackson Heights, New York, with their cat, Congee. Sung Jee left the translation industry last year to join Scholastic’s International Rights division.

Xiaoyu Eileen Zhang and Matthew Richards (Levy Scholar 1999–2001) celebrated the first birthday of their daughter, Sophie May Richards, in June 2008.

’00 The MacGuffin, a national literary magazine from Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan, published Michelle Efrein’s short story “Orders” in its spring/summer 2008 edition.

’99 10th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663 or whitmore@bard.edu

’98 Class correspondent Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com

Archana Sridhar is enjoying life in Bloomington, Indiana, where she lives with her husband, Kevin. Archana is assistant dean for research at Indiana University School of Law.

’97 Class correspondent Julia Wolk Munemo, jmunemo@roadrunner.com Joshua Lutz (ICP–Bard ’05) had a solo show of photographs at Tobacco Warehouse Pavilion in Brooklyn, May 14–18. The exhibition was sponsored by The Tierney Fellowship in conjunction with the New York Photo Festival. For more information on Joshua’s work, visit his website: www.joshualutz.com.

Hunter Bivens is an assistant professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is working on a book about urban space, affect, and literature in the German Democratic Republic.

Ruth Ungar Merenda and her husband, Michael, released a duo CD of their music, titled The Honeymoon Agenda, and are overjoyed to announce the birth of their son, William Puck Merenda, born January 28, 2008. Their wedding in Big Indian, New York, on October 28, 2006, was attended by several fellow Bardians: Mollie St. John ’98, Sheila Berotti ’96, Jessica Burr ’96, Pahu Kier Van Riel ’96, Andrew Hill ’95, Jennifer (Lewenson) Hansen ’97, and Jennifer Glickman ’98.

Gretchen L. Wilson is based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is Africa correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace.

She writes that she “had an awesome time at the 2007 Reunion Weekend, but time was fleeting and suddenly it was over and everyone was going home.” She would love to stay in touch: gretchen@gretchenlwilson.com.

Jennifer (Hames) Winsor and Jon Winsor ’93 had their first baby, Theodore Andreas Winsor, on February 28, 2008. Jen wonders if he might be a future Bardian himself one day.

’96 Class correspondents Gavin Kleespies, gwkleespies@hotmail.com Abigail Morgan, abigail@floatchinesemedicalarts.com Brent Armendinger has begun a tenure-track position at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he teaches creative writing and literature.

Kristi Barnes has spent the last year traveling around the world with a very affable fellow named Dennis Campbell. To learn more about their travels, visit www.sophisticatedalpaca.com.

Hunter Bivens ’97 with his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Miranda

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Anna Boroughs and her husband, Ryan, have welcomed Logan Milo into the world. Fellow Bardian Elena Vogel ’02 was the doula at the home birth.

’93

Michael Merenda, William Puck Merenda, and Ruth Ungar Merenda ’97

Matthew DeGennaro recently received his Ph.D. in developmental genetics from New York University. His focus was on the redox regulation of germ cell migration in drosophila. He will continue to live in New York City, where he has accepted a postdoctoral position at Rockefeller University. He is also happy to announce his engagement to his partner, Christian Larsen.

Gavin W. Kleespies and Gabriel Robinson have moved to the Boston area, where Gavin has begun working as the executive director of the Cambridge Historical Society.

’95 Lisa Kereszi was named “Critic’s Pick” by Richard Woodward in the January 2008 issue of Artnews. Her monograph Fantasies was released in March 1, 2008; a book signing took place at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in Manhattan. Lisa was in the group show Properly Past, curated by Olga Kopenkina CCS ’06, at the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn from March through May. In August 2007, Laurie (Curry) Molnar and her family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where Laurie works for the United States Mission and represents the United States at the World Trade Organization as trade negotiator for industrial tariffs in the Doha Development Round. They are enjoying the hiking, skiing, and scenery, with wine and chocolate, of course.

’94 15th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Gantt Gurley received his Ph.D. in Scandinavian from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007. His dissertation was titled Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Prose. After lecturing for the department for one year, he accepted a position at Harvard University for 2008–09 as a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies. Gantt is working on a book project that deals with the emergence of rabbinic anthologies in 19thcentury English, German, and Danish literatures.

Susan Johnston is the coauthor, with Nicole Sexton, of Party Favors, a “novel of politics and greed” published by the Lyons Press. Party Favors launched its national book tour with stops at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Denver and Minneapolis this past summer. Susan finished her bachelor of fine arts degree at New York University’s Gallatin School, and earned her master of fine arts degree in dramatic writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a published playwright and has worked as a film industry reporter for Interview magazine as well as a writer for A&E’s popular Biography series.

She was the recipient of a MacDowell Colony residency, a Eugene O’Neill Theater Center summer residency, and a Jerome Fellowship, and was a Fulbright nominee. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Benjamin Schneider left a litigation firm in October 2007 to become assistant deputy executive director of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board.

’92 Class correspondent Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu Michael Conelly has published his first book, The Abbot’s Book, which is available on Amazon.

Random House has published David Cote’s Spring Awakening: In the Flesh, a behind-the-scenes companion volume to the hit Broadway musical, Spring Awakening. David also wrote the libretto for Bard classmate Stefan Weisman’s short opera Fade, which was commissioned by Second Movement, a London-based opera company. The work gets its world premiere this fall in London, on a triple bill with operas by Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber.

David has a full-length play and other projects in development. He blogs at histriomastix.typepad.com. Stefan teaches in The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program and the Music Department of the City College of New York, CUNY. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.

James Kulla lives and works in San Jose, California, as an engineering technician for a start-up company that is developing a next-generation chip for cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). He can be reached via e-mail at jamiekul@yahoo.com.

’91 Following the success of her book, Prague: Artˇel Style, Karen Feldman, director and proprietor of Artˇel, opened a flagship store in November 2007. The boutique, located in Prague’s Old Town, features an extensive collection of Artˇel glass, alongside antique books, jewelry, and found objects. For more information, visit artelstyle.com.

CLASS NOTES | 55

Educational and Cultural Affairs, was created to foster cultural exchange in areas with limited access to American culture. Visit universesonstage.com or myspace.com/universesmusic.

’88 Class correspondent Tena Cohen, callejero@earthlink.net Jennifer Dewsnap is the manager of the business and science department at the Main Library in Miami, Florida. She has been living in Coral Gables, Florida, with her husband, John, and their dog, JoJo, since 2004.

Scott Licamele ’91 and John Major

Scott Licamele is based in Kiev, and is a vice president at Renaissance Capital, the leading independent investment banking firm operating in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The firm serves both domestic companies and international clients investing in the CIS. Scott met the Right Honorable John Major, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, at a conference in Kiev in February.

’90 Charlotte Mandell had five translations published in 2008: Listen: A History of Our Ears, by Peter Szendy (Fordham); The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac (Melville House); Geography of Hope by Pierre Birnbaum (Stanford); The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust (Melville House; see Books by Bardians, this issue); and On Poetry and Politics by Jean Paulhan (University of Illinois, cotranslated with Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, and Jennifer Bajorek). Charlotte’s translation of Jules Verne’s The Castle in Transylvania (Melville House) is forthcoming. Also forthcoming, from HarperCollins, is The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, which will be published in February 2009; look for its website online, in English, German, and Hebrew.

’89 20th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu Class correspondent Lisa DeTora, detoral@lafayette.edu Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz ’92, and William Ruiz ’03 are members of Universes, a critically acclaimed poetic theater ensemble whose work incorporates theater, hip-hop, blues, boleros, and poetry. In February 2008, Universes traveled to Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Romania, Amsterdam, and London through the prestigious Rhythm Road Program at Jazz at Lincoln Center. This program, coproduced with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of

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Shawn Hill is an art history instructor at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, and a contributing editor at Art New England. He curated a show of encaustic painting in Maine in June 2007, and also spoke that month at the Second Annual Conference of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat.

After a decade as a newspaper reporter, Gavin McCormick now teaches journalism at Queens College and lives in Douglaston, Queens. He married Michelle Anderson in April 2006, and blogs about his one-year-old daughter, Eavan, at tappedoutyawning.blogspot.com.

Minna Scherlinder Morse lives and works in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Fred Scherlinder Dobb, and their three-yearold, Sara Scherlinder. “Scherlinder,” a fusion of maternal family names, was taken at Minna and Fred’s wedding in 2000. Minna works part-time at American University’s career center.

Jenna Smith lives in Big Indian, New York, and has a gynecology practice near Woodstock. She and her husband, Henry Stout, have a five-year-old daughter, Rodman, and a two-year-old son, Lindon.

’87 Class correspondent David Avallone, ednoon@aol.com David Avallone produced and edited the feature film Tru Loved, which is currently playing festivals around the country. Last year he acted alongside legendary British playwright Steven Berkoff in the black comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous. He has also been editing and directing segments of the HBO family series Puppy Plays. In 2007 David came to Bard for his 20th reunion, accompanied by his girlfriend, Augusta, and proposed to her in Blithewood Gardens just before the Commencement fireworks. They live happily ever after in Hollywood, with three well-adjusted cats.

Anna Bloomer and her husband live in Chicago with their two children, Clara (5) and Ansel (8). They met while she was working toward her master’s degree in social work at the University of Connecticut, and married in August 1994. Anna has worked in community organizing, but is moving toward a clinical focus and looking to start work with young children in a school setting. She likes living in Chicago with its cultural events and excellent music scene.

Kate Cherry has moved to Perth to become the artistic director of Black Swan Theatre Company, the state theater company of Western Australia. In July 2008 she directed her first big opera, The Coronation of Poppea, for the Victorian Opera at the Australian National Academy of Music’s South Melbourne Town Hall. Kate has a two-year-old boy named Orlando and is married to American actor Ken Ransom. She writes that they “live their lives in delirious chaos.”

