2009 Spring Bardian

Bardian Bard College Spring 2009

opposite page Students discuss science posters in the hallway of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. The poster display rotates in order to include representations of all Senior Projects in the sciences, as well as work on other student research projects. above Looking west at dusk, The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, including the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories cover At work in the new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories: Professor of Chemistry Simeen Sattar (left) and Robert Kittler ’11

Dear Bardians, The Class of 2009 will graduate aware of concepts, such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt, that were unknown to me, and most of my classmates, when we left Bard in the mid-90s with dreams of Internet start-ups.

Bard will endure, even as corporations that once seemed invulnerable tumble. Dramatic changes have swept the world during the course of Bard’s nearly 150 years, yet the College has remained a beacon of progressive education, despite pressures to scale back its ambitions.

This beacon is sustained by faculty who are fully committed to the art of teaching, students who take ownership of their intellectual destiny, and an agile administration able to stretch limited resources to produce superior results. The foundation for this success is built by dedicated alumni/ae, parents, and friends who deem Bard worthy of generous support.

I urge you to become a part of this group that steps up for Bard. The rewards of participation are very satisfying. The temptation to wait out the storm is powerful, but I can assure you, from personal experience, that watching your savings evaporate in the markets is not nearly as enjoyable as investing in Bard.

You can make an enormous difference in Bard’s future, and not only by writing checks. The Class of 2009 and other alumni/ae need contacts and advice in order to navigate the shifting job market. Bard needs help recruiting and retaining students from historically underrepresented communities. Organizing an alumni/ae event in your area is as easy as picking a location and sending out an e-mail. Share with your peers the news from this terrific issue of the Bardian and encourage them to make sure that they are doing everything they can to keep our college strong. Please e-mail alumni@bard.edu for more information on these and other opportunities.

Thank you for all you do.

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 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Pia Carusone ’03 Charles Clancy ’69, Stewardship Committee Cochairperson Peter Criswell ’89 Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson

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 Chairperson 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, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Mollie Meikle ’03

Steven Miller ’70, Stewardship Committee Cochairperson Anne Morris-Stockton ’69 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 Emilie Richardson ’05 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Joan Schaffer ’75 Barry Silkowitz ’71 George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochairperson Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69 Paul Thompson ’93 Erin Toliver ’00 Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Samir B. Vural ’98 Brandon Weber ’97 Barbara Crane Wigren ’68 Dumaine Williams ’03 Ron Wilson ’75 Matt Wing ’06 Sung Jee Yoo ’01

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SPRING 2009 FEATURES 4 GABRIELLE H. REEM AND HERBERT J. KAYDEN CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND COMPUTATION EARNS MAJOR DESIGN AWARD Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories Open

DEPARTMENTS 20 ON AND OFF CAMPUS 21 BOOKS BY BARDIANS 26 CLASS NOTES 46 FACULTY NOTES

6 A BROADENED VISION FOR THE BARD GRADUATE CENTER An enlarged curriculum, diversified student body, and campus expansion keep the BGC on the forefront of material culture studies 8 CULTURAL LITERACY Bard’s Middle Eastern Studies Program offers a rich multidisciplinary opportunity 12 TRAINING GREEN LEADERS Economist Eban Goodstein joins the Bard Center for Environmental Policy

above, left to right: Inside the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories; Noam Chomsky speaks in Olin Hall; graduates of the Bard Prison Initiative at their Commencement

14 HEALTH MATTERS Three Bard alumni/ae conduct research with the potential to improve the health of millions 18 A LION OF LANG AND LIT The never-flagging passion of Professor Peter Sourian

Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation Earns Major Design Award Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories Open The design created by Rafael Viñoly Architects PC for The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation garnered a 2008 International Architecture Award. Two institutions give the award, the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, and the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies in Dublin, Ireland. The award, one of 114 worldwide, represents “recognition of the most important key buildings produced in this decade, underscoring the highest level of imagination and inspiration,” said the Chicago Athenaeum’s announcement. The Reem and Kayden Center also received a 2008 Illumination Design Award from the New England chapter of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America.

The Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories, inside the Reem and Kayden Center, belong to chemistry—

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and to the green future. The Resnick laboratories affix 20,000 square feet to the south of the 49,000-square-foot science building arc, complementing the Biology and Computer Science Program facilities already housed in the Center. The Class of 2012 is Bard’s first entering class since the Reem and Kayden Center opened, notes Mark Halsey, associate dean of the college and associate professor of mathematics.

He adds, “We have seen an increase in the percentage of entering students interested in science. With the opening of the Resnick laboratories, the teaching, learning, and research that our faculty and students engage in have a flexible, innovative, well-equipped facility second to none among Bard’s peer institutions.”

The inclusion of the Resnick laboratories in the Reem and Kayden Center represents a tremendous commitment by the College to invest resources in the sciences, says Craig

Anderson, associate professor of chemistry and director of the Chemistry Program. “They will invigorate our growing Chemistry Program,” he says. “A great effort was made to create an environment that would simultaneously enhance students’ classroom and hands-on research experiences.”

Opened this spring, the Resnick laboratories contain individual research labs across the hall from each faculty member’s office. Each laboratory contains two eight-foot hoods and 18 feet of bench space; a refrigerator and freezer; and gas, air, nitrogen, and vacuum lines via a series of customdesigned bollards. “The expanded laboratories allow us to easily include more students in our own research,” says Emily McLaughlin, assistant professor of chemistry. “They provide many features not found at most other colleges and universities.”

Capping the southbound hallway is a small seminar room with three glass walls, an architectural echo of the glassenclosed classroom at the Center’s northern tip. A brassencased pod—an informal lounge area—accompanies the copper, zinc, and steel pods of the original structure. A large seminar room contains a 60-inch LCD screen and whiteboard. Twenty-five additional slots for student and faculty research posters await new placards along the atrium wall.

Besides beauty, the Resnick laboratories’ distinction is their technology, says Anderson: “Both our teaching and research spaces are state of the art. Along with new instrumentation, these spaces facilitate research programs for our faculty as well as prepare students for a future in chemical research. This is of paramount importance for attracting young minds to science.”

New equipment includes an advanced 400-MHz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer (NMR), which aids in the characterization of complex molecules, and a liquid chromatograph/mass spectrometer and gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, top-notch instruments that separate the components of a mixture, then ionize and fragment the components, and finally determine the mass of each fragment. The new equipment allows students to become experts with contemporary instruments.

A separate geothermal well field, similar to a larger one already in place, has been built underground across from the new southern entrance. The wells preheat cold water, using the earth’s heat during cold weather, and use the earth’s temperature to chill water in the summer, thereby saving energy costs.

Four enthalpy wheels give the chemistry laboratories their stellar energy-saving ranking, says Halsey. The spin-

ning eight-foot-high wheels, set into chambers on the roof, capture vented air from huge air-handling units and exhaust fans, and draw out the heat or cold that otherwise would have left the building completely. About 70 percent of the energy that would have been lost is retained, compared to 40 percent in the original part of the building. For that portion, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority issued $207,000 in energy rebates; the Resnick laboratories are expected to reap $350,000.

The original building’s above-the-ceiling “spine,” containing the Center’s heating and cooling systems, continues over the new area. But here, more air circulates, accommodating the higher number of fume hoods: some 49 in the new space alone. The hoods, which open and close, vent air and fumes from the self-contained work areas.

The western side of the Resnick laboratories continues the original glass-fronted teaching laboratories; each station boasts a four-foot hood and four feet of bench space.

Two teaching labs are separated by a shared equipment space. Each chemistry lab measures approximately 1,000 square feet and contains 16 four-foot fume hoods. Each teaching lab also has three 50-inch LCD monitors and a wireless microphone and speaker system. Two support rooms contain equipment, peninsulas for bench work, and eight-foot hoods under which students can prepare for full experiments. “These hoods are unique in that all sides of them are transparent, allowing clear visibility, a feature that provides another level of safety for students and faculty,” McLaughlin says. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to be an integral part of the continuing development of science at Bard.”

—Cynthia Werthamer

Part of the geothermal heating and cooling installation for The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation

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A Broadened Vision for the Bard Graduate Center Peter Miller, formerly chair of academic programs at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC), was appointed dean in July 2008. He now oversees the Center’s M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. programs and its exhibitions, publications, and public programs in consultation with Susan Weber, founder and director of the BGC. “Since Peter’s appointment to the chairmanship in 2007,” says Weber, “the BGC has enlarged the scope of its academic and exhibition programs. With the growth of the Center, the student population has changed significantly, and additional partnerships with like-minded cultural institutions have been developed.” The BGC is also undergoing a physical expansion: a major renovation project is under way that will combine two adjoining town houses on West 86th Street into an expanded, state-of-theart academic facility.

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Given his intellectual background, it’s not surprising that Miller, a “scholar of scholarship” who holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Cambridge, has been instrumental in the BGC’s development of its mission. One of Miller’s longtime interests is Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a 17th-century polymath who, by poring over archives and explaining the value of artifacts in historical research, helped change the way Europeans thought about ancient and distant civilizations. While it would be a stretch to say that the BGC’s scope is similar to the expanded intellectual universe that Peiresc inspired for future generations of scholars, Miller does point out that the Center’s potential fields of study are “encyclopedic.” “Among our essential strengths is not just the focus on the human transformation of the natural, but the fact that we’re committed to pluralistic study of this range of endeavor,” he says. “The

decorative arts is a complex discipline, made even more so by the parallel, complementary, and sometimes competing discourses of material culture and design history. We’re not pushing one line over another. As Montaigne said, there are many paths to the same goal.”

The Center’s faculty bring a variety of academic backgrounds to the BGC, such as the history of architecture, furniture, ideas, design, technology, craft, painting, and textiles.

“For our students, this richness makes for a fantastic mix,” Miller says. “And this plurality of voices puts the institution in the right position to study what we study, and teach what we teach. If we were doctrinaire or dogmatic, if we said ‘it’s our way or the highway,’ we might surf the zeitgeist for a while, but eventually, like all fashions, it would collapse, and we’d be just like everybody else.”

Concurrent with the broadening of its intellectual endeavors, the Center has seen a change in its applicant pool. “Not only do we have many more ‘traditional’ graduate students than the Center once had,” Miller says, “but they are coming to us with a more diverse academic background.” By “traditional” he means that most of the BGC’s current M.A. students recently (within the past year or two) finished their undergraduate degrees in a wide range of fields—history, anthropology, and American studies, for example. In the past, 75 to 80 percent of BGC students held a B.A. degree in art history; now the number is closer to 40 percent. Many of the Center’s students aspire to careers as academics or curators. What particularly inspires Miller about these students is that “whatever they’re working on, they know that it can be dramatically enriched by understanding complementary areas. Someone who’s interested in William Morris, for example, can be motivated by a lecture on medieval history, or antiquarianism in China.”

Lectures and symposia have become an important element in the BGC’s vigorous research program under Miller’s deanship, working in counterpoint with the broad course offerings. “As a graduate research institute,” says Miller, “we believe that teaching and research are on a continuum. Our seminar series and program of symposia let students see where classroom questions can lead, and allow faculty to develop ideas in the classroom and bring them to scholarly fruition in the lecture hall.”

The “cultural sciences campus,” as Miller terms it, is another of the Center’s endeavors. The BGC has partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Art for nearly a decade, co-curating exhibitions and, in the process, teaching BGC

students about museum and curatorial work. Building on this successful model, Miller and his BGC colleagues have developed similar partnerships with two important cultural institutions on Manhattan’s West Side, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) and the American Museum of Natural History. The first fruit of the BGC–N-YHS collaboration is Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick, which opens at the BGC on September 17. The exhibition explores van Varick’s fascinating life by way of her textile shop’s inventory and account books, documents that are now in the N-YHS material culture collection. The exhibition’s co-curator, Marybeth De Filippis BGC ’06, first developed her arguments about van Varick’s artifacts in her

“As a graduate research institute, we believe that teaching and research are on a continuum.”

M.A. thesis. “Marybeth is a wonderful example for our students,” says Miller.

The completing link in the “campus” is the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), which presents numerous exhibitions every year and maintains an extraordinary international collection of anthropological material.

The BGC–AMNH relationship is slightly different from the others. “We’re building it around a joint two-year fellowship; the Fellow will teach a course on anthropology and material culture here, and also work on an exhibition there,” says Miller. Aaron Glass, the current Fellow, came to Bard’s Annandale campus to speak in April. In “Edward Curtis Meets the Kwakwaka’wakw ‘In the Land of the Head Hunters,’” a talk presented by the Anthropology Program, Glass described a multimedia collaborative project to restore a landmark 1914 silent film.

Miller is an enthusiastic teacher as well as an imaginative leader and administrator. What does he hope to pass on to his students? “Questions are more important than answers,” he says. “Curiosity is something to be followed, not avoided. Of course you can’t teach creativity. But as a teacher you can introduce conditions in which creativity can take off, and show students your passion for your subject, and for the hard work that goes into learning.”

—Kelly Spencer

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Cultural Literacy Bard’s Middle Eastern Studies Program To be truly fluent in a language, one must be fluent in the accompanying culture(s). In this regard, Bard’s Middle Eastern Studies Program (MES) fulfills the promise inherent in the College’s Hebrew and Arabic courses.

Oren Garonzik ’09 is among the first students to benefit from MES. Garonzik is a native of Israel who moved to Boston as a young child. At Bard, he combined MES and the Political Studies Program, moderating into the latter. He has also taken related courses (Culture and Power in the Middle East, Middle Eastern Modernities, The ArabIsraeli Conflict, Islam and Europe) through other programs. These enabled him to study, for example, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bedouin culture, Islamophobia, and immigration and citizenship issues related to the presence of Muslims in Europe. He spent his junior year in his homeland, studying, through Hebrew University, the history of the Middle East, sects of Islam, relationship dynamics that exist between Israel and the Arab countries, and Iranian history up to the 1979 revolution.

Garonzik’s Senior Project tackles the issue of Israel’s radical right and the associated topic of settlements. Both factors exert a “negative impact on the peace process,” he says.

The effects are Gordian, intertwining historical patterns and the coalitions necessary to govern Israel. “These are critical issues,” says Garonzik. “How do we find a peaceful political solution? A lot of issues within Israel need to be resolved before peace is possible. I’m optimistic in the sense that today more Israelis are aware of the problem with settlers and the radical right and are more critical of their government.”

Unlike Garonzik, Molly Anders ’09 arrived at Bard with no previous connection to the Middle East, and that was what motivated her. “I’m from Kentucky, where I was very sheltered,” says Anders. “I knew nothing about Arabic or Islam. But I was so curious. I took Arabic for my language requirement and loved it. It was different from anything I’d learned before. Arabic is a poetic language, but at the same time, formulaic.

Mathematical. And in Arabic literature there’s more emphasis on sound. Arabic taught me how a whole statement will flow when recited.”

Anders has also delved into Sufism and Islamic law and, during a semester in Cairo, took a course that examined media and the Middle East. The course revealed a world of misinformation on all sides and retriggered Anders’s high school interest in journalism.

Upon returning stateside, she pursued that interest through the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program. Internships are a key part of BGIA, and Anders was guided toward one at the Middle Eastern editorial desk of Newsweek.

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Anders moderated into creative writing and MES, and was one of the students who helped evaluate prospective faculty for the latter program. Two recent additions to the MES faculty—Rivka Halperin and Elizabeth Holt—join Joel Perlmann, director of MES and Levy Institute Research Professor at the College; Yuval Elmelech, associate professor of sociology and research associate at the Levy Institute; Youssef Yacoubi, assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature; and Jeffrey Jurgens, visiting assistant professor of anthropology.

Halperin, visiting assistant professor of Hebrew, teaches beginning and intermediate courses in that language. A native of Israel who has lived in the United States for more than two decades, Halperin studied at Bar-Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities before receiving her Ph.D. in contemporary Hebrew literature from New York University. She coordinated the Hebrew program at Princeton University for eight years and spent two years chairing the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Hebrew Department.

“I begin the course with a discussion of Orientalism.

Americans and the U.S. media often make assumptions about the region; it’s important to acknowledge that.”

—Elizabeth Holt

In teaching Hebrew, Halperin uses what she refers to as “a diverse menu of subject matter and techniques” and is committed to a pedagogy that combines texts and technology. Class work incorporates Israeli literature, current events, Biblical texts, newspapers, the Aggadah, short stories, novels, poetry, songs, music, the Internet, audiovisual material, and student presentations that reflect individual interests. All classes are conducted entirely in Hebrew. “It’s a very dynamic and challenging program of reading, writing, listening, and speaking,” she says.

Holt, assistant professor of Arabic, received a B.A. from Harvard University and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. A 2006 Fulbright brought her to the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the American University in Cairo. She has also spent time in other Middle Eastern countries.

Last fall Holt taught Modern Arabic Literature: Changing Places in the Arab World, a course that explores a variety of genres (novels, short stories, poems, films). The syllabus includes works set in such places as Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

Holt points out the distinction between Arabic dialects, which “differ from country to country,” and the Modern Standard Arabic used in religion, politics, and the world of letters. Of Modern Standard Arabic, Holt says, “It’s pretty consistent and it’s among the ways that writers of one Arab country stay tuned to the work of writers in other Arab countries.” The level of Arabic language skills among Holt’s students varies; perforce, texts are often studied in translation, which “affects our position as readers,” says Holt.

“Sometimes I will Xerox one word and discuss the number of ways it can be translated.

But the translator has to choose one word, and other avenues and understandings are then closed off.”

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And, context must be taken into account. “The contemporary is in dialogue with political situations,” says Holt. “I begin the course with a discussion of Orientalism.

Americans and the U.S. media often make assumptions about the region; it’s important to acknowledge that. I give historical context but am most concerned that we approach the texts as creative works of literature and film. I tend to structure classes around discussion questions drawn from close reading. Of course, if the text goes into the subject of colonialism, then the text steps into a historical register. So the class is a balance of my priorities, with students’ bringing a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives, including their political knowledge, to the class. I want students to come away with an enthusiasm for Arabic literature.”

Bard’s Hebrew and Arabic courses are cross-listed with MES. The mix becomes even more fertile when Bardians tap into related courses offered through programs in sociology, historical studies, political studies, religion, anthropology, art history, social studies, economics, and literature. The result: a rich multidisciplinary opportunity.

—René Houtrides MFA ’97

MES: Background and Curriculum Within the overall MES structure, Bard’s Hebrew courses were the first in place. Arabic classes followed in the fall of 1998—an outcome of Bard’s characteristic responsiveness to student interest. Once Arabic joined Hebrew in Bard’s curriculum, eager students—in concert with faculty—lobbied for the establishment of MES. It first appeared on the College’s program list in the spring of 2006.

