2010 Fall Bardian

Bardian Bard College Fall 2010

cover The SummerScape production of Franz Shrecker’s opera The Distant Sound: Jud Perry as The Chevalier and Yamina Maamar as Grete dance at La Casa di Maschere, a Venetian cabaret. above and facing page Commencement 2010

Dear Bardians, Welcome to the first Bardian of Bard’s 150th year! This anniversary is a tremendous milestone in a journey that grows more interesting every day. I am deeply grateful to those who supported Bard before I got there and who made possible my wonderful college experience. All of us who attended Bard did so by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us and helped the College to thrive. The stories told at Reunion Weekend by those who were at Bard during very difficult days, when students were sent home to ask their parents to support the College so that it could reopen in the next semester, seem far from the Bard experience of today. Yet the spirit of participation, engagement, and responsibility for one’s own education remains unchanged.

Congratulations and welcome to the 431 new members of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association in the Class of 2010. Alumni/ae are happy to help you navigate the transition to life after Bard, so don’t hesitate to use the resources of the Alumni/ae Office to find people who can assist you. If you’re not receiving Bard’s monthly Annandale Triangle e-newsletter, just send a message to alumni@bard.edu. A typical issue includes news of Bard and Bardians, including local alumni/ae events and class notes.

Commencement and Reunion Weekend brought the exciting news that Bard has purchased the restaurant of many names (Whalesback, Mariner’s Harbor, Cappuccino) located across from the main entrance to campus. Plans are to renovate the space for a permanent Alumni/ae House, with a bar available for students 21 and over, and faculty. Thank you to Trustee Stanley A. Reichel ’65 and his wife, Elaine Reichel, for the lead gift that made the purchase possible. If you would like to help fund the renovation, please contact Jane Brien ’89 in the Alumni/ae Office.

And please mark your calendars for Bard’s 150th anniversary jubilee on November 11, to be held in New York City at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. This gala will not only celebrate Bard but also present the biggest and best Holiday Party ever, for this year only. Don’t miss this festive opportunity to see friends and support Bard.

Thank you for all you do to make Bard such a special place. We all can be tremendously proud of Bard’s history, its glorious present, and its bright future. Here’s to the next 150 years!

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 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 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Eric Warren Goldman ’98, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Rebecca Granato ’99 Dr. 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 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Isaac Liberman ’04 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95

Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Steven Miller ’70, Stewardship Committee Cochairperson Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 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 Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Brandon Weber ’97 Barbara Crane Wigren ’68 Dr. Dumaine Williams ’03 Ron Wilson ’75 Matt Wing ’06

Bardian FALL 2010

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FEATURES 4 CITIZEN SCIENCE Bard Prepares Citizen Scientists in the 21st Century 8 150th ANNIVERSARY CAMPAIGN 10 COMMENCEMENT 2010 16 IN THE MIDST OF HISTORY The Bard Family and the Hamilton-Burr Duel 10

18 BARD REDISCOVERS BERG Alban Berg’s Lyrical Modernism Informed Summer Festivals 20 VINTAGE VIEWS OF ANNANDALE

DEPARTMENTS 24 ON AND OFF CAMPUS 25 BOOKS BY BARDIANS 18

30 CLASS NOTES 46 FACULTY NOTES 49 JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS Members of the John Bard Society and the Legacy Club

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AT LEFT, TOP TO BOTTOM Brooke Jude (left) and Lauren Dorsey-Spitz ’13; newly minted alumni/ae; Yamina Maamar as Grete in the SummerScape production of The Distant Sound; a conga chorus consisting of Neftali Martinez ’77, John Gonzales, Louis Flaherty ’75, and Steve Pouchie ’76; Nadiyah Ford, BHSEC Manhattan ’10, Commencement speaker at Bard High School Early College

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A mutant Vibrio cholerae bacteria seen expressing toxin co-regulated pili (TCP). Vibrio cholerae uses TCP to colonize the human intestine, causing cholera.

CITIZEN SCIENCE Bard Prepares Citizen Scientists in the 21st Century

Editor’s note: In honor of Bard’s 150th anniversary, the Bardian asked Sanford Simon for a reflection on science teaching at Bard College today. Simon is professor and head of the Laboratory of Cellular Biophysics at The Rockefeller University, and the 2004 recipient of the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science. The teaching of science at Bard now encompasses the College’s new Citizen Science program, which Simon introduces below and which is described further in the accompanying article.

Amazon lists some 8,000 books on cycling. While I have not done the proper experiment (embarrassing to admit for an experimentalist such as myself ), I strongly suspect that if you were to read even a few of these books before learning how to cycle, the number of bruises and scabs on your knees would be indistinguishable from the number on the knees of a control group that had not read the books. Similarly, even the most beautiful Shakespearean sonnet can only remind someone who has been in love of what the sensation is like. It cannot teach the uninitiated. Certain things you can learn from studying; others you must experience personally.

To a large extent, training in the sciences falls into the latter category; science must be experienced, not just verbalized. As result, training in science, at least for those who will eventually practice science, is an apprenticeship. Just as a young artist may labor in the studio of a master, learning the master’s technique before breaking off on her own, all young scientists apprentice to mentors. This apprenticeship is universally practiced in graduate training, generally for four to seven years. It is often followed by a second and, maybe, a third apprenticeship, each with a single mentor, as postdoctoral training. Even junior faculty members often apprentice to senior faculty.

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Incongruously, this is not true of training in the earlier stages of a scientific career. Most science education today, from kindergarten through college, is based on teaching “the facts of science” and then judging students based on their ability to regurgitate those facts. This approach is touted as offering three advantages: 1) providing a way to evaluate students, 2) providing a way to evaluate teachers, 3) if we can find the “best” teachers, we can record their lessons, disseminate them electronically, and thus save on salaries.

This approach misses out on critical opportunities. As Michael Tibbetts, associate professor of biology and director of Bard’s Biology Program, points out, “Science is not a body of facts; [at Bard] we see science as the process. What we are trying to teach is the process; anyone can look up the facts.” In other words, the crucial factor missing in most science education is the realization that science is a way of analyzing the world. If students were to try to learn all “the facts of science,” they would spend their lives memorizing. They would never get to do science. Are facts important? Clearly they are, but only when learned in the context of doing science.

What is remarkable about the teaching throughout Bard’s Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing is precisely its emphasis on training undergraduates in the process of science. Students, once motivated, will learn all the facts they need.

During a recent visit to the Manhattan campus of Bard High School Early College (BHSEC Manhattan), I was invited to teach a ninth-grade biology class. Personally, my own experience in ninth-grade biology had been rather deadly. I recall that we had spent most of our time memorizing the names of the different parts of the cell, and the names of the components in each of the parts. At BHSEC Manhattan, a different paradigm was in place, one that fostered inquiry-based learning. Knowing this, I divided the students into groups. One group was herpes, one was HIV, one was Plasmodium (the organism responsible for malaria). Each group was subdivided in half. One half was on the body’s side; it had to figure out how to stop an invasion from entering the body or cells. The other half was the aggressor; it had to figure out how to evade the defenses. In a short time— and without realizing it—the students had memorized all the parts of the cell. They had a need to learn them—the proper motivation. Bard excels at giving students the tools to gather whatever facts they need for their explorations. The facts are then more meaningful, have context, and can be drawn upon throughout a lifetime.

Craig Anderson, professor of chemistry and director of Bard’s Chemistry Program, concurs, saying, “Chemistry students at Bard learn by doing and are encouraged to move beyond the

passive consumption of information and toward the active contribution to new knowledge. All of our chemistry majors complete independent experimental projects, capstone experiences that permit the students to consolidate their foundation of core knowledge and develop habits of critical and creative thinking.”

What is key to the process of science? One important factor is asking questions. Alas, in most undergraduate science labs, students are given overly formulaic printouts. If students follow through, taking one from column A and one from column B, and obey instructions, they can get the “right” answer—without ever engaging the material intellectually. Not surprisingly, Tibbetts eschews this model. As Trillian Gregg ’10 says, “Bard’s Cell Biology course was my first introduction to real laboratory research, rather than predesigned handouts. It was ‘journalclub based,’ so we read through the textbook at home and then, in class—which had only six students—we discussed the articles.

Then, in the lab part of the course, Mike [Tibbetts] told us the general problem he was working on and asked, ‘What do you find interesting?’ From that point on, we got to run with our own projects!”

In many schools, an opportunity to work in the lab, if available at all, is a rare treat offered to select seniors. But Bard has a history of including all students in research across all disciplines. And the inquiry-based approach starts early. Valeri Thomson ’85, now principal of BHSEC Queens (a campus that replicates the BHSEC Manhattan model), is a practicing scientist, who, for a decade, ran the College’s Immediate Science Research Opportunity Program (ISROP). ISROP placed those first-year students who exhibited a passion for science into laboratories where they could work on molecular biology research projects. In 2008, the program was redesigned to form the Bard Summer Research Institute (BSRI). Students in BSRI spend eight summer weeks in residence, working on individual research. Each student receives a place at the bench, a faculty mentor who provides guidance, and a stipend. As Tibbetts says, “We are using science more as an apprenticeship. . . . We give students these research projects so that they can see the entire trajectory of the process.”

Although the research opportunities open to Bard students include ecology, physics, computer science, chemistry, et alia, the fundamental process of science is the same, independent of field. For students who feel compelled to explore beyond the immediate classroom/lab, Bard has an ecology field station on the Hudson River and numerous alliances with outside organizations, such as Hudsonia Ltd. and New York City’s Rockefeller University, where Bard students can spend a summer or semester working in a research lab. As is true for all Bard students,

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work culminates in the independent Senior Project, a yearlong investigation. In the sciences this has always included a laboratory or field component that provides an opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor on research of particular interest to the student. The results are presented in a written thesis, an oral defense, and a public poster session.

A Bard science graduate is prepared to think as a scientist and work as a scientist. The College’s system has the advantage of training students in the same way that science is actually practiced. Any gaps in the student’s knowledge of various “facts of science” will be no more severe than the gaps in the knowledge of many of the Nobel Prize laureates I know.

There are additional benefits to Bard’s approach. One of the flaws within the classical rote method of teaching is that it assumes all students have similar learning styles. However, a truly good teacher realizes the importance of being attentive to each student and incorporating different pedagogical techniques accordingly. Teaching by rote is perhaps the single greatest factor that drives promising nascent scientists out of the field. Science needs to attract precisely those individuals who are driven by questions. At Bard, where each science student is apprenticed to a teacher, instruction corresponds to learning style. Of course, inquiry-based apprenticeships require significant effort on the part of teachers and unflagging support from the institution. Bard supplies both. For decades, the College has seen the advantages of a personalized approach in all disciplines.

In recognition of the increasingly important role that science plays in our world, Bard has redoubled its efforts to ensure the science literacy of every student. One of the most recent innovations was introduced, by College president Leon Botstein, in a letter to the Class of 2014, informing incoming students that they will be the first “to have the opportunity to spend twoand-a-half weeks in the January term in a new program titled Citizen Science . . . an intensive, interdisciplinary investigation of the nature and conduct of science.” Why should nonscientists study science? There are at least two clear reasons. First, as Botstein writes, “Bard has initiated this program because we at the College are concerned about the consequences of inadequate scientific literacy in our democracy. A civil and open conversation about public policy issues depends on some comprehension of the extent and limits of scientific claims.”

As time progresses, science has a greater impact on our lives. We are faced with questions such as: Should we feed our kids genetically modified foods? Should we agree to be tested for genetic diseases—tests that could save us from some future, yet-to-be-identified illness, but could also tag us with a “preexisting condition” that will raise our insurance premiums or affect our ability to get a new job? An education in science could help individuals formulate a position on stem-cell research or provide a basis for judging whether to invest in a biotech com6

pany. Science literacy empowers individuals when they have to make decisions about medical care. An understanding of science, as well as the ability to read, with comprehension, a science article enables individuals to go online to the National Institutes of Health (or similar websites) for information when they, or loved ones, are faced with disease.