Liz Kauffman and Rob Liroff ’88 were married in Manhattan at the University Club on September 8, 2007. Rob works as a clinical psychologist in Manhattan. Liz continues to write for Scholastic and Highlights for Children. They share their homes in Manhattan and New Jersey with Liz’s 12-year-old daughter, Erin, and their two cats.

Buddy Enright worked in Pittsburgh in the (cold) winter of 2007– 08 producing the feature film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is slated for release in this fall. He writes that he is “a proud charter member of the Red Sox Nation, West.”

’83 Valerie Tyrol and her Aussie husband are on a spontaneous “walk-about,” traveling through Baja Mexico, the South Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia, where they have an oceanside home base on the Gold Coast of Queensland. Avid cruisers, they head next to Tasmania, Western Australia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China.

’80

Naomi Maxwell (Lasher) lives in Red Hook outside the village on an old apple farm with her boyfriend, three dogs, one cat, and two horses. Naomi enjoys gardening, training her horses, hiking with the dogs, spinning, and knitting (wool and other fibers). She works in Rhinebeck as a licensed massage therapist, practicing shiatsu, Swedish massage, and Reiki. Naomi is also an assistant teacher of shiatsu at the Center for Natural Wellness School of Massage Therapy in Albany.

Michael Heller received five awards for his photography in the New York Press Association’s 2007 Better Newspaper Contest, held in Albany in April 2008. His honors included two first place awards, including a sweep (first, second, and third place awards) in the Feature Photo(s) Division 1 Category, out of 172 entries submitted by newspaper photographers throughout New York State.

Michael is the staff photographer for the Sag Harbor Express in eastern Long Island. To see his work, visit www.hellercreative.com.

Michael Stern is one of the writers of the Disney Channel’s Handy Manny. He also works on Imagination Movers, which debuts this fall. In the spring of 2008 he traveled to Dubai (for a screenwriting project) and Madrid.

’79 30th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu

’78

Alx Uttermann spent several years in South India at an ashram before returning to the Santa Cruz Mountains of California in 2003 with her husband, Jonathan Rosen. Alx teaches meditation, spirituality, and healing, and performs sacred Sanskrit music. For more information, visit www.karmatalk.com.

Cindy Pauly MacLeod lives in Cincinnati, where she has been teaching four-year-olds since 1979. She and her husband, Jamie, have two girls: Emily, 19, who attends Michigan State on a crosscounty/track scholarship, and Jill, 16.

’86

’77

Class correspondent Chris LeGoff, cak64@comcast.net

After 20 years of work in information technology, Jim Heffren has begun putting his film degree to use producing posters of the Southwest via www.canyonlandgraphics.com. He is particularly interested in working with preservation and conservancy groups.

Mark Street’s film Hidden in Plain Sight was screened last spring at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. The 62-minute film, shot in Santiago, Chile; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; and Marseille, France, was also screened in August 2008 at the Sarajevo Film Festival. For more information, visit www.markstreetfilms.com.

’85 Karen Cook is now a high school assistant principal in Dickinson, Texas (near Houston).

In March 2008 New Jersey’s Hunterdon Review ran a feature on artist Lisa Uchrin. The Visions Art Gallery in Clinton, New Jersey, has displayed many of her watercolors.

’84 25th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Matt Soper, 845-758-7505 or soper@bard.edu

’74 35th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu Chuck Greenhawt has retired. He and his wife, Cheryl, now split their time between a rural cabin in Idaho and their home in Salt Lake City, allowing him to indulge in two of his favorite pastimes— skiing and fly-fishing. They have two grown sons and four grandchildren. After Bard, Chuck studied law at the University of Wyoming and then entered private practice in Wyoming. In 1985 he and his wife wanted a change (and to be near the skiing in northern Utah), and decided that Salt Lake City would be the perfect place. For the next 23 years Chuck worked in a variety of legal and executive capacities for Questar Corporation, a large oil and gas firm based in Utah.

CLASS NOTES | 57

Ralph “Greg” Hurst invites his old gang to come by his shop, Caffe Forte, if they are in San Diego: caffefortesandiego@yahoo.com.

In September 2008 Judy Kramer had an exhibition of her painted wooden tea trays at the Brookline Arts Center in Brookline, Massachusetts. In March 2009 she will have a show of her figurative paintings at the Sarah Doyle Gallery at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. To see Judy’s paintings and hand-colored silkscreens, visit judykramer.net.

Jeannie Motherwell’s daughter Rebecca Swanson delivered Jeannie’s first grandson, named Leo, in September 2007. She is “a happy Grandma Jeannie!”

’73 Kirk Bjornsgaard is acquisitions editor for regional studies for the University of Oklahoma Press, vice president of the Oklahoma Center for the Book, and president of the Norman, Oklahoma, chapter of Westerners International. He is also the drummer in the classic rock cover band Sacred Wind.

Frances Fitch is still active as a musician—performing, teaching, and directing. She had a wonderful sabbatical in the fall of 2007, when she went to Bamako, Mali, to study Mande music.

’72 Catharin Dalpino teaches at Georgetown University, where she is associate professor of Southeast Asian studies. She is also director of the Aspen Institute Advocacy and Exchange Project on Agent Orange/Dioxin, which seeks humanitarian solutions to the continuing impact of the wartime use of Agent Orange on Vietnam. The project focuses on containing and cleaning up dioxin at the former airbases, and addressing the human costs of exposure to Agent Orange, the impact of which is now being seen in a third generation of birth defects in Vietnam.

’71 Class correspondent Carla Bolte, carlabolte@excite.com Lex Bernstein and his wife, Donna, live in McCall, Idaho, where Lex teaches and coaches women’s soccer. He has coached men’s and women’s teams at the Browning School in New York City, C. W. Post College on Long Island, and Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. He maintains the highest coaching certifications from the United States Soccer Federation and the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.

Carla Bolte won an award at the 2007 New York Book Show for her design of Viking author Jon Savage’s book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture.

Bruce Diamond is rabbi at the Community Free Synagogue (www.fortmyerssynagogue.com) in Fort Myers, Florida. He also serves as adjunct professor of civic engagement at Florida Gulf Coast University. When not watching his classmate Bruce Chilton on the History Channel, he enjoys a leisurely life of writing, tennis, and frolicking with his dog, Pandora. He can be reached at bdiamond5@comcast.net.

Rhonda Harrow Engel, who recently earned a master’s degree, lives with her husband, Larry, in Delhi, New York, where Rhonda teaches art history, ceramics, and drawing at SUNY Delhi. Their children, Lise and David, both live in New York City.

Debby Davidson Kaas lives with her husband, Don, in Palm, Pennsylvania, where Debby volunteers as a special court advocate for victims of domestic violence.

Wayne Robins, whose long journalism career began at the Bard Observer, is enjoying promoting his third book, A Brief History of Rock, Off the Record (Routledge, 2007). Find out more at http://myspace.com/briefhistoryofrock, or contact Wayne—who works as a copy editor at Billboard magazine and loves hearing from Bardians of any era—at w2robins@mac.com.

Wendy Weldon had a solo exhibition in July 2008 at the Shaw Cramer Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard. Her work is always up in the gallery, so please stop in any time, or visit Wendy’s website: www.wendyweldon.com.

’69 40th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu Class correspondent Elaine Marcotte Hyams, eshyams@yahoo.com

Barns at Dusk, acrylic and copper leaf on canvas, by Wendy Weldon ’71

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William Dreskin earned a master of fine arts degree in music at the California Institute of the Arts in 1972, and his California teaching credential from Dominican College in San Rafael in 1974. From 1974 to 1982 he was a college and private music instructor (flute, recorder, tabla) and performed North Indian classical music and

Bard professor Robert Kelly. His recent book of poetry, No Wrong Notes, was favorably reviewed by English Studies Forum. Norman and his wife, Mary Owen, live in Boise, Idaho. He would enjoy hearing from Bard architecture buffs.

’68 Class correspondents Diana Hirsch Friedman, wowdiana@optonline.net Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com Philisse Barrows writes, “I lived in Camelot with my true love for 30 years until his death; birthed and home-schooled a daughter; worked in theater; and lived on a boat, in a San Francisco apartment, in a log cabin, on a nudist ranch, in a New York City brownstone, and now on Martha’s Vineyard. I’m ready for an adventurous rest of my life.”

Three Bard alumnae met Lech Walesa—the activist who sparked the Solidarity movement, recipient of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, and president of Poland from 1990 to 1995—in July on an educational cruise on the Baltic Sea. Above from left to right are Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65, Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68, Walesa, and Betsey Ely ’65. The three Bardians (and Betsey’s husband, Jonathan) heard lectures by Walesa and Jack Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. They also visited Smolny College in St. Petersburg, many ports of call in Scandinavia, and the shipyards of Gdansk, where this photograph was taken.

African music. He has had various art and photography shows in the San Francisco Bay Area (where he lives) and elsewhere in the last seven years. He has received various awards, and a recent photograph appeared in the juried art catalogue American Art Collector.

Karen (New) Franco lives with her husband in the Hudson Valley and works as senior editor for an educational testing company. Her hobbies include hiking (they walked across England in 2006) and genealogy research (she has found many interesting characters in her family tree, including a lord mayor of Canterbury). Now she wishes she had been a history major!

Pierre Joris invites you to check out his website: http://pierrejoris.com/home.html, and blog: http://pjoris.blogspot.com/.

Roseanne Kanter writes: “The kids are grown. Down to one dog at home. Looking forward to retirement after teaching first grade for about a zillion years. Still paint and build paper cut-outs, and still feel like me inside.”