Neil Westman ’97 was in the vanguard of students who advocated for inclusion of Arabic courses. Having grown up bilingual English-Spanish (his mother is from Puerto Rico), Westman began studying Spanish at Bard, but soon sought the challenge of learning a new language. He started to explore Arabic through a correspondence course, followed by a summer in Tunisia.

Westman served five-and-a-half months with the U.S. Army in Iraq, and his experience there verifies the importance of proficiency in cultural understanding as well as language—a proficiency that MES develops. “You could be well studied in Arabic and talk to somebody,” Westman says, “but when I was translating in Iraq, I knew that you couldn’t ask questions without knowing the social graces. When you go into an Iraqi home, you have to sit there and have tea, or whatever is offered. You have to ask about the family, repeatedly. Americans always want to cut to the chase, but if you really want to ‘win hearts and minds,’ as our government says, cultural details are important.”

The term Middle East raises questions of culture, ethnicity, language, history, and religion. As a result, the region is variously defined. Bard’s MES focuses on “the formation and evolution of the historical and contemporary Middle East, spanning from North Africa to Afghanistan and from central Asia to Yemen.”

“Of course there are students who are interested in the Middle East as a problem area,” says program director Joel Perlmann, who did undergraduate work at University of California, Berkeley, and holds a B.A. from Hebrew University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. “What we concentrate on is providing a variety of basic skills—modern historical and language skills—and allowing students to choose how to use these cornerstones.”

Before moderating into the program, students must complete Narrating the Modern Middle East—a core course, and must have a one-year proficiency in Arabic or Hebrew.

Senior Projects must address the contemporary Middle East.

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Training Green Leaders Eban Goodstein joins the Bard Center for Environmental Policy “We are alive at an extraordinary moment, one that demands, especially from educators, an extraordinary responsibility.”

—Eban Goodstein, in Inside Higher Ed

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When Eban Goodstein received an e-mail that described the opening for director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, his radar went off. A professor of economics at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, Goodstein wasn’t looking for a new job. Yet he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to direct a center that develops leaders in environmental policy.

“I have two daughters who are 18 and 21 years old, and I spend a lot of time thinking about what has to be accomplished within their lifetimes,” says Goodstein. “My vision for the Center is not only to provide leadership training firmly grounded in science, policy, and economics, but also to provide a place where master’s degree students can come to terms with the magnitude of what they have to do, and learn to be ambitious.”

Goodstein, 49, calls his daughters’ generation the new “Greatest Generation” because the environmental crisis they have inherited and now face is so extraordinary.

“It’s difficult for people to grasp,” he says. “American media has largely failed. Journalists have given too much credence to climate skeptics. The reality is a problem of probabilities, and the probability of catastrophic outcomes is uncomfortably high.”

Goodstein cites the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicts that global warming will skyrocket 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century if emissions in industrial countries do not stabilize immediately and decline rapidly within the next few years. He points out that it’s already too late to save the Arctic ice cap and that Australia is fast becoming a desert.

“Many of us who work in this area are only beginning to get it, in a profound way,” he says. “I’ve been writing about climate change since 1992, but only in the last four or five years have we begun to understand how quickly it’s unraveling. We thought we had a little more time.”

Goodstein’s love of the natural world developed in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he grew up. Both of his parents taught at the University of the South, and his family lived on the university’s campus, which is situated atop the Cumberland Plateau and includes a 13,000-acre nature preserve of lakes, forests, and bluffs called the Domain. There, he and his buddies used to hang out in caves and climb the hills.

As an undergraduate at Williams College, Goodstein studied geology. At graduation he received a Watson Fellowship to work on mining and economic development projects in Africa. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan and author a science textbook, Economics and the Environment, which is now in its fifth edition. He has also written The Trade-Off Myth: Fact and Fiction About Jobs and the Environment and Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction, a memoir. In February 2009, Goodstein spearheaded the National Teach-in on Global Warming Solutions, a grassroots initiative that engaged more than a million Americans in a policy-focused conversation on climate change during the first 100 days of the Obama administration.

On the day of the teach-in, Goodstein sat in the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in the Capitol Rotunda, with members of Congress, speaking with thousands of college students at different institutions across the country through video conferencing technology. “I was in Washington, D.C., looking out at the auditorium of Lewis & Clark,” says Goodstein with enthusiastic amazement.

Using this technology, he plans to launch a biweekly national climate seminar from the Center, with scientists, policy makers, politicians, analysts, and economists. Candidates for Bard’s environmental policy master’s degree will develop online resources and the framework for a public dialogue in which people from all over the country can engage.

Goodstein finds the Center an ideal place to start training leaders who can surmount the key challenges in stabilizing the climate, which include ending world dependence on fossil fuels by 2040, rewiring the entire planet with clean technologies, and reinventing cities, the global food system, and transportation. “Bard has done what everyone wishes they could do: integrate a curriculum of policy, science, and economics,” he says. “A lot of people talk about doing that, but I’ve never seen it done as effectively as it is done here.”

Goodstein takes his position as director this fall. He has taught at Lewis & Clark since 1995 and he will miss Portland,

he admits, but he looks forward to coming east. He and his wife will live close to the Bard campus in a house with views of the Catskill Mountains. He plans to dive into the beauty of the region by hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing.

Above all, he is excited about joining the Bard Center for Environmental Policy and about helping the “Greatest Generation” tackle a momentous endeavor. In his letter to prospective applicants, Goodstein sums up: “To prepare for the work ahead, you need the highest-quality education and training that my generation can provide . . . Bottom line: the Bard Center for Environmental Policy is training leaders for the heroic tasks that face your generation, and I am excited and honored to be a part of that effort.”

—Jennifer Wai-Lan Huang

The Bard Center for Environmental Policy offers either an M.S. or a professional certificate in environmental policy; dual-degree programs in conjunction with Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program (M.S. and M.A.T.) and Pace University Law School (M.S. and J.D. in environmental law); and, for Bard undergraduates, a 3-2 program that grants both a B.A. and an M.S. in environmental policy in five years.

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HEALTH MATTERS Three PH.D.’s Take the Molecular Approach Three Bard alumni/ae are using their Ph.D. degrees to conduct research that has the potential to improve the health of millions of people. At a nonprofit laboratory in Seattle, Anu Kumar ’00, who finished her Ph.D. in biochemistry at Tufts last spring, is helping to create new drugs that will combat tuberculosis. Gavin Jones ’03, who completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at UCLA in 2007, works at a lab at MIT where he researches chemical reactions to learn how to improve the yields of life-saving drugs at the atomic level. His Bard classmate Dumaine Williams ’03, who was awarded his Ph.D. in pharmacology at Stony Brook University in 2007, is developing new therapies for diabetes at Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx.

All three came to Bard from overseas—Kumar from southern India, Jones and Williams from Jamaica, though the two didn’t meet until they arrived in Annandale.

Jones remembers his first day at Bard in August 1999, when “someone directed me to Kline to get something to eat. When I got there, a woman called me over to say hello.

Turned out she was Dumaine Williams’s mom. She’d already figured out that I’d come to Bard from Jamaica. I remember that I was surprised to learn that Dumaine was Jamaican—he’s 6 foot 6. Jamaicans who are that tall are very rare.”

Jones entered Bard thinking he might go into mathematics: “I was strong in all the sciences in high school, but math was my favorite subject.” When he took Organic Chemistry during his first semester, he found that “it matched my own outlook perfectly. I take an analytical, logical approach to most things, and organic chem is a very logical subject.” His professor for Organic Chemistry—and the adviser he’d been assigned to—was Hilton Weiss (now professor emeritus). “I’ll never forget one of the

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best pieces of advice Hilton ever gave me. He said, ‘It’s ridiculous to try to remember a whole lot of material (that’s not exactly how he said it, but you get the idea), because you’re going to forget it anyway. It’s much easier to remember a few important facts and apply those principles to any problem you’re faced with.’ I’d never heard a teacher say anything like that. It seemed funny at the time, but if you think about it, it’s true that while you learn a lot of things over a lifetime, you forget all but the most important details.”

After he finished his studies at Bard a semester early, Jones went home to Jamaica, where he taught at his former high school for a semester while he applied to graduate school. He enrolled in UCLA’s Ph.D. program in chemistry the following September.

The transition was “quite a shock,” he says. “Bard had about 1,300 students when I was there, and UCLA has about 38,000. Fortunately, the Chemistry Department has only about 500 students—postgrad, grad, and undergrad. It’s a contained environment where everyone knows everyone else, much like Bard.” At UCLA Jones studied with Ken Houk, “one of the pioneers in computational organic chemistry—he established a lot of the rules, and his name is associated with the field.”

“We figure out what’s going on in the reactions, and then the medical scientists can find ways to improve their therapies.”

—Gavin Jones

clockwise from top Gavin Jones ’03, Dumaine Williams ’03, Anu Kumar ’00

The research Jones is conducting at MIT is similar to his graduate work at UCLA, though the problems are much more complex. “We’re using computers with dual quad core processors,” he says. “Even with such powerful computers, some of the calculations we perform take as long as six weeks.” Jones and his fellow research chemists at MIT are trying to identify the most favorable course that a reaction can take. “Think of a reaction as analogous to a journey over a mountain with many peaks. You can choose to go over a higher peak, which we’d describe as less favorable, or a lower peak, which would be more favorable,” he says. “We’re trying to pinpoint the course a reaction takes by calculating what the transition states—the peaks—would look like. We calculate the energies of the materials we’re testing, and then we can figure out which is the most favorable path for the materials’ reactions.”

How does his work in theoretical chemistry translate to medicine? “It’s used in pharmaceutical settings,” says Jones. Pharmaceutical companies want to obtain as close to a 100 percent yield as possible, meaning that all reactants are converted to pure product during the reaction, without forming unwanted side products. “There’s a limit to what medical scientists can do to improve the yields of the reactions that are used to make drugs if they don’t understand what happens during the reaction at the molecular level,” Jones explains. “That’s where we come in, as research chemists.

We figure out what’s going on in the reactions, and then the medical scientists can find ways to improve their therapies.”

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When Anu Kumar arrived at Bard in 1996, she quickly found her academic niche, biochemistry—“though I enjoyed organic chemistry as well; both made a lot of sense to me.” Bard’s science faculty are “great,” she says. “I particularly like their teaching style. It isn’t purely a lecture format; they lead you through the problems toward the answers, trying to help you understand the basic principles behind them. That’s what I like about biochemistry, too. It’s not just a lot of facts; it actually makes you understand why the facts happen.” Like Gavin Jones, Kumar has “great memories” of classes with Hilton Weiss. “I ended up taking every class Hilton offered while I was at Bard,” she says. “In fact, I considered majoring in organic chemistry.” She is now a biochemistry researcher at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI), where she is involved in a project to develop new drugs that fight tuberculosis, a project that is close to her heart. “I grew up in India, a country in which TB is still a huge burden,” she says. “I’ve always wanted my work to have a direct impact on the underserved, at home in India as well as in other developing nations that are battling TB.”

The ultimate goal is for the process to lead to “a few unique drugs that will be effective against multidrug-resistant TB, and that will also have a shortened course of therapy.”

—Anu Kumar

Tuberculosis research has come to the forefront mainly due to the recent alarming rise of multidrug-resistant TB and, secondarily, because current TB drugs require lengthy courses of treatment whose expense and complicated regimes make them impractical for use in developing nations. Given these parameters, the research effort involved in developing effective, easy-to-use, inexpensive TB drugs is spread among large pharmaceutical institutions all over the world. The initial optimization is being carried out at SBRI. Kumar’s part in the lab’s project is to develop purified enzymebased assays (an assay is a chemical analysis that determines a substance’s composition) that provide clear readouts as to whether the tested drugs would be effective against TB enzymes. Once she and her colleagues have developed and optimized the assays, they will work in conjunction with pharmaceutical companies who can screen their compound libraries to find new drugs that can inhibit TB enzymes. Further down the road, those drugs will be tested against the living bacteria, and the most promising will undergo further drug trials. The ultimate goal, Kumar says, is for the process to lead to “a few unique drugs that will be effective against multidrug-resistant TB, and that will also have a shortened course of therapy.”

Kumar radiates enthusiasm for her work. She’s eager to find better ways to treat and prevent TB and other communicable diseases, and she is also “energized about the science itself. Plus, this project gives me insight into the global research community.

In this job I get to see, up close, the coordination and dialogue between academic and nonprofit research institutes, international funding agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and governmental health organizations. It’s exciting.”

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Like Kumar, Dumaine Williams exudes an infectious passion—in fact, he’s something of a Pied Piper. The Admission Office still hears (and gives) rave reviews about the campus tours he led while he was at Bard. He loves teaching as much as he enjoys his lab work, and he continues to take particular pleasure in mentoring students in collegepreparatory programs. When he’s not in the lab at Einstein Medical Center, Williams spends much of his spare time with The Metric System, a collective of New York City– based artists and art enthusiasts who facilitate collaborative projects in the visual and performing arts and sciences. The collective was founded by Bard alumni/ae, and most of the group’s 25 current members are recent graduates, “from ’03 to ’06,” says Williams.

Williams majored in biology at Bard; for a while, he considered attending medical school. During the summer between his junior and senior years, while he was doing an eight-week internship in a diabetes lab at the University of Iowa, a decisive moment changed the course of his life. “I was looking at how diabetes develops, as a disease. It struck a chord inside me. The timing was perfect—it gave me the clarity I needed.”

“What drives me is trying to find out the ‘how’ and the ‘why.’

That’s what keeps me going—I exercise my curiosity by taking the molecular approach.”

—Dumaine Williams

When Williams taught undergraduates as part of his Ph.D. program at Stony Brook, he quickly realized that his teaching method was “different from what they expected. It was a large institution, but I came to it from Bard’s discussion-based approach. At first that was very hard for the students to grasp. They said, ‘Wait. You’re a T.A. You’re supposed to tell us what the answers are, so we can pass our tests.’ When they realized that my approach was to be more involved with them, and to encourage them to become engaged with the material, they took on a lot more responsibility in the classroom, and they learned more.” For his teaching, Williams received the prestigious K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, given to only 10 graduate students per year for exhibiting prowess and leadership ability in “advancing underserved students, assessment, collaborative pedagogy, and institutional integrity.”

Williams’s Ph.D. is in pharmacology, which he defines as “designing drugs through careful study of how they interact with the body. We go back to the basics, to what’s happening at the molecular level,” the end result being new therapies, treatment, or even a cure for a disease. The field that grabbed his interest while he was an undergraduate still holds great fascination for him—and people are always interested in hearing about his work. “When I talk about diabetes in layman’s terms, nearly everyone knows what I’m talking about,” he says. “I find that most people know someone who has it. What drives me is trying to find out the ‘how’ and the ‘why.’ That’s what keeps me going—I exercise my curiosity by taking the molecular approach.”

—Kelly Spencer

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A LION OF LANG AND LIT The Never-Flagging Passion of Professor Peter Sourian

Years ago, a new member of Bard’s faculty was introduced to Peter Sourian. Upon being told what Sourian taught, the young man was taken aback: “You don’t look like an English teacher!”

Indeed. There’s not even the faintest whiff of the academic about Sourian, who has taught literature and writing at the College with undiminished vigor for what seems like a geological epoch. A big, craggy, bearlike man, he looks more like a former pugilist (which he is not, contrary to rumor) than a sage who is able to discourse on the novels of George Sand, or the films of Eric Rohmer, or the causes and effects of the French Revolution—and sometimes all in the same sentence. By his own admission, he tends to “talk too much, envelop people, and rant—but for some reason I manage not to do that in the classroom.” And his long list of literary achievements notwithstanding, the classroom is Sourian’s true arena—the place where he has inspired, infuriated, intellectually contended with, and made an indelible impression on more than four decades of Bardians.

“As a teacher he could be very sympathetic and laid back, but he would always call you on your weaknesses,” says Chelsea Leigh Doyle ’05. “If he thought a paper of mine was not up to the standards he expected from me, he would let me know and give me a chance to try again. He was always right, too!”

That last remark would no doubt rankle Sourian. “I tell you, I’m not always right,” he says, pointing his finger at an imaginary student. “I warn you—what I tell you in class, bury it under a tree, the way hunters do in the spring, and then dig it up in the winter.” The implication being that if it stinks, get rid of it, but if it doesn’t, use it.

A visit to Sourian’s home on New York’s Upper East Side found its occupant in fine fettle. With his blue flannel shirt rolled up at the elbows, his large hands as animated as birds, he held forth on his long tenure at Bard and the joys and terrors of teaching, with hearty good humor and an easy, unimpeded flow of literary and historical allusions.

The apartment, where Sourian has lived since 1938—and, since the late 1960s, with his wife, Eve, who teaches 19thcentury French literature at the City University of New

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York—was renovated many years ago by his father, Zareh, an architect who painted “when he couldn’t get work.” His father’s oils—sensuous land- and seascapes—vie for the visitor’s wandering eye with religious icons and Asian, Greek, and Middle Eastern antiquities, as well as a noble old Chickering piano that Sourian says he plays on occasion, “pretending I can’t hear.”

Sourian arrived at Bard in 1965, a year that saw the College swell to 500 students from 320 at the beginning of the decade. “There were more new faculty that September than the previous entire faculty,” he recalls. Today, he retains a fierce loyalty to his remaining colleagues from that time, among them Luis Garcia-Renart, Robert Kelly, Terence Dewsnap, Stuart Stritzler-Levine, and Justus Rosenberg.

“When I got here, literature, theater, and the arts were dominant at Bard. There was a kind of innocence here,” he says. “It was the only place I applied to, perhaps because, as one friend told me, ‘It’s the only place that would dream of having you.’”

Forty-three years later, it’s hard to imagine Bard without him. Over that span, Sourian has taught courses that cover the literary waterfront—the novel, poetry, short fiction, cultural reportage—all of which echo his own multifarious career as a man of letters. Sourian has written six novels (three published; three in manuscript), plays, short stories, book reviews and critical commentaries on other media (he was The Nation’s television critic for five years), and even poetry en français, in alexandrines and other classical French forms. Of his literary work, the critic Hrag Vartanian has noted, “Sourian’s writing reveals a pensive soul that is always looking for truth. His work is the record of this search for the genuine and it is filled with quiet moments of surprise that appear when he finds it in unexpected places. The fact that he has been able to live a full life in words that chart that journey is a credit to his intellectual energy and a testament to his curious mind.”