There is a second, parallel justification for scientific training for nonscientists. The practice of science is not one of establishing truths; it is a process whereby—through observation, formation of hypotheses, and subsequent testing—one tries to establish a model of how the world works. For the scientist there is never the “truth” or the “correct answer.” Instead, there is a working answer. While a classic science textbook might read, “Proteins are made by a machine in the cell called the ribosome,” a scientist would say, “We believe that proteins are made by machines in the cell for the following reasons . . . .”

Everything is presented as a working hypothesis, one that is fair game to question and test. In short, the scientific process is appropriate for all areas of intellectual pursuit.

Bard’s goals are strong and unambiguous: to emphasize that science is increasingly integral to a liberal arts education and to create new citizens as literate in science as they are in languages, the arts, and social studies.

—Sanford Simon

Science Literacy for Every Student “How do we reduce the global burden of infectious disease?”

That’s the question that Brooke Jude, microbiologist and assistant professor of biology, will ask the Class of 2014 in January during Bard’s first Citizen Science program, an intensive, introductory science course scheduled for two-and-a-half weeks during intersession. Citizen Science—required but not graded and not for credit—is the newest addition to Bard’s first-year curriculum and represents a groundbreaking effort to revitalize the way undergraduate science is taught and learned.

Citizen Science emphasizes laboratory work, data collection and analysis, modeling, epidemiological models, statistics, applied math, methodology, and how to work with the technology, including computer programs. Experiments in which viruses are used to infect bacteria will lead to a consideration of influenza strains, such as H1N1. Investigation and experimentation are closely followed by discussion of the relative effectiveness of different treatment modalities and interventions.

Students will read primary literature and science papers, and consider them with a focus on how scientists do the work they do and how researchers extract information from a journal paper. This rigorous schedule still allows time for field trips and guest speakers, including policy makers, scientists, journalists,

and industry representatives. Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University, a pioneer in the topic of bacterial communication, is scheduled to speak this January.

After an initial lab-based focus on the problem of infectious disease, how it spreads, and how antibiotic resistance develops, students will look for solutions at the clinical, community, and global levels. In addition to influenza, they will consider tuberculosis—the risk factors that make it worse, the probability of exposure in different parts of the world, and how to alter these odds. State-of-the art computer simulation will be used to model the spread of the disease when different preventative measures are implemented. At the conclusion of the course, students will present their findings to peers and faculty.

“We envision this program [in part] as an opportunity to impress upon those of you who may be hesitant about your potential in science courses, that you absolutely have the ability to understand and appreciate the intricacies of scientific problems,” Jude wrote in a memo about the course sent to all students in the Class of 2014. Their response is unknown at this writing, but students who are already part of the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing are enthusiastic about it, says Jude. “Some Upper College students lament that they didn’t get this opportunity,” she says. “I’m trying to find ways for them to participate, perhaps as peer counselors.”

Speaking generally about Bard’s science offerings, Matthew Deady, professor of physics, calls the College “well above average in its serious and challenging lab-based courses that nonscientists find intriguing.” Examples of physics-based approaches to subjects that many students are already engaged in include courses titled Acoustics, Light and Color, Climate Change, and The Physics of Stuff.

“While I can’t point to specific physics content in the first incarnation of Citizen Science,” says Deady, “that program’s philosophy is born from the prevailing attitude throughout the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing—that science is for everyone to understand, and that comprehension comes only by actually doing science, not just hearing about it.”

Deady served on the committee that was charged with planning and implementing the Citizen Science program. He is assisting Jude, the program’s director, in defining the curriculum, developing exercises, and training instructors, and will teach in the program himself. Deady sees Citizen Science as an appropriate bookend for the Language and Thinking Program, the three-week August intensive course required of all first-year students, which “involves reading, writing, and shaking them out of their high school habits—helping them to reconstruct the way they relate to the written word,” he says.

“We devised this program—concentrated learning within an overarching problem—to promote science literacy,” says Jude, who has taken part in both traditional semester and intersession courses as student and teacher, first as an undergraduate

Brooke Jude (right), director of the Citizen Science program, and Jing Yang ’12

at Colby College and then as a visiting assistant professor there (2007–09) and at Dartmouth, where she earned her Ph.D. “In immersion programs, an important factor is that the course is the only course the student is concerned with,” she says. At Bard, “every day, for two-and-a-half weeks, students will work personally with the same core faculty.

“Part of our hope is that the things students do during the Citizen Science program will allow them to start Bard science courses at a higher level,” she adds, “instead of taking a required course during their senior year and discovering, late, that they love the field. But we’re not looking to turn everyone into a science major. There are equal parts in this course for scientists and for artists. All students should end up with a greater understanding of the language and processes of science, and be more at ease in the field.”

“They will learn how to do science—not listen to someone talk about science—and how to think in the realm of science,” says Deady. “When I first came to Bard, I noticed right away that the students here are intellectually alive. They really tangle with you—they don’t just want to follow the path of somebody else. Citizen Science will relate to whatever it is they will do in their lives.”

—Debora Gilbert 7

WE NEED . . .

$594,350,000

ONE HUNDRED FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CAMPAIGN GOAL The largest and most ambitious fund-raising campaign in the history of Bard College—the 150th Anniversary Campaign— was launched during Commencement and Alumni/ae Weekend in May. At the President’s Award Ceremony and Dinner, Leon Botstein reported that the trustees, during their annual meeting earlier that day, had approved a campaign goal of $594,350,000 to sustain Bard’s leadership as a liberal arts institution serving the public interest. To date, $217,474,353 has been raised, primarily from College trustees and volunteer leadership, including $862,000 to endow student scholarships from the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association.

The 150th Anniversary Campaign is a comprehensive effort which, when completed, will significantly strengthen Bard’s endowment, provide much-needed funds for capital projects, and support the annual operating budget for the four years of the campaign.

Strengthening the Endowment Bard College, known for its rigor and intimacy, its commitment to academic excellence and the preservation of the value of arts and culture in a democratic society, is uniquely positioned to leverage substantially its standing as a world-class liberal arts college. With imagination, careful planning, creative but cautious financing, and the anticipated generosity of its extended family, the College has developed a blueprint for its future.

Bard’s first priority has always been investment in its current programs. Today, however, the College stands at a critical crossroads. The decade ahead will see a widening gap between wealthy and non-wealthy institutions of higher education, a trend that parallels a larger pattern in our society. Now is the time, not only to ensure that funds are available to continue to take advantage of opportunities that arise, but also to build an endowment for the future. While Bard attracts and maintains an outstanding faculty and student body, comparable to those of its peers, its endowment and endowment-per-student allocation lag far behind those peers. For example, at the end of the 2008–09 fiscal year, Vassar College had an endowment of $658,239,000, compared to Bard’s $239,815,000. Vassar’s endowment per student was $275,876 while Bard’s was $46,843.

Bard’s distinct academic advantage has come despite such a remarkable difference in resources between it and the insti8

tutions with which it is most closely compared. Institutional wealth can be measured by endowment, level of annual giving, relative wealth of alumni/ae and parents, and ready access to philanthropic capital. In contrast, Bard’s current expense structure is derived from a vision of an institution that requires a magnitude of resources in addition to its endowment and the level of annual fund-raising. Simply put, Bard is undercapitalized. While it is rich in vision and ideas, it has depended and continues to depend on the generosity of a relatively small number of benefactors. The College must grow its endowment in order to preserve its reputation and allow for proper planning for the future.

Renovation and Construction As a residential college, Bard provides an exquisite campus setting in which students pursue their academic interests and craft a rich social life. Bard’s park-like campus, the fusion of two historic estates, covers more than 500 acres of fields and forested land bordering the Hudson River.

Bard has approximately 80 buildings on campus, including 49 residence halls serving almost 1,500 students. Many of these facilities have not kept pace with Bard’s remarkable achievements. Without updating and expansion, Bard’s facilities will not adequately support the College’s mission. In the coming years, Bard needs to invest heavily in capital projects.

Sustaining Excellence: Annual Giving at Bard Bard College, having achieved more than three decades of balanced operating budgets, is a financially stable and economically sound institution. Tuition and fees generate revenue, in addition to income from auxiliary enterprises (such as room and board) and private gifts.

Among these revenue sources is the Annual Fund—the driving force of unrestricted gifts that supports the day-to-day advancement of the College’s mission. These funds assist in developing the creative intellect of Bard students in practical ways, by providing such essentials as library resources, computers, financial aid, and opportunities to engage in the arts. An enhanced Annual Fund helps Bard remain competitive in terms of student and faculty recruitment. Unrestricted funds allow Bard’s academic programs to make timely enhancements for

students and faculty when the opportunity, even if unexpected, presents itself. In addition, the Annual Fund helps the College to maintain its physical plant.

In short, the Annual Fund helps bridge a revenue gap, since tuition, fees, and room and board provide only about 66 percent of the operating budget each year. Over the course of the 150th Anniversary Campaign, contributions raised for current operations through the Annual Fund will continue to be an urgent priority and will be allocated across the campus to areas such as classroom instruction, student financial aid and services, technology, and the maintenance of the physical plant.

A Vision for the Future Education—the capacity to ask, criticize, discover, discriminate, interpret, debate, write, invent, agree, dissent, compromise, listen, look, and reflect—requires a community of scholars and learners engaged collectively and separately in real space and time. The national task in the education of young adults of college age is to ensure that this opportunity is made available to all. Bard College, precisely because it is small in size, committed to the individual student, yet eager to innovate and to appropriate the advances of the age, can serve the national interest at this historic juncture. Bard: • represents an authentic continuity with the liberal arts tradition • is international in scope • recognizes that the assumptions behind the structure of the contemporary university must be revisited • moves beyond the model of the freestanding college by making pathbreaking, selective innovations in graduate education and collaborations with museums, universities, research institutions, and arts organizations • broadens its mission by addressing the issue of how to better educate students below the traditional college age • invests in matters of public policy ranging from education to the environment to economics • pioneers the assertion that in the 21st century the aesthetic dimension plays an integral part in the quality of private and public life and remains crucial to preserving liberty in contemporary society

Though the challenges ahead are great, so too is the opportunity. Together, we have the chance to make a significant change in the history of Bard College with a vision of the future that is ambitious, transformative, and achievable.

Please participate in this journey and support the 150th Anniversary Campaign for Bard College.

For more information, please visit www.bard.edu/ 150th-campaign.

150TH ANNIVERSARY CAMPAIGN FOR BARD COLLEGE Campaign Goal Endowment Capital Projects Annual Fund ($17 million/year for 4 years)

$594,350,000 $350,000,000 $176,350,000 $68,000,000

Endowment Funds—Undesignated Scholarships Faculty Chairs and Fellowships Library and Technology Fund Graduate Programs

$220,000,000 $150,000,000 $50,000,000 $10,000,000 $10,000,000

Endowment Funds—Designated Bard High School Early College Bard Music Festival Conservatory Fisher Center Institute for Intl Liberal Education Levy Institute Smolny College Endowment Funds TOTAL

$130,000,000 $40,000,000 $15,000,000 $20,000,000 $25,000,000 $5,000,000 $20,000,000 $5,000,000 $350,000,000

Capital Projects—Immediate Priorities Dining Facilities Expansion Library Addition Stevenson Gym Renovation and Expansion Chemistry Addition Reem/Kayden Science Center North Village Expansion—80 beds Emergency Power Generator Albee-Rose-Hegeman Renovation Avery Arts Center Alumni/ae House Kean House IT Infrastructure

$104,200,000 $25,000,000 $21,000,000 $15,000,000 $15,000,000 $9,800,000 $6,000,000 $5,000,000 $3,000,000 $2,600,000 $750,000 $550,000 $500,000

Capital Projects—Other Campus Restoration New Classrooms/Offices Art Expansion Campus Landscaping Plan Drill Hall Robbins Residence Hall Roadways/Parking Writing Center Blum renovation Bard CEP building Radio Station Wooden Barn Guest/Apartment building—12 units Kappa House Campus Center Quad— 60 beds Capital Projects TOTAL

$72,150,000 $18,350,000 $20,000,000 $4,900,000 $4,800,000 $3,500,000 $1,500,000 $2,000,000 $1,500,000 $750,000 $1,000,000 $600,000 $3,000,000 $4,500,000 $350,000 $5,400,000 $176,350,000 9

one hundred fiftieth

COMMENCEMENT Bard’s 150th Commencement found attendees looking forward and back, as President Leon Botstein elucidated the College motto and launched the 150th Anniversary Campaign for Bard College. The College awarded 431 undergraduate degrees and 130 graduate degrees, and the newly minted graduates gave a standing ovation to Carlos Rosado Jr., one of their own. Rosado earned his B.A. through the Bard Prison Initiative at Woodbourne Correctional Facility; recently released, he attended Commencement to receive his degree. Ambassador Brandon H. Grove Jr. ’50, returning for his 60th reunion, was awarded an honorary degree in humane letters. Margaret Atwood, internationally acclaimed novelist, was honored twice during the weekend, with the Mary McCarthy Award at the President’s Dinner on Friday night, and with an honorary doctor of letters during Saturday’s Commencement ceremonies. Honorary degrees were also conferred on economist Alan S. Blinder; Norman C. Francis, president of Xavier University in New Orleans; physician, investor, and entrepreneur Henry G. Jarecki; and physicist Lisa Randall. Atwood, too, took a long view in her Commencement address. “Above all, relish your sojourn on planet Earth,” she advised the graduates. “It may be a strenuous and demanding time, but what time has not been?”