Toni (Chapman) Travis spent the fall 2007 semester as a fellow at Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute. In January 2009 she expects to be in London as faculty director of George Mason University’s new London semester program. She would love to make contact with Bardians in the United Kingdom.

Norman Weinstein published an essay on the importance of writing for architecture students in the March 7, 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes about music for the Christian Science Monitor, architecture for Architectural Review, and has new poetry in First Intensity, a magazine also featuring

Vickisa “Vicki” Feinberg is an artist living in northern California.

She also has a bed-and-breakfast for those in the know in Bolinas, California. Her e-mail is vickisa@aceweb.com.

Steve Josephs and a several friends created “a political satire” about “political karma and its fallout” that is viewable on www.youtube.com. To see it there, search for “Captain Karma version 2.”

’67 Class correspondent Pamela Dendy Knap, pdknap@optonline.net In January 2008 Martha Stewart filmed a segment about the sculptural wood bowls that Kip Eggert makes (viewable on marthastewart.com). He reports it was fun to appear on live television and to chat with Martha, who loves the Kip Eggert canarywood bowl in her Bedford, New York, kitchen.

Maggie Hopp had 10 photographs in the exhibition The Chelsea Hotel through the Eyes of Photographers at the Chelsea Hotel Ballroom in May 2008.

Johanna Shafer is chair of the India Network Committee of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and now serves on the diocesan mission commission. The Diocese is in partnership with the Diocese of Madras, Church of South India.

’66 Barb and Peter Kenner continue to split their time between New York City and Germantown, New York. Their son, Nicholas, and his partner, Rob Crespi, have three restaurants in New York City called Just Salad—on Park Avenue, Maiden Lane, and West 37th Street. Laura Pensiero, from Gigi’s in Rhinebeck, is the chef and creator of the Just Salad menu. Both Nick and Rob were listed in Inc.com’s “30 Under 30” list of America’s coolest entrepreneurs.

They have also appeared on the Martha Stewart show and have been written up in New York magazine.

CLASS NOTES | 59

Jonathan Greene’s 28th book of poetry, Heart Matters, has been published by Broadstone Books (see Books by Bardians, this issue).

Charlie Hollander retired three years ago but remains busy with genealogy, folklore research, and choral singing. His and Janet’s daughter, Amelia, lived in Israel for two years as a member of a string quartet, but now she’s back in the country and married to Christopher Ames.

Don Hurowitz’s daughter Kate got married last April and is living in San Francisco, working for Google. Don has two sons entering their senior year, at Earlham and Bard, and two more who will start college just as the other two graduate, so no retirement soon for him.

Woodstock Trees (2004, oil on canvas) was part of an exhibition of recent landscapes by Mari Lyons ’57 at First Street Gallery, New York City.

’65 Class correspondent Charlie Hollander, chas956@rcn.com Joan (Hand) Axelrod’s poem, “Emily at 9-1/2” (from her 2004 book of poems, East of July), appeared in the spring 2008 issue of the Welsh literary quarterly The Seventh Quarry.

David Jacobowitz retired from the University of Vermont in May 2008. His son Eli works at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Natalie, who recently graduated from New York Law School.

His son Saul Jacobowitz ’01 lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and works for a distributor of independent recordings.

Carol (Rawicz) Layman is in her last year of teaching basic skills in grade school. She plans to retire in June 2009.

Steve Lipson and his wife, Serl, have taken up bridge and are now life masters. Their eighth grandchild was recently born. They play a lot of bad golf, but are happy and healthy.

Jim Banker is retired—playing golf, volunteering at a residential institute for girls, and being a dutiful househusband while Michele continues to work. He stays in touch with David Jacobowitz, Ed Fischer, and Richie Pargament.

George Lynes retired from the college admission business but still stays involved with the profession as a consultant and president of the New Jersey Association for College Admission Counseling. He and Jane Rady ’63 celebrated their 40th anniversary this summer.

Their son, Josh, is a systems consultant in Brooklyn.

Katya (Rosenberg) Bock decided not to retire, at least for one more year. She lives in California and teaches at Antioch High School and Chapman University. She spent the summer of 2008 in Peru and Ecuador.

Andrew Marum, a social worker who works for New York City, continues drawing in his spare time. His wife, Lisa, is now head copy editor for Parents magazine, and their daughter, Maria, teaches at Mamaroneck High School.

Michael (and Wenny) DeWitt moved the family business, DeWitt Bros. Tool Co., from lower Manhattan, where it had been since 1919, to Kenilworth, New Jersey, 12 minutes from Newark Airport and near Exit 138 of the Garden State Parkway. They write that their “new toolmine is terrific,” and they “enjoy reverse-commuting from Greenwich Village. Please visit!”

Robert Salsburg is marking his 22nd year in public radio as a classical music host and arts producer, now at WVIA in Pennsylvania. His son Nathan is the production manager of the Alan Lomax Collection and has his own weekly program, Root Hog or Die, on East Village Radio—EVR.com.

Betsey Ely is active in the new Bard Arboretum and would love to show off her work. One of her nephews, Michael Humphreys MFA ’98, has a pottery studio in Rhinebeck. He and his wife and one-year-old love living in the Hudson Valley.

Carole Fabricant is still teaching at the University of California Riverside. She has several current projects: editing [Jonathan] Swift’s Miscellaneous Prose for Penguin UK; collaborating on an edition of Swift’s Irish Writings for Palgrave; writing a book on 18th-century Ireland (colonial representations); and writing essays, including one on late 18th-century travel literature.

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Rod Townley has written books in five genres. His fifth children’s novel, a thriller called The Red Thread, appeared last year. Knopf will publish his fantasy novel, The Blue Shoe, in 2009. Rod and his wife, Wyatt, live in Kansas, with a son in Berkeley and a daughter at the University of Kansas.

Bob Weissberg writes that he has been busy committing political heresies. He is writing a book on K-12 education arguing that student sloth, not bad schools, causes our educational woes. He also teaches a graduate seminar on elections at New York University.

Dr. P. P. Witonski ´ is a retired academic, currently directing the activities of Academica Associates LLC, a consulting firm operating in the sphere of economic development. He is the author of several books.

’64 45th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu Rikki Ducornet received a 2008 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 her novel Gazelle, published in France by Gallimard, received le Prix Guerlain. Rikki is a writer in residence at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

’63 Class correspondent Penny Axelrod, axelrodp@earthlink.net

’62 Class correspondent Susan Playfair, srplayfair@comcast.net Jack Blum has been participating as an expert in the United Nations Task Force on Illicit Financial Flows, which is part of the United Nations Millennium effort to alleviate poverty. He has also been working to establish an international group to recover assets stolen by corrupt heads of state and participated in a conference at the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies in June 2007. He is “of counsel” at Baker & Hostetler in their Washington office. You can find him at bakerlaw.com or e-mail him at blumja@gmail.com.

Peter Eschauzier and his wife, Jan, have been living in Naples, Florida, since 1989. In December 2000, Peter retired from American Airlines after 31 years as a pilot. Active retirement, including a stint on the Naples Airport Authority, came to an end in July 2004, when he accepted a pilot position with Health Management Association (HMA), flying a Falcon 50. HMA owns 60 hospitals throughout the country. When not flying, Peter enjoys tennis, golf, and boating. He and Jan have three daughters, all of whom live in the Boston area, and one granddaughter. He can be reached at peter4997@aol.com.

’58 Sheila Shulman has lived in London since 1970, and says she is “still the same radical feminist lesbian I have been since 1972.” She was ordained as a rabbi in 1989 by Leo Baeck College in London, and built (with friends) a new congregation. She teaches at Leo Baeck, but has retired from congregational work. She writes, “Now thinking ‘What next?’”

’57 Mari Lyons presented Green Thoughts: Recent Landscapes, her 13th exhibition at First Street Gallery in New York City, in September. Her website, www.marilyonsstudio.com, reports further news of her, reprints some reviews, and shows a representative group of her paintings.

Being Included Is Not the Same as Belonging, a welded Corten steel sculpture

by McAlistair Coleman ’54

’54 McAlister Coleman’s sculpture Being Included Is Not the Same as Belonging was dedicated in a ceremony on March 8, 2008, at the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts in Newnan, Georgia.

McAlister was thrilled to be present at the dedication, and the Centre has adopted the piece as its official symbol.

’53 Class correspondent Naomi Bellinson Feldman, nada1500@comcast.net Joanne Pines Hersh manages to get to Bard fairly often to attend performances at the Fisher Center, and says that she can’t get over how Bard has grown (“mind-boggling,” to use her words).

Peter Hoag, having shown his work in several galleries and outdoor art fairs, writes that his work as a graphic artist is becoming more widely known in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, area. In addition, Peter’s family has been increased by seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. He says that he owes a great deal to Bard, and will never forget his classmates and teachers. He writes, “I owe the world to great people like Stefan Hirsch, Louis Schanker, Danny Newman, and others, all of whom encouraged me and pushed me on with their enthusiasm and caring interest.”

Tommie Lillien Kaufman writes that she still leads a busy and active life, playing tennis at least five times a week.

Robert Ronder “finally retired” in December 2007 as chairman of the board of Ulster Savings Bank.

CLASS NOTES | 61

’52

John Goldsmith sends greetings to his fellow Bardians.

Class correspondent Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net

Richard “Dick” Koch continues to commute between California and New York. He enjoyed Reunion Weekend 2008 at Bard.

Rev. James E. Lindsey is more or less retired, spending one-third of the year is Scotland, where he and his wife have a home at last.

They are otherwise in Millbrook, New York, and thus close to Bard.