Sourian’s career as a teacher has been an extension of that search for the genuine, and the passion that fuels that search has never flagged. If he at times appears to be an overly demanding taskmaster in the classroom, it is because he cares so much—about literature, about intellectual honesty, and about his students doing the very best work they are capable of. Though some students may be put off by his candor, the serious ones recognize it as a form of respect, and appreciate it.

“I found that a lot of writing workshops at Bard were hampered by this need for everyone to be incredibly polite to everyone else,” says Adam Janos ’06. “No one was willing

to offer a really harsh critique—unlike Peter. He can be very un-PC. He’d say something like, ‘This story is very contrived—and what a stinker of a final line! You really dropped the ball on that.’ I don’t take criticism very well, but it never really bothered me coming from him, because he was always ready to lay it on the line.”

For his part, Sourian is well aware that coming down hard on a fledgling writer’s poem or short story is very different from giving the same student a bad grade in biology or math.

“In literature, yes, you are talking about his or her baby—yet if your criticism is implicitly informed by a passion for the subject, that’s not being a crank,” he insists. “I think I’m a pretty tolerant teacher. And if you’re a tolerant teacher, no amount of harsh criticism is going to decrease your pedagogical value.”

That “passion for the subject” has ensured that, whatever else they may be, Sourian’s classes and seminars are never boring.

“At the first meeting I attended of his Fiction Workshop, he talked about the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule,” remembers Amelia Cass ’05. “He said that it’s sometimes better to ‘tell.’ He got up to demonstrate the action of coming into the room. First he simply walked in and sat down, explaining that in a story such an entrance was probably best told plainly: ‘Peter entered the classroom.’ Then he got up and went out again.

We heard him before we saw him, but it didn’t lessen the effect when he appeared in the doorway crawling on all fours like a gray-haired, long-legged toddler, somewhat clumsy, but moving surprisingly fast. When he’d made it back into his chair, he told us that an action like that ought to be ‘shown,’ but we didn’t really need to be told.”

In 2000, some 35 years into his life in Annandale, Sourian was presented with the Bardian Award, an honor bestowed upon veteran faculty members by the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association. Sourian’s longtime colleague, professor of English Benjamin La Farge, concluded his written tribute for that year’s Commencement program thus: “Peter is incapable of condescending to his students. . . . [He] is always eager to engage his friends, students, and colleagues in a never-ending conversation about the questions that concern them from day to day. To engage in that conversation with him is to speak with a moralist who never grows tired of trying to think well, a man for whom thinking well is the only morality.”

Those words capture the essence of Peter Sourian, both as a teacher and as a man.

—Mikhail Horowitz

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ONANDOFFCAMPUS

PARTNERSHIPS A groundbreaking collaboration by Bard College and Al-Quds University in Jerusalem creates three programs designed to improve the Palestinian education system. On track to open in phases over 2009–10, each program addresses a separate but related element of the education process: The Al-Quds Bard Honors College for Liberal Arts and Sciences offers a four-year interdisciplinary curriculum that combines the best traditions of the Palestinian and U.S. education systems and draws on progressive trends in contemporary education.

Graduates will receive dual B.A. degrees from Al-Quds University and Bard College.

The Al-Quds Bard Master of Arts in Teaching Program brings a new model of postgraduate teacher training to the region, integrating graduate-level study in an academic discipline and key areas in education with ongoing work as a teacher or apprentice in a classroom setting. Graduates will earn dual master’s degrees from the two institutions.

The Al-Quds Bard Model School (grades 5 through 12) supports the improvement of Palestinian secondary education and serves as a laboratory for the MAT program.

“For us, this is what the internationalization of American higher education should be about,” Bard president Leon Botstein told the New York Times in February.

The partnership creates “a qualitative leap” in Palestinian higher education, said Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University.

Bard College has received partial funding for the partnership from the Open Society Institute. The grant must be matched and funds raised for needs including scholarships, library resources, and salaries.

Jeremy Thomas ’00 (left) discusses equations for linear motion with his ninth-grade physics students at Bard High School Early College II in Queens. Thomas, a film major at Bard, earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Washington.

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The partnership between Bard College and the New York City Department of Education expanded last fall with the opening of Bard High School Early College II in Elmhurst, Queens. Like the original Bard High School Early College (BHSEC), in Manhattan, BHSEC II uses 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 degree from Bard College and a New York State Regents diploma. The principal of BHSEC II is Valeri Thomson ’85, a microbiologist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a master’s degree in education from Teachers College, Columbia University. This fall the school will move to its permanent home, in Long Island City, Queens.

The Bard–West Point Exchange continued its civilian-military educational collaboration with a panel discussion (“Georgia and the Future of U.S.–Russian Relations”) held in partnership with the Bard Global and International Affairs Program; a lecture (how the intelligence community influences American foreign and domestic policy); a roundtable, chaired by Jonathan Cristol ’00, which focused on the pedagogical benefits of civilian/military collaboration in teaching international relations; and a debate, “Resolved: The United States federal government should open unconditional, high-level talks with Iran.”

The Landscape and Arboretum Program at Bard and the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) paired up to offer continuing education classes at Bard. NYBG is an advocate for the plant kingdom based at a 250-acre National Historic Landmark site in the Bronx. Bard’s 550 acres along the Hudson River, with its existing Landscape and Arboretum Program, make it a perfect complementary satellite location for NYBG’s Continuing Education program, said Sabine Stezenbach, NYBG’s director of continuing education.

At the panel on U.S.–Russian relations (left to right): Jonathan Becker, dean of international studies at Bard; Major Jonathan Dunn, assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; Carter Page, director, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program

WELCOME Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, author, and professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave two lectures to SRO crowds in March. In “The Biolinguistic Perspective” he discussed the view that language in all of its aspects— sound, meaning, and structure—is a state of some components of the human mind. In an evening talk, he touched on U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East, and the role of dissent in the Obama era.

Books By Bardians Python Web Development with Django®

by Jeff Forcier, Paul Bissex ’91, Wesley Chun

addison-wesley This how-to manual focuses on the basics and uses of Django, a framework that enables the construction of Web applications using Python, an object-oriented applications development language.

Irma Brandeis: Profilo di Una Musa di Montale

by Irma Brandeis; compiled, edited, and with an introduction

Mark Blum, associate professor of Japanese studies at the University at Albany, delivered the 2009 Warren Mills Hutcheson Memorial Lecture in March. Blum’s talk, “Democratic Authority Realized: Nenbutsu as the Defining Ritual of Japanese Religion,” traced the evolution of reciting nenbutsu—a three-word phrase involving the name of a mystical Buddha—from visionary meditation practice to its creative culmination in Japan today. The lecture, presented by the Religion Program, honored Warren Mills Hutcheson ’10, who died in 2008.

by Jean Cook

edizioni ulivo Journals and letters of Irma Brandeis (1905–1990), professor of literature from 1944 to 1979, provide insight into the woman who is regarded as the principal female presence in the poetry of Eugenio Montale, the Italian Nobel laureate in poetry.

Black Smoke: A Woman’s Journey of Healing, Wild Love, and Transformation in the Amazon

by Margaret De Wys, music faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

S. James Gates Jr. presented “On Solving an ‘Unsolvable’ Problem in Superstring/M-Theory” in March as part of the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series. Gates is John S. Toll Professor of Physics and director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland. In a talk about cutting-edge work in physics that was accessible to the general public, he discussed a new sort of mathematical adinkra (symbol) that was created to solve one of the most difficult problems in present-day theoretical physics.

sterling publishing When Margaret De Wys learns she has breast cancer, she undergoes a “holy voyage” that entails traveling to the Ecuadorian jungle to work with Carlos, a master of indigenous mystical healing.

The One Marvelous Thing

by Rikki Ducornet ’64

dalkey archive press Short stories by Rikki Ducornet, winner of Bard’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters, visit the Mistress of Napkin Folding and other characters with intelligence and humor, accentuated by T. Motley’s cartoons.

Book of Fears

by Ava Fedorov ’02

ugly duckling presse In this limited-edition picture book, drawings illuminate each specified fear, some common (“fear of sloth”) and others whimsical (“fear of peanut butter”).

Isaac’s Torah

by Angel Wagenstein, translated by Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, and Deliana Simeonova

handsel books Amiable tailor Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld lives in five different countries— S. James Gates Jr. talks with a student after his address in the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series.

without ever leaving home—when his small town is taken over by one country or empire after another.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 23

Roger Scotland ’93

Jean Valentine, New York State Poet, read from her work in February. Valentine is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, which received the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and, mostly recently, for the Bard Prison Initiative.

Jayne Anne Phillips and Elizabeth Hand read from their work in February and March, respectively, as part of the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series. Phillips is a novelist and short story writer whose books include Machine Dreams and Black Tickets. Hand is an award-winning fantasy novelist who is the author of, among others, Generation Loss and Saffron and Brimstone.

Simon Schama, British art historian, delivered the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities in November. Schama addressed the fate of post-abstract art in Great Britain in a series titled “The Impossibility of the Contemporary in British Art Now.” Meeting with Bard students, he described them as “hopping with ideas and enthusiasm” about “thoughtful, fresh topics.”

The Hecht Lectures honor this preeminent poet, who graduated from Bard in 1944 and taught at the College from 1952 to 1955 and 1962 to 1966.

Jonathan Z. Smith, distinguished historian of religion, gave the inaugural Jacob Neusner Lecture in the Comparative Study of Religion in October. Smith, whose topic was “Why Compare Religion?” is on the faculty of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. The lecture series is named for Bard’s Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism.

Pete Seeger, activist and folk music legend, spoke and sang to a Weis Cinema packed with students and faculty in February. The

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Latiqua Williams ’11

Bruce C. Ratner

90-year-old Seeger told anecdotes of blacklisting in the 1950s and the folk music scene of the 1960s. “I’m more optimistic about the future than I’ve ever been in my life,” he told students. “You’re the ones who will make it happen.”

Ian Dawkins ’08, Megan DeMarkis ’95, Ljiljana Dukanovic ’08, George Hamel III ’08, Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Max Hernandez-Calvo CCS ’07, Jami Landry ’05, Vesna Straser ’95, Brandon Weber ’97, and Michelle Wong ’06 returned to campus to participate in the Your Future Fair in March. Jane Brien ’89, director of alumni/ae affairs, moderated a panel, “International Student Networking,” and the alumni/ae represented their employers and took part in panels such as “Working in Finance” and “Navigating the Graduate School Application Process.” More than 300 students, along with representatives of 24 organizations offering jobs and internships, attended the fair, which was organized by the Career Development Office.

Roger Scotland ’93, president of the Southern Queens Park Association, a human services agency serving Jamaica, Queens, was appointed Alumni/ae Trustee to the Board of Trustees.

Bruce C. Ratner, director of Forest City Enterprises, was appointed to the Board of Trustees.

KUDOS Tracy Potter-Fins ’10 and Nathaniel Zeitlin ’12 are the first Warren Mills Hutcheson Scholars. Potter-Fins, of Moscow, Idaho, is a religion major. Zeitlin’s hometown is Nashville; he plans to moderate into the Photography and Religion Programs. Warren Mills Hutcheson ’10 died on January 1, 2008, before he was able to complete his studies in religion at Bard. This scholarship has been

established by his family in his memory and is for students in the study of religion who best exemplify Hutcheson’s deep inquisitiveness, aptitude for the analysis of primary sources, and inspired, original thought.

Alive and Well in Prague, New York

by Daphne Grab ’93

harperteen In Daphne Grab’s debut novel for young adults, Matisse Osgood tries to reconcile her misery over her family’s move, from New York City to an

Latiqua Williams ’11 pulled off one of basketball’s rarest feats during Bard’s 75-28 drubbing of the College of New Rochelle on November 16, 2008. Williams, a 5-foot-7 1/2 inch forward from Bay Shore, New York, achieved a “quadruple-double,” registering double digits in four major statistical categories with 21 points, 13 rebounds, 11 steals, and 10 assists. Only a handful of hoopsters at any level of competition have ever accomplished that. Williams plans to become a teacher and is strongly considering applying to Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program after completing her undergraduate work.

Trustee Leader Scholar students raised $37,000 for their projects, through grants (Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Davis Projects for Peace); focused letter-writing campaigns, to alumni/ae, among others; and every manner of on-campus activity, from hosting chili lunches to auctioning paint-wrestling matches. Almost every dollar of the funds listed below went directly to the work. Occasionally, a contribution is made for travel expenses, but usually each student is responsible for those costs, to insure that the collective effort goes where it is needed most.

International TB Relief Project: three students spent their intersession in Vietnam providing education and delivering funds for tuberculosis tests in a rural province ($7,000).

New Orleans Project and Children’s Expressive Arts Project: 30 students conducted a crucial census for the Broadmoor Improvement Association and worked in an elementary school ($12,000).

Nicaragua Exchange: nine students spent their intersession in Chacraseca, building homes ($8,000).

Sri Lanka Project: Jennifer Lemanski ’09 spent three months in Sri Lanka, setting up an expressive arts studio and developing scholarship opportunities for Sri Lankan students ($10,000).

upstate town, with her need for friends and comfort.

Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human

by Elizabeth Hess ’74

bantam books A biography of the chimpanzee, who achieved fame through learning sign language and living with a family, explores the challenges of what it means to be human.

Blue Nights

by George Hirose ’79

provincetown arts press Nighttime photographs of Provincetown, Massachusetts, populate this book, which features a glowing introduction by Norman Mailer.

The Book from the Sky

by Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature

north atlantic books Science fiction meets philosophy in this novel about Billy, an inquisitive boy abducted by aliens who communicate in a universal language.

Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic

by James West Davidson; Brian DeLay; Christine Leigh Heyrman; Mark Lytle, professor of history; and Michael B. Stoff

mcgraw-hill higher education The sixth edition of this textbook features essays, tailored to each period of history, that focus on the lives of ordinary Americans.

Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape edited by Denise Markonish CCS ’99

mass moca/mit press This annotated catalogue for an exhibition at the Massachusetts

Bard’s Skyline Conference Scholar Athletes are Aaron Ahlstrom ’10, (men’s cross country), Abigail Paris ’09 (women’s soccer), and Rachel Van Horn ’12 (women’s volleyball). One scholar athlete of the year is chosen from each sport from the conference’s scholar athlete list for the season.

To qualify for the scholar athlete list, student athletes must have a grade point average of 3.30 or higher during the semester in which they compete. Erica Ball ’11, named Skyline Conference Women’s Cross Country Scholar Athlete of the Year for the fall 2007 season, made the fall 2008 scholar athlete list for the sport, along with 46 other Bard students who were honored in cross country (men’s and women’s), soccer (men’s and women’s), and women’s tennis and volleyball.

Museum of Contemporary Art explores artists’ interactions with the earth through artworks that engage history, science, and culture.

Never Seen, Only Heard: The Impact of Radio 1930–1945

by Alex McKnight ’79

publishamerica Radio radically changed life in the United States by giving far-flung citizens a common language, as depicted in this study of radio from Depression-era escapism through World War II.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 25

Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature Justus Rosenberg’s work for the rescue mission of Varian Fry during World War II is chronicled in In Defiance of Hitler by Carla Killough McClafferty. Fry set up a secret mission on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee; Rosenberg, only 17 at the time, worked for Fry as a courier, transporting information, papers, money, and parcels to refugees in danger. After the war Rosenberg came to the United States and earned a Ph.D. He was on the Bard faculty from 1962 to 2003.

Diana Ayton-Shenker, senior fellow and faculty member at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA), is cofounder of the Fast Forward Fund (FFF). As part of the second annual Clinton Global Initiative University, held in February at the University of Texas at Austin, former President Clinton showcased FFF, a youth-driven social venture fund that directs philanthropic capital to youth-led initiatives for global change. FFF was one of only three projects featured, among approximately a thousand.

Ayton-Shenker’s BGIA course, Strategic Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, serves as a pilot program to train students in the process of strategic investment for FFF. The Sherman Brothers, Robert and Richard, both Class of 1949, received the National Medal of Art for “unforgettable songs and optimistic lyrics that have brought magic to the screen and stage.”

Two students earned bachelor of arts degrees and 14 students earned associate in arts degrees at the Bard Prison Initiative’s fifth Commencement, held at Eastern New York Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York, in February.

La Voz, cultural y noticias hispanas del Valle del Hudson, received an Ippie Award for best overall design for a magazine with a circulation under 10,000. La Voz, which is sponsored by Bard, first appeared in 2004 as the Trustee Leader Scholar project of Mariel

Okwui Enwezor

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Fiona Maazel

Fiori ’05, now the magazine’s managing editor, and Emily Schmall ’05. The Ippies are given by the New York Community Media Alliance to honor excellence in ethnic journalism in the northeast.

Mortimer and Theresa Sackler, philanthropists; Sir Hugh Roberts, director of the Royal Collection and surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art; Daniel Miller, professor of material culture, University College London; and Nicolas and Alexis Kugel, proprietors of Galerie Kugel, Paris, received the 13th annual Iris Foundation Awards for outstanding contributions to the decorative arts, given by The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City in April.

Okwui Enwezor, independent curator, former artistic director of documenta XI, and dean of academic affairs and senior vice president at the San Francisco Art Institute, received the 12th annual Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), at its April gala in New York City. Isaac Julien, filmmaker and installation artist, presented the award.

Fiona Maazel received the 2009 Bard Fiction Prize, based on the strength of her debut novel, Last Last Chance. The prize consists of a $30,000 award and a one-semester residency at the College.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music was rewarded for its vision with a $2.5 million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will provide the base for a $10 million endowment, once the College raises $7.5 million to meet the challenge.

ON VIEW The Parliament of Reality, by Olafur Eliasson, is a permanent sculptural environment at the north end of the Bard campus. A

A discussion on closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay filled every seat in Tewksbury Lounge.

stone bridge enclosed in tunnel-like latticework leads to an island of cut granite in a circular pond surrounded by a ring of trees. Eliasson, a renowned Icelandic-Danish artist, encourages viewers to “relax, discuss ideas, question what you’re taught, and negotiate with each other.” The installation was funded by the Luma Foundation, founded by Maja Hoffman, a member of the Board of Governors of Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture.

Rachel Harrison: Consider the Lobster, the first major survey of this New York–based artist, opens June 27 and runs through December 20 at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).

Named for an essay by the late David Foster Wallace, the exhibition encompasses more than 10 years of Harrison’s largescale installations, all reconfigured for the CCS Bard Galleries, and presents a number of the autonomous sculptural and photographic works for which she is best known.