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“CREATIVE AUTONOMY THAT TRANSCENDS DOCTRINE” Canadian author Margaret Atwood delivered the keynote address at Bard’s 150th Commencement. The following excerpt is adapted from her speech.

The reason for my being invited here to Bard was the Mary McCarthy Award, which I have incongruously but gratefully received. As it happens, when I was your age I was reading Mary McCarthy’s famous 1963 novel, The Group. I can remember exactly where I was reading it—in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the bathtub on the third floor of a women’s graduate residence. It was a rambling, 19th-century classic white New England building. Unbeknownst either to itself or to me, it would later serve as the model for the Commander’s house in my 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

The window blind was down, but the window was slightly open, kept from being raised higher by a lock. I was just at the famous numerological sex scene in The Group when in through the open window came a large, hairy hand, groping around to see what might be accomplished. I thought of slamming the window down on it, or putting the wet soap into it, but I did nothing. I merely contemplated it, wondering to what literary uses it might be put. Surely Mary McCarthy would have known.

That story makes those times sound carefree. But consider: World War II had been over for a mere 17 years, and many countries were still recovering from the enormous trauma and destruction that war had caused. We lived in the shadow of the Cold War and the atomic bomb, convinced that we could be blown to smithereens at any moment. The civil rights movement was trying to end segregation, and encountering violence and murder.

John F. Kennedy was the glamorous president, but he had less than a year to live: he would be assassinated on November 22 of that same year. American involvement in the Vietnam War had already begun: a war Mary McCarthy would later oppose, as she opposed many things throughout her life. One of the things she wasn’t too keen on was The Handmaid’s Tale, which she reviewed unfavorably for the New York Times. Lack of imagination, was her verdict. I suppose she just didn’t believe that religious extremism would ever get that powerful, though she did agree with the novel’s suspicion of credit cards.

Those of us entering The Rest of Our Life back then felt we were living in tense times. We were. So are you. The problems you will face are to some extent predictable—who can now avoid the fallout from the economic meltdown of 2008? The ripples are still spreading. Then there’s the environmental crisis. With climate change will come water wars, and worsening

conditions for crops, and famines—25 million people entered the ranks of the malnourished in 2007 alone. Couple these conditions with growing demands for energy, and thus more CO2, and more global warming—how will such forces play out? As populations attempt to shift from less prosperous to more prosperous areas and conflicts threaten, more walls will go up, as those who have, try to keep, and those who have not, will in desperation try to storm the barricades. What is a single individual to do? What can a single individual do? It will be part of your story to find out.

But more important for you to consider are the mental walls—the polarization and labeling that seem so characteristic of our times. When people can no longer talk about the problems they share, but can only scream as if the debate were one big shock-jock radio rant, a democratic society is in trouble.

Part of the screaming happens because, as a civilization, we’ve exhausted the usefulness of the old terms of reference—the traditional left and the traditional right have lost much relevance, as global financial systems twist under the strain and neither side seems able to come up with new, useful ideas. “Choice of evils” debates always produce extremism—people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize—to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.

Back to Mary McCarthy. With her strong and energetic spirit, Mary McCarthy worked her way through various ideologies—adopting them, testing them, rejecting them, to arrive at a belief in—I quote—“the necessity for creative autonomy that transcends doctrine.” That is the gift I would wish for you. It will allow you to work in communities, but not to be entrapped by them; to contribute what lies within your power, rather than what others tell you that you must. Above all, relish your sojourn on planet Earth. It may be a strenuous and demanding time, but what time has not been?

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Five distinguished recipients don distinctive doctoral hoods at Bard’s 150th Commencement (clockwise from lower left): Norman C. Francis, Brandon H. Grove Jr. ’50, Alan S. Blinder, and Henry G. Jarecki received honorary doctor of humane letters degrees; (lower right) an honorary doctor of science degree was conferred upon Lisa Randall.

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“BE FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH, AND I WILL GIVE YOU THE CROWN OF LIFE.” Charge to the Class of 2010

By Leon Botstein The tenth verse of the second book of the Book of Revelation to John, from the New Testament, reads as follows: “Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Beware, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison so that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have affliction. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

We recall this passage this afternoon particularly to you, the graduating class of 2010, since you have the singular honor and privilege of receiving your degrees at the start of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Bard College. The text from the Book of Revelation inspired John Bard to found this College. And he drew from the very last line the words that would give the College its motto. It is inscribed into the seal of Bard College, found not only on the cover of your Commencement program but affixed within the seal on each of your diplomas.

That, unfortunately (as is often the case), is not entirely true or, rather, the whole story. The history of Bard’s motto is ironic and instructive. When the College was founded, the entire final line was inscribed into the seal: “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” Like many other private colleges founded on the eve of the Civil War, the impetus for creating an institution of higher education here was religious and theological. The relationship between learning and faith was intimate. The conceit was that the more literate an individual became—the more versed in history and natural philosophy as well as theology—the natural and human sciences—the more likely that modern individual would recognize how and why faith and reason might be reconciled. Nineteenthcentury America was marked by two seemingly incongruous movements: a growing enthusiasm for the promise and power of the rational, and at the same time a reawakening of a profoundly antirational and often apocalyptic religious fervor. For the patrician and wealthy John Bard, faith and reason were not at odds.

He was an optimist: a deeper understanding of the parallel universes of the spiritual and material inhabited by humans could reconcile each individual to a life marked by faith and reason.

That is why he founded this College.

But in the end, for John Bard, the reward—the crown of life—was salvation, the transcendence of the quotidian, the bliss of eternal rest. But when Bard became part of Columbia University in 1928, under the benign aegis of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Bard shed decisively its sectarian charac-

ter. The admonition “be faithful unto death,” with which the last line of the tenth verse began, was dropped, leaving only “I will give you the crown of life” as the motto of Bard. Only that phrase is now on the seal of the College in your diplomas.

The Class of 2010 will readily recognize that the severing of the two parts of the final line of the tenth verse creates a playful and dangerous ambiguity. It not only eliminates any reasonable hint of what the crown of life might actually be, but it renders obscure the reasons that the crown of life, whatever it may be, would be given to you. And it only residually suggests that the giver—the “I”—refers to a god. The radical secularization that took place in the late 1920s and that characterized much of American political and cultural life during the 20th century—once a source of pride in human progress—has increasingly seemed inadequate and has made many in our own times uncomfortable, which is why we now in the 21st century are witnesses to such a thoroughgoing and nearly overwhelming religious revival. It is precisely the discomfort and uncertainty about what the crown of life might be and where it comes from that lends our motto its mystery. For the faithful John Bard and his colleagues who read the Book of Revelation, with its seven seals and the four horsemen of the apocalypse, it was our deliverance from suffering from the prison of one’s body and the passage of human time, and therefore of human history, that was the crown of life. Life as we live it is a severe test.

John Bard’s particular ten days of affliction, his test, included death (his son’s), illness, and, ultimately, bankruptcy. But his faith inspired him to soldier on in the conviction that he would receive the crown of life, if he could remain true to his faith: passage to heaven, redemption, and the immortality of his soul.

Does this conviction represent what this graduating class believes? The answer is, probably no. For this College today, the crown of life lies not in the afterlife, but in life itself before death. Yet the wisdom of the Book of Revelation need not be

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lost on us. You yourselves, and certainly your parents and your teachers, know that each of you will suffer. Life is indeed a test for each of us, filled with disappointments, defeats, loss, and pain. Each of us will encounter our own ten days of affliction, the proverbial devil in the world, and some of us will be more severely tested than others in that metaphorical prison created by our dialogue with ourselves called a sense of failure, insecurity, and envy. No one escapes this fate. Some—including students at this College—will face a not-so-metaphorical prison, one imposed by both the proper and improper use of political power and the rule of law.

Nonetheless, there is a crown awaiting each of us—a crown symbolic of human achievement, the creation of beauty, value, and power—that each of us can receive and each of us deserves from life and in life. In contrast to the faith of Bard’s founders, that crown we promise you is one that you can obtain within life.

Like the founders of this College, we believe that the receipt of that crown is inherently and directly tied to your education and what you make of it.

But what defines the education your alma mater now stands for? What are the values that we hope you, as Bard graduates, will exhibit throughout your life, despite the tests of life and the setbacks you will face, values that can give you the necessary courage and optimism to engage life fully in search of that crown. What are the values and virtues that define that crown that we confidently put forward and ask you to be faithful to?

What do we stand for that is sufficient for us to have no fear in restoring the first part of the original motto so that we might indeed ask you to remain faithful unto death.

The virtues and values of this institution that we hope you will carry with you into the world are, first and foremost, an abiding curiosity and a deep love of and respect for learning. The medium of learning is language. Language is, if not the mother, then the parent of thought. Through language we wish that you would carry forward a degree of skepticism and criticism for the pieties and conceits of conventional wisdom and the will to combat them and fight for human progress. We hold up to you an allegiance to the power of the human imagination in the arts, in the study of history and society, and in the natural sciences.

Bard stands apart in its single-minded dedication to teaching and to scholarship. We have no incongruous bells and whistles at Bard, no fraternities, no eating clubs, no football teams and overpaid sports coaches. The pride of the institution remains its students, its faculty, and its curriculum. We are, consequently, nearly deadly serious, but not without an affectionate smile and a sense of joy in learning. And for us the material—particularly money and wealth—do not define our criteria of success.

Therefore this institution is committed to using the privilege of its place and position in the public interest. How can we sit idly by, facing an American educational system that is entirely broken, not only for the poor and disadvantaged but also for the 14

smug elites who too frequently consider themselves insulated by the semi-isolation of suburbia? How can we tolerate a nation in financial difficulty in which only 37 percent of those who enter college ever finish, and where in our urban centers more than 50 percent of our high school students drop out? To meet that crisis, this College has created schools in rural California and New York City and trains new teachers. Bard is a pioneer on behalf of the reform of the link between the secondary school and college.

How can any institution of higher education look inward and build walls around itself with an endowment while the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth fails to reach out to the rest of the world with proper measure? That is why this institution, unlike any other, has pioneered in bringing the liberal arts and fine teacher training to Russia, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan, and South Africa. And how can we at Bard go about daily life unconcerned when the arts in our culture are marginalized and threatened from both political extremes as discretionary, irrelevant, or elitist? For that reason, we train artists, curators, and scholars; maintain museums and literary journals; and sponsor music, theater, and dance festivals.

The Bard of today draws from the inspiration of its founding the conviction that for all individuals, from the devout to the agnostic and the atheist, there is an indispensable and profound connection between learning and life. But it is up to each and every one of us—and each and every one of you—to forge that connection. Do not leave this place and segregate learning into a cul-de-sac of mere preparation for life. Rather, extend the habits of the life of the mind and the spirit as guides for your life and for enlightened service and leadership. But beware. The linking of learning to life will lead you into the opposition. You will be forced to confront the conventions of compromise. But the rewards for challenging received wisdom and for refusing to accept the status quo are the jewels in the crown of life.