He has finished editing a collection of Civil War letters and diaries.

Janet Gay Newman has retired as a dance-movement therapist.

She now has a part-time “day job” with the nonprofit organization Creative Response to Conflict (www.crc-ny.org). Other interests include saving wetlands, preserving open space (especially in Rockland County, New York), and clean water (especially the West Branch of the Hackensack River).

’51 In April 2008 Philadelphia’s City Center Opera presented a world premier workshop production of Peter Westergaard’s chamber opera The Always Present Present, based upon the book of poetry and letters by Renee Weiss and her late husband, Ted, who taught English literature at Bard from 1948 to 1969. Renee also wrote the libretto for the opera, and took part in a public discussion at the premiere with the composer, conductor, and cast.

’48 Edwina and Monty Scharff are enjoying a good life on the coast of Maine—“great people, good skiing, and super sailing!” Monty helped start a scholarship fund at the Landing School, a famous wooden boat building school in Kennebunkport.

’39 70th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu Dr. John “Jack” Honey and his wife, Mary, are looking forward to the birth of their first great-grandchild in September 2008.

John Leggett wanted to attend Reunion Weekend 2008 but writes, “It’s a long trip from Napa, California.”

Dalton McBee retired from teaching English at Philips Academy in 1981.

Dr. Dominick “Pap” Papandrea had brain surgery early in 2008 and is doing well.

George Rosenberg attends community seminars on the humanities at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He writes that the seminars “keep the old people off the streets.”

Charles Selvage worked for many years as a fashion illustrator, and later as a silversmith. He had a heart valve replacement and triple bypass operation in 2006. He writes, “Greetings to the survivors of the class of 1939.”

’37 At age 92, Elias Dann, professor emeritus, Florida State University, is enjoying retirement in Tallahassee, Florida.

’44 65th Reunion: May 22–24, 2009 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

’42

Correspondent Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, ABTOK@aol.com

Harold Altshuler practiced law for about 15 years after law school, and then went into life insurance. At one time he owned four companies in that field, and still owns two. He had a stroke in 2007, but recovered well.

’06

William “Bill” Beringer is always glad to hear news from Bard.

Wayne Horvitz lost his wife a few years ago, but he remains in good health. He attended his reunion in 2008, and was, happily, also there to celebrate the graduation of his granddaughter, Nica, from the College.

’41 Vail Church lost his wife in October 2007. He had a stroke in 2006, but is doing well. He sends his regards to Bardians.

Bethany Ides (Wright) recently changed her name, married Joseph Bradshaw, moved back to Portland, Oregon, and began teaching at the Pacific Northwest College of Art—“all of which amounts to much happiness.” Her most recent chapbook, From Whence Undone, is available from Cosa Nostra Editions, and she is busy at work on a collaborative performance-installation piece with composer Micah Silver.

Marina Berio was awarded a Pollock-Krasner grant and a residency at Yaddo in April 2008. She also had a solo show with Michael Steinberg Fine Art in May.

’04 ’40 Class correspondent Dick Koch, rfkoch@macdave.com, 516-599-3489

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Adriana Farmiga was awarded a 2008 Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Socrates Sculpture Park.

In February Matt King’s drawings were shown in ABC With Love . . . (Too Cool for School) at Art Metropole in Toronto, curated

by Jill Henderson. In March he showed a group of sculptures in 3D Multiples: The Object of Production at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

Steve Whitesell is an adjunct instructor at SUNY Farmingdale, teaching a survey of landscape and garden history. He is also working on a master plan for the New York City Department of Parks for the Bowne House in Flushing, a 17th-century house acquired by the department’s Historic House Trust.

’01

’06

Holly Lynton has moved back to the United States from London.

In 2008 her work was shown at the Bronx River Art Center as part of Surprisingly Natural: The Nature of the Bronx, an exhibition that ran simultaneously in three venues.

Sarah Archer was named director of Greenwich House Pottery.

Tony Thatcher presented his most recent film/dance performance piece in May to the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. He is head of choreography and the director of the Master of Arts Choreography Programme at Laban in London, England.

’97

Rita Jules taught a studio course on book design at Parsons The New School for Design during the spring 2008 semester.

Monica Obniski published an article based on her M.A. thesis, “Exhibiting Modernity Through the Lens of Tradition in Gilbert Rhode’s Design for Living Interior,” in The Journal of Design Theory. She is now working on a Ph.D. in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

’05

Nick Tobier’s recent projects include a souvenir produced for citySPACE and distributed throughout San Francisco, a profile of his public performances in the Canadian journal Locus Suspectus, and a public project at Noordkap in Dordecht, the Netherlands.

Freyja Hartzell spent the last year researching her dissertation as a fellow with the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin. Her Ph.D. dissertation is titled “Delight in Sachlichkeit: Richard Riemerschmid and the Thingliness of Things.”

’94

Remi Spriggs married Michael Dyll in October 2007.

Gary Green had a one-person show this past spring at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. The exhibition, titled The History of Nature (Part 1), included 27 photographs from two series of work and three short video pieces. Several of his photographs were also included in The New Natural History, a group exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. Gary is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Colby College, where he teaches photography.

’04 John Stuart Gordon curated The Architect’s Table: Swid Powell and Postmodern Design for the Yale University Art Gallery. He is researching the late windows of John LaFarge for an upcoming exhibition catalogue, as well as planning a catalogue of modernist American design.

’03 ’91 Lily Prince received a Release Time Grant for two years from the William Paterson University of New Jersey. This grant will enable Lily to focus on her painting research while carrying a reduced teaching load.

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture ’07 Kate Papacosma is a planner for the Central Park Conservancy.

She published a review of Robert Moses and the Modern City in the February 2008 issue of The Public Historian, and presented a paper on Prospect Park at the Designing the Parks conference at the University of Virginia in May. This fall she is teaching a class at Parsons The New School on the history and design of the park movement in New York City.

Sarah Lichtman is an assistant professor of design history in the Art and Design Studies Department at Parsons The New School for Design. She also continues to work with the master’s program at the Cooper-Hewitt. She presented a paper, “The State of Design History,” at the 2008 College Art Association conference in Dallas.

Scott Perkins’s Building Bartlesville, 1945–2000, which explores the architectural history of post–World War II buildings in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, was published by Arcadia in May. Scott recently curated Setting the Table: Designs in Mid-Century Dinnerware and cocurated Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, both of which were on view at the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville in 2008.

Elizabeth Sullivan gave birth to a son, Thomas Almerick Dolan, on March 14, 2008.

’02 Julie Muñiz is the associate curator of decorative arts and crafts at the Oakland Museum of California. This past year she co-curated

CLASS NOTES | 63

Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Melissa Post is curator at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington.

’00 Anne Eschapasse is working on an exhibition of Tiffany glass for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris (fall–winter 2009), organized with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She is also working on a Frédéric Boucheron jewelry exhibition and a Christofle silver show. Anne gave birth to a baby girl named Marguerite on January 26, 2008.

Caroline Hannah spent six months, starting in September 2007, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as the James Renwick Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft. She then returned to the Metropolitan Museum in March as a Jane and Morgan Whitney Art History Fellow in the Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. Julie Saunders delivered a lecture on Peter Larkin’s decorative arts collection at the Long Branch Historical Society.

’99 Judith Gura’s book on interior design in New York from 1935 to 1985 was published by Acanthus Press in September. She lectured on Scandinavian design at a number of venues, including Scandinavia House, the Stockholm Furniture Fair, and the Furniture Society.

Judith heads the design history curriculum at the New York School of Interior Design and is a contributing editor to Art + Auction.

’98 Natasha Schlesinger will teach a course on the history of furniture in the Cooper-Hewitt graduate program next year.

’96 Marianna Poutasse was guest curator for the exhibition America Seen at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Center for Curatorial Studies ’08 Daniel Byers has a curatorial fellowship at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Terri Smith won the 2008 Ramapo Curatorial Prize. Her thesis exhibition, Recasting Site, will be reconfigured for an exhibition at the Berrie Center, School of Contemporary Arts, Ramapo College, in the winter of 2009. The Ramapo Prize is organized by Sydney Jenkins ’96, director of the gallery at Ramapo College.

’07 Markús Thór Andrésson, an independent curator living in Berlin, curated It’s Not Your Fault—Art from Iceland at the Luhring

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Augustine Gallery in New York City. He also codirected Steypa, a documentary on Icelandic art, which was screened at Scandinavia House in Manhattan. Özkan Cangüven works as a gallery associate at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in New York City.

Chen Tamir’s thesis exhibition, Stutter and Twitch, traveled to the Justinea M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, which is publishing her thesis essay. Tamir is an independent curator living in New York City.

Emily Zimmerman is a curatorial assistant at EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

’06 Erica (Fisher) Battle, project curatorial assistant in modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, helped organize an exhibition of works by Bruce Nauman that will represent the United States at the 2009 Venice Biennale. She worked with curators Carlos Basualdo and Michael Taylor on the proposal to the U.S. Department of State.

Will Heath and Zeljka Himbele-Kozul co-curated My Little / Membrane at NURTUREart Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Himbele-Kozul is a curatorial assistant of contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Heath is an independent curator.

Amy Mackie, curatorial assistant at the New Museum in New York City, moderated a panel at the Bronx Museum of the Arts as part of the exhibition Making It Together.

Mariangela Méndez curated Medias Promesas at Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño in Bogota, Colombia. She teaches at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota.

’05 Cecilia Alemani, curator of special projects at Artissima in Turin, Italy, curated Beyond Art in General at Bloomberg L.P., headquarters of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York–based financial services company. Access to the exhibition was by appointment only.