The Soul of the Rhino: A Nepali Adventure with Kings and Elephant Drivers, Billionaires and Bureaucrats, Shamans and Scientists, and the Indian Rhinoceros

by Hemanta Mishra with Jim Ottaway Jr., Bard College Trustee

the lyons press Hemanta Mishra, a leader of Nepal’s efforts to save the rhinoceros from extinction, has written a “mesmerizing account” that Publishers Weekly chose as one of the top nonfiction books of 2008.

Goldengrove

by Francine Prose, Distinguished Writer in Residence

harpercollins Grief pulls Nico, 13, and her parents apart as each of them copes with the death of Margaret, Nico’s older sister.

Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences

by Catherine Kohler Riessman ’60

sage publications

COLLOQUY

Ideas of what constitutes narrative vary in different cultures; forms of storytelling and ways of analyzing them are the focus of this

“Why He Still Matters” was the title of a conference on Abraham Lincoln held at Bard in March, marking the bicentennial year of Lincoln’s birth. Participants were Harold Holzer, cochair, Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission; Douglas L. Wilson, codirector, Lincoln Studies at Knox College; James Oakes, professor of history, CUNY Graduate Center; Philip B. Kunhardt III, Bard Center Fellow; and Bard faculty Myra Armstead, Christian Crouch, Mark Lytle, and Geoffrey Sanborn.

Topics addressed were “Lincoln in American Memory,” “Lincoln and Words,” and “Lincoln and Emancipation.”

“Closing Guantánamo,” an informal discussion, took place in Tewksbury Lounge in February. Leon Botstein, president of the college; Jonathan Becker, dean of international studies; and Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project, led a consideration of the implications for U.S. foreign policy of the 2010 closing deadline of the detention center at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Cosponsored by the offices of Residence Life, Dean of the College, and Dean of Students, the program was one in a series that continues classroom studies in residence halls.

qualitative research.

Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education edited by Michael Sadowski, faculty, Master of Arts in Teaching Program

harvard education press Drawing on the experiences of teachers, researchers, and middle- and high school students, this study focuses on how academic environments shape the self-image of young people.

It’s Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974–2006

by Leslie Scalapino, writing faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

university of california press The structure of language is the subject of this collection, which includes short plays, captioned photographs, prose poems, and the sonnet-like “Floating Series.”

The Godfather Family Album

by Steve Schapiro ’55

Several dozen architects, landscape designers, history teachers, students, and community members gathered in November to take a closer look at Bard’s Historic Preservation Master Plan. The plan sets out the College’s strategy for preserving its many historic buildings and landscapes. The Campus Heritage grant received from the J. Paul Getty Foundation supported the conference and will ensure that the College “can acquire the tools necessary to make sensitive and thoughtful decisions about our historic resources,” said Amy Foster ’99, Bard’s horticulture supervisor.

taschen Steve Schapiro, special photographer on the set of all three Godfather films, has collected more than 400 photos, most never before published, from the filming of these classics, in an edition limited to 1,000 numbered and signed copies.

A Message Back and Other Furors

by Leonard Schwartz ’84

chax press Alliteration and wordplay highlight this collection of poems that examine presence and absence, reality and plays on reality.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 27

CLASSNOTES

COMMENCEMENT AND ALUMNI/AE WEEKEND MAY 22, 23, 24 Highlights President’s Dinner and Bard Awards Graduation of the Class of 2009 and awarding of honorary degrees Celebration and Tour of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories Tour of The Parliament of Reality by Olafur Eliasson Commencement-Reunion Barbecue, Dance, and Fireworks

New this year on Friday . . .

ANNANDALE ROADHOUSE BERTELSMANN CAMPUS CENTER I 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.

• Two bars

• Alumni/ae film show

• Cafe (8 p.m.–midnight)

• DJ dance party

• Cocktail lounge

• Diversity Committee/HEOP

• Open terrace • Movies for kids

welcome lounge (9–10 p.m.)

’08 Rachel Manning is the residence director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City.

Gerald Pambo-Awich was in the news shortly after graduation for having created a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to determine when to buy, sell, and hold stock. He lives in Brooklyn and works at Goldman Sachs, where he does market risk analysis.

Viktoryia Pavlenkovich is a Ph.D. candidate at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, in the laboratory of Dr. Jan Pielage. Viktoryia coauthored, with two colleagues, “The Survival Advantage of Olfaction in a Competitive Environment,” an article published in Current Biology on August 5, 2008.

’07 Mia McCully worked in Cairo, Egypt, for the creative services company MADEO, founded by Ramy Nagy Hemeid ’05. While in Egypt, she also worked for the destination management company Abercrombie & Kent. She then returned to New York and, in June 2008, became assistant director of Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program.

Tanner Vea enjoys working as a senior web producer for Thirteen/WNET New York, where he produces the websites for the PBS series Nature and Cyberchase. Last summer, Tanner was honored to be part of the Emmy-nominated Cyberchase team in the New Approaches–Daytime Children’s category.

Genevieve Wanucha has begun the master’s program in science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She plans to cover areas such as neuroscience, psychiatry, and new discoveries about the human sense of smell, in publications for scientists and nonscientists alike.

’06 Cameron Bossert had an orchestral work, Music for Film, performed by the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra in December 2007.

In August 2008, Cameron’s string quartet, Particle Spin, was performed by the JACK Quartet at the Emerging Quartets and Composers festival sponsored by the Utah Symphony in Park City, Utah.

After working for the Armenia Tree Project post-graduation, Seta Chorbajian moved to the West Coast, where she is rounding out her second year of environmental service in the Puget Sound region. As a crew leader for the nonprofit EarthCorps, she works with a diverse group of six people, implementing environmental restoration plans for degraded ecosystems. She plans to move to the Southwest to gain more field experience before pursuing a master’s degree in ecological restoration.

As a spokesperson for the Delaware Department of Transportation, Misty Seemans publicizes the agency’s environmental, historical, and disability programs. Misty writes speeches for the governor, leg-

Misty Seemans ’06 (left) and Delaware Department of Transportation Secretary Carolann Wicks

islators, and transportation secretary, and has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, and Philadelphia and Maryland television.

Henry Seltzer is a home page editor for The Daily Beast, a news aggregation and original content website that launched in October 2008.

’05 Eddie Bennett is an actor based in Chicago. In the summer of 2008 he toured the Pacific Northwest with Montana Shakespeare in the Parks in Macbeth and All’s Well that Ends Well.

Emilie Richardson graduated cum laude from Boston University School of Law in May 2008. Her article “Breaking the Norm: Accurate Evaluation of English Language Learners with Special Education Needs” appeared in the Spring 2008 Boston University Public Interest Law Journal.

’04 Emily Grumbling is working on her doctorate in chemistry at the University of Arizona.

Joe Vallese MAT ’06 is a language lecturer in the expository writing program at New York University, where he received his master of fine arts in fiction in May 2008. His short story “Diorama” was published in the North American Review. He is coediting the anthology What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour through New Jersey.

’03 Ben Fundis was part of a three-person film team awarded an international prize for Border Stories, a film documenting lives along the U.S.–Mexico border. Ben accepted the prize at the Internews Every Human Has Rights Media Awards in Paris in December 2008, with Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Mariane Pearl, Richard Branson, and Peter Gabriel in attendance.

CLASS NOTES | 29

Other Bardians in attendance: Amy Hondo ’01, Alex Richards ’01, Natalie Amar ’01, Raissa St. Pierre ’87, Eileen Brickner (Bard College Conservatory of Music), and Andrea Guido (Bard College Office of Development). Robyn and Josh live and work in San Francisco.

Amy L. Clark’s collection of short fiction, Wanting, was published as part of the book A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (Rose Metal Press). She and her husband live in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, two doors down from Zach Enright ’00 and his wife. Amy is assistant professor of college composition at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

Her online home is www.overtimewriting.com.

Mneesha Gellman ’03 and Joshua Dankoff in the spring of 2008, visiting the pyramids of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico

Mneesha Ilanya Gellman and Joshua Aaron Dankoff (Wesleyan ’02) were married on July 26, 2008, at the home of the bride’s parents in Kneeland, California. The couple completed their master’s degrees at the University of Queensland, Australia, in 2007, and spent their “prewedding honeymoon” traveling as freelance journalists for four months throughout Mexico and Central America. They now live in Chicago, where Mneesha has begun a doctoral program in political science at Northwestern University, and Josh has begun legal studies at Loyola University.

After two years abroad, singing with Spain’s national chorus, Elizabeth Luttinger completed a master of music degree in composition at Syracuse University, where she is a now a part-time instructor teaching courses in music theory. She also freelances as an accompanist on accordion, piano, and double bass. Elizabeth looks forward to her chamber-opera premiere in Florence, Italy, this spring. For more information, visit http://eluttinger.com.

Daniel Wohl lives in Brooklyn, where he is busy writing music. In 2008 he was awarded an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer’s award, and a New York Youth Symphony commission. This year he will be a featured composer at the MATA Interval Series in Brooklyn. In the fall of 2008 he started teaching music composition and theory at Sarah Lawrence College.

Tate DeCaro spent four months in Tuscany in the fall of 2008. She studied Italian, photography, and art history at the Siena School for Liberal Arts while she worked for the school’s director. She writes, “I returned to the United States at least semifluent in Italian, with a bellyful of homemade cheeses and pastas and wine!”

Robert Flottemesch works as an engineer in the field of renewable energy. He invites other Bardians interested in “energy/renewables/art” to e-mail him at rflottemesch@yahoo.com.

Laura Freden and Vance Edwards-Orr were married in Hancock, Maine, on August 31, 2008. Their Bardian guests included Katheryn Ross-Winnie, her husband Will Winnie, Katheryn’s brother Jesse Ross ’97, and his wife Erin Judge. Ethan Bremner sang at the ceremony. The Edwards-Orrs live in the Boston area, where Laura is a food and farm activist and freelance writer.

Shortly after graduation, Jane Gilvin moved to Santa Cruz, California, where she works at the public radio station KUSP. She produced KUSP broadcasts of the Carmel Bach Festival in the summer of 2008, featuring 14 concerts aired with commentary. Jane also began work on a master’s degree in library science at San Jose State University in the fall of 2007.

Toni Fortini Josey is the distance-learning librarian at Norwich University, a private military school in Northfield, Vermont. Having

’02 Class correspondent Toni Fortini Josey, toni.josey@gmail.com Jessica Anzelone and Adam Brown were married on June 28, 2008, at the Manor field on the Bard campus. Anna Callner played cello during the ceremony, and the couple wed under a chuppah made by Gabriel Blau and his husband. Gabe signed the couple’s ketubah. A reception was held at Bard’s Spiegeltent, where Jane Gilvin served as emcee and Lara Tucker toasted the couple.

Robyn Carliss married Joshua Pieper on September 15, 2007. Jill Sylvia ’01 officiated at the ceremony in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

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Laura Freden ’02 and Vance Edwards-Orr at their wedding in Hancock, Maine

Kerry Brogan lives and works in Beijing, where she has developed a successful career as an actress. Fluent in Mandarin, Kerry has appeared in more than 40 Chinese films and television shows, playing a wide variety of roles. A native of Massachusetts, she was profiled by the Boston Globe on the eve of the Summer Olympics in Beijing (including an online video interview with clips from some of her performances). She is recording her first CD.

’00

Jane Gilvin ’02, Jessica Anzelone ’02, and Adam Brown at Jessica and Adam’s wedding celebration at Bard’s Spiegeltent

earned her master’s degree as a distance-learning student, Toni is happy to have returned to a community of online learners. When she bumped into Sarah Shapiro at a restaurant after her interview, she knew it was a sign to take the job.

Clarisse Labro lives in Paris. She is an architect for the firm of Shigeru Ban, whose offices are located at the top of the Centre Pompidou. Clarisse married in the spring of 2008. Angie Smith ’04 was a guest at her “big wedding celebration” in France that fall.

After receiving a recent issue of the Bardian, Clarisse reconnected with Pia Carusone ’03.

María Elena Masó Isea, William Ruíz ’03, and their son, Simón, moved to Puerto Rico last summer. The family plans to open an artist collective/theater space.

Melanie A. Meyer was acknowledged in Martha Blackwelder’s book At the Edge of the Sky, published by the San Antonio Museum of Art. Melanie provided research in the formative stages of the book, which describes the museum’s Asian art collection.

Jessica Neptune is a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Chicago. Having finished her course work, she is doing research for her dissertation. She also teaches courses on race and the American prison system, and historical writing and research for college seniors.

Tamara Plummer is the assistant director of campus programs at the University of Vermont. She continues to play bassoon, and performed with the Harlem Symphony Orchestra at the Apollo Theater in 2007.

Jaren Smith and Patrick Farrell were married on October 6, 2007, in Boulder, Colorado.

Lara Tucker is in her third year as a graduate student and teaching fellow in Latin American literature and culture at Columbia University. She received her master’s degree in 2007 and expects to complete her Ph.D. by 2010.

’01 Class correspondent Sung Jee Yoo, sujeyo@gmail.com

Toni Capaccio and Josh Miller were married on August 16, 2008, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. In attendance were fellow Bardians Hillary Avis, Julie Endy, Jean-Marc Gorelick ’02, Heather Salon, J. R. Valenzuela ’02, Elena Vogel ’02, and Vanessa Volz. Toni and Josh have settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where Josh is finishing a Ph.D. in philosophy and teaching at George Washington and American Universities and Toni works as an attorney with the Government Accountability Office.

Julia Christensen is the Henry R. Luce Visiting Professor of the Emerging Arts at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Her first book, Big Box Reuse, about the community reuse of abandoned Wal-Mart and Kmart buildings, was published by MIT Press in 2008.

In May 2008 Michelle Efrein became the executive assistant to Susan Weber, director of The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City.

After a rewarding and fascinating year teaching English at West Point, David Gruber accepted an offer to return to Bard in the fall of 2008 as a visiting assistant professor, teaching First-Year Seminar and in the Academic Resources Center. His first collection of poetry, Sleepers’ Republic, was published by Astrophil Press.

Ariana Stokas has returned to Bard as the director of opportunity programs. After graduation in 2000, Ariana went on to earn a master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she is now completing work on her dissertation on “the school as an embodied aesthetic experience.”

’99 Jedediah Berry’s first novel, The Manual of Detection, was published

by The Penguin Press in February. He completed a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2008, and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Kanako Nakamura Kishi was married in September 2007 to an engineer whom she met at the tennis school they both attended. On July 5, 2008, they became the proud parents of their son, Nagisa. The family lives in the outskirts of Tokyo.

Christa Parravani’s first solo exhibition of photographs opened in November 2008 at the Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery in New York City.

Marina Smerling graduated from University of San Francisco School of Law in 2006, “blessedly” passed the bar exam, and has since joined an employment law firm in San Francisco that represents low-income Latino immigrant workers in unpaid wage and discrimination cases.

CLASS NOTES | 31

She sings in a “folkish-rock band” and teaches cardio-salsa and yoga at the local gym.

Peace Reporting. The nomination, in October 2008, was in recognition of his reporting from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Amanda Youmans and Max Lefer ’02 welcomed their daughter, Birdie Paige Lefer, on August 2, 2008.

Abigail Morgan is pleased to announce the birth of her son, Gabriel Silas Morgan Clark, born at home, underwater, into the arms of his father on July 13, 2008. In attendance at the birth (and of immeasurable help!) was doula Elena Vogel ’02, and arriving in Los Angeles shortly thereafter was proud uncle Sam Morgan ’03. After a threemonth maternity leave, Abigail returned to work as an acupuncturist in her private practice, FLOAT: Chinese Medical Arts, where she specializes in traditional Chinese medicine for women’s health and the childbearing cycle. Abigail is eager to hear stories from Bard alumnae who are successfully balancing working and mothering. She can be reached through her website, www.floatchinesemedicalarts.com.

’98 Class correspondent Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com John Berman and Beata Papp ’99 welcomed their first child, Wyatt Alexander Berman, on March 13, 2008.

Dave Case is a public defender in Bethel, Alaska, near the Bering Sea. Natasha and Jeremy Dillahunt ’97 are the proud parents of Flynn McKinley Dillahunt, born at home and “in a hurry” on May 15, 2008.

To keep track of Natasha, Jeremy, and the “the wee li’l fightin’ Irish bonny lass,” visit www.thedillahunts.blogspot.com.

’97 Class correspondent Julia Wolk Munemo, juliamunemo@mac.com Allison Fletcher Acosta and her husband, John, welcomed daughter Violet Fletcher Acosta on May 22, 2008. They live in Washington, D.C., where Allison works at Jobs with Justice, a national network of labor-community coalitions.

Dave Bates’s work was shown last year at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn and in the Deitch Projects Parade in Manhattan. To see more, go to JoseyHale.net.

Josh Diaz won an Emmy in 2008 for his writing on the game show Cash Cab. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with his girlfriend, Sarah North. He hopes that everyone will watch his newest show, Man v.

Food, on the Travel Channel.

In 2002, Raman Frey and Wendi Norris opened Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco, managing the careers of prominent contemporary artists from the West Coast and Asia. They have since added an annex focused on women artists of the surrealist movement. For more information, visit www.freynorris.com/.

Trilby MacDonald spent the summer of 2008 doing field research for her master’s degree in geography at Michigan State University.

She was back in the Brazilian Amazon, researching migration trends among farmers living in the Tapajos National Forest and the popular beach town of Alter do Chao. In addition to taking classes and writing her thesis, Trilby is finishing work on a documentary about the organic farming and folk music movement in Michigan.

’96 Class correspondents Gavin Kleespies, gwkleespies@hotmail.com Abigail Morgan, abigail@floatchinesemedicalarts.com Michael Deibert was named as a finalist for the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism, sponsored by the Institute for War and

32

’95 After nearly 13 years in the nation’s capital, Goldie Gider has moved from D.C. to San Francisco, where she is the director of development for Equal Rights Advocates. She looks forward to connecting with Bardians in the Bay Area, and attending the San Francisco Cities Party in the spring.

Angela Rowan gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Rose Angelica Rowan, on August 1, 2008. Rose was born at home with her father, Michael, and brother, Riley, there to meet her. Angela and Michael are “deliriously happy” with their growing family. They live in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where Angela works part-time as a psychotherapist, specializing in trauma and in work with transgender people and their families.

’94 Georgia Hodes and Christopher Wood announced the birth of Emma Hodes-Wood on September 15, 2008. Emma is the first grandchild of Frances Hodes (Zuckerman) ’61. Both Georgia and Frances hope that Emma may choose one day to become the third generation of women in their family to attend Bard.

Tatiana Prowell writes: “Our latest news is another baby—this is number three in four years—a little girl named Faraby Claire, born January 10, 2008. She is a complete peach!”