So on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of this college, I urge each and every one of you to remember the original and unabbreviated motto of your alma mater. I admonish you to be faithful unto death: faithful to the values that this College represents. Speak and act in your lives according to that motto, fighting for what is just, right, and true to the benefit of your fellow human beings. If you do so, you will indeed receive the crown of life. That crown, granted through a life of learning, is an abiding sense of gratitude for the gift of life in each of us, the gift of service, and the gift of learning. Having spent more than three decades on this campus, I can assure you that Bard has brought the crown of life closer to me.

I therefore congratulate each and every one of you on your commencement and graduation, with a deep sense of gratitude for the privilege of serving as the president of this unique, distinguished, and innovative institution of teaching and learning.

May its spirit be with you always.

THE PRESIDENT’S AWARD CEREMONY AND DINNER An outstanding lineup of award recipients took the stage at the Sosnoff Theater in the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts during the President’s Awards Ceremony and Dinner the night before Bard’s 150th Commencement.

Humility, intelligence, and humor graced the presentations of Bard awards to leaders in the arts, humanities, and sciences. President Leon Botstein welcomed the crowd in Sosnoff, calling the College “a truly remarkable place” and announcing the 150th Anniversary Campaign for Bard College. Following the ceremony, a festive dinner was served in Theater Two, the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Theater Studio, and the Felicitas S. Thorne Dance Studio. Large red banners celebrated “150 Years of Bard,” and faculty, alumni/ae, awardees, and guests mingled.

Emily H. Fisher, since 1996 vice chair of the Board of Trustees of Bard College, received the Bard Medal. “I’ve had a love affair with Bard and Simon’s Rock for 30 years,” she said, “and I intend to love Bard for the rest of my life.” The Bard Medal, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest award, honors those whose efforts have significantly advanced the welfare of the College.

Dr. A. James Hudspeth, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and F. M. Kirby Professor at Rockefeller University, received the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science for his work on the biology, neurophysiology, and biophysics of hearing. “I salute Bard College for its success in instilling a broad understanding of science and its beauty,” Hudspeth said in accepting the award, which acknowledges scientists’ depth of commitment and breadth of concern in their achievements.

Billy Steinberg ’72, recipient of the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters, wrote the lyrics to such iconic popular songs as Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors.” Steinberg laughingly recalled his Moderation adviser “calling me a dilettante, and I was insulted.” The Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters recognizes noteworthy contributions to the American artistic or literary heritage.

Raymond Peterson, retiring principal of Bard High School Early College Manhattan, received the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service for providing collaborative and visionary leadership to the Bard community.

From his early years as a foundational member of what is now the Language and Thinking Program at Bard to his nine years as the first principal of the pioneering BHSEC, he recognized, he said, “how much a part of this school its components are.” Those components, such as “a great faculty, have allowed the school to prosper.”

Aileen Passloff, L. May Hawver and Wallace Benjamin Flint Professor of Dance, was honored with the Bardian Award, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s recognition of service by longtime members of the Bard community. In accepting the award, Passloff said, “Bard is exactly the place I’ve wanted to be for the last 40 years.”

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The Bard Family and the Hamilton-Burr Duel The Bard College Archives are replete with documents that pertain to local and national history. The letter below was written by Nathaniel Pendleton (1756–1821), husband of Susanna Bard (1757–1816), a daughter of Dr. John Bard. Pendleton served as Alexander Hamilton’s second in Hamilton’s fatal 1804 duel with Aaron Burr. Several weeks later Pendleton wrote to his friend and nephew-in-law, William Bard. William was the father of John Bard, who, with his wife, Margaret, founded St. Stephen’s College, the precursor of Bard College.

New York July 26, 1804 My dear William The letter you wrote me did indeed give me a great deal of consolation under the deep affliction I suffered for the loss of our excellent, our noble friend: and altho I know I suffered a more keen anguish from the agency I had in the causes that preceded it, yet I feel now that it was impossible for me to have declined, or even to have to have [sic] hesitated for a moment whether I would decline it. You know that besides the love, the admiration and respect I always had for the amiable qualities, the sublime talents, the generous spirit of that man, I was under particular obligations to him for particular acts of kindness, and of late also much more in the habits of confidence with him than any

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other man in New York. While these considerations left me no room to doubt whether I should accompany him, they have very much increased the anguish of mind produced by the result. I am much gratified that that [sic] my friends, not being acquainted with all the motives which I had, still think I could not have declined the office. The truth is that General Hamilton had made up his mind to meet Mr. Burr before he called on me, provided he should be required to do what his first letter had declined; and it was owing to my solicitude and my efforts to prevent extremities that the correspondence was kept open from the 23 June to the 27th. I have therefore the satisfaction of knowing I did all I could to prevent it, and this seems universally known and acknowledged.

The coroners’ inquest have been sitting [sic] here ever since the day after his death. They have examined many witnesses and among others myself. But on my representations that what I could say would be of a nature necessarily to implicate myself, they acquiesced and examined no farther. They have had Matthew L. Davis before them who refused to answer certain questions, and they committed him to Bridewell [prison, in New York City] with one of the Boatsman [sic] who refuses to answer. They have arrested Col. Willett & had a warrant against Irwine who has fled, as I understand their object was to ascer-

tain the truth of a report that at a caucus of these and some others it was agreed Burr should fight one or the other of four or five characters. You will see by the Evening Post that Coleman is Endeavoring to prove that it was predetermined, and induced by motives of revenge.

I intended to write to Johnson but have not time. I have had a conference with Judge Radcliff and examined Mrs. Parson’s marriage settlement. I am clear the husb[and] cannot safely part with the fund of his fortune, and shall do what is necessary to secure him in that affair.

I wish it were in my power to comply with your father’s request of coming up to Hyde Park. Never did my spirits require to be tranquilized by quiet and repose more than the present, but my business forbids. I shall be on my way to Albany on Friday or Saturday week. Love to Mrs. Bard and all friends.

Adieu Yours truly Nath. Pendleton

The Story Behind the History Nathaniel Pendleton was born in Virginia, to a prominent family. He entered the Continental Army at the age of 19 and served in the Revolutionary War campaigns in the southern states, earning the thanks of the Continental Congress for his bravery.

After the war he married Susanna Bard, a daughter of Dr. John Bard and sister of Dr. Samuel Bard. The Pendletons lived in Georgia, where Nathaniel studied law and was appointed a U.S. district judge. He was elected to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 but did not attend, and thus lost the opportunity to sign the Constitution.

In 1794 Pendleton’s name was submitted to President George Washington for the office of secretary of state, after Thomas Jefferson resigned from the position. Alexander Hamilton opposed the nomination, telling Washington that Pendleton was “somewhat tainted with the prejudices of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison,” who had founded an opposition party several years earlier. Nevertheless, Hamilton and Pendleton were friends. When Pendleton became involved in Georgia’s Yazoo land scandal—he knew that the sale to speculators of 31 million acres around the Yazoo River was rife with corruption, yet he supported it—he suffered the loss of money and reputation. Forced to resign his judgeship, Pendleton moved his family to New York City in 1796; Hamilton assisted him in setting up a law practice there.

When Hamilton, the first and former secretary of the U.S. Treasury, was facing a duel with Burr, the sitting U.S. vice president, he called upon Pendleton to be his second. Duelists communicated through their seconds; ideally, the seconds reconciled the parties without violence. Hamilton and Burr had a longstanding political enmity, and both had been involved in duels with others. When they would not resolve their differences, after days of letters back and forth, Pendleton wrote

out the regulations for the duel for his side, as did William Van Ness, Burr’s second, for his.

At 5 a.m. on July 11, 1804, Pendleton called for Hamilton in Manhattan—in a barge. Dueling had been outlawed in New York State, so the duelists were rowed, in separate boats, across the Hudson River to a ledge above the village of Weehawken, New Jersey. In standard practice, so that the rowers could say they had observed neither guns nor duel, the pistols were carried in portmanteaus and the oarsmen stood with their backs to the duel. When the duelists said they were ready, Pendleton reportedly gave the order to “present.” The duelists fired, and Burr’s shot hit Hamilton. Pendleton brought the wounded man back to New York, where he died on July 12.

The New York coroner’s jury met four times without rendering a decision; Hamilton had died in New York, but the shooting took place in New Jersey. Finally, on August 2, indictments were issued against Burr for “willful murder” and against Pendleton and Van Ness as accessories. A grand jury indicted the three men for participating in a duel. Van Ness and Pendleton were tried, found guilty, and disenfranchised for 20 years. Burr was acquitted in several trials related to the duel.

Describing as unbearable New York’s “odium” for his part in the tragedy, Pendleton moved his family in 1807 to Hyde Park, property that Susanna’s father had inherited and named.

Pendleton later served as a judge in Dutchess County. The Pendleton household in Hyde Park consisted of Nathaniel and Susanna, their four sons and one daughter, an orphaned niece (Susan Mary Bard, daughter of Susanna’s brother John) and a widowed sister-in-law (Ann Bard Pierce, widow of Colonel John Pierce).

On October 20, 1821, Pendleton set out for Poughkeepsie in his gig—a two-wheeled, one-horse carriage—and was killed when the horse bolted. Susanna and Nathaniel are buried in the Bard family plot in the cemetery of St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park. Susanna’s father, Dr. John Bard, was a key figure in the formation of St. James, though he died in 1799, before its organization. Dr. Samuel Bard, his son and Susanna’s brother, donated the land for the church and its grounds.

“The flavor of these lives adds resonance to our lives, as we move around the Bard campus and surrounding community,” says Helene Tieger ’85, college archivist and reference librarian.

“I’m curious about the Bard family dynamics that must have existed. Pendleton was a Revolutionary War hero, and doctors John and Samuel were committed loyalists. Christmas dinner conversations must have been very interesting in Hyde Park.”

References Special thanks to three members of the St. James Churchyard Committee:

Carol Vinall, Gloria Golden, and John Golden.

“Sale of Old Hyde Park Property Recalls Exciting History of Estate,” by

Helen Myers, from the July 5, 1942, Hudson Valley Sunday Courier Duel, by Thomas Fleming (Basic Books, 1999)

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BARD REDISCOVERS BERG Alban Berg’s Lyrical Modernism Informed Summer Festivals Bard’s campus was steeped in the charm, gemütlichkeit, and intellectual ferment of Old Vienna this July and August, as both SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival (BMF) embraced the life, times, and creative milieu of Alban Berg and his world. Berg (1885–1935), whose richly expressive music both exemplified and extended the Viennese tradition that began with Mozart and was borne along by Schubert, Mahler, and Schoenberg, was celebrated not only with brilliant performances of his works, but with the playing and staging of works by his contemporaries, such as Claude Debussy, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill.

Traditionally—and with the festival now in its eighth season, we can speak confidently of tradition—SummerScape programs are chosen to reflect and provide a context for the achievement of each year’s honored composer. This year’s installment was no exception, with the festival featuring the first U.S. stage production of Franz Schreker’s opera The Distant Sound and a gripping reprise of Ödön von Horváth’s morally problematic 1937 drama Judgment Day. Of the former, directed by Thaddeus Strassberger, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Leon Botstein, conducting the American Symphony Orchestra, brilliantly realized both the lyricism and the cacophony of this remarkable score.” In its review of von Horváth’s play, the New York Post lauded “the visually

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striking production” and pronounced the denouement “both natural and inevitable.”

Evoking the bawdier side of Vienna in the years before the Great War was a sprightly production of The Chocolate Soldier, an operetta by Oscar Straus. The annual SummerScape film festival also complemented the BMF theme, with screenings of The Threepenny Opera and other movies directed by G. W. Pabst, along with other German features and documentaries and a selection of American films noir. And the myriad mirrors of the Spiegeltent reflected the frisky spirit of Weimar-era cabaret, as cross-dressing, gender-juggling, and sleight-of-mind performers cavorted in late-night shows.