Lyra Kilston, editorial researcher for Modern Painters, reviewed Trevor Paglen’s work in the December 2007 – January 2008 issue of the magazine.

Jen Mergel, assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, co-curated Momentum Project and helped mount a survey of Tara Donovan’s work, on view this fall. She also gave the keynote address at the 24th annual Boston University Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art. Meg Shiffler, gallery director at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, curated After the Revolution: Contemporary Photography from California and Tehran, at San Francisco City

Hall—one of three exhibition spaces that she oversees. Shiffler is the mother of toddler Sam. Yasmeen Siddiqui, a curator at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, organized a temporary “Pop Up” Storefront in Los Angeles. She is the mother of Tariq Ilan.

’04 Stacy Allan, a Los Angeles–based writer and associate editor of Afterall, published an article, “Introducing Amanda Ross-Ho,” in Modern Painters.

Claire Barliant, senior editor at Modern Painters, reviewed the work of the New York artist Rachel Mason in the magazine.

Tairone Bastien reviewed Performa 07, the second biennial of new visual art projects organized by the New York nonprofit arts organization Performa, in APTInsight. Bastien is a curatorial associate at Performa.

Yasmil Raymond, assistant curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, was the recipient of an International Association of Art Critics Award. Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, organized for the Walker by Raymond and Philippe Vergne, was named Best Monographic Museum Show.

Ryan Rice, an independent curator in Kahnawake, Quebec, curated Buffalo Boy Rides into Town, an exhibition featuring artist Adrian Stimson, at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston, Ontario.

Yasmine Van Pee is working on her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. She reviewed Americana: 50 States, 50 Months, 50 Exhibitions, a show at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, for Modern Painters.

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the accompanying catalogue. The exhibition traveled to the University at Buffalo Art Gallery, where Sandra Firmin curated two installations by New York City artist Douglas Repetto.

Kelly Lindner, director of the George Adams Gallery in New York City, curated The Dog Came Out of the Woods . . . at Stonefox Artspace. She is the mother of toddler Finn.

Jenni Sorkin, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, wrote a feature article on the artist Zoe Leonard, “Finding the Right Darkness,” for frieze magazine. Another article, “The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt,” was published in Modern Painters.

’01 Ilaria Bonacossa, curator at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, co-curated Greenwashing, an exhibition that presented the work of 25 international artists and artist group.

After four years as curator at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Ines Katzenstein has moved to the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, also in Buenos Aires, where she is developing a new contemporary art program. Her son, Leon, was born in 2007.

Independent curator and art critic Olga Kopenkina curated Properly Past at the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn. She also contributed an article, “Introducing Yevgeniy Fiks,” to Modern Painters.

Dermis Léon is working on her Ph.D. at Carlos III University in Madrid and keeping track of her young son Sebastian.

’00 Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy reviewed the Mexico City–based artist Adriana Lara’s work for Modern Painters. An independent curator living in New York City, she also curated Autopsia de lo Invisible at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires.

Rob Blackson, formerly the curator at Reg Vardy Gallery, School of Arts, Design, Media, and Culture, University of Sunderland, UK, now works across the river from his old post as curator at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Tracee (Williams) Robertson is the director of the University of North Texas Art Gallery, College of Visual Arts and Design, in Denton, Texas.

José Luis Blondet, curator of visual arts, Boston Center for the Arts, traveled to Berlin and London with Joan Jonas to present The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, a performance loosely inspired

by Aby Warburg’s memories of his journey to the American West.

Lorelei Stewart, director of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, commissioned and produced Edgar Arceneaux’s The Alchemy of Comedy . . . Stupid, which was included in the Whitney Biennial.

Christel Tsilibari, of think.21 gallery in Brussels, Belgium, and Marketa Uhlirova, director of the Fashion in Film Festival, London, organized the Second Fashion in Film Festival, If Looks Could Kill. The festival, which explored the links between cinema, fashion, crime, and violence, spanned three weeks in May and ran at such London venues as BFI Southbank, Ciné Lumiére, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Tate Modern, and the Horse Hospital.

Mercedes Vicente, curator of contemporary art at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand, organized a suite of exhibitions that showcased new works by internationally acclaimed artists Bill Culbert, Francis Upritchard, Jayce Salloum, and Len Lye.

’02 Cassandra Coblentz, associate curator at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, curated Lyle Ashton Harris: Blow Up and wrote

’99 Alejandro Díaz was one of 30 artists who received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007. The award honors artists whose work shows serious promise, but who have not yet received widespread recognition. The recipients were chosen from more than 448 nominees proposed by the Foundation’s trustees,

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previous award winners, and artists, critics, and musuem professionals throughout the country.

publication of the Artist Pension Trust. As a guest curator, she organized new work by Julieta Aranda at Sala Diaz in San Antonio, Texas.

Denise Markonish curated her first exhibition at Mass MoCA, Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape.

Sydney Jenkins, director of the gallery at the Berrie Center, School of Contemporary Arts, Ramapo College, New Jersey, is collaborating with the American Folk Art Museum on a multiyear visiting scholar program.

’98 Sarah Cook, an independent curator and postdoctoral research fellow at the Curatorial Resource for New Media Art, University of Sunderland, developed exhibition projects in New York as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded opportunity for the University of Sunderland/CRUMB to work with Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Manhattan. She worked with Eyebeam fellows and residents to exhibit their art through the summer and fall program of exhibitions and events.

Anne Ellegood, curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., published a review of the 6th Mercosul Bienal in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in Artforum.

Victoria Noorthoorn, an independent curator based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, organized Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy, an exhibition about contemporary Argentine art that was on view at the Americas Society in New York City last winter.

Zhang Zhaohui, director at Joey Chang Art, Beijing’s most visible and energetic art gallery, curated a solo show titled Rong Zhi’s Memory.

’97 Rachel Gugelberger and Jeffrey Walkowiak ’00, codirectors of the Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York City, curated Landscapes for Frankenstein, on view at the gallery from June 19 through August 1.

Brian Wallace curated Intimacies of Distant War for the Horace and Alice Chandler Gallery at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. The exhibition, which ran from February 8 through April 13, 2008, explored some of the ways that American artists—such as Yoko Ono, Steve Mumford, the late Leon Golub, and An-My Lê, assistant professor of photography at Bard—have attempted to come to terms with the war in Iraq. A review in Chronogram lauded the artists for “doing work that seems all the more necessary, as it brings personal perspective and thoughtful engagement—through art—to focus our attention on these crucial (if seemingly distant) realities.” The New York Times praised Wallace, curator at the museum, for prompting discussion on such a contentious subject.

’96 Regine Basha recently moved from Texas to New York City, where she continues working as an independent curator. Basha, Chus Martinez ’01, and Maria Lind, director of the CCS Graduate Program, participated in unitednationsplaza Mexico DF, an art project in the form of a temporary school. Her review of the Mercosul Biennial, “Beyond Borders,” appeared in the quarterly

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In Memoriam ’10 Sameer Mathur, 19, died on April 30, 2008, after contracting meningitis. A semifinalist in the prestigious Siemens-Westinghouse Mathematics, Science, and Technology Competition, his project dealt with molecules that regulate genes. He also excelled at expository writing, music (he was very proficient on the guitar), and foreign languages, which he acquired during more than a decade of living in Switzerland and India and traveling to more than 20 other countries. A Boy Scout for seven years, he attained the rank of Life Scout at Troop 100 in Westport, Connecticut. He is survived by his parents, Aparajita and Alok Mathur; a brother, Mohit; two grandmothers, Mrs. Krishna Mathur and Mrs. Padam Bhatnagar; five uncles; three aunts; many cousins; and two dear friends, Kira Kim-Fredell and Trevor Morris.

’09 Christina Richelle Tarsell, 21, died of natural causes on June 23, 2008, at her home in Tivoli, New York. She had just completed her junior year at Bard, where she was majoring in studio arts. She was an honors student, played on the tennis team, and served as art editor of the student literary journal Verse Noir. At the time of her death, she had been working for the summer at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art. A 2005 graduate of Hereford High School in Sparks, Maryland, she was a member of the National Honor Society and Amnesty International, art editor of the student magazine Brillig, and a varsity softball player. She won various juried art honors and awards, and achieved a Gold Award in female scouting with Troop 589. Her survivors include her parents, Emily Tarsell and Richard Heyman; two aunts, Tommie Tarsell and Anna Marie Heyman; an uncle, Robert Heyman; and many cousins and second cousins.

’01 Rebekkah Marie Willingham died suddenly on January 13, 2008, of a bacterial infection. An artist, musician, dancer, and writer, she had returned to northern California three years previously and was making plans to pursue a master’s degree. Her mother, Lynda Aubrey, writes: “Rebekkah was an inspired cook, and she also loved to sketch, paint, sew, knit, and hike. She loved animals, particularly cats, and they were drawn to her. She was a voracious reader, seeking out and reading a long list of books banned in certain libraries, and was known to recite lengthy poems by Federico García Lorca.

Always angered by injustice, Rebekkah could hold her own in a

political debate. She had a wicked wit and wacky sense of humor.

She lit up the room when she entered, and glowed while dancing ballet onstage.” In addition to her mother, her survivors include her father and stepmother, Stephen Willingham and Claire Stuart; two brothers, Aarron and Sabin; her grandmothers, Charlotte and Vera; and her aunts Joyce, Karen, Bonnie, and Lyn. Her mother invites Bardians to share memories or stories: lsaubrey@yahoo.com.

the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and Bard, where he majored in English literature. During World War II, he served in the army and fought in the battle of Iwo Jima. In 1953 he bought the Ambassador Hotel, moved to Palm Beach, and went on to develop condominiums in South Florida. In the 1960s and 1970s, he built some of the most talked-about buildings in Palm Beach, including the oceanfront condominium Sloan’s Curve. He is survived by his wife, Eleanor, and his children and their spouses.