’93 Obadiah Eaves lives in White Plains, New York, where he works as a composer and sound designer for theater, television, and film. His award-winning work for theater has appeared in dozens of Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional productions, and he created sound for the original productions of plays by David Mamet, Woody Allen, and Suzan-Lori Parks. His scores and jingles have appeared on The Discovery Channel, TLC, HBO, and the broadcast networks. He has now begun to develop sound and music for Fisher-Price toys. He writes that his wife and young daughters, Emmeline and Liv, find this amusing, but other parents across the country are sure to hate him for it.

Roger Scotland left his post as senior policy adviser in the New York City Mayor’s Office last fall to assume the presidency of the Southern Queens Park Association (SQPA), a 32-year-old human services

agency serving Jamaica, Queens. He writes, “When I was a teenager, SQPA helped to shape my development and successful transition to adulthood. I am very excited by this opportunity to have a similar effect on others.” Roger was appointed last fall to the Bard College Board of Trustees (see page 22).

Neela Woodard (Weber) and her husband, Jeb, had their first child, a son named Finn Harrison Woodard. He was born on September 1, 2008 — “Yes,” Mom writes, “that was Labor Day.” The family lives in West Orange, New Jersey, where Neela has started an interior design firm called Neela Woodard Design. For more information or to contact her, visit www.neelawoodard.com.

’92 Class correspondent Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu Colleen Brondou is enjoying life in rural Oregon, working at home as a writer for a New York–based website, FindingDulcinea (www.findingdulcinea.com/home.html). She was married in June 2008, and plays mom to Leo, a grouchy old chow rescued from Hurricane Katrina.

Ty Donaldson lives in Los Angeles, where he does graphic design for theater and independent films, and also produces films and shorts.

His company, Buddha-Cowboy Productions, has two movies out on DVD, Soldier of God and Bunny Whipped, and is trying to fund several other projects. Check out his website at www.buddhacowboy.com.

The Marvelous Wonderettes, for which Ty designed the original Los Angeles graphics, had a run at the Westside Theatre in New York City. He also maintains the website www.marvelouswonderettes.com.

His son, Ross, graduated from high school this year.

Samantha Miller lives near Venice Beach, California. She continues, after almost 10 years, to remain enthusiastic about working as a fourth-grade Spanish language immersion teacher in a public school in Culver City, and enjoys integrating music, movement, and the use of folk instruments in her curriculum.

David Nochimson finished his master’s degree in library science at Queens College in the spring of 2008, and works at a branch of the New York Public Library in the Bronx.

Allison Parker is consulting editor for the literary imprint OV Books, and works on other freelance projects as well as her own writing. On October 18, she returned to the Greek-American Writers Association at the Cornelia Street Cafe to read from her novel in progress. She lives in New York City, and is proud to have sent her son off to kindergarten this year.

Stefan Weisman and David Cote are the composer and librettist, respectively, of the new one-act opera, Fade, which had three performances in Philadelphia in September 2008 as part of Center City Opera Theater’s ConNEXTions workshop series. The 30-minute piece is a witty, dark, and disturbing slice of life, say its creators. It follows two wealthy vacationers, their eco-friendly mountain estate, and a power failure.

’91 William “Ben” Lackey was named general counsel last year to the North American Renewables division of Iberdrola Renewables, the United States subsidiary of the Spanish company Iberdrola Renovables, which is the world’s largest generator of renewable energy. Iberdrola Renewables is one of the largest developers and owners of renewable energy projects (particularly wind) in the United States. On August 2, 2008, Ben and his wife, Sheryl, had their second child, Eliot Benjamin. Their daughter, Kate, is four.

’90 Laura Muller and her husband, Will Snyder, spent the summer of 2008 as resident supervisors for the 29 students in the Jackson Laboratory Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor, Maine. The program brings college and high school students to the lab for summer research internships studying cancer, bioinformatics, developmental biology and aging, genomics, hematology/immunology, metabolic diseases, and neurobiology. Laura and Will oversaw the students’ life outside the lab, including hiking, bicycling (they tried to reduce the van trips to the lab, a mile away, by getting people to walk and bike every day), whitewater rafting, and climbing Mount Katahdin.

’89 Class correspondent Lisa DeTora, lisadetora@hotmail.com

’88 Class correspondent Tena Cohen, callejero@earthlink.net Ken Brown works as a case manager in homeless shelters and is completing graduate work in urban planning at Hunter College in New York. He would love to hear from fellow Bardians at thekenbrown@yahoo.com.

Tena Cohen teaches Spanish at L. D. Brandeis High School. She taught in New Orleans from 2003 to 2005 and is editing a memoir about that experience. An excerpt from her novel Heat Wave appeared in the spring Podium Literary Journal. In July she attended a writing seminar at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Laura Giletti got her fifth-degree black belt in tae kwon do in December 2007. In April 2008 she gave birth to her second daughter, Charlotte Ruth Meany. Her older daughter, Margaret Ann Meany, is four.

Shawn Hill curated the show In Flat Fields: New England Wax at the Irvine Gallery at River Tree Arts in Kennebunk, Maine, in June 2008.

Amy Kupferberg is an artist living and working in New York City.

She participated in a group exhibition at NURTUREart in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in February 2008.

Quahog.org, a Rhode Island history and culture website founded by Christopher Martin, Dan Hillman, and Dan’s wife, Claudia, was awarded best local website in the readers’ poll of Rhode Island

CLASS NOTES | 33

Suzy Perler (Barocas) has been lead guitarist for the all-female New Jersey rock band, The Mood Swings (www.myspace.com/themoodswingsnj), since 2006. She also owns her own illustration company. When she’s not playing music and drawing, she’s wife to Alan and mom to Andrew, 15, and Brandon, 12. Brandon, a professional actor, made his Broadway debut last fall in To Be or Not to Be at the Biltmore Theatre in New York City.

’84

Anne Meredith ’86 and China Jorrin ’86 on their wedding day

Monthly in 2008. The editors of Rhode Island Monthly selected it as the best Rhode Island website in 2007.

’87 Class correspondent David Avallone, ednoon@aol.com David M. Phillips is vice dean of admissions and director of information and management systems at the University of Pennsylvania. He had previously worked at Columbia University.

Raissa St. Pierre, associate director of the Bard Music Festival and host of Radio Archaeology on WKZE in Red Hook, presents Thursday Night Live at the Spiegeltent, as part of Bard SummerScape 2009.

Thursday Night Live runs for six weeks, from July 16 through August 20, and features Hudson Valley musicians. Illustrious Bardians are part of the roster—Courtney Lee Adams ’83, Brian O’Sullivan ’84, Tim Allen ’84, Bradford Reed ’93, and William (Otto) Ylitalo. For more information, e-mail Raissa at stpierre@bard.edu.

’86 Class correspondent Chris LeGoff, cak64@comcast.net Anne Meredith and China Jorrin were married on Cape Cod in August 2008.

’85 Karen Briefer-Gose and her partner of 11 years were the first samesex couple legally married in Kern County, California, “amid quite the media circus,” on June 17, 2008.

Mallory King is the founder and executive director of Arts to Grow, a New York metropolitan area nonprofit arts education program that creates free art classes for inner-city children. More than 300 kids annually participate in creative learning through these classes, which are led by teaching artists in partnership with schools and community organizations. Mallory lives with her husband and two children in Jersey City, and would love to hear from Bard alums interested in becoming involved in Arts to Grow. For more information, visit www.artstogrow.org.

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Leonard Schwartz’s chapbook, The Library of Seven Readings, was published by Ugly Ducking Press in 2007, and his prose poem “Red Fog” appeared in the April 2008 issue of Harper’s. Leonard is currently a professor of literary arts at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

In October 2008, Steven Zucker received a prestigious award for his website, www.smARThistory.org. AVICOM, the committee of the International Council of Museums responsible for the audiovisual, image, sound, and new technologies, honored the website with their highest award (gold) in the web category of their annual competition.

SmARThistory.org is a free multimedia web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

’83 Tim Long wrote and directed the PBS documentary Escape to Dreamland, which tells the story of the Tamiami Trail, a historic road through the Everglades. The film explores how the idea of south Florida as a tropical paradise became rooted in the country’s cultural imagination and spawned a new twist on the American Dream.

Moira Pitteway has been living in North Devon in the United Kingdom for the last 16 years and “absolutely loves it.” She has been married for 21 years, and has a 20-year-old daughter in college. Moira would like to find Sarah MacDonnell ’85. Anyone who can help her out in that regard can e-mail her at mpitteway@aol.com.

’82 Steven Colatrella and Silvia Bedulli are the parents of Ines Elizabeth Colatrella, born on July 3, 2008, in Padua, Italy. Ines is named in part for her grandmother and aunt, and in part for Inez Mulholland, the feminist pacifist who died while fighting to win for women the right to vote and to stop the First World War. Steven is an associate professor of international affairs and politics at John Cabot University, a liberal arts college in Rome.

Last summer Mark Ebner hosted and consulted on the true crime series Rich and Reckless for TruTV (formerly CourtTV), and Simon and Schuster published Six Degrees of Paris Hilton, his new nonfiction Hollywood crime book. Robert Graysmith (Zodiac) called Ebner “a born storyteller” and the book “fiendishly ingenious and shocking.” Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight, Pain Killers) called Six Degrees “something very close to a masterpiece.” Mark is, of course, “beside himself.”

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After 15 years, Kim Graves closed his woodworking business in Brooklyn. He and his partner, Masha Zager, moved to Saugerties, New York (directly across the river from Tivoli), where they bought a piece of rural land next to the Kaaterskill Creek. Kim designed a highly energy-efficient house, and using an interesting new building method called Insulated Concrete Form (ICF), he and his crew broke ground in late fall of 2008. They hope to be finished by early summer. He writes, “We’re having great fun.”

Dexter Lane’s insatiable curiosity, nurtured at Bard, led him to a career in social work, followed by design and manufacturing in electronics, then to advertising copywriting, and, finally, to stock photography file and database management. His songwriting credits include “Lord Take Away Her License, ’Cause She’s Driving Me Insane.”

’78 Flora “Florrie” Eyster keeps busy performing and recording Celtic and jazz improv music; some of her recordings have been used in film sound tracks. She stays in touch with Bardians including Emily Hay, Bill Averbach ’77, Daria Albini ’77, and Peggy Lubman ’77. She would be pleased to connect with other Bardians. Her e-mail address is florapro@ptd.net.

David Segarnick presented at the ExL Pharma 3rd Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Continuing Medical Education Grants conference in Philadelphia last October. David is president of Terravation LLC, specializing in medical education strategic consulting. His daughter, Maxine, is a first-year student at Bard.

’77 Lindsey Houlihan successfully defended her dissertation, “Child Attachment at Adoption Placement and Three Months,” in early 2009 at Case Western Reserve. She is applying for faculty positions in social work. Her biggest fan, daughter Kate (14), will be accompanying her wherever she goes.

Rick Kamen is in his third year of teaching the automotive restoration class in the Industrial Design Program at the Georgia Tech College of Architecture. He annually presents a history of styling by the independent automakers of the 1930s through ’60s to the class, which is offered through the same program. Rick lives in the Atlanta area with his teenaged daughter, owns a few antique vehicles, chairs several car shows a year, and has been active in the old car hobby most of his life.

’76 James B. Fishman is a consumer rights and privacy advocate who founded Fishman and Neil, LLP, in 1989. He was honored in the fall of 2008 by being named a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School.

’75 John Browner has been a bookseller for 32 years, during which time he has lived in New York City, Boston, Vermont, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. Since 2004, he has lived in Munich, Germany, where he owns The Munich Readery, Germany’s largest English-language secondhand-book shop. He has also published a novel and won a North Carolina Arts Council Screenwriters Fellowship.

’73 Howard Good has a new chapbook, Tomorrowland, in the Achilles Chapbook Series. Reviewing the book, Good’s sixth, poet J. A. Tyler called it “a wonderfully bruising read.” Good, who teaches journalism at SUNY New Paltz, has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry for the third time in the past three years.

’70 Steven Miller, since 2001 the director of the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, received the 2008 John Cotton Dana award, given annually to a New Jersey individual, organization, or institution that has significantly advanced the service of museums in the region.

During his tenure, Steven has strengthened the museum’s exhibition program, overseen the renovation of the facility (including the addition of two new wings), and secured the internationally known Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata, which draws visitors from around the world. In February 2009 he was profiled in the New Jersey Star-Ledger in a piece titled “Both Sides Now.”

’69 Class correspondent Elaine Marcotte Hyams, eshyams@yahoo.com Judy Beasley and Chris Mauran have been married for 39 years and have two grandsons (and two more grandchildren on the way). Chris is a master engraver with his own shop and Judy owns a ballet school in partnership with her sister. Since 1976 they have lived in Judy’s hometown of Conyers, Georgia.

Regan Burnham (O’Connell) is still focused on music, and sings with the Carolina Concert Choir. She notes that her “tree house” in the mountains of western North Carolina is a vast change from her former life in New York City and Westchester.

Tina Chisena makes and sells enamel jewelry through the Enamelist Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia, where she also teaches classes. She is developing her website, TinaChisena.com. She no longer plays soccer, but continues to enjoy coed softball and golf. Last year she attended a music camp, taking bluegrass lessons on the fiddle and mandolin.

Paula Elliot has added vocal jazz to her music repertoire, which also includes renaissance and baroque styles.

Elaine Hyams (Marcotte) and her husband, Paul, bought a house in Oxford, England, in anticipation of Paul’s eventual retirement from Cornell. The house is conveniently located within walking distance of six pubs.

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Gene Kahn published a short story in On the Meaning of Friendship between Gay Men (Routledge, 2008). “It’s a good sailing story,” Gene says. “Tension and adventure with just a little bit of seasickness and one hopeless gay romance. But no one falls overboard.” Gene continues with woodworking and cycling, and has finished another book.

E-mail him at emkahn@earthlink.com “to suggest a literary agent, or talk about bikes.”

Roseanne Blitz Kanter is in her 23rd year of teaching first grade in Princeton, New Jersey.

Sharon (Schreiber) and Dennis Piendak were married in 1970. For the past 23 years, Dennis has been town manager in Dracut, Massachusetts. His hobbies are cooking and golf. Sharon, an art major at Bard, has made a freelance career in clothing design, graphic design, and custom sewing. She performs in several choral groups that do charity and special concerts. Sharon is also on an emergency response team trained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for national security, emergency rescue, and Red Cross relief.

Rob Stephenson writes, “In a time of extraordinary climate, cultural, political-economic change, I am relieved to report that there are no changes to report!” He notes, “I remember Bard fondly . . . my life would not have had half the quality otherwise. My Bard experience was a major contributing factor in my eternal love of music and film . . . the fires were lit there, and continue to burn.”

’68 Class correspondents Diana Hirsch Friedman, wowdiana1@gmail.com Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com Architectural photographer Peter Aaron was awarded a 2009 Collaborative Achievement Award by the American Institute of Architects at the AIA convention in San Francisco on April 30. He has been photographing architecture and interior design for more than 30 years, and is a contributing photographer for Architectural Digest.

He divides his time between Brooklyn and Hudson, New York. His work can be seen at www.peteraaron.net or www.esto.com/aaron.

Mack McCune and Josh Brooks ’69 ran into Stephen Tremaine ’07 at Reunion Weekend in May 2008 and got intrigued enough by his description of his role as director of Bard’s New Orleans Initiative (NOI) to track him down during their visit to New Orleans in August.

Mack and Josh both have connections there, and are “very interested in the welfare of that proud city.” They met with Stephen and were “quite impressed” by his account of the initiative and its work, and struck by Stephen’s strong commitment. For more information about NOI, visit www.bard.edu/noi/.

’65 Class correspondent Charlie Hollander, chas956@rcn.com

’63 Class correspondent Penny Axelrod, drpennyaxelrod@fairpoint.net After a long career as a professor in a school of education, Penny Axelrod left the college classroom to consult with administrators and teachers in public school districts and to help them meet the needs of students who struggle with reading. She writes that it is “ever challenging, and satisfying when positive change is created.” She is happy to have more time for travel and visiting family and friends.

Nan Toby Feldman’s great love is her son Todd Sean, who has a son of his own and is “kind, caring, and open to music and life.” She recalls her days at Bard as “a deep part” of her life.

Rayna Meshorer Harman and her husband, Dr. A. Jay Harman, both retired in February 2008 and celebrated their 11th wedding anniversary on August 31. She writes: “It took a while for us to settle into this wonderful reward but now that we have, we adore it.” They have plans to travel, relax at home, be mindful of their health, take care of themselves and each other, and keep up with their “siblings, kids, and grandkids and all old friends.”

Michael Miller writes that “at 68, when most people have retired, I am still at it, doing what I love most in life: teaching writing to freshmen and freshwomen at Baruch College.” Michael earned a degree from Columbia’s Teachers College years ago, and began to teach in middle and high schools. He did not “hit his stride,” however, until he found his vocation in his 50s as a teacher of writing at the college level.

William Sherman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the New York Daily News. In December 2008, he literally stole the Empire State Building, transferring ownership to his own Nelots Properties LLC (that’s “stolen” spelled backward). “Fay Wray” witnessed the signing of the transfer documents and “Willie Sutton” was the notary.

Then, he wrote about the heist in the Daily News to illustrate loopholes in New York City’s system for recording property transactions and malfeasance among title company representatives, lenders, and mortgage brokers. The article was the finale of 15 stories on greed and massive scams that served as a primary fuse for the ongoing real estate meltdown. Later, he returned the Fifth Avenue icon to its rightful owners.

Joan Spielberg Rich has been retired from teaching at the high school level for two years now and is “enjoying every minute of it.” A second home on the bay in Delaware allows her to have “water playtime” with five grandchildren and three married sons. She is still making baskets, which, in the past, have been displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.

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Class correspondent Pamela Dendy Knap, pdknap@optonline.net

Class correspondent Susan Playfair, srplayfair@comcast.net

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Jack Blum is the chairman of the board for the Violence Policy Center, an advocacy group for gun control and a leading source on the subject of damage done by firearms.

Eve Odiorne Sullivan was elected to the council of the National Parenting Education Network (NPEN, www.npen.org) and began her three-year term in April 2008. NPEN and Parents Forum (www.parentsforum.org), the organization she founded and runs as a volunteer, welcome inquiries from Bardians and others involved in parenting education or interested in parenting issues.

’61 Diane Miller had a solo exhibition of 37 large-scale collages at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery from June 21 through September 7, 2008. Images of her work can be seen on her website, www.dianemiller.org.