As expected, the Trisha Brown Dance Company was a highlight of SummerScape 2010. The pioneering choreographer brought one of her newest dances, L’Amour au theater, to Bard, as part of a program that also included two of her collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. According to the Newark StarLedger, it was a “buoyant program infused with wit,” combining “postmodern austerity and conceptual daring” with more than a dollop of mischief.

Which brings us back to Berg. The 22nd Bard Music Festival—directed by Botstein, Robert Martin, and Christopher

Gibbs, with Christopher Hailey serving as this year’s scholar in residence—examined this complex and secretive composer’s happy marriage of Romanticism to Modernism, of sensuous expression to intellectual rigor, in the context of a specific time and place—Vienna during the first third of the 20th century.

Among the many highlights of the BMF were a rare performance of Franz Schmidt’s choral masterpiece, The Book of the Seven Seals; a program titled “Eros and Thanatos,” which included works by Berg, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, and the fabled Alma Mahler, among others; and the festival’s capper, which included Berg’s Lulu Suite and three fragments from Wozzeck, along with works by Hindemith and Weill.

At right, top to bottom: the Trisha Brown Dance Company in a program described as “buoyant . . . infused with wit”; a scene from Odon von Horvath’s gripping drama Judgment Day; Oscar Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier, which fuses Viennese opera and British wit; Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra in Royal Palace, by Kurt Weill, in the final concert of the Bard Music Festival. Below: Grete (Yamina Maamar) and Fritz (Mathias Schulz) meet again at La Casa di Maschere, a Venetian cabaret.

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Bonnie Marcus ’71, first female president of the Bard College Student Association

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Vintage Views of Annandale Editor’s note: Bard’s 150th anniversary offers an opportunity to read the College’s story in photographs. The digital collections of the Bard College Archives and Special Collections (www.bard.edu/archives), headed by Helene Tieger ’85, preserve Bard’s history in many different forms, including hundreds of photos. Drawing on these resources, the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs is compiling Bard in Black and White: Selections from the Bard College Archives, an exhibition that will open on campus on Alumni/ae Day, Saturday, October 16. Following is a sampling from three of the photographers—Peter Aaron ’68, Fred Greenspan ’75, and John Duke Kisch ’76—whose work will be part of that exhibition.

Peter Aaron ’68 As depicted in the photographs of Peter Aaron, Bard in the 1960s was an idyllic campus, where latter-day dryads and fauns pursued their studies amid wildflowers.

“They were halcyon days,” says Aaron, who has since become a successful architectural photographer. “Our world was changing rapidly, but we were hopeful, discovering new ways to approach life, breaking the mold.”

For Aaron, a shy and somewhat sheltered young man, “discovering new ways to approach life” meant acquainting himself with an area of social interaction that had previously been terra incognita on the map of his psyche. “I went to an all-boys high school, and when I got to Bard I was completely nonplussed by women,” he says with a laugh. “I took pictures that reflected my innocence.”

Aaron’s trove of images also includes many studies of his Bard buddies, including Chevy Chase. Since Aaron knew the comedian “before the rest of the world did,” he says, he and Chase have always enjoyed a comfortable friendship and are in touch frequently.

Photography was not Aaron’s area of study at Bard. He pursued a bachelor’s degree in physics, and his Senior Project entailed the creation of holograms in the basement of Hegeman Hall. “Hilton Weiss and Peter Skiff were both wonderful teachers who made science very accessible to me for the rest of my life,” he says.

Today, with his wife, Brooke Allen, and their twin daughters, Aaron maintains a home in Manhattan and another about 20 minutes from the former site of Adolph’s, the fabled hangout of Bardians in the sixties.

Chevy Chase ’68 (left) and Peter Aaron

Bard students circa 1968

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Fred Greenspan ’75 Fred Greenspan has always carried a camera with him, dating back to his days at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. He had it with him at Bard in the early 1970s, and he put it to very good use for the College.

“I did a lot of work for Annys Wilson [the late College historian], photographing college events and campus life between 1972 and 1975,” he recalls. “I also took photos for the Drama and Dance Department and was chairman of the Bard Photographic Society,” a student organization that existed prior to the founding of Bard’s Photography Program.

Although he’s not credited, Greenspan took the lion’s share of photographs for the 1975–76 College Caption Catalogue. His unposed portraits of students in the classroom or reading under trees or passing under stone arches with degrees in hand could be emblematic of any era during the College’s 150-year history, except for the hair—manes, beards, mustaches, afros—that adorns the majority of his subjects and pinpoints the moment in time.

For Greenspan, who studied anthropology with Mario Bick and film with Adolfas Mekas, the educational and social environment that Bard provided was a welcome change.

“Coming from a school with 10,000 commuters that felt more like a factory, I liked the small-town feeling of Bard—you had small seminars, closeness to teachers, you could get into doors and talk to people,” he says. “You knew everybody. I lived in Stone Row all the years I was there, and it was like a neighborhood, a little community. Bard was a safe place for personal adventurousness, and I consider [my time there] the best years of my life.”

Greenspan has been back many times, most recently for his 35th class reunion in May, which he attended with his wife and daughter.

Caption

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Caption

Above: Denise Durling Biedron ’77 (left) and Chris Hillegass ’75; below: at left Professor Burt Brody instructs students in physics; at right Professor Peter Sourian leads a seminar in literature, with Rebecca Rice ’77 at right.

John Duke Kisch ’76

Clockwise from top left: Paul Babicki ’75, Professor John Fout, and Luis Marciscano ’75; John Duke Kisch and Brooks Parsons ’76; President Leon Botstein and Bob Reselman ’77. Reselman was later married at Bard.

John Duke Kisch avers that his four years at Bard in the early 1970s were the most profoundly influential years of his life. Starting out as a sculpture and painting major, he was able to finish his stint in Annandale as the first graduate of the fledgling Photography Program.

“It was like an extra pat on the back,” he says. “I did something right—I became somebody, my work took on a bigger meaning. I was now truly a photographer—at least, that’s what the sheepskin said.”

Kisch’s Bard photo album, like that of his friend Fred Greenspan, is chockablock with images of campus life—including a young, smiling, white-jacketed, pre-bowtie Leon Botstein, captured during an unguarded moment at Commencement ceremonies; and a portrait of flowingly tressed, first-year roommates in their Tewksbury digs: Kisch and Brooks Parsons, now the chief financial officer for New York City Ballet, with a reel-to-reel tape recorder between them, and a cat named Bebe ensconced in Parsons’ lap.

Post-Bard, Kisch worked as a photographer’s assistant for Annie Leibovitz, Maureen Lambray, Denis Piel, and other big names in the worlds of media and advertising. He also indulged a personal passion by photographing Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Chick Corea, David Bowie, and other jazz and pop music giants. Most important, after acquiring a scarce poster for the film Caldonia, starring Louis Jordan, he began the collection that would lead to his founding Separate Cinema, an archive of still photos, lobby cards, film posters, and related ephemera pertaining to the history of the black film industry. Based in Poughkeepsie, New York, Separate Cinema contains more than 38,000 items, many of which are loaned to museums, galleries, libraries, and art institutions around the world, and is the largest archive of its kind, according to Kisch.

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ONANDOFFCAMPUS WELCOME The Class of 2014 has arrived, 507 strong, sporting more diversity than a rain forest. They hail from Maine and Ukraine, Long Island and Thailand, Indiana and Iran, Connecticut and Kazakhstan—43 countries and 31 states in all. Among their company are cyclers and recyclers, pianists and physicists, debaters and meditators, and Boy Scouts, black belts, ballerinas, and a student conducting research on hyenas.

Moreover, this cream of the crop of 5,570 applicants is highly engaged, both intellectually and socially. Members of this class have founded programs for the elderly, worked in orphanages, volunteered in soup kitchens, tutored children in the inner cities, fought for animal rights, and served as congressional interns. Probatum est: this group has what it takes to do Bard proud. A robust chorus of bravos in advance to the Class of 2014!

Among Bard’s distinguished faculty are several new members: Walter Russell Mead has joined Bard as James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities. Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. Richard Aldous, who had been Senior Research Fellow, is now Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature.

Aldous is the author of The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli.

Nuruddin Farah, a prominent Somali novelist, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan who has received numerous awards for his poetry and prose, are writers in residence as part of Contemporary Masters, a course taught by Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture. In the spring ’11 semester, Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland, is scheduled to join the faculty as distinguished visiting professor of writing.

Mollie Meikle ’03 has returned to Bard as the new assistant director of development, alumni/ae programs. She joins the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs, which works to keep alumni/ae engaged in the College and supporting Bard and its programs.

Johanna Burton, an art historian and distinguished writer, is the new director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard). She is responsible for all aspects of the Center’s academic program, including curriculum and faculty development for the two-year master of arts in curatorial studies degree, supervising student-curated projects, directing research initiatives for CCS Bard, and organizing the Center’s artist and curator in residence programs. Burton, who is widely recognized for her critical writing on contemporary art and artists, was formerly associate director and senior faculty member in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She is completing a Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University, where she earned an M.A. She took her position at CCS Bard on July 1, replacing Maria Lind, who had served as director since 2008.

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The Class of 2014 arrived in Annandale in August for the Language and Thinking Program, orientation, meeting with advisers, and a break for a buffet under blue skies.

Wyatt Mason, a critic, essayist and journalist, is senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking at Bard College. Modern Library published his translations of the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete and I Promise to be Good. Ursula Ludz is a visiting scholar at the center. A sociologist based in Munich, she is editor of Letters: 1925–1975 by Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, and of Arendt’s Denktagebuch. The Arendt Center is also hosting two postdoctoral fellows this year, Charles “Bill” Dixon and Laura Ephraim. Dixon’s research interests include ancient and modern theories of democracy and political economy. Ephraim’s research scrutinizes several texts from the origins of modern science in order to reopen a question that Arendt posed in The Human Condition and other works: What is the role of science in a democratic society? Ephraim also teaches First-Year Seminar.

Robert Longo, who is internationally recognized for his large-scale works in various media, visited the Hessel Museum of Art in May. In conjunction with the CCS Bard exhibition Living Under the Same Roof: The Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Longo discussed possible relationships with museums and collections within the framework of his artistic practice. Longo is the father of Viktor Longo BHSEC ’06.

Garry Wills, author, scholar, and recipient of an honorary degree from Bard in 2009, gave the 2010 Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities on campus over three days in October. His topic was “Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” The biennial lecture series honors Anthony Hecht ’44 by reflecting his lifelong interest in literature, music, the visual arts, and U.S. cultural history. Wills, the author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and Why I Am a Catholic, among many other books, will deliver a fourth lecture in this Hecht series at The Morgan Museum & Library in New York City in early 2011.

KUDOS

Books by Bardians

Bard High School Early College awarded associate in arts degrees to 173 graduates—125 from the Manhattan campus and 48 from the new Queens campus—at its Commencement on June 24. All graduates—126 from Manhattan and 50 from Queens—also earned New York State Regents diplomas. Deborah Bial, founder and president of The Posse Foundation, gave the Commencement address.

Moving Blanket

Bard College awarded degrees to 27 incarcerated students at the seventh Commencement of the Bard Prison Initiative, held at Woodbourne Correctional Facility on June 5. Seven students received bachelor of arts degrees; 20 received associate in arts degrees. Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, delivered the Commencement address. As recipient of Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, Nestle was cited for “transforming how we understand the societal role of the food that the United States produces and consumes.”

by Kostas Anagnopoulos MFA ’99

ugly duckling presse

These graceful poems in Anagnopoulos’s first full-length collection explore the elusive yet passionate intimacy between a poet and his world.

2X2

by Martine Bellen ’78

blazevox books

In this whimsical novella, Nora, a lonely woman living a safe island life, stumbles upon a newspaper article about Rona Z, her presumed lost twin, and embarks on a surrealist journey to find her doppelganger.

Practicing Memory in Central American Literature

by Nicole Caso, associate professor of Spanish

palgrave macmillan

This close examination of 20th-century Central American historical fiction traces the interplay between fiction and history, studying how language, space, and memory continuously define local identities in this “isthmus” region.