’88 Scott A. Dalton died on April 14, 2008. After graduating from Bard, he was a professional actor in New York City for 10 years. He then settled in Connecticut and spent the next decade working as a real estate professional in New Canaan. He was a gifted tennis player and continued his love of acting in local community theater.

He was predeceased by his father, Michael Dalton, and is survived by his mother, Patricia Dalton; two brothers, Michael and Christopher; a sister, Carolyn; and three nieces.

’73 (Editor’s note: We received the following letter from David Goldfischer ’75, eulogizing his friend Tom Mayer ’73, whose obituary was published in the spring 2008 issue of the Bardian.)

It has been years since I have lost touch with my old Bard friends, so when the Bardian arrives, I always turn to “Class Notes” with interest, and to “In Memoriam” with trepidation. When I read that Tom Mayer ’73 had died last summer [2007], I burst into tears. Of course, I think of the good times tramping around Cruger’s Island and the trails paralleling the Saw Kill with Tom; I think of the good times enjoying mother nature and music in dormitory rooms, and solving the problems of the college, the country, and the cosmos with our discussions; I think of what a wonderful friend Tom was to anyone who needed his friendship. Yet, what was truly extraordinary about Tom was a quality of his spirit that caused him to be so beautiful in so many ways—from his beautiful hair, to his beautiful face, to the beautiful giving nature of his friendship and love.

I feel so grieved from losing Tom. But I also felt so joyful and privileged to have been touched by his extraordinary spirit. Just from having known Tom, I am a gentler, kinder, more honest and loving person than I would have been. I will be grieved by Tom’s death for a long time, but I will be forever blessed by having once been touched by such a beautiful spirit.

Sincerely, David Goldfischer ’75

’65 Diana Dew died on February 8, 2008. After her time at Bard she worked as a designer, and was known in the late ’60s for creating electronic clothing with flashing lights embedded in them. She also designed dresses for Joan Baez.

’46 Sander B. “Stanley” Weinstock died on January 31, 2008, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Born in New York City in 1924, he attended

’45 The Reverend Merrick Andrew Danforth died on March 10, 2008. He left Bard in 1942 to join the navy, serving for three years and taking part in the Normandy landing. Upon his discharge he resumed his studies at the University of New Hampshire, where he earned his B.S. in music education in 1950. After serving as director of music for public schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, he obtained a master of divinity degree in 1965 from Bexley Hall Seminary in Ohio. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1966 and served churches in Iowa and Ohio. He retired in 1987 and moved to Concord, New Hampshire, where he served the bishop of New Hampshire as chaplain to retired parishioners and assisted at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Concord. He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Jean Irwin Danforth; a daughter and a son; and four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and several cousins.

’41 Ross Edward Lucke, 88, a lifelong resident of Toledo, Ohio, died on February 1, 2008. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Bard and went on to a career with the Charles Dowd Advertising Agency. He married Betty Slee Harrison on June 5, 1954. After his retirement, he and Betty split their time between Toledo and Naples, Florida. Betty died in 1991. He is survived by a son, Daniel; two daughters, Elizabeth and Susan; three granddaughters; and two great-granddaughters.

’38 Stephen Peabody, 89, died on January 26, 2008, in Needham, Massachusetts. After graduating from Bard, he earned a degree from Tufts Medical School, and went on to practice as a family physician in Wellesley, Massachusetts, for half a century.

According to an extensive obituary in the Boston Globe, Dr. Peabody was “among a vanishing breed of family doctors who worked around the clock with patients from birth to old age,” making house calls while “nattily dressed in a suit, white shirt, and signature bow tie.” He favored the bow ties “because pediatric patients kept sucking on and pulling his long ones,” according to Marcie Holtje, his secretary of 38 years. In the early years of his practice, his patients included many Italian immigrants, who would often bring him vegetables from their gardens, fruit from their trees, and homemade wine, “not as payment but because they loved him,” his secretary said.

Dr. Peabody was affiliated with Newton-Wellesley Hospital from his internship until his retirement in 1994. His office was

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always in his home, and during the 1950s office visits were never more than $3. He also served as the physician for Babson College in Wellesley for many years. During World War II, he was attached to the 34th Division and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, providing emergency medical treatment at the front. He was predeceased by his wife of 43 years, Miriam Chandler. Survivors include two sisters, Sylvia Peabody and Katherine Crouse, and a grandson, James Lambert Peabody.

The Reverend John Ahern Schultz died on January 17, 2008.

After graduating from Bard, he earned his master of divinity at the General Theological Seminary in New York. He was ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church in 1943. In World War II, Father Schultz served as a chaplain (major) in the U.S. Army in India, Burma, and China. He subsequently served as rector of the Church of the Advent in Cape May, New Jersey, and, for 25 years, rector of Trinity Church in Ambler, Pennsylvania. He retired in 1986, but continued to assist at several churches and to teach computer technology and history to senior citizens. He also aided many nonprofit agencies with computer system development. He was predeceased by his wife, Thalia Jean (Hammer) Schultz, and is survived by his three children, John, Jeanie, and Timothy; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

’37 Retired Rear Admiral Edward S. Grandin III died on May 27, 2008. Admiral Grandin earned his bachelor’s degree at Bard, then went on to earn a master’s from New York University and a degree in insurance from the American College of Life Underwriters. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, earning two battle stars. He then settled in Brooklyn, where he had a long career in the insurance industry. He continued his work with the navy as an officer in the reserves, retiring with the rank of captain. He was later appointed a rear admiral in the New York Naval Militia.

A founding member of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association, Admiral Grandin was named as the first alumni/ae trustee of Bard College in 1950, and served in that capacity until 1965. He was a trustee emeritus until his death. He was active in a number of civic organizations and military clubs and associations—so active that the borough of Brooklyn designated both April 20, 1974, and December 5, 1975, as “Captain Edward S. Grandin Day” in recognition of his “outstanding community service.” He also received a citation as “Man of the Year” from Brooklyn borough president Howard Golden in May 1995. He was predeceased by his parents, Edward S. Grandin Jr. and Eileen Grandin, and his cousin, William H. Maher.

Faculty Paul Arthur, 60, a film historian, scholar, and critic who taught at Bard for several years during the 1970s, died on March 25, 2008, at his home in White Plains, New York. Chiefly known for his writings on avant-garde cinema, his work appeared in Artforum, Film

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Comment, Cineaste, the Village Voice, and other publications, and was later collected in more than two dozen books, including A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965. He was a lecturer in film at Bard from 1973 to 1975, and again from 1976 to 1977. He also taught at Montclair State University, New York University, the University of Southern California, and the Otis Art Institute at Parsons School of Design. In addition to his critical writings on film, he also appeared behind the camera, completing 13 shorts and a feature-length film, (Late) of the Primate’s Palace. He is survived by two daughters, Jarrett and Devin; his mother, Pearl Fried; and a sister, Rosanne Arthur.

Charles Bancroft McLane, 88, died on February 23, 2008. After one semester as a visiting assistant professor of history at Bard, he earned a doctorate in public law and government at Columbia University in 1955. He joined the Dartmouth College faculty as a professor of Russian civilization in 1957, later becoming chairman of the Government Department. In addition to several scholarly works on Soviet–Third World relations, he coauthored—with his wife, the late Carol Evarts McLane—a multivolume social and economic history of Maine’s coastal islands. In 2004 he published a novel, Red Right Returning, a tale of Maine island life set in the 1930s and 1940s. During World War II he was the first volunteer for the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division Ski Troops, serving from 1941 to 1944. He then served with the army’s Psychological Warfare Division as an intelligence officer in Europe, reaching the rank of captain. In the early 1950s, along with his wife and two young children, he lived in Moscow, where he was a cultural attaché at the U.S. embassy. He is survived by two sisters; five children—Kristin Kehler, Alexander McLane, Eben McLane, Rebecca McLane, Jeremiah McLane, and Elisabeth McLane—and five grandchildren.

Christopher Markle, 53, assistant professor of drama and dance from 1987 to 1994, died on July 28, 2008, in DeKalb, Illinois. A highly regarded professional stage director, he received a B.A. with honors from Indiana University and an M.F.A. from Yale School of Drama. He was long associated with The Acting Company, the group founded by the legendary John Houseman; he also was a resident director at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis from 1980 to 1985, and a founder and artistic director of Dearknows, a New York City–based company known for its inventive work with narrative texts. Among his many directing credits were the national revival tour of The Cradle Will Rock; three versions of A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie; and Othello for the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival. In recent years he had been a theater professor at Northern Illinois University (NIU). In an obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Alexander Gelman, director of NIU’s School of Theatre and Dance, remembered Markle as “a unique artist and teacher” who had “an old-fashioned quality to his artistry . . . it was always wrapped up in inspiration and humanity.” He is survived by his wife, Sophia Varcados; a daughter, Zoe Markle; and four sisters, Karen Knab and Alana, Bonnie, and Marilyn Markle. David Nochimson ’92 of New York City organized a gathering in memory of Markle for Bardians and other friends.

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS For some, September marks a new year, with the beginning of school. For others, it’s January 1, with a fresh calendar and the reminder that it’s time to start preparing for tax returns.

Whether your new year starts in September or January—or in the case of Bard, July 1, when the fiscal year begins—today is a good time to review your financial affairs and make sure everything is in order.

Where to begin? Start by making a list. Write down the following information: • Bank account names, numbers, contact person, telephone numbers, address (including e-mail). Don’t forget to list pension and IRA accounts.