’58 On January 26, 2009, veteran Broadway orchestrator Jonathan Tunick was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. He is one of only five living persons holding all four major awards: Tony, Grammy, Emmy, and Academy Award.

’57 Eliza Miller’s play Vinnie was staged by Stageworks/Hudson’s Showcase Theatre in Hudson, New York, on November 29, 2008.

Eliza studied acting at Bard, where she met her first husband, Michael Miller. They had three children, Daniel, Caperton, and Michael, and lived in New York City, where Eliza started writing plays as she and Michael pursued acting careers. Michael died in 1983. Eliza remarried in 2002 and moved to New Jersey with her husband, Charles Johnston. She continues to write and visit her three “adorable grandchildren.”

’56 Although Rosalind Davis Friedman did not graduate from Bard, she credits many of her accomplishments to the intense teaching in music and English that she received at the College. She is enjoying her 30th year as the theater critic on WMNR 88.1 Fine Arts Public Radio in Connecticut. In 2008, her original musical for children, Hanukkah Holiday, was published by Samuel French, Inc./Baker’s Plays. In November 2008, for the second year in a row, Rosalind cochaired and comoderated a playwrights panel for the Outer Critics Circle at Sardi’s in New York City. Most important, with the help of their wonderful family, her husband continues to show amazing improvement from a serious stroke two years ago.

’55 Steven Barbash has had a busy year. In June 2008, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University mounted an exhibition of works that he has collected over more than 50 years. The show, titled Shared Experience: The Steven Barbash Collection, featured paintings, prints, and works on paper by such 20th-century American artists as Neil Welliver, Michael Mazur, Evan Summer, and Louis

Schanker, among others, along with several works by Barbash himself. The exhibition traveled to Juniata College Museum of Art, where it was on view through February. From September to December, Steven had a solo show, titled Apotheosis, of floral studies in oil at the gallery of Bloomer Creek Vineyard in Hector, New York.

And in December 2008 and January 2009, his work was included in Fine Etchers: 7 Etchers at The Ink Shop Printmaking Center/Olive Branch Press in Ithaca, New York.

’53 Class correspondent Naomi Bellinson Feldman, adfnbf@gmail.com Robert Cornell contributed an article to the 2007 book Remembering Lincoln, about Lincoln Kirstein, the administrator of the Ballet Society and later of the New York City Ballet Company. Bob was Kirstein’s secretary from 1958 to 1964.

Naomi Bellinson Feldman spent time in England last summer visiting Steve Portman ’56 and his family. Naomi’s family now includes a great-granddaughter as well as three children and six grandchildren.

She continues to be an active chamber music player in and around the Chicago area.

Joanne Pines Hersh was, unfortunately, unable to join the 55th reunion of the Class of ’53 in May 2008. She reports that she stays in touch with other Bardians, especially Elly Rosenblum Kopmar ’52, Paula Stern Pines ’53, and Doris Pines Markoff ’56, her sister.

Tommie Lilien Kauffmann plays many games of tennis each week and has been in touch with Peggy Gummere, who was the violist in her Bard string quartet.

’52 Class correspondent Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net

’51 Henry Milliken Jr. lives in Duxbury, Massachusetts, with Sheila Milliken, his wife of more than 60 years. Henry and Sheila married while Henry was at Bard on the G.I. Bill, after having served in the Pacific. He went on to a long career in education, both as a classroom science teacher and as a headmaster. He retired from teaching in 1985, but he keeps active as a volunteer; so active, in fact, that he received, in 2007, both the Duxbury Lifetime Achievement Award and the Presidential Award (a plaque for outstanding volunteer work awarded and signed by the president of the United States). He remains active on the board of the Duxbury Council of Aging. Henry and Sheila have four children and five grandchildren.

’44 Arnold Davis helped to organize the third annual reception for the faculty of Bard High School Early College, held on June 13, 2008, at the National Arts Club in New York City. He is also chair of the board of the Director’s Company in New York City. Their production of

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Irene’s Vow, starring Tovah Feldshuh, opened Off Broadway in the fall of 2008, and was well received—a review in the New York Times called it “an absorbing 90 minutes of theater.”

Matt King had a solo show in October 2008 at the Werkstätte Gallery in New York City. His work was also included in a two-person exhibition that opened in April at Fourteen30 in Portland, Oregon.

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Richard Burns is a graphic artist. He had a show of his watercolors in Boston in 2008.

Joel Griffith had two paintings selected for the 72nd Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region, which took place from June through August 2008 at the Albany Institute of History & Art. In the fall of 2008 he exhibited 20 new oil paintings at the Greenwich Arts Council’s Bendheim Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut. His work may be viewed online at joelgriffithpainter.com.

’40 Class correspondent Dick Koch, dickkoch88@gmail.com, 510-526-3731

’39 Wesley Dochtermann is retired from a career, which he “loved,” teaching chemistry and physics at a prep school.

Joe Pickard has been living in a retirement community in Greenport, New York (on the north fork of Long Island), for five years.

After seven years of teaching part-time at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Marc Holland became a full-time tenuretrack assistant professor of studio foundation there in September 2008. This year he will have a show at Incident Report in Hudson, New York.

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Program in International Education (PIE) ’99 Urska Dolinsek earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 2004 from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. She was married in the summer of 2005. She now works in Brussels, Belgium, with the foreign ministry of Slovenia, where she represents Slovenia at the European Union regarding energy issues.

’95 Vesna Straser earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Notre Dame with a specialization in market microstructure theory.

She is a director in the US Algorithmic Trading Product Management Group at Barclays Capital in New York City. She is married to Brandon Weber ’97.

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts ’06 A poetry chapbook by Bethany Ides (Wright), Approximate L, was published by Cosa Nostra Editions in conjunction with a traveling multimedia-video installation piece created by Ides with many collaborators, all named Lindsay.

’05 Branden Koch had two solo exhibitions of his work in the fall of 2008: one at the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the other at High Energy Constructs in Los Angeles.

’04 Adriana Farmiga serves as an artist-adviser for exhibitions and programming at La Galleria, the nonprofit gallery space run by La MaMa in New York’s East Village.

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Carrie Moyer participated in a group exhibition, That Was Then . . .

This Is Now, at P.S. 1 MoMA from June 25 to September 25, 2008.

Carrie published “Rochelle Feinstein: Modernist at the Disco” in the September 2008 issue of Art in America, and in October, Dyke Action Machine! Values, Visions and Goals: One Company, as part of the Artists + Activists series published by Printed Matter, Inc.

’01 Holly Lynton had her first solo exhibition in Europe, Solid Ground, in November 2008 at Galerie Schuster Photo in Berlin.

Marjorie Vecchio was a guest lecturer and juror at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and guest curator for the Contemporary Arts Collective, Las Vegas, in the spring of 2008. She remains director and curator of Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno.

And yes, she finally went to Burning Man, as a guest of the art director, and “had a great time on the playa with 50,000 other people!”

’99 Daniel DuVall lives for much of the year in the Dominican Republic, where he is involved in a long-term project photographing preColumbian Taíno cave paintings. After five years of work, he still has hundreds of caves to investigate, and new ones are rediscovered every year. He has a number of mural-sized photos on permanent exhibition at the Museum of Man in Santo Domingo and at the Center for Prehistoric Antillean Rock Art in El Pomier. In 2008 he was part of an exhibition in the French Embassy in Santo Domingo, which then traveled to the Alianza Francesa in Santiago, Dominican Republic. For more information, visit www.danielduvall.com.

’92 Grace Markman was in the group show Timeless: The Art of Drawing at the Morris Museum of Art in Morristown, New Jersey, in the fall of 2008, and was also represented in the accompanying catalogue. Her work can be seen at www.gracemarkman.com.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy ’08 Shortly after graduation, Chunyan Chai moved back to China, where she works as a project manager for Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) China, headquartered in Beijing. She is responsible for projects on emissions trading and multipollutant control at coal-fired power plants. Chunyan completed her BCEP internship with EDF China and wrote her master’s thesis on the role of emissions trading in reducing SO2 emissions in her country.

Christie Ferguson graduated with a dual degree from BCEP and Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program in the spring of 2008. She is the first BCEP grad to complete this joint degree program, for which she received an M.S. in environmental policy and an M.A. in teaching. Christie is now the East Hudson Regional Representative for the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference.

Altje Hoekstra does sustainable site design for Meliora Environmental Design, LLC, in Kimberton, Pennsylvania, an environmental engineering company (and a woman-owned business).

Kytt MacManus married Samantha Rivera on August 15, 2008, and they spent their honeymoon in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada.

Kytt and Samantha are building a new home in Livingston Manor, New York, Kytt’s hometown. He works for the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (where he completed his BCEP internship), as a research associate doing GIS work.

Litta Naukushu, a 3-2 student at Bard, graduated with a B.A. in natural science with a concentration in conservation biology, and an M.S. in environmental policy. She now works for the New York City Office of the Population Council as a program assistant in the Council’s Poverty, Gender and Youth Program.

Ananta Neelim, a 3-2 student at Bard, graduated with a B.A. in economics and an M.S. in environmental policy. After graduation, he returned to his home country of Bangladesh, where he is now a researcher for BRAC, a development organization that works toward the alleviation of poverty and the empowerment of the poor. Ananta contributed to WASH Programme of BRAC: Towards Attaining MDG Target: Baseline Findings, a book on water sanitation and hygiene. He is working on a project that will integrate geographic information systems (GIS) with BRAC’s activities in Bangladesh and Africa.

Kate Rosenfeld lives in Washington, D.C., where she is the manager of legislative affairs for D.C. Legislative and Regulatory Services.

part of Climate Resilient Communities, a pilot program with ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives). Fort Collins is one of three cities participating in this pilot project. Katie, who has worked for the City of Fort Collins since her BCEP internship in 2006, writes that she is very excited about this position.

Jackson Morris was promoted last summer to air and energy program associate for Environmental Advocates of New York.

Jennifer G. Peters lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a policy analyst for Clean Water Network (CWN), a national coalition that works to defend and strengthen the federal Clean Water Act. Among the many responsibilities Jennifer has at CWN are lobbying, managing interns, managing grants, and updating the website. She worked previously as a research assistant with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to develop a wetland-monitoring protocol for the city’s parks. While she attended BCEP, Jennifer received an EPA National Network for Environmental Management Studies fellowship to conduct research on wetland restoration strategies at the U.S. EPA Region 2.

Jessica Steinberg completed a dual degree with an M.S. in environmental policy and a J.D. from Pace University School of Law in 2007.

She works as an associate at Sive, Paget & Riesel, one of the nation’s top environmental law firms.

Jie Wu works for ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) USA in Boston. He provides technical assistance to local governments in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions on environmental programs, especially climate change, air quality, and sustainable development issues.

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture ’06 Monica Obniski has settled into life in Chicago, where she is a research assistant in American art at the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. candidate in design history at the University of Illinois. She turned her master’s thesis into an article that was published in the Journal of Design History. Her paper on the American sunroom was presented at the 12th Annual Conference on Cultural and Historic Preservation at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island.

Another paper, on the batiks of Marguerite Zorach, was presented at the 97th annual conference of the College Art Association, held in Los Angeles in February.

’07 Katie Bigner is the environmental program coordinator at the City of Fort Collins (Colorado) Utilities. Her work in this newly created position entails implementing a sustainability initiative with the company as it seeks to become the first municipally owned utility to be registered with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a prominent sustainability reporting framework. She also helps to develop climate adaptation policies focused on water resources and management as

Daniella Ohad Smith, Ph.D., attended several conferences in 2008, including the International Conference of the Interior Design Educators Council, University of Montreal, Quebec. Her article on T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings appeared in the October 2008 special issue of History of Interior Design. Daniella curated Dialogues with Design Legends, a series of programs at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan that featured Ralph Rucci, Peter Eisenman, and Milton Glaser. She

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’05

Katherine Wahlberg ’04 and Erin Eisenbarth, current BGC doctoral candidate, to the recently published Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, which accompanies the traveling exhibition of the same name.

Genevieve Ward Swenson and her husband, Erik, welcomed a baby girl, Lillian Elisabeth Swenson, on May 25, 2008.

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teaches modern design in the Continuing Education Program at Cooper Union.

’04 Mary Dohne is the director at Liz O’Brien, a gallery specializing in 20th-century decorative arts.

Maria Perers gave several lectures in the teacher education program at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm. In the spring of 2008, she lectured on design history at Gotland University and on Scandinavian designs at Parsons and Cooper-Hewitt. Her Ph.D. dissertation topic was approved in May: “From Housing to Home: Changing Values in the Politics, Architecture, and Design of Apartment Living in Sweden 1960–2010.”

She has been happily married since last year.

’03 Christine Brennan and her husband, Craig Feder, welcomed a baby boy, Liam Feder, on April 22, 2008.

’01 Edina Deme moved back to Hungary after finishing her studies and work at the BGC. She is the director of the docent program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. She regularly conducts educational gallery tours and lectures on European history and art. The museum’s website is www.szepmuveszeti.hu.

’00 Ayesha Abdur-Rahman organized a workshop on the decorative arts of Sri Lanka, in conjunction with the Sri Lankan Decorative Arts Documentation Project, in August 2008, in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Sponsored by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (www.aisls.org), the workshop included seminars on furniture, textiles, costume, design elements, and museum and historic house collections. Annual workshops in Sri Lanka are planned to attract international participation. For further details, e-mail Ayesha at aye.dec.arts@gmail.com.

Caroline Hannah, a BGC doctoral candidate, and photographer Elizabeth Felicella, Bard College ’89, published an article, Crow House Rising, in the June/July 2008 art and architecture issue of American Craft magazine. The article, which is available online, deals in part with the town of Ramapo’s early 2008 purchase of the home and studio of artist, craftsman, and designer Henry Varnum Poor through a successful Environmental Protection Fund matching grant awarded by New York State’s Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. Caroline shared a component of her dissertation on Crow House at the 12th Annual Conference on Cultural and Historic Preservation, held at Salve Regina University in October 2008. Caroline also contributed catalogue entries, along with

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Judith Gura is a professor at the New York School of Interior Design. Her new book, Interior Design in New York, 1935–1985, was published by Acanthus Press in the fall of 2008. The two-volume work chronicles the history of the educational institutions, associations, media, and marketing strategies of the interior design profession. It also includes profiles of 58 key designers as well as images of work by more than a hundred important designers.

’96 Jeanne-Marie Musto is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Sewanee: The University of the South. She apologizes for having been out of touch, but would be delighted to hear from BGC people, especially any coming through the beautiful Cumberland Plateau.

Center for Curatorial Studies ’08 Anat Ebji opened The Company, an exhibition space in Chinatown, Los Angeles, in November. Plans are for The Company to feature a mix of solo and group exhibitions and provide a resource center for artists, curators, and the public.

Terri Smith is a curatorial researcher at the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, New York.

Niko Vicario, CCS Curatorial Fellow, worked with CCS artist in residence Bernd Krauss and a group of first-year curatorial students on an exhibition at the Woodstock Guild’s Kleinert/James Arts Center in Woodstock, New York, which concluded a month’s run at the end of November.

’07 Özkan Cangüven is the assistant director of the Slag Gallery in New York City. The gallery specializes in emerging Eastern European artists who haven’t had much exposure in the United States.

Ruba Katrib curated Dark Continents, her first exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, where she is associate curator.

Kate McNamara, curatorial assistant at P.S. 1 MoMA in New York City, curated This Is the Way the World Is at Cleopatra’s in Brooklyn.

It was the inaugural installation at Cleopatra’s, which Kate started with three partners.

Amy Owen, director of exhibitions at Artists Space, curated Salad Days III, which also included a slew of related performances and film screenings at the New York City venue.

Chen Tamir, an independent curator in New York City, curated Life Stories at Gallery TPW in Toronto, with works by Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela, Meiro Koizumi, and Tova Mozard. Chen also curated Exit Poll Cocktail Toll at White Box in New York City, as well as Living Room at Flux Factory in Long Island City.

’06 Montserrat Albores Gleason, an independent curator living in Mexico, curated Cool Ridicule: ensayos y escenarios para un autorretrato Jonathan Hernandez. The exhibition was on view at Petra, Montserrat’s curatorial project space in Mexico City.

Kerryn Greenberg worked on the Mark Rothko exhibition that opened in late September 2008 and ran through February 1 at the Tate Modern in London. It was the first significant exhibition of Rothko’s work to be held in the United Kingdom in more than 20 years. Kerryn is an assistant curator at the museum.

Geir Haraldseth, an independent curator in Norway, and Ruba Katrib ’07, an associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, cocurated Fact or Friction at Vox Populi, an artist-run space in Philadelphia, in January 2008. Geir traveled back and forth last fall between New York City and the University in Oslo, where he was teaching.

Amy Mackie, a curatorial assistant at the New Museum in New York City, organized the collaborative exhibition C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), by A. L. Steiner + robbinschilds. The show ran through the middle of January.

Mariangela Méndez, faculty at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, curated Sin remedio at the city’s Galeria Alcuadrado.

Yasmeen Siddique, curator at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, was awarded an Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship for her project The Futurist Legacy.

’05 Judy Ditner completed her Ph.D. qualifying exams at Boston University and has begun work on her dissertation. She holds the joint position of curatorial assistant to the Triennial and public programs coordinator at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Jen Mergel curated Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo, the South African artist’s first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum. It was Jen’s inaugural project in her new role as associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Simone Subal, director of the Peter Blum–Chelsea Gallery in New York City, organized Terranaut: Sculptures and Paintings, a show by Matthew Day Jackson. The exhibition ran from September 12 to November 8, 2008.

’04 Stacy Allan, a Los Angeles–based writer and associate editor of Afterall, was featured in “Los Angeles Art Magazine Editors in

Conversation” in the July 2008 CAA News. As a launch event for Afterall 18, Stacy organized “Making Strange: Rooftop Sci-Fi at the Westin Bonaventure,” a three-week rooftop film series at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown L.A. Mary Katherine Matalon’s interview with Regine Basha ’96, “Accoutrements of Bourgeois U.S. Comfort,” was published in fluentcollaborative. Mary Katherine is the coordinator of testsite, an ongoing series of collaborative projects that is based in Austin, Texas, and generally pairs an artist with a writer.

Steven Matijcio is the curator at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In December 2007, SECCA became an operating entity of the North Carolina Museum of Art and the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. Steven has held positions at the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and has organized projects across all media and themes. Along with his curating, writing, and criticism, he is an active researcher and lecturer, and has received many awards in those capacities, including a Governor General’s Award and the Orpheus Prize in Humanities.