Leaving Rock Harbor

by Rebecca Chace, visiting assistant professor in First-Year Seminar

scribner Told in the voice of Frankie Ross, whose parents move to a booming New England mill town in 1916, this captivating novel takes the reader into the heart of a girl’s transformation into adulthood during the First World War and the Jazz Age and into the Great Depression.

The Way of Jesus: To Repair and Renew the World Graduates of both campuses of Bard High School Early College—Manhattan and Queens—got together for the conferring of associate in arts degrees at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University in June.

by Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion

abingdon press This original and inspiring portrait of Jesus as prophet leaves behind the scholarly arguments about Jesus’s identity and focuses on his prophetic vision for the world and the forces he wished to unleash in people in order to make change happen.

I Can Help

by David Hyde Costello ’94

farrar, straus and giroux Illustrated in simple watercolor and line, the characters—a little duck, monkey, giraffe, and other animals—in this delightful children’s book show each other in turn just how easy it is to help another creature in need.

Global India circa 100 CE: South Asia in Early World History

by Richard H. Davis, professor of religion

association for asian studies, inc.

Through an in-depth examination of traders, missionaries, warriors, Twenty-four of the 27 Bard Prison Initiative graduates at Woodbourne Correctional Facility gathered for a portrait commemorating their accomplishment at their Commencement on June 5.

adventurers, and localists, this interdisciplinary booklet offers a refreshing introduction to India and its international relations in the global context of early world history.

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Luke Bolton ’09 was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student grant to spend nine months in Egypt researching an independent project. Titled “Pious Publications: The Role of Al-Azhar in Egyptian Discourse,” Bolton’s project focuses on the publications of Al-Azhar University. Fulbright also awarded Bolton a Critical Language Enhancement Award, which allows him to study Arabic for the three months preceding his grant. He and his wife, Caity Bolton (Cook) ’07, went to Cairo at the end of the summer to spend a year there.

Arnold Steinhardt, violinist and founding faculty of The Bard College Conservatory of Music, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Steinhardt is first violinist and a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Guarneri String Quartet, with which he has recorded dozens of albums. He has also appeared throughout North America and Europe as a recitalist and soloist with numerous orchestras. The Academy, one of the world’s most distinguished honorary societies, is a center for independent policy research.

Leon Botstein, president of the college, was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States. He is among 38 distinguished leaders and thinkers who were elected this year to the Society, which was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin.

The Society has 1,001 elected members; they have included Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Robert Frost, and Saul Bellow; and, currently, Philip Glass and Yo-Yo Ma. Three Bard College faculty members—Luca Buvoli and Nancy Shaver, sculpture faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and Lothar Osterburg, a master printer in etching and photogravure who is a visiting associate professor in studio art—received fellowships in fine arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The three Bard artists have shown their work extensively in the United States and abroad. They bring the number of Bard faculty members who have received Guggenheim fellowships to more than 35.

Jonathan Cristol ’00 has become director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. Cristol has taught at Bard since 2003, currently as visiting assistant professor of political studies. He has held several positions in the BGIA program, including deputy director. A former student of James Chace, BGIA’s founding director, Cristol holds an M.A. in international relations from Yale University and will defend his doctoral dissertation in politics at the University of Bristol (U.K.) this fall.

La Voz, cultural y noticias hispanas del Valle del Hudson, received a Special Citation in the 2010 Dutchess County Executive’s Arts Awards from the Dutchess County Arts Council. La Voz, which is sponsored by Bard, was first published in 2004 as the Trustee Leader Scholar project of Mariel Fiori ’05, now the magazine’s managing editor, and Emily Schmall ’05. Published monthly, La Voz is written in Spanish by Bard students and faculty, and individuals and organizations from outside the Bard community. La Voz, with a circulation of 4,000 copies and an estimated readership of 12,000, is a service for the Hispanic community of the Mid-Hudson Valley area. The awards ceremony takes place in October. Nominees for the awards come from residents of Dutchess and nearby counties; the final recipients are selected through a panel review process.

Bard president Leon Botstein visited Budapest, Hungary, in June for the Commencement ceremonies at Central European University. At the Budapest home of László Z. Bitó ’60 and his wife, Olivia Carino, Botstein met with former recipients of Kellner Hungarian Scholarships. Top: Botstein with (left to right) Viktoria Szabo, a Kellner Scholar during the 2007–08 academic year; Susie Sperry, a supporter of The Bard College Conservatory of Music; and Zsuzsanna Horvath, a 2004–05 Kellner Scholar. Bottom: Botstein with Zoltán Bruckner ’94, the first Kellner Scholar (1991–92), who is now an investment manager in Hungary and coordinator of the Kellner Hungarian Scholarships there.

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The faculty Curriculum Committee has approved Environmental and Urban Studies (EUS) as a major program of study in the Division of Social Studies. EUS is coordinated by Mark Lytle, professor of history, and draws on faculty from all the divisions, particularly from the programs in anthropology, biology, economics, and history. The new program offers three tracks that students may follow individually or in combination: social sciences, sciences, and urban studies. A rich variety of internship and junior year abroad programs includes a junior year practicum in nearby Kingston and Ulster County. The Hudson River forms a laboratory and stepping-off area for an integrated understanding of global environmental transformation.

The Men’s Volleyball Team took the Skyline Conference Tournament in April with a 3-2 win over the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the championship match. Henry Schenker ’10 was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player, and Michael Abalos, head women’s volleyball coach, was named Skyline Coach of the Year.

ALUMNI/AE

The New Antiquity

Ethan Porter ’07 was the invited Alumni/ae Speaker at the Senior Dinner, held the Thursday before Commencement Weekend. Porter is a writer and the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, named Best New Publication in the 2007 Independent Press Awards and dubbed “What Obama’s Reading” by Politico. Porter, who is the son of Scott and Marcy Porter, both Class of 1979, presented the Class of 2010 with a frank discussion on what to expect from their first post-Bard jobs.

damiani

The annual Alumni/ae-Student Rugby Games (men’s and women’s) that kick off Commencement and Reunion Weekend highlight the passion that Bardians have for this game. This year’s players were Kimani Davis ’99, Andrew Corrigan ’00, Larry French ’02, Will Baylies ’04, Matt Cameron ’04, David Tramonte ’04, Juan Martinez ’04, Jacob Grana ’05, Taun Toay ’05, Leonard Reibstein ’05, Brian Wolf ’05, Geoffrey Wilson ’06, Alex Weinstein ’06, Samuel Struzzi ’06, Bill Ardito ’07, Timothy Moody ’07, Morgan Kelly ’07, Ben Dexter ’08, Kevin Potter ’08, Judena Foster ’08, Maida Ives ’08, Blaine Keller ’09, Robert Ross ’09, Bethany Dettmore ’09, Jen Overstreet ’09, and Marta Shocket ’09. A group of alumni/ae rugby enthusiasts are working with the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs on raising money to enlarge the rugby field to regulation size; to date, they are halfway to their goal.

The annual Cities Party dotted the nation again this year, as more than 150 alumni/ae met up in informal gatherings that took place in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland (Oregon), moving east through Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans, and north to Brooklyn and Boston. There was even one “country party,” in Staatsburg, New York, for alumni/ae who live in the Hudson Valley. Next year the annual Cities Party may go global, as there is talk of alumni/ae gettogethers in Berlin, Beijing, Paris, and London. Want a party in your city?

Call 1-800-BARDCOL or e-mail alumni@bard.edu.

Pia Carusone ’03, chief of staff for U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), organized a gathering of D.C.–area Bard alumni/ae and parents with Leon Botstein on Capitol Hill in June. President Botstein spoke to the group about Bard’s current application for federal funds to continue the early college model nationwide. Alumni/ae attending who work in government included Markus Rose (Olin-Fahle) ’90, legislative assistant for U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.); Gillian Huebner ’97, program specialist for USAID; Betsaida Alcantara ’05, spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency; and Marvin Fell ’77, an economist with the Department of Homeland Security.

Class of 2009 alumni/ae Brian Dorsam, Anna Henschel, Veronica Hunsinger-Loe, Nat Kusinitz, and Evan Spigelman comprise the New Orleans–based Skin Horse Theater. They returned to Annandale last spring to meet with current theater students and perform Curiouser, a play the group conceived while at Bard and then completely reworked into a powerful production that intertwines the lives of Sylvia Plath, Lewis Carroll, and Carroll’s muse, Alice Liddell. The work was performed on two consecutive, well-attended evenings in a raw space in Tivoli, and included a “talkback” with the cast.

by Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography Merging disparate centuries into single moments, these arresting photographs of people, street scenes, urban landscapes, and everyday objects reveal unexpected significance in anonymous locations throughout Rome, China, and the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Ozalid

by Biswamit Dwibedy MFA ’09 1913 press

Spare, powerful poems, set elegantly on the page, delve into the timeless tension between the constructed and natural worlds in distinctly contemporary and exquisitely inimitable language.

Our Farm: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary

by Maya Gottfried ’95

alfred a. knopf

This sweet children’s book features lyrical poems written by Gottfried from the voices of various animals living at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, coupled with wonderfully idiosyncratic paintings and sketches by artist Robert Rahway Zakanitch.

Joker

by Arlo Haskell ’00

sand paper press

Quietly haunting poems piece together a sensitively observed portrait of Key West—its dazzlingly sea and sky tempered by the fragile social hierarchy of tourists, real estate speculators, alcoholics, and service workers—by a native son.

The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History

By Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass, faculty, Bard Graduate Center

university of washington press Almost 200 photographs and illustrations accompany the authors’ exploration of the history, transformation, and role of the totem pole in various cultures and contexts from the 18th century to the present.

The Logic of the World and Other Fictions

by Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature

mcpherson & company

The 30 works in Kelly’s fifth collection of short fiction defy conventional plot and draw their narratives from myths, dreams, letters, rituals, and the intriguing psyches of their characters.

The Mental Traveler

by Stephen Kessler ’68

greenhouse review press Set at the end of the 1960s, this antinostalgic novel charts the misguided journey—from graduate school, to the infamous Altamont free concert, to prison and various mental hospitals—of a lost young poet living in California as he searches for his place in a tumultuous and often misremembered era of American cultural revolution.

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PARTNERSHIPS Pilgrimages is a new project of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College in collaboration with Chimurenga, a journal of writing, art, and politics based in Cape Town; Kwani Trust, a Kenya-based literary network; and Kachifo Limited, an independent Nigerian publishing house. Pilgrimages has sent 14 African writers to 13 African cities and one city in Brazil for two weeks to explore the complexities of disparate urban landscapes. The writers will create 13 books about their trips, to be published simultaneously in Lagos, Nairobi, and Cape Town during the 2012 African Cup of Nations football tournament.

The Pilgrimages website (pilgrimages.org.za) presents blogs, videos, and essays. Sponsors of the collaboration are the Open Society Foundation South Africa, Karibu Foundation (Norway), Heinrich Boll Foundation (Germany), DOEN Foundation and HIVOS Foundation (both Netherlands), Nigerian Breweries PLC, Royal Norwegian Embassy in Abuja and in Khartoum, and John B. Hurford Humanities Center at Haverford College.

Bard College and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company culminated the first year of their successful teaching partnership with a creative residency and free performance in May and expanded their partnership for this academic year. During the May residency the dancers created a multidisciplinary work from the ground up: Another Evening: Venice, a site-specific work that was performed at the Venice Dance Biennial in June. The residency was funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Based on the success of the teaching partnership’s first year, Bard and the company doubled the company’s teaching commitment, to a total of 10 courses per year.

PUBLICATIONS

will explore the ways human beings have shaped and interpreted the material world from the perspectives of archaeology, anthropology, art and design, economic and landscape history, technology, and philosophy.

ON VIEW / ON STAGE Shawn Moore ’11, a student in The Bard College Conservatory of Music, was guest violinist, and Diogo Ahmed, who earned an M.F.A. degree this year from the Conductors Institute at Bard, was guest conductor, for the April 29 Woodstock Chamber Orchestra concert in Olin Hall. Ahmed conducted “Two Arabesques” by Claude Debussy. Moore soloed in Max Burch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor.