• Bankers’ and/or brokers’ names, with telephone number and address (including e-mail) • Attorney’s name, address, telephone number • Accountant’s name, address, telephone number • Insurance broker’s name, address, telephone number. List the number of each policy, and include home, health, car, life, and any other insurance.

• Safe deposit box number and address, with the location of both the box and the key • Location of will, health care proxy, and power of attorney If you don’t have any of the documents listed in the last item, now is an excellent time to create them. By writing a will and having a health care proxy and power of attorney, you ensure that your preferences will be known and adhered to. A will distributes your assets according to your wishes—not those of Uncle Sam or someone else—and lets you take care of family and any charitable organizations you care about.

Once you have completed the above list, give a copy to your advisers and to your children or a close friend. Keep another copy with your important papers as a reference.

If you have included Bard College or any charitable organization in your will, consider notifying the institution. Bard would like to thank you and offer you membership in the John Bard Society. As a member, you would receive invitations to special events throughout the year, including a luncheon with the College president. Most important, you would have the satisfaction of knowing that your wishes would be followed and you would help future students receive a Bard education.

For more information on how you can make a bequest or join the John Bard Society, please contact Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, at 845-758-7405 or pemstein@bard.edu. All inquiries will be kept confidential.

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FA C U LT Y N O T E S

Peggy Ahwesh, associate professor of film and electronic arts, participated in a panel discussion and screening held in conjunction with WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at P.S.1 MoMA. In a performance during the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Jennifer Montgomery and Ahwesh presented Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

In the spring, Ahwesh screened work at the 6th Orphans Film symposium, sponsored by New York University Cinema Studies and the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and was on a panel for “Moving/Images: Preserving Downtown TimeBased Works,” a conference held at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections. In June she curated a program for Light Industry, in Brooklyn, called “It Came from Pittsburgh.” In the past six months, she has screened short videos at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, European Media Art Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

James Bagwell, associate professor of music, prepared the Concert Chorale of New York in June for two performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces with the Michael Clark Dance Company, and in August for a number of concerts with the Mostly Mozart Festival, both at Lincoln Center. In June and July he conducted three new productions, including Candide, with Light Opera Oklahoma in Tulsa.

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, took part in the 2008 Festival of Ideas in New York City sponsored by Nextbook, an organization that presents public programs on Jewish literature, culture, and ideas.

In a program called “Culture, Taste, and Power,” James Shapiro, Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, moderated a conversation between Botstein and Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, that addressed questions about the relationship between cultural and political authority. For The Musical Quarterly, Botstein wrote “The State of the Business: Chamber Music America after Thirty Years.” In commemoration of the 30th season of Symphony Space in New York City, he led the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) in a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor in the “Wall-to-Wall Bach” weekend marathon.

In the ASO’s regular series of concerts, he conducted programs

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spotlighting the music of György Ligeti and 20th-century Italian composers, and gave the American premiere of Ferdinand Hiller’s oratorio The Destruction of Jerusalem. For SummerScape and the 19th annual Bard Music Festival, “Prokofiev and His World,” he led the ASO in performances of a newly discovered version of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare and large-scale orchestral works, and participated in panel discussions on the composer’s life, works, and context. For the volume of essays that accompanied the festival, published by Princeton University Press, Botstein contributed “Beyond Death and Evil: Prokofiev’s Spirituality and Christian Science.” In addition, he fulfilled regular conducting duties with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

The work of Mary Caponegro ’78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing, is included in Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana, to be published this fall by Fordham University Press. The Translator, her new novella, was excerpted in the spring issue of Conjunctions (“Fifty Contemporary Writers”). Caponegro gave a reading at Vassar College in February and spoke with students there who were studying her fiction.

Gabriela Carrion, assistant professor of Spanish, delivered two papers this year: “The End of Marriage in Lope’s ‘La viuda valenciana’” in March at the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater meeting in El Paso, Texas; and “A Question of Honor: Marriage and Murder” in July at “XV Coloquio Anglogermano sobre Calderón,” in Wroclaw, Poland.

Nicole Eisenman, assistant professor of studio arts, staged a performance at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in May and had a show of new work at Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin in September.

Omar G. Encarnación, associate professor of political studies, made presentations on reconciliation and democratization in Spain at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University in February and at the Congress of Europeanists meeting held in Chicago in March. His essay “Pinochet’s Revenge: Spain Revisits its Civil War” appeared in the Winter 2007–08 World Policy Journal.

Harold Farberman, founder and director of The Conductors Institute, was the guest lecturer at the Conductors Guild convention, held in January in Baltimore. Farberman’s “Double Concerto

for Violin and Percussion” was performed in April by the Fredonia (New York) Symphony Orchestra and in May by the Taiwan National Conservatory Orchestra in Taipei. In April Farberman completed a commission for the the Dauprat Horn Quartet of Basel, Switzerland. The work, “Strauss=4 Horns +Percussion,” will be premiered at a contemporary music festival in Berlin in 2009.

Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature and First-Year Seminar, gave a talk, “Larkin’s Distances,” at a seminar on Philip Larkin held in June at the West Chester University Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania. In September he delivered a paper, “W. G. Sebald, H. G. Adler, and Theresienstadt,” at a conference on Sebald’s life and work, held at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

Jacqueline Goss, associate professor of film and electronic arts, received a Media Arts Fellowship from the Tribeca Film Institute.

The fellowships in film and video, which are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, assist media artists in the United States who work in the broad categories of documentary, narrative, experimental, and video installation.

Cole Heinowitz, assistant professor of literature, presented papers at three international conferences: in August, “Robert Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay and the Bursting of the South American Bubble,” at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, held at the University of Toronto; and in April, “Commercial Colonialism and the Enlightenment Roots of Romantic Imperialism,” at the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, held in Long Beach, California, and “An Empire in Men’s Hearts: Commerce, Colonialism, and the Enlightenment Rewriting of Spanish America,” at the New York University Atlantic World Workshop.

Franz Kempf, professor of German, presented a paper entitled “Närrische Gespenster: Zum Humor in Kafka’s Betrachtung” at the Second International Congress of the German Kafka Society, held in Heidelberg in July. He also chaired a panel at the congress, on new approaches to Betrachtung (Meditation), Kafka’s first collection of short prose.

This year David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies, published “Political Education for Empire and Revolution” in

Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature; “Franz L. Neumann” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, second edition; “Antifascism as Ideology: Review and Introduction,” in Habitus, Identität und die exilierten Dispositionen; “Erste Briefe.

Zwischen Exil und Rückkehr” in Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte; and “Negotiations: Learning from Three Frankfurt Schools” in Fruits of Exile. In 2007 “Negotiating Exile: Franz L. Neumann as Political Scientist” came out in Der Eigensinn des Materials.

Erkundungen sozialer Wirklichkeit. In May Kettler was organizer and chair of a workshop on the “First Letters” project of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and gave a public lecture for the Department of Sociology at the University of Frankfurt.

Joel Kovel, Distinguished Professor of Social Studies, was the keynote speaker at the third National Conference on the Environment, sponsored by the Ministry of the Environment of Brazil and held in Brasilia in May. The meeting’s focus was climate change, and its occasion was also the launch of the second edition of Kovel’s book The Enemy of Nature.

An-My Lê, assistant professor of photography, presented Small Wars, a solo show, at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center from May to August. Events Ashore, a series of new photographs, was exhibited at the Murray Guy Gallery in New York City April 26 – May 31. 29 Palms—film and photographs—was at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New Paltz in Intimacies of Distant War, a group show (February 8 – April 13).

A selection of photographs from 29 Palms was on display at PhotoEspaña 2008 in Madrid during June and July, and photographs from Events Ashore were part of two group exhibitions: That Was Then . . . This Is Now at P.S.1 MoMA, New York, and at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in October. Photographs from Trap Rock were part of Portraits: Of People and Places, a group exhibition at University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in September.

Hoyt Long, assistant professor of Japanese literature, received the 2007 Horace H. Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Michigan for “On Uneven Ground: Provincializing Cultural Production in Interwar Japan.” Eight dissertations are chosen annually for the award from all disciplines at the university.

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Mark Lytle, professor of history, presented a paper, “1968: What Kind of Year Was It?” at “Global 1968,” a conference held in April at Colgate University. In June he participated in a conference on transatlantic relations in the 1960s and ’70s, held at University College Dublin. In September, Diplomatic History published, in conjunction with Environmental History, a volume on environmental diplomacy that he had edited with Kurk Dorsey of the University of New Hampshire.

Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture, and writer in residence, received two honorary degrees in Romania in April, from the University of Bucharest and the University of Cluj. At the Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest, he participated in the publishing launch by Editura Polirom of his complete work in 22 volumes. As part of this event, Manea participated in meetings with his readers in Bucharest, Sibiu, and Cluj, and traveled to his native region of Bukovina. In May Manea participated in an evening dedicated to him at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in a literary colloquium at the Centre Culturel de Rencontre–Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud.

Steven Mazie, faculty, Bard High School Early College, presented a paper, “A Clueless Electorate? Exploring the New Assault on the Reasonable Citizen,” at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, held in Chicago in April.

Chiori Miyagawa, playwright in residence, received a 2008–09 fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her new play, I Have Been to Hiroshima Mon Amour, was presented in Women Center Stage at Culture Project, in April.