Aubrey Reeves, programming director at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, hosted Grizzly Proof, an exhibition of artworks by Chen Tamir ’07 that were inspired by Peter Lynch’s cult classic film Project Grizzly. Originally created at Flux Factory in New York, Grizzly Proof was shown at Trinity Square as part of a Peter Lynch retrospective at Cinémathèque Ontario.

Ryan Rice, an independent curator and a Mohawk of Kahnawake, Quebec, curated Lore, an exhibition at Gallery 101 in Ottawa that was on view in September and October 2008. Lore focused on forms of storytelling and oral traditions found within First Nations cultures.

Ryan also curated Scout’s Honour at the Main Gallery, University of Lethbridge, Alberta.

’03 José Luis Blondet, curator of visual arts, Boston Center for the Arts, organized three artist projects at the Center’s Mills Gallery—Free Parking (Kirsten Mosher); A Family Portrait (Sean M. Johnson); and This is a proposal (Dave McKenzie).

Ingrid Chu, independent curator in New York City, has launched Forever & Today, a Manhattan exhibition space that she describes as a “new nonprofit-minded adventure into contemporary art.” She cocurated the inaugural exhibition, Pablo Helguera: The Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which opened in October 2008. Ingrid also continues to write exhibition reviews for TimeOut New York.

John Weeden is executive director of the Urban Art Commission in Memphis. John was formerly assistant director of the Rhodes College CODA Fellows program.

’02 Cassandra Colblentz, an associate curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, curated Lyle Ashton Harris—Blow Up,

CLASS NOTES | 41

an exhibition organized by the museum that traveled to the University at Buffalo Art Gallery, SUNY, where Sandra Firmin is curator.

Luiza Interlenghi is director of the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro. She was formerly the director of temporary exhibitions at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio. Although Kelly Lindner has moved to California, she will continue to be associated with the George Adams Gallery in New York City, which she served as director for several years. Kelly writes that she’s “going green,” as her husband is now an executive with Springboard Biodiesel, a company that manufactures machines that convert recycled vegetable oil into fuel.

’01 Linda Park, formerly program officer for the New York Foundation for the Arts, is now program manager of LINC (Leveraging Investments in Creativity) in New York City.

’99 Marieluise Hessel, founding chair of the CCS Board of Governors, invited Xandra Eden Baeden (curator of exhibitions, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and the Contemporary Collector’s group to her home, where she talked about her early years as a collector. The Marieluise Hessel Collection is the foundation of the permanent collection at the Center for Curatorial Studies. For the Art on Paper 2008 biennial exhibition at Weatherspoon, Xandra selected the 75 artists whose work was represented.

’97 Sonia Becce, an independent curator in Buenos Aires, curated a Félix González-Torres exhibition at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), in May 2008. She also traveled to New York City in connection with the exhibition.

Tomás Pospiszyl writes that he is “fully occupied” at the Center of Audiovisual Studies at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He still finds ways to do some writing and curating on the side. This year he worked on four different exhibitions with contemporary Czech and international artists in Prague, contributed to three catalogues, and presented papers at several conferences and lectures.

’96 Regine Basha, an independent curator in New York City, curated The Activist Impulse at Women + Their Work in Austin, Texas. The exhibition included work by Andrea Geyer, Emily Jacir, Kristin Lucas, Valerie Tevere + Angel Nevarez, and Judi Werthein. Regine also cocurated The Marfa Sessions—Marfa’s first exhibition devoted to artists working with sound, which opened in San Antonio in September.

In Memoriam ’06

Mercedes Vicente, curator of contemporary art at the GovettBrewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand, curated an exhibition of work by Amar Kanwar, a leading Indian filmmaker.

Charles “Chill” Hamilton, 46, a graduate of the College through the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), died on December 27, 2008, at Woodbourne Correctional Facility. He was to be paroled on January 20, 2009, after 26 years in prison. “Charles was among the most affable, gracious, kind, and beloved members of our program,” said BPI director Max Kenner ’01. Enrolled in BPI since 2002, Hamilton was selected as junior marshal for the program’s first Commencement, at Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York, in 2005, and was elected head of the student government by his peers. “His cheerful, go-ahead energy recognized no obstruction,” said poet Janine Pommy Vega, one of Hamilton’s teachers. Hamilton is survived by his mother, his wife, and two daughters.

’98

’00

Sarah Cook, an independent curator and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Curatorial Resource for New Media Art, University of Sunderland, UK, curated an exhibition titled Untethered at Eyebeam in New York City. Sarah described the show as a “sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence, and transformed into surrealist and surprising ready-mades.”

John Michael Clair, 30, died on January 31, 2009, in Mamaronack, New York. Friends and classmates remember him as a funny, sweet, gentle man who loved sports, books, his cats, his friends, and beauty.

He devoted his life to study, writing poetry (several of his poems have been published), and composing experimental music. He is survived by his parents, Ira and Rita Clair of Pound Ridge, New York; two sisters, Lisa Clair ’03 and Sara Clair ’07, both of Brooklyn; and his companion, Margaret Graham ’00, with whom he shared his life, family, and friends.

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, an independent curator living in New York City, is curator in residence at the Center for Curatorial Studies, where she is collaborating with artist in residence Bernd Krauss.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curator in architecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, organized a small gathering of CCS alums at her home in Los Angeles.

Victoria Noorthoorn, an independent curator in Buenos Aires, was a guest speaker in the seminar “Eyes Wide Open,” which took place in April at the Goethe Institut in Berlin.

’89 Carissa South, formerly at the National Gallery of Art, is now director of development and marketing at Community School in Roanoke, Virginia.

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Adam Nodelman died on August 25, 2008, in Woodstock, New York, where he lived with his wife, Stacey, and daughters Pascal, Kaya, and Jasper. He was a talented, multidimensional musician, known for his

virtuosity on bass and synthesizer and for his powerful stage presence. His survivors also include his parents, Leonard and Ellen Nodelman; his sister and brother-in-law, Rachel Nodelman Alemany ’85 and Jason Alemany ’87; and two nephews.

Haider Salahuddin died on September 8, 2008. A native of Pakistan, he worked at IBM and lived in Vienna, Virginia. He is survived by his wife, Saadia, and infant son, Emil; his father, Air Commodore (Ret.) Salahuddin, and mother, Fawzia, of Lahore, Pakistan; his brother, Fahad Azizuddin ’95; and his sister, Maha. Many of his Bard friends contacted the Alumni/ae Office after his death, remembering his enthusiasm, good humor, and infectious laugh.

’88 Mary B. Polonis died on November 8, 2002, in Florida. She was born in Italy and came to the United States as a child. She married, raised a family, worked in a variety of jobs, retired in 1983 to Lake Katrine, New York, and then decided to get a college degree. Five years later she graduated with a B.A. in literature from Bard. She was predeceased by her husband, Michael, who drove her to Bard for all of her classes. She is survived by their children, Paul, Richard, Joseph, Lauretta, and Rosemarie.

’83 Joshua D. Siegel, Esq., died on June 22, 2008. After earning a law degree from The Dickinson School of Law at Penn State, he worked for the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office. He had a private practice in Westchester for more than 20 years. He is survived by his wife, Carol Mamone; his parents, Rabbi Paul and Dr. Lorraine Siegel; his brothers, Fred and Arthur; his sister, Debbie; and six nieces and nephews.

’76 The Reverend W. Keith Hedrick died on December 10, 2008. After Bard he earned a master of divinity degree in 1979 at Nashotah House seminary in Wisconsin. He was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church and served his entire ministry at Christ Church Episcopal in Hudson, New York, retiring in 2002. He is survived by his life partner, C. Robert Lewis; his brother, Robert; his sister-in-law, Florence; and a nephew.

’73 Elizabeth Gilliland died on July 2, 2008.

’72 ’85 Mary Hampton Mason sent the following note to the Bardian in memory of her dear friend, Thomas G. Ormsby: With a great personal sense of loss I write to tell you that Thomas G. Ormsby (who earned his associate’s degree at Simon’s Rock and his bachelor’s at Bard) died on November 11, 2008, in Washington, D.C. After serving with the Peace Corps in rural Tunisia for two years, he moved to Washington, D.C., and received a master’s degree in anthropology from American University in 1988. He worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as a terrestrial archeologist, and took part in a number of archeological digs in and around D.C. and in Pennsylvania.

Tom loved underwater archeology, and moved to Kauai, Hawaii, in 1997, where he worked with the Smithsonian in diving and charting the 1824 shipwreck of King Kamehameha II’s royal yacht. He returned to Washington, D.C., in 2008. Throughout his life, Tom stayed close to several Simon’s Rock/Bard classmates. In addition to them, he is survived by his mother, Deborah Ormsby; his father, David Ormsby; his stepmother, Lindsay; two brothers, Peter and Chris; and a sister, Cameron. His family is planning a memorial service in Greenwich, Connecticut, in June. Bardians who would like to share remembrances of Tom can write to David Ormsby at 14 Partridge Hollow Road, Greenwich, CT 06831, or e-mail me at mary.mason@usdoj.gov.

’84 Bruce T. Grossman died on December 13, 2008. He was a musician and composer, and also produced recordings by himself and others.

An accomplished guitar and mandolin player, he performed mostly his own compositions at many venues in the Los Angeles area. He is survived by his parents, Beverly and Felix Grossman; two brothers, Peter and David; and a nephew and niece.

Ann Gross Linehan died on May 18, 2008. She held a master’s degree in social work from Hunter College, and worked for many years as a program coordinator for the Lenox Hill Neighborhood Association in New York City. She moved to New Jersey in the early 1980s, and worked for various universities and school districts over the next two decades. Survivors include her husband, Dr. Edward Linehan; her daughter, Kate; her father, Lewis; and her brother, Michael.

’71 Lauren Totty Higginbotham died on May 10, 2008.

’70 Deborah Jean Lange, of Overland Park, Kansas, died on November 29, 2008, after a 21-year disability. She grew up in Kansas City and earned a master’s degree at Boston University. She worked with children with learning disabilities in a New York City high school for several years, and returned to Kansas City in 1986. In 1987 she suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, which left her totally disabled and living in institutional care. She is survived by her brothers, Robert and Steve.

’69 Andrea Selkirk died on August 11, 2007, in New York City.

’62 Painter, poet, and musician Steven Sles died on October 24, 2008, in Arizona. Although he suffered from cerebral palsy his entire life, he devised at an early age a way to create art, holding a pen or paintbrush between his teeth. He is survived by his sister, Andrea, and daughter, Harmony.

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’59 George Callahan died on June 15, 2008. He is survived by his wife, Frances Callahan; four children; and four grandchildren.

’57 Barbara B. Payne died on June 25, 2008. She held a master’s degree in education from New York University. She was a resident of Dunedin and Clearwater, both in Florida, for more than 40 years, and spent 33 of those years teaching at San Jose and Garrison Jones Elementary Schools. She is survived by her three children—Kenneth, Elizabeth, and Wallis—and nine grandchildren.

’56 Charles E. Howard Jr. died on April 13, 2008. He is survived by his wife, Margaret Howard of Omaha; his children, Doug, Jon, James, Megan, and Joseph; and eight grandchildren.

’53 Peter K. Hoag died on January 29, 2009. In recent years, he had achieved recognition as a graphic artist in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and environs, through participating in gallery and outdoor art exhibitions. Shortly before his death he submitted a note to the Bardian, expressing gratitude to his art mentors at Bard, particularly Stefan Hirsch, Louis Schanker, Danny Newman, Sam Sommers, and Marie Kelbert, who all encouraged him “by their enthusiasm and caring interest.” He also worked in the field of product design (table tops and floors), and made block prints and color drawings. He is survived by his wife, Helen; their daughters, Katherine, Cynthia, and Carol; and seven grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Robert Solotaire died on October 3, 2008, in Portland, Maine. He was known as a landscape painter with an eye for industrial elements. His work was shown over the years in galleries and museums in New York City; Pittsburgh; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and numerous cities and towns in Maine. He was married for 17 years to Patricia R. Solotaire ’53, whom he met at Bard. He is survived by his longtime companion, Dana Williams; three children, Matthew, Lynn, and Benjamin; and five grandchildren.

’52 Judson L. Levin died on August 7, 2008. He earned his juris doctor degree from Yale Law School and entered the United States Army in 1955. After six months of total immersion in Russian, he was trained as an intercept translator of Russian military maneuvers. Upon his return to civilian life, he joined a law firm in Detroit, and then moved to New Jersey with his first wife, Audrey Goldman ’56, and three children. There he had a private law practice, and during his commute, he began to write plays. Playwrighting became his life’s passion, along with directing and acting. In all, he wrote more than a dozen plays and three novels. The last 23 years of his life were spent with his wife Elinor Wallach Levin ’54 at Morningside Gardens in upper Manhattan, where the Morningside Players staged many of his plays. The couple traveled in France and Russia, and during a visit to St. Petersburg, they toured the Bobrinskiy Palace as it was being ren-

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ovated to house Smolny College (see the Summer 2006 Bardian). He is survived by his wife; his daughters, Laura, Sharon, and Wendy, and their mother; his sister, Nancy; his brothers, Jeremy and Franklin; and six grandchildren.

Artist Nina Ransohoff died on April 20, 2008, in Bradenton, Florida.

Her mediums were pen and ink, monoprint, acrylic, and watercolor.

She worked as an illustrator throughout her life and also taught drawing and pottery at a senior center in Cincinnati for many years.

Survivors include her daughters, Alison and Elizabeth, and three grandchildren.

’50 John “Jack” Hoke died on January 1, 2009. He was a resident of Potomac, Maryland, where he had worked in real estate for 60 years.

He was a World War II veteran of the Army Air Forces. He married the late June Gordon in 1948 and they had two children. He is survived by his second wife, Nancy; his son, John, and daughter, Joyce; his brother, Charles; and ten grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

’48 Janice Weitz Feinberg died on December 29, 2006, in Newton, Massachusetts. Her husband, Robert L. Feinberg, predeceased her.

She is survived by their children—John, Emily, Jody, and William— and 17 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Harold Lubell ’44 wrote the following remembrance of his classmate Donn O’Meara ’48.

Donn O’Meara (July 30, 1924 – September 8, 2004) was a skilled wordsmith, linguist, and part-time anthropologist who made his career in advertising and public relations. He picked up Spanish as a youngster, then French, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, German, passable Japanese, and Hebrew. In 1942, before being drafted into the war, Donn recognized that he was Jewish, since he was born of a Jewish mother. He spent the summer of 1942 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and came back to Annandale speaking Galitzianer Yiddish. Shortly before he was drafted, Donn married Cecilia Pereira, a young woman from Nicaragua. Sent overseas, he worked in London in the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. After the Normandy landings, he got to France, where he ran into another Bardian, Al Sapinsley ’42, probably in Rouen.

Donn returned to Bard on the GI Bill in 1946, with his wife. One of Donn’s extracurricular activities was acting the lead part, in French, in a production of Alfred Jarry’s proto-Dadaist French farce Ubu Roi, which was directed by Eve Stwertka (Gassler) ’49 as her Senior Project. Along with Albert Stwertka and several others, Donn participated with Elie Shneour ’47 in setting up Bard’s first radio broadcasting station in 1946.

Donn worked in advertising and public relations in Caracas, New York, Michigan, and Rio de Janeiro. Back in Caracas in 1972, he wrote Living Jewish, which was published in New York and London under the pseudonym Michael Asheri. “Who would buy a book like that by somebody named O’Meara?” Donn explained. In 1977, Donn and his wife moved to Israel, where they settled in Petah Tikva. Cecilia took the name Zippora. Donn worked as an executive of the Israel Military

Industries Corporation until he retired. He lived to enjoy his 80th birthday party in Petah Tikva with some of his family and lots of old friends.

His survivors include his children, Gabriel, Suzana, Miriam, Daniel, and Dina.

went on to a long career in city planning and urban renewal, supervising projects in cities and towns throughout Massachusetts. He is survived by his wife, Ellen Feingold; four children, Katie, Joel, Judith, and Lila; and two grandchildren.

Roy Spence Richardson Jr. died on November 14, 2008, in Putney, Vermont. After World War II service in the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army, he completed his undergraduate degree at Bard and earned an M.A. in theater from the University of Iowa. He settled in Putney, where he cofounded the Grammar School and served as the head of school and trustee. He also cofounded the Brattleboro Center for the Performing Arts and authored several books and plays. He is survived by his wife, Dorothy Richardson; their children, Kathy, Elizabeth, Seth, Jess, and Johnathan; 12 grandchildren; and a son, Spence, from an earlier marriage.

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’46 Marda Liggett Woodbury died on July 8, 2008. After earning degrees at Bard and Columbia University, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked as a librarian, education researcher, and journalist. She was also a longtime Bay Area activist and early folk music scene enthusiast. She wrote and published two books on educational research and Stopping the Presses, a book about her father, Walter Liggett. Her survivors include her brother, Walter Liggett ’47 of Berkeley, California; three children, Mark, Brian, and Heather; and three grandchildren.

’45 H. Standish Thayer died on August 8, 2008. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy from Columbia University. He taught at Columbia from 1949 until 1961, and then at City College of New York until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1990. He received numerous honors over the course of his academic career, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Herbert W. Schneider Award for contributions to American philosophy from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and two appointments to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Thayer published widely, but is best known for his 1952 book The Logic of Pragmatism: An Examination of John Dewey’s Logic. He is survived by his wife, Elisabeth; three children, Hewitt, Alexandrea, and Jonathan; and three grandchildren.

’44 Harold A. Chamberlin died on December 15, 2008. He attended Bard for three years before enlisting in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He graduated from Tufts Dental School in 1953 and embarked upon a 40-year dental career in Wayland, Massachusetts.

He is survived by his wife, Mary; two sons; a daughter; a stepdaughter; and six grandchildren.

’39 Justin Gray died on April 9, 2008. He earned a master’s degree in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and

Elias L. Dann died on September 23, 2008. He majored in music at Bard, and then won a fellowship in violin at Juilliard Graduate School; he received a diploma there in 1940. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University, where he lectured in music. He served in the United States Army during the war years of 1941 to 1945. From 1946 to 1950 he was musical director and conductor of the national company of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! He traveled with five musicians and rehearsed 23 local musicians in each city before opening night. He conducted Oklahoma! in 100 cities in the United States and Canada. In 1968 he joined Florida State University’s School of Music and helped the school establish a Ph.D. program in musicology. He taught there for the rest of his career, becoming professor emeritus in 1996. He is survived by his wife, Janice Smith-Dann; a daughter, Deborah; a granddaughter; and two nieces.