Raissa St. Pierre ’87, associate director of the Bard Music Festival, again hosted SummerScape’s “Thursday Night Live” (TNL)—weekly sessions of eclectic music performed in the Spiegieltent by an international array of talent that hailed from hometowns ranging from Tivoli to Timbuktu. (St. Pierre attended the Festival au Desert in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2008 and helped bring Malian performer Khaira Arby and her band to TNL for their first-ever appearance in the United States.) Art rocker Chris Cochrane ’82 performed with his trio and Seth Travins ’97 performed with his band the Minivans. Alumni/ae had a free pass to all TNL sessions.

Filmmaker Cambiz Khosravi screened his documentary Howard Koch: You Must Remember This at Bard in April. Howard Koch ’22 was an alumnus of St. Stephen’s College who went on to become a screenwriter for Casablanca and other films, along with War of the Worlds, the infamous 1938 radio broadcast. In the audience were Peter Koch ’70, Howard’s son and a Woodstock resident, and Shirin Khosravi ’06,

Conjunctions: 54, Shadow Selves gathers many of today’s leading writers and poets to examine the venerable themes of self and other, appearance versus reality—in sum, the tenuous nature of identity. The latest issue of Bard’s innovative literary magazine features new fiction and poetry from Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul West, and Anne Waldman, among others. “The theme of the doppelganger has preoccupied the likes of Dostoevsky and Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare and Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” writes Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor. “Shadow Selves offers a spectrum of permutations on these themes that is central not just to classical literature but to postmodernism and post-Freudian psychoanalysis from Lacan forward.”

The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture launches two publication initiatives this year. West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, set to debut in spring 2011, will be published in print and online, where it will serve as the starting point for an open-access website dedicated to journal-related digital content. West 86th, edited by Paul Stirton, replaces Studies in the Decorative Arts, an award-winning journal published by the BGC for the past 17 years. The second initiative is Cultural Histories of the Material World, a series of monographs and collections of essays published in collaboration with Harvard University Press that

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Khaira Arby (center) and her band played the Spiegeltent this summer as part of the “Thursday Night Live” series organized and hosted by Raissa St. Pierre ’87.

Cambiz’s daughter, who lives in Red Hook. Thanks to webmaster Jeremy Hall ’98, more of Koch can be seen and heard at www.bard. edu/archives/voices.htm.

A vast treasure of concert music recorded by the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) since 1992, under the baton of music director Leon Botstein, is now available via iTunes, amazon.com, and other major online retailers for the first time. Almost 100 titles were released this past summer, and hundreds more ASO concert recordings will be offered for sale to the public online. This digital recordings initiative enhances the orchestra’s mission of making great music easily available to wide audiences. Among the releases were last year’s performance of Meyebeer’s opera Les Huguenots and the only existing recording of Africa, a 1930 composition by William Grant Still. The releases were made possible by an agreement reached with ASO musicians, who forewent the traditional advance payment in exchange for the lion’s share of the royalties. “The orchestra as an institution does not expect to profit with money from this initiative but with recognition for our performances and for these rare masterpieces,” said Lynne Meloccaro, ASO executive director. Income goes to the musicians, or to offset expenses, she said. “Our intention is to preserve and make available what in some cases are the only existing recordings of these works.”

The ASO begins Year Two of its Beethoven celebration, performing the sixth symphony (“Pastorale”), along with Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, on October 22 and 23 in the Sosnoff Theater of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

The Sweetness of Herbert

by Stuart Krimko ’00

sand paper press

The title poem in this collection pays playful yet heartfelt homage to Welsh poet George Herbert (1593–1633), whose metaphysical exploration of the trajectories of hope and despair are reexamined here in contemporary contexts and brilliantly piercing language.

A River’s Pleasure: Essays in Honor of John Cronin

edited by Michelle D. Land and Susan Fox Rogers, visiting associate professor of writing

pace university press

This anthology pays tribute to John Cronin, an environmental advocate who spent 35 years working to preserve the Hudson River, with essays from Pete Seeger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Paul Bray with Maurice Hinchey, among many others. Rogers contributed “Learning the River,” about Cronin and kayaking the Hudson.

Introduction to World Religions: Communities and Cultures edited by Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism

abingdon press

This accessible volume, with contributions by several scholars, introduces readers and students to the world’s major communities of faith—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Shinto, indigenous religions, and new American religions of the 19th and 20th centuries—through rich overviews of each religion

COLLOQUY

accompanied by timelines, classic texts, and descriptions of important

“Human Being in an Inhuman Age: What Does It Mean to Be Human Amid Superhuman Technological Advances?” is the title of this year’s conference at the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking at Bard College, to be held on October 22 and 23.

Using Arendt’s ideas as a catalyst and framework, an international array of panelists will discuss how human beings might respond to their inhuman future. Keynote speakers are Nicholson Baker, whose essays have tackled Wikipedia, Google, Kindle, and card catalogues; Ray Kurzweil, author, futurist, and inventor of the Kurzweil Synthesizer; and Sherry Turkle, scholar and author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. Conference cosponsors are the Human Rights Project and the Science, Technology, and Society Program.

and sacred spaces and times.

Race and the Pastoral: Interrogation, Conversation, Performance, Play was presented on May 8 by the students in the Race and the Pastoral course and by the Institute for Media, Culture, and Difference, a project of the Bard Multicultural Affairs Office. The daylong colloquy included four panel discussions between Bard students and guests: Pastoral Origins/Decolonizing the Pastoral; Landscapes of Privilege/ Whiteness as Property; Emerson, Thoreau, and the “White Liberal” Pastoral; and The Future of the Hudson River School: From Harlem to Kaaterskill Falls. The day culminated with a collaborative multimedia performance featuring Bard students, visitors, local residents, faculty, and staff. Special guests included theater artist Shawna Powell ’09, playwright Nick Mwaluko, performance artist Sienna Shields, performance and video artist Kanene Holder, and photographer Curtis Fuller.

by Shawn Vandor ’99

rituals, symbols, figures and events, characteristic beliefs and creeds,

From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual

by David Levi Strauss, faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

oxford university press Twenty-one lucid essays on painting, sculpture, and writing—including pieces on Martin Puryear, Joseph Beuys, Leon Golub, and Robert Kelly— explore “the mysterious process whereby an idea is born in the mind and materialized through the hand” and invigorate contemporary art’s connection to the past and the direct manipulation of materials.

Fire at the End of the Rainbow sand paper press

Written in refreshingly candid prose, this collection of humorous and sometimes humiliating short stories takes the reader into the author’s quirky quotidian life to reveal a deeper, disarming wisdom.

Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature

by Li-Hua Ying, associate professor of Chinese

scarecrow press

This encyclopedic reference book offers more than 300 entries on significant authors; literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts; a chronology covering 1891 to 2009; and an impressive bibliography.

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CLASSNOTES Reunion 2010 Almost 250 alumni/ae came back to Bard for Reunion 2010, among them Dick Koch ’40, returning for his 70th reunion. Friday night the Bardians either dressed up for the President’s Award Ceremony and Dinner at the Fisher Center, or they kicked back at Annandale Roadhouse on the deck of the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Saturday morning the iconic Tewksbury Hall, which has been housing students since 1960, was feted with a 50th birthday party. The Alumni/ae Office had set up a sample dorm room with vintage furniture; visitors and former residents explored and reminisced. Songwriter Billy Steinberg ’72, who received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters on Friday night, treated the Tewks group to an impromptu acoustic performance of two of his most famous songs.

Saturday night’s barbecue, dancing, and fireworks on the Blithewood lawn brought everyone together, creating a sea of blankets all the way down to the Hudson River.

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The Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association and friends

’09

Dan Wilbur is a comedian and writer living in Brooklyn. He has spent his time since graduation moving up the stand-up ladder, and finally has a credit he’d like to brag about: contributing writer for the Onion News Network (www.theonion.com). He also works at Comix, a comedy club in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, and hosts a weekly show called “Lasers in the Jungle.”

graduate schools. This fall, she begins the master’s program in museum studies at New York University.

Rachel Elise Sanders lives the life of a nomadic outdoor educator, musician, and traveler. Since graduating, Rachel and her guitar have spent time in Central America, Texas, Oregon, California, and Hawaii.

She is now the water field instructor at Oregon Outdoor School.

Rachel’s music can be found at www.cdbaby.com/rachelelisesanders.

’08

Genya Shimkin works for Baltimore HealthCare Access, serving the city’s Medicaid enrollees and the uninsured. She is getting ready to apply for a master’s degree in public health.

Zoltán Glück lives and works in Budapest. He completed a master’s degree in sociology and social anthropology at Central European University in June 2010, having spent the months of March and April in Kenya pursuing research on piracy, state structure, and the trials of Somali pirates in the law courts of Mombasa.

Jie Zhang is pursuing her Ph.D. in immunology at Washington University in St. Louis. In early 2010, she met her Bard professor Karla Marz, who happened to be a Washington U. alumna and came back for a career panel discussion on liberal arts education. She writes, “It was wonderful to reconnect with some Bard people and recollect the life back in Annandale.”

Class correspondent Patricia Pforte, patricia.pforte@gmail.com

Shay Howell writes: “I graduated, flew to Germany, hung out in Europe for the summer, flew to Senegal, visited my junior-year host family in Mali for six weeks, flew to Australia, got everything stolen, flew home to Alabama broke and hating Australia. Worked as a bartender for a year.

Got bored. Wander-lusted west. Now live in San Francisco.” She blogs at shayhowell.wordpress.com.

Ashleigh McCord has spent the last two years supplementing her Bard education by learning more about shell fishing, invasive plants, and chainsaw maintenance than she ever expected. She lives on Cape Cod and supervises 13 AmeriCorps members as they serve the environmental needs of Barnstable County. And she’ll be doing it all again next year, too!

Philipp Penka is completing course work for his doctorate in Harvard University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is grateful to his Bard professors, especially Marina Kostalevsky and the late Jennifer Day, for both inspiration and guidance.

This has been an exciting year so far for Patricia Pforte. She joined a ladies basketball league for women 5’2” and under, started composting in her apartment, ran in more than 10 road races, and applied to a lot of

’07

Class correspondent Reanna Blackford, reanna.blackford@gmail.com After graduating, Reanna Blackford worked as a grant writer at a New York City nonprofit, as a freelance grant writer, and as a researcher in Washington, D.C. She is happy to now be a graduate student in city and regional planning at Cornell University.

Rose Swan Meacham lives in New York, where she works as a website producer at GQ magazine.

Tanner Vea has entered an Ed.D. program in instructional technology and media at Teachers College, Columbia University.

’06

5th Reunion: May 20–22, 2011 Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663 or whitmore@bard.edu Class correspondent Kirsten Dunlaevy, kdunlaevy@gmail.com

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5th Reunion, Class of 2005 Sarah Elia teaches ESL at SUNY New Paltz.

Adam Nathaniel Greene is the owner of Green Lens Media LLC, a film production studio focused specifically on video for green businesses, organizations, and causes. An Apple Certified Trainer, Adam freelances at Future Media Concepts and the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. For more information, visit www.GreenLensMedia.com.

Victoria Jacobs celebrates the first successful year of her Seattle modern dance company, Sapience Dance Collective, founded with codirectors and choreographers Sarah Mercer ’07, Lilah Steece, Amy Weaver, and Ariella Brown. She returned to New York in April to perform in Bard professor Aileen Passloff’s 40-year dance retrospective.

Sarah Keezing and Ryan Gay ’02 live in Maine, where Sarah is a high school English teacher in South Portland and Ryan works in an elementary alternative education program in Saco. They have three cats “who behave like Bard students on a Thursday night” and a glorious excess of books.

’05

Rachael Morrison lives in Brooklyn and works at the Museum of Modern Art Library, where an exhibition she organized, Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter, was on view from April 7 through July 5.

’04

In September Yishay Garbasz, who is based in Berlin, presented two of her photographic projects, In My Mother’s Footsteps and Becoming, at the Busan Biennale in South Korea. In My Mother’s Footsteps was among the books nominated for the 2009 German Photo Book Awards, and Yishay will show work from that project in November at Northwood University in Michigan. Becoming was published as a monograph in July and is also a zoetrope film, for which Yishay received a Berlin Senate filmmaker award.

Amelia Overbay-Day is happy to be one of the newest correspondents for GreyWardens.com, and is now writing almost weekly columns there on the art of “being a Grey Warden and defeating the Darkspawn.”

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Samantha Safer works at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

She is a research coordinator in the retail area of the museum and also does freelance writing for the museum’s fashion history–related titles (even coauthoring a few books so far). Her first solo book, on the textile/ fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who was the subject of her Senior Project, is scheduled to be published in October.

’03

Emma Ferguson and her husband, Ben, are now parents of Hudson Guy, born on March 25. All are happy and well.

Kale ’99 and Caitlin (Lord) Kaposhilin are delighted to announce the birth of their first child, Clara Grace Kaposhilin. Look out, Class of 2028!

’02

Class correspondent Toni Fortini Josey, toni.josey@gmail.com Dages Juvelier Keates lives in Brooklyn and loves to travel. She spent many of her postgraduate years studying in seminaries in New York and Israel. Locally, she founded Delicious Dialogues, a Manhattan-based business offering health coaching, cooking classes, and regular yoga retreats in the Hudson Valley.

Clarisse Labro is an independent designer-architect, and lives in Paris with her husband, Mark, whom she met during graduate school at Yale.

After working for and with architect Shigeru Ban and director Bob Wilson, Clarisse now works for herself, remodeling and designing Parisian interior architectures. She is also building, along with another woman, a nonprofit association for young designers, promoting their talents through collaborative creative works and public exposure. Their first event took place in late June in Paris.

Jack Lewis lives in Portland, Oregon, with his partner Marci LeBrun.

He often performs and records with his brother, Jeffrey. Jack’s song “Shadow Party” (cowritten by Raphi Gottesman ’03) was used in the movie Breaking Upwards. The Bundles, a band featuring Kimya Dawson, Karl Blau, and Jeffrey and Jack Lewis, released their first album in March on K Records.

10th Reunion, Class of 2000 Rachel Mahoney is completing her doctorate in clinical psychology at Adelphi University. This fall she began an internship at North Central Bronx Hospital, and plans to defend her dissertation. She is engaged to Roberto Rengifo and is a full-time mother to her stepdaughter, Anastasia. They all live together in Rutherford, New Jersey.

Lisa Downward received a Ph.D. in physics in March 2008 and married Mark Lakata in May of that year. Amanda Holt played cello for the ceremony. Other classmates in attendance were Maryam Jowza, Melanie Pender, and Luke Nickerson. Mark and Lisa welcomed their son, Dylan, in December 2009.

Sarah Shapiro is a massage therapist and student of clinical herbalism in Montpelier, Vermont, where she lives in the country with her sweetheart, a cat, two goats, and various herb, flower, and vegetable gardens growing around the house. Learn more at lifeforcebodywork. blogspot.com.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is finishing a double Ph.D. in media studies between Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. He lives in Berlin and visits Paris regularly to see Emilie Gobe and a coterie of other Bardians-in-exile.

’01

Maryam Jowza is in her final year of training as an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She married her medical school classmate Leon Bacchus in May 2009, and they live in Cambridge.

She would love to hear from other Bardians in the Boston area.

10th Reunion: May 20–22, 2011 Staff contact: Mollie Meikle ’03, 845-758-7583 or meikle@bard.edu Class correspondent Sung Jee Yoo, sujeyo@gmail.com Hannah Adams and her fiancé, Chris Burque, run a music licensing company called Ghost Town (www.ghost-town.com), based in Los Angeles. The company represents all kinds of musicians, whom Hannah and Chris pitch for television, film, trailers, and commercials. Bard friends, musicians, producers, editors, and advertising people, please get in touch!

Ursula Arsenault and her husband, Bob Adams, welcomed their daughter, Flicka Maxine Adams, on October 16, 2009, in Chicago. Flicka and Ursula share the same birthday.

Grace Bell (Uffner) has been painting backdrops and sets for Broadway theater and movies. That is where she met Matthew Bell, whom she married at Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, on June 28, 2009.

Shonali Choudhury had an article accepted for publication in the journal Culture, Health, and Sexuality. The article, titled “‘As prostitutes, we control our bodies’: Perceptions of health and body in the lives of establishment-based female sex workers in Tijuana, Mexico,” was developed from her dissertation research. She completed her Ph.D. in public health at the UCLA School of Public Health in June 2009.

After graduating from Bard, Jason Rabinowitz opened up an information technology (IT) company in Manhattan. He supported a variety of small- to medium-sized companies, ranging from fashion and the arts to banking and advertising. In 2004 he went to Washington, D.C., and earned a master’s degree in international relations with a focus on mediation and conflict resolution. He now manages IT contracts for several U.S. government vendors overseas. “Bard’s classes and students alike gave me a new attitude and level of maturity,” he says. “Now, in a field as fluid as information technology, those lessons are critical to working with both computers and people. Most universities, my grad school included . . . taught me job skills. Bard gave me intellectual perspective, analytical road maps, and the ability to argue the hell out of things till 3 a.m.”

Elijah Vanaver is working on 3-D animation and compositing for a film called Moving Day, to be submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. He is also working on various commercials at shilo.tv. You can see the rest of his work online at www.nycmirage.com.

Sung Jee Yoo moved from New York City to San Francisco in October 2009, and freelances as an editor in Oakland. She would love to meet fellow alums in the Bay Area.

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15th Reunion, Class of 1995 Xiaoyu Eileen Zhang has decided to take a year’s leave following the birth of her second daughter, Lucy Jane Richards. She is enjoying every moment of time being with the two beautiful girls. Daddy Matt Richards, Levy Cambridge Visiting Scholar at Bard from 1999 to 2001, is working very long days at UBS, but enjoying his work.

’00

Michael James Paglinger (formerly Pagliarulo) lives in Portland, Oregon, where he owns and operates a construction company called Habilis Construction, LLC (named after Homo habilis, the first of our ancestors to use tools).

’97

Class correspondent Julia Wolk Munemo, juliamunemo@mac.com Dana Goswick is a professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Her adventures are shared with her partner Alex, her son Tom, and their dog Hadley. She loves showing off her adopted city and would welcome visits from fellow Bardians. She can be reached at danagoswick@yahoo.com.

Gretchen Wilson is a journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In August 2009, she married her longtime partner, Anthony Prangley, in the woods of Whidbey Island in Washington State. She is grateful to have been supported there by Caroline Burghardt, Cara Cibener ’96, Muni Citrin ’98, Naya Colkett ’98, Andrew Greenberg, Robin Jacobs ’96, Anna Lacina ’98, Tess Mayer, Betsy Nordlander, Megan Pruiett, Cody “Susie” Strauss, Phuc Tran ’95, and Sue Tran ’96, plus a few other Bardians who couldn’t be there in person. Just two months later, in October, she and Anthony welcomed a beautiful son, William Lesedi Wilson Prangley.

’96

Class correspondent Gavin Kleespies, gwkleespies@hotmail.com Karin Bolender “straddles an interdisciplinary art practice, with one foot planted in the post-humanities and the other sunk in barnyard

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mud.” One noteworthy project was the “Can We Sleep in Your Barn Tonight?” Mystery Tour in 2006, with Pamela Albanese, George Murer ’97, Alex Ney ’97, Jacob Mitas ’99, Susannah Slocum ’99, and others. Karin is married to Sean Cummings.

Wendelin Scott lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She completed a master’s degree in Eastern classics at St. John’s College and is director of YogaSource. She is pursuing certification in Iyengar yoga and taking kyudo lessons (Zen archery). Wendelin walks in arroyos with her husband, Aaron Rhodes; their two miniature schnauzers; and Sadie, a dog rescued from behind Café Pongo 13 years ago.

’95

Tereza Bottman (Topferova) teaches language arts, ESL, and drama at a high school in Portland, Oregon. She recently founded the Slavic American Youth Zine (sayzine.blogspot.com), an online magazine of artwork, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, whose mission is to provide a platform for creative expression and self-definition for Slavic American youth, including teens of Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity, living in the United States. Tereza’s other projects include a podcast she is launching in conjunction with Roma Rights Network (www.romarights.net/v2/).

She was awarded a fellowship with The Advocacy Project to work with the Dženo Association, an independent Roma news and information service in Prague. As a Summer 2010 Peace Fellow, she worked with Roma journalists raising awareness about the struggle of the Roma people for justice and equality in the Czech Republic (where she grew up) and elsewhere.

Tracy Feldman came out with a fourth album of original songs, Middle of the Road, in late 2009.

Andrew F. Fowler has joined Gray Haile LLP as a partner. Gray Haile, a diverse boutique corporate law firm located in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., specializes in mergers and acquisitions, securities law, and business transactions for companies from start-ups to the Fortune 1000. Andrew joins several former colleagues from Skadden, Arps, including Leander C. Gray, the firm’s founder and managing partner.

20th Reunion, Class of 1990

’92

Class correspondent Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu Lisa Sanger Blinn had an amazing reunion with her biological mother after a lifetime of seemingly fruitless searching due to closed records. In a serendipitous twist that would have been unbelievable as fiction, the final piece of information that connected the two came from a man who lives in Red Hook. She credits Professor Alice Stroup with teaching her the strong research skills that helped her to finally connect the dots.

She’d love to help other Bardians with their search; you can reach her at lisablinn@yahoo.com.

In September David Cote began teaching a seminar in arts criticism at Brooklyn College. He continues as theater editor and chief drama critic for Time Out New York and contributing critic on NY1’s On Stage. This year he plans to finish his first full-length play, Otherland (commissioned by the Gingold Theatrical Group). David lives in Manhattan.

Sarah B. Davis lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner, John Hines, and their longtime feline companions Hazel and Riley. She is a licensed massage therapist and an instructor at East West College of the Healing Arts. She never tires of the inspiring dynamic of teaching and learning that she experiences in the classroom every day, and she feels fortunate to be able to model and honor the excellent professors she had at Bard.

Margaret Loftus and Jonathan Durham ’93 left Brooklyn four years ago for central Vermont. They live with their three little boys (Keelan, Tobin, and Wendell—eight, six, and two) in an old, refurbished church and raise sheep, chickens, pigs, and vegetables. In addition to farming, Jonathan works from home as a network engineer and Margaret heads up the Board of Directors of the Wellspring Waldorf School in Chelsea, Vermont.

Ben McClure lives in Perth, Australia, and is full-time staff with Youth With a Mission, doing a variety of Christian ministry activities, including cross-cultural film production and training. Ben and his wife, Liesbeth, have three beautiful young daughters. Ben still enjoys “making films fun,” just like back at Bard.

Allison Parker writes: “Slinging hash and baking fresh peach pies for hungover Bard students at the 9G-Diner (RIP) may have been ages ago, but it was only the seed of something bigger.” Since she last checked in, Allison’s writing-and-editing career has veered into the culinary. Earlier this year, she was made managing editor for the James Beard Award– winning online publication, LeitesCulinaria.com, and she started her own recipe-driven blog, FeedingTheSaints.com. The blog has also gained some nods from the industry. “One thing I’ve heard a lot,” Allison says, “is that people think the site stands out for the quality of its writing. I owe that to my years at Bard more than anything. I’m so grateful for that education, and for the enduring friendships.” Allison is always happy to reconnect with Bardians, and you can reach her (plus find something good to eat) via the blog.

Olivia Schoeller writes: “I’ve worked as a journalist for German newspapers almost ever since my graduation from Bard. The highlight of my career thus far was a six-year stay as the U.S. correspondent for Berliner Zeitung in Washington, D.C. I had a great time at Bard, but thinking of that time makes me sad as well. I still miss James Chace, who was my professor and Senior Project adviser. I now live in Berlin and work at Redaktion Dumont, a newly founded company serving all four newspapers of the Dumont publishing group. I cover international relations, the United