Stephen Mucher, faculty, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, presented a paper, “‘Egregious Blunders’: The Urban Schoolman’s Critique of Teacher Preparation, 1894–1927,” in March at the American Educational Research Association annual conference in New York City.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college and president of the Levy Economics Institute, was interviewed in March by Nicholas Rummel at Financial Week regarding Basel II,

by Michael Derby at Dow Jones Newswires about Federal Reserve interventions during times of market trouble, and by Mary Kane at the Washington Independent on the Bear Stearns liquidity problems; in April by Kenneth Jost at Congressional Quarterly about what went wrong in the U.S. financial system, by Ron Fink at Financial Week regarding monetary policy and bank regulation, by Daniel Sturgeon at Tokyo News on the latest Federal Reserve interest rate cut, and by Sarah Bradshaw of the Poughkeepsie Journal regarding ways in which people could spend their stimulus payment that would help the local economy; in May by Christine Pizzuti of the Poughkeepsie Journal regarding current research programs at the Levy Economics Institute; and in June by Ron Fink at Financial Week regarding regulations limiting investments in banks. Papadimitriou was a keynote speaker at the “International Conference on Employment Opportunities and

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Public Employment in Globalising India,” sponsored by the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, India, April 3–5. He published “The Economic Contributions of Hyman Minsky: Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Reform” (written with L. Randall Wray) in Leading Contemporary Economists (Routledge, 2008).

In celebration of the 80th birthday of Matt Phillips, Asher B. Edelman Professor Emeritus of Art, the Meyerovich Gallery in San Francisco presented Undiscovered Monotypes last summer.

Jennifer Reeves ’93, faculty in film, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, received a Media Arts Fellowship from the Tribeca Film Institute. The fellowships in film and video, which are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, assist media artists in the United States working in the broad categories of documentary, narrative, experimental, and video installation.

On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Rescue Committee, Justus Rosenberg, professor emeritus of languages and literature, delivered the March 6 keynote address at the Committee’s headquarters, on the IRC’s activities, past and present.

Michael Sadowski, faculty, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, gave a presentation entitled “Meeting the Needs of LGBTQ Youth: A Relational Assets Approach” at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in New York City this past spring. The presentation focused on data from a qualitative research study led by Sadowski and psychologist Lisa Machoian.

An article about the relational assets approach written by Sadowski, Stephen Chow of the University of Hong Kong, and Constance P. Scanlon of the Chelsea (Massachusetts) Public Schools, will appear in the Journal of LGBT Youth in early 2009.

Geoffrey Sanborn, associate professor of literature, wrote the afterword to the new Signet edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was published last spring. Sanborn’s essay “Lounging on the Sofa with Leigh Hunt: A New Source for the Notes in Melville’s Shakespeare Volume” appeared in the June issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Luc Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, attended Festarch, the international festival of architecture, held in Cagliari, Sardinia, in May. There he delivered a talk on necrotourism and the World Trade Center site. In April, Sante interviewed the artist Christian Boltanski at the New York Public Library for the International Center for Photography, and in May he interviewed Peter Hutton, professor of film, at the Museum of Modern Art, and James Nares, artist and filmmaker, at Anthology Film Archives.

Phaidon published Stephen Shore, a retrospective monograph on the work of Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Shore presented two solo exhibitions, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri (February–May); and at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (July– September). He lectured at the Akron (Ohio) Art Museum; NelsonAtkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and Bezalel

Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Foam magazine published a portfolio of his work.

French writer Jean Paulhan: Jean Paulhan: On Poetry and Politics, published by the University of Illinois Press in June.

Amy Sillman MFA ’95, faculty in painting, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, has a solo exhibition, Third Person Singular, on display at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. The show remains up until January 4, 2009.

Michael Vahrenwald, visiting lecturer in photography, presented Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, February–August. The show then traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (October 4 – January 18, 2009). The Walker published a catalogue of the show with the same title.

Mona Simpson, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature, received an Academy Award in Literature, honoring “exceptional accomplishment,” last spring from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Elizabeth Smith, visiting associate professor of theater, worked as a voice and speech consultant with Tony nominee Martha Plimpton and other cast members of Top Girls by Caryl Churchill.

At Lincoln Center she was dialect consultant for Cymbeline and for Tom Stoppard’s award-winning trilogy, The Coast of Utopia. In the past year she also worked in the same capacities on Broadway productions of The Homecoming by Harold Pinter and Rock ’n Roll by Stoppard.

Richard Teitelbaum, professor of music, was a panelist for “Ancient Soundscapes, New Echoes: A Symposium and Musicale,” presented by the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies, on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, in March at Casa Italiana, Columbia University. In May his composition “Piano Tree,” for piano and computer, premiered with pianist Hiroko Sakurazawa at the Merce Cummingham Dance Studios in New York City. New work was performed for Beacon Event (2008) with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York.

Elaine Thomas, assistant professor of political studies, wrote a chapter on changing French responses to Muslim demands for public cultural and religious accommodation in Culture and Belonging: Symbolic Landscapes and Contested Identities in Divided Societies, published this year by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, had a lively spring sabbatical with numerous performances celebrating her 70th birthday year. As Season Composer with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she had three commissioned premieres, “A Gift” (wind quartet and piano), “Trio Cavany” (piano trio), and “Simply Purple” (solo viola). She received a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center. Her actual birth date, September 6, was celebrated at Merkin Hall in New York City with a concert that featured longtime performer friends. Concerts every week during September, October, and November salute her birthday.

Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, spoke at “The Demon of Melancholy: Genealogies, Modernities” (April 24–25), a conference hosted by the Department of French Studies at Brown University. He coedited, introduced, and translated, with Jennifer Bajorek and Charlotte Mandell ’90, an anthology of essays by

Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature, spent the 2007–08 academic year as Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. During that time she wrote “Good Fatigue, Bad Fatigue: Lessons in Productive Insomnia” for Cabinet Magazine and “Dissociative Disorders : Le Rouge et le Noir and the Failure to Converse” for Nottingham French Studies. She gave a keynote address at “Raising the Stakes of the Humanities through Public Scholarship,” the University of Madison’s Conference for Public Humanities; presented “Therapeutic Obsessions: Creativity and Compulsion in Literature and Art” at “What is the Human,” a symposium at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the Humanities in Madison; lectured on “Janet, Ribot, and Therapeutic Dissociation” at the Slought Foundation’s symposium “Modernism: The Time of the Unconscious” in Philadelphia; and lectured on Paul Lafargue’s “Philosophy of Laziness” at “Sloth Day” at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City.

Suzanne Vromen, professor emeritus of sociology, was the keynote speaker at the Yom Hashoah commemoration, Holocaust Remembrance Day, organized in May by the Jewish Federation of Dutchess County and Vassar College. She spoke on the topic of rescuers—people who risked their lives and those of their families to save Jews from extermination at the hands of the Nazis.

Stephen Westfall, faculty in painting, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, presented Grand Opening, a mural project, last fall at Solvent Space, an installation site for international artists in Richmond, Virginia. The mural, which was supported by Westfall’s 2007–08 Guggenheim Fellowship, was favorably reviewed in the March issue of Art Papers.

Japheth Wood, faculty, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, gave two talks last spring: “Partially Ordered Voting Preferences” at the Mathematics and Voting Theory Contributed Paper Session at the Mathematical Association of America New Jersey Section spring meeting at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey; and “A Simple Solution to Complicated Voting Systems,” to celebrate Math Awareness Month at New Jersey City University.

At the annual spring meeting of the Metropolitan New York Section of the Math Association of America, held in May at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, Wood was co-presenter of a poster, “Math Circles in the Metro NY Region.”

FACULTY NOTES | 73

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD.

VOTE NOVEMBER 4

Image credits Cover: Stephanie Berger 1: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 2: Don Hamerman 3: (left) ©Jackson Hill/Black Star; (center) ©Mike Steinberg/Black Star; (right) Karl Rabe 4–7: ©Jackson Hill/Black Star 8: Karl Rabe 9: ©Jackson Hill/Black Star 11: (top and middle) Stephanie Berger; (bottom left) Gene Schiavone; (bottom right) ©Nathaniel Brooks 12: ©Mike Steinberg/Black Star 14–21: Gilles Peress 22: ©Lisa Quin˜ones/Black Star 23: SBLM Architects PC 25: ©Chris Ho/Black Star 26: (top) ©U.S. Army/Cpl. Brian M. Henner/Hardout/Reuters/Corbis; (bottom) ©JLP/Deimos/zefa/Corbis 29: Karl Rabe 30: Courtesy of Cook+Fox Architects 31: Tobey Sanford 32: Courtesy of Cook+Fox Architects 41: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 42: (top) ©Mary Grusak; (bottom) cover image for Retrieving James/Yakov, the Brother of Jesus, Stephanos Tzangarolas/The Bridgeman Art Library 43: Courtesy of Bard College Athletics 44: (top) Gregory Cherin; (bottom) Susan H. Gillespie 45: (top) Visualization courtesy of Studio Olafur Eliasson; (bottom) Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art 46: (top) courtesy of Michael Beutler and Franco Soffiantino Artecontemporanea; (bottom) Scott Smith 47: (top) 41: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00; (bottom) ©Susan Meiselas/Magnum 48: Joseph Consentino Photography 49: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 50: Courtesy of Ursula Arsenault ’01 52: Courtesy of Hunter Bivens ’97 53: Courtesy of Ruth Ungar Merenda ’97 54: Courtesy of Scott Licamele ’91 56: Courtesy of Wendy Weldon ’71 57: Courtesy of Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 58: Courtesy of Mari Lyons ’57 59: Courtesy of McAlistair Coleman ’54 67: Doug Baz 68: (left) Noah Sheldon; (middle and right) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 69: (left and right) Don Hamerman; (center) Bessina Posner Harrar ’84 72: (left) USA, 2008 Elections, New York City, McCain Campaigns/ ©Ramin Talaie/Corbis; (right) USA, 2008 Elections, Washington, D.C., Senator Obama Speaks at AIPAC/©Brooks Kraft/Corbis Back cover: Scott Barrow

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