’30 Robert H. Empsall died on May 2, 2008, in Potsdam, New York. He was the proprietor of Empsall’s Department Store, in Malone, New York (which had been founded by his father), until he sold the store in 1969. During World War II he served in the Army Air Forces and was stationed at Romulus Air Base in Michigan, where he helped with the shipment of supplies in support of the invasion of North Africa. In later years he was active in his church and community. He developed an interest in genealogy and traced his lineage back to a Revolutionary War soldier. He was predeceased by his brother, Harlon, and his wife Margaret, who died in 1967. His survivors include their two sons, John and William; and two grandsons and a granddaughter.

Faculty David Crowell, an artist, craftsman, and theater professional who had a brief term as a drama instructor at Bard after the Second World War, died on January 17, 2009. He came to Bard in 1947 after wartime service in the Marine Corps, and left the College in 1948 to pursue a career in advertising and fabric design. He is survived by his wife, Joan Crowell, of Quogue, New York; a daughter; five stepchildren; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Donald Finkel, 79, a celebrated American poet who taught briefly at Bard, died on November 18, 2008, in St. Louis. He was an instructor in English at the College from 1958 to 1960; he left Annandale for Washington University. His wife, the poet and novelist Constance Urdang, predeceased him. His survivors include a son, Tom; two daughters, Amy and Liza; and two grandchildren.

CLASS NOTES | 45

views, and book reviews were published in Anthropos, Technology and Disability, National Catholic Reporter, Living Pulpit, and other magazines and scholarly journals. “Paul engaged theological truth with courage and faith,” said Bard president Leon Botstein. “He was a loyal and devoted alumnus, a caring and kind teacher, and a muchloved priest.” Father Murray’s survivors include his mother, Verna Murray, of Arlington, Virginia; and a sister, Rebecca Burns. A memorial service took place on April 20 in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents on the Bard campus.

Staff Linda Dedrick, 60, a housekeeper in the Cruger Village residence halls and an Aramark employee since 1989, died on November 9, 2008. As a housekeeper at Bard for many years, she considered the students her “kids,” and they in turn considered her their “dorm mom.” She was active in the United Methodist Church of Germantown and, as a fan of stock car racing, was a well-known figure at Lebanon Valley Speedway. Survivors include three brothers, Brian Mabb, Donald L. Mabb, and Joseph E. Mabb Sr.; four sisters, Karen Buffa, Theresa Clark, Maggie Ingham, and Donna Jostlin; and several nieces, nephews, great-nieces, and great-nephews.

Father Paul Murray

Father Paul Edward Murray ’71, Bard’s Roman Catholic chaplain and a visiting assistant professor of religion, died on January 30, 2009. He held master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology from Catholic University of America. He ministered to the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., from 1975 to 1998, and then returned to Annandale to teach in the Religion Program and to assume the Catholic chaplaincy of the College. Father Murray was the author of Life in Paradox: The Story of a Gay Catholic Priest (O Books, 2008), a memoir of the personal odyssey that led him to effect a radical transformation in his understandings of God, church, and society. Noting that the struggle within the church over homosexuality “is not just about homosexuality [but] about the meaning of Catholicism,” Murray writes: “Homosexuality and Catholicism provide the texts and contexts of my life’s story. Both domains are appetites, attractions and forces whose signals I seek to decipher. . . . Both, however, are profoundly implicated in each other. Homosexuality underscores my choice of Catholicism. Catholicism informs my commitment to being proudly gay. But paradoxically, the process that promotes healing and integrity in my life, the convergence of domains, marks the path of my divergence—my ‘heresy’—from official church structures.” The book has stirred much controversy, but it has its champions within the church. Sister Jeannine Gramick, executive codirector of the National Coalition of American Nuns, calls it “a bold indictment of proclaiming any ‘truth’ that is unknown by the heart.”

Father Murray was the founder and executive director of Among Friends, Inc., an organization that provides counseling, housing, and job-search support to persons in crisis. His articles, inter-

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Anita Lynn Micossi, 61, who had worked for the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) since 2002, died on December 8, 2008. She was at BPI from its start, teaching its first English composition course during the first semester that Bard offered conventional course work within the New York State prison system. She was a central figure in BPI’s small college community at Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York, serving in administrative roles, acclimating incoming students to college life, and teaching nearly every student enrolled at Eastern. “Anita was the face of the program to many students at Eastern,” said BPI director Max Kenner. “She was beloved by our students, and was remembered by many of them years after graduation or release.” She is survived by her husband, Robert Zises, and her daughter, Sophia.

Friend Helen A. Bard, 91, died on February 5, 2009, in Rhinebeck, New York. She and her late husband, Richard E. Bard, worked for the Zabriskie Estate (Blithewood) and Ward Manor until 1952. Mr. Bard was then employed by the College until his retirement in 1980, and the couple lived on campus in Sands House. Mrs. Bard was known for her abundant flower and vegetable gardens, her upholstery and laundry services to Bard faculty and students (many of the latter considered her a surrogate mother), and her frequent offerings of coffee and doughnuts to the College’s Buildings and Grounds personnel. Her survivors include two sons, Robert L. Bard ’66 and Richard J. Bard; a daughter, Cornelia Fowle ’80; three sisters; a brother; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. She was buried in the Bard College Cemetery, alongside her husband.

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS Michael and Wenny DeWitt Support 150th Anniversary Campaign Loyal alumnus Michael DeWitt ’65 and his wife, Wenny, wanted to help Bard build its endowment for future generations through the College’s 150th Anniversary Campaign.

Michael is a former president of the Board of Governors of the Bard-St. Stephen's Alumni/ae Association and that Board's current executive vice president. He has artwork on display at the Bertelsmann Campus Center, previously served as a volunteer admission ambassador, and is an allaround celebrated alumnus. He sought to make a significant gift to the College while he and Wenny retained income from their assets.

“Would it be possible to participate in the campaign by setting up a charitable annuity with Bard?” asked Michael.

“Absolutely,” said Debra Pemstein, vice president of development and alumni/ae affairs. “We can work it out.”

A charitable gift annuity, a contract between the donor and Bard College, is an irrevocable arrangement in which the College pays a guaranteed lifetime income to the donor (and, if designated, another annuitant) at a rate based on the age(s) of the annuitants(s). The charitable gift annuity is a way of reducing income taxes, since it generates a charitable income tax deduction in the year it is created, and because a portion of the annual income received by the donor may be tax free. In addition, if appreciated assets are contributed via the charitable gift annuity, the donor may avoid federal estate taxes.

Michael and Wenny chose to let the College decide how best to use their gift. It is also possible to designate a contribution for a particular purpose, for example, a scholarship fund for students in the Studio Arts Program or the Biology Program.

Bard requests a minimum donation of $15,000, in cash or marketable securities, to establish a charitable gift annuity. Individuals receiving payments from a charitable gift annuity must be at least 60 years old when the payments begin. Those younger than 60 can establish a deferred payment gift annuity, in which the gift is made and the donor defers receiving income until age 60.

Bard’s 150th Anniversary Campaign, which has been in a “quiet phase” since July 2007, has the ambitious goal of raising endowment, capital, and operating funds exceeding $500 million. To date, $183 million has been raised. Gifts can be made over several years and through various testamentary possibilities.

The Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association, of which Michael is a longtime member, has agreed to make a collective gift to the College’s endowment in honor of its 150th anniversary in 2010. This historic effort has raised over $850,000 to date, and the Board of Governors members hope that other Bard alumni/ae will join them in designating gifts, pledges, and testamentary commitments to the campaign.

During these challenging economic times, Bard is particularly grateful to the DeWitts and to all its alumni/ae who not only continue their support each year but also direct their contributions to help future generations.

For further information on creating a charitable gift annuity with Bard, or to make a donation to the 150th Anniversary Campaign, please contact Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, at pemstein@bard.edu or 845-758-7405. All inquiries are confidential.

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FA C U LT Y N O T E S

Peggy Ahwesh, associate professor of film and electronic arts, screened films at Skolská 28 Gallery and at the Academy of Film and Television (FAMU) in Prague, Czech Republic, last fall. With Keith Sanborn, faculty in film, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, she presented “Laughter and Abjection,” two evenings of individual and collaborative films, at the Rodina Kino in St. Petersburg, Russia. In December, Ahwesh and Sanborn traveled to Ukraine and presented “Happy Video New Year: Bricolage with Stereotypes” at the Yagallery in Kiev, an event sponsored by the Fulbright Program, and were artists in residence in the village of Legedzine.

JoAnne Akalaitis, Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Drama, directed The Play of Daniel in New York City in December at The Cloisters and at Grace Church.

Mark Danner, James Clark Chace Professor in Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, published two essays last fall in the New York Review of Books: “Obama and Sweet Potato Pie” and “Frozen Scandal.”

Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography, presented Kings of Cyan at Galerie Mitterand + Sanz in Zurich, May 30 – October 18. The exhibition consisted of photographs, centered on Italian political posters, that Davis took during his 2007–08 American Academy in Rome Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize.

Yuval Elmelech, associate professor of sociology, is the author of Transmitting Inequality: Wealth and the American Family, published last year by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies, spoke at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, at a February conference on new modes of governance and security challenges in the Asia-Pacific.

Omar G. Encarnación, associate professor of political studies, published an essay, “Reconciliation after Democratization: Coping with the Past in Spain,” in the fall 2008 issue of Political Science Quarterly.

Laura Battle, professor of studio arts, showed work in an invitational exhibition at the museum of the National Academy in New York last summer and received the Academy’s Charles Loring Elliot Award and Medal.

Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature and First-Year Seminar, is the translator of a new edition of H. G. Adler’s novel The Journey that was published by Random House.

Daniel Berthold, professor of philosophy, published an article, “Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness,” in Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology.

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, was invited to contribute the article “The Unsung Success of Live Classical Music” to the Wall Street Journal. For Newsweek International he wrote “The Real Crisis in High Schools,” and for Thought & Action, the journal of the National Education Association, he wrote “Higher Education and Public Schooling in Twenty-First Century America.” With the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the radio orchestra of Israel, which he serves as music director and conductor, Botstein toured the West Coast and Midwest. He led the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) in concerts featuring the work of Bard professor Joan Tower, Beethoven, and Richard Strauss at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts; Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs at Peter Norton Symphony Space; and Édouard Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys at Lincoln Center.

Leaving Rock Harbor, a novel by Rebecca Chace, visiting assistant professor in First-Year Seminar, was published by Scribner’s this spring.

Laurie Dahlberg, associate professor of art history and photography, presented a paper, “At Home with the Camera: Modeling Masculinity in Early French Photography,” in November at the Western Society for French History conference held in Quebec City.

Deirdre d’Albertis, associate professor of English, was an organizer of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, held at Skidmore College April 24–26.

48

Richard Gordon, Research Professor of Psychology, completed the final round of interviews for his project on the modern history of eating disorders. In London he interviewed Susie Orbach, feminist psychoanalyst; Rachel Bryant-Waugh, child psychologist and codirector of the program on eating disorders at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children; Robert Palmer, editor of European Eating Disorders Review; and Hubert Lacey, head of the Adult Research team of the St. George’s Hospital Eating Disorders Service.

Elizabeth M. Holt, assistant professor of Arabic, published “‘In a Language that Was Not His Own’: On Ahlam Mustaghanami’s Novel Dhakirat al-Jasad and Its French Translation ‘Mémoires de la chair’” in Journal of Arabic Literature last year.

Samuel K. Hsiao, assistant professor of mathematics, is a coauthor of “Enumeration in convex geometries and associated polytopal subdivisions of spheres,” published in the 20th-anniversary issue of Discrete & Computational Geometry.

Lodz Symphony by Peter Hutton, professor of film, was screened by the Whitney Museum of American Art last October. In November Anthology Film Archives in New York City screened Hutton’s New York Portrait (part 2) and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, showed his Time and Tide and At Sea. David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies, is a coauthor of Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber: Retrieving a Research Programme (Ashgate, 2008); coauthor of “Weimar Sociology” in Weimar Thought (Princeton University Press, 2009) and author of “Spiritual Diaspora and Political Exile” in Neuer Mensch und kollektive Identität in der Kommunikationsgesellschaft (Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008).

Or to Begin Again, the eighth collection of poems by Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature, is due out this spring from Penguin Press. Lauterbach’s essay “The Thing Seen: Reimagining Arts Education for Now” appears in What Is Art Education? A Twenty-First Century Question (MIT Press, 2009). She was visiting senior critic (sculpture, fall 2008; painting, spring 2009) at the Yale University School of Art. Maria Lind, director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement from the Menil Collection. Named for the Menil’s late founding director and internationally renowned curator, the biennial award recognizes early and mid-career curatorial achievement.

Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture, and writer in residence, attended the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair, at which Polirom, the Romanian publishing house, launched the first six volumes of the complete series of 22 volumes of his literary work. New translations of his work were published in Israel and the Czech Republic, Spain, and Italy. Greek National Television made a film about Manea at Bard, with the participation of president Leon Botstein and executive vice president Dimitri B. Papadimitriou. Romanian television screened a film about Manea’s trip last spring to his native region, Bukovina.

Stephen Mucher, faculty, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, presented “The Pedagogical Dimension of Secondary School Inspections, 1871–1903” at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society in St. Petersburg, Florida, in November.

Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism, edited The Treasury of Judaism: A New Collection and Translation of Essential Texts, in three volumes, all published last year by University Press of America in its Studies in Judaism series. Academic Studies Press brought out his Theological and Philosophical Premises of Judaism last year in its Jewish Studies series.

Lothar Osterburg, visiting assistant professor of studio arts, screened a new video in October at a concert performed by Elizabeth Brown and Frances White at The Times Center in New York City.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college and president of the Levy Economics Institute, was interviewed in July by Tammi Luhby at CNNMoney.com regarding the current state of economic well-being of the average American, compared to the last U.S. recessionary period; in August by Louis Uchitelle at the New York Times on the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW); in September by Daniel Sturgeon at Tokyo News regarding the federal funds rate; and in October by Alejandro Rebossio at La Nación about the implications of the financial crisis.

Papadimitriou published “The Economic Crisis and Beyond” in the October 18, 2008, issue of Kathimerini, Greece’s international English-language newspaper, and “Global Imbalances: The U.S.

and the Rest of the World” in Finance-led Capitalism: Macroeconomic Effects of Changes in the Financial Sector (Metropolis, 2008).

Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, presented Paper, recent works in mixed medium and paper, at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art in New York City, January 15 – February 21.

Antarctica: Life on the Ice, edited by Susan Fox Rogers, visiting associate professor of writing and First-Year Seminar, won a silver award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation, in the category of Travel Books.

Keith Sanborn, faculty in film, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, spent August 2008 to February 2009 in St. Petersburg, Russia, through the Fulbright Scholar Program. He taught at Smolny College and pursued independent research on systems of meaning in Russian media such as film, television, and public signage. His project was to explore “how these systems work and the forms they use to construct social meanings.”

Benjamin Stevens, assistant professor of classics, was awarded, for the second time, a FIRST (Faculty in Residence, Summer Term) grant from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Richard Teitelbaum, professor of music, had a residency last summer at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, during which he composed a new work for the Da Capo Chamber Players that will premiere in June at Merkin Hall in New York City.

Eric Trudel, associate professor of French, is an editor and a translator (along with Charlotte Mandell ’90) of, and cowrote the introduction for, On Poetry and Politics by Jean Paulhan, published last year by the University of Illinois Press. He contributed a chapter to Chris Marker. L’imprimerie du regard, a book devoted to the cult French filmmaker, published in 2008 by L’Harmattan.

Suzanne Vroman, professor emeritus of sociology, participated last fall in “History and Memory,” a panel discussion at BookFest in San Francisco, and in a panel about Jewish rescuers at a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust.

Stephen Westfall, faculty in painting, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, had his fifth solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg gallery in New York City, October 30 – December 20.

The show was accompanied by a catalogue that surveyed the last 10 years of Westfall’s paintings and featured an essay by Amy Sillman MFA ’95, faculty in painting at the Avery Graduate School.

Mark Wonsidler MFA ’00, faculty in sculpture, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, had a solo show at the Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh University, August 20 – September 28.

Japeth Wood, faculty, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, is the coauthor of “The Free Spectra of Varieties Generated by Idempoten Semigroups,” published last year in Algebra and Discrete Mathematics.

FACULTY NOTES | 49

Fireworks by Daniel Terna ’09, an image from “I’ll See You on the Beach,” his Senior Project in photography

Image Credits Cover: ©Peter Aaron/Esto Inside front cover: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 1: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 2: Don Hamerman 3: (left) ©Peter Aaron/Esto; (center) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00; (right) Karl Rabe 4–5: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 6: ©2008 John Rizzo 13: Brett Patterson 14: (top) ©2008 MJ Maloney/Black Star; (bottom) ©2008 Doug Wilson/Black Star 15: ©2008 Lisa Quin˜ones/Black Star 18: ©2008 John Rizzo 20: (left) ©2008 Lisa Quin˜ones/Black Star; (right) Karl Rabe 21: Karl Rabe 22: (left) Don Hamerman; (center) Courtesy of Bruce C. Ratner; (right) Stockton Photos 24: (left) ©Jeff Weiss; (center) ©Tobias Everke; (right) Karl Rabe 26: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 27: DelDOT/James Pernol 28: (top) Joop Rubens; (bottom) Katheryn Ross-Winnie '0200000 29: Teresa Horgan 32: Rita Pavone 44: Julia Glynn Warga 45: Karl Rabe 48: Courtesy of Daniel Terna ’09 Back cover: ©Peter Aaron/Esto

Board of Trustees of Bard College David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary Roland J. Augustine, Treasurer Fiona Angelini + Leon Botstein, President of the College David C. Clapp Marcelle Clements ’69, Alumni/ae Trustee The Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan Jr., Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61 Robert S. Epstein ’63 Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Sally Hambrecht Ernest F. Henderson III, Life Trustee Marieluise Hessel John C. Honey ’39, Life Trustee Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan George A. Kellner Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Murray Liebowitz Marc S. Lipschultz Peter H. Maguire ’88 James H. Ottaway Jr. Martin Peretz Bruce C. Ratner Stanley A. Reichel ’65 Stewart Resnick Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee Martin T. Sosnoff Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52 + ex officio

Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu; Jane Brien ’89, Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu; Tricia Fleming, Assistant Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7089, fleming@bard.edu; Anne Canzonetti ’84, Assistant Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7187, canzonet@bard.edu Published by the Bard Publications Office Mary Smith, Director; Ginger Shore, Consultant; Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mikhail Horowitz, Ellen Liebowitz, Kelly Spencer, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Kevin Trabucco, Designer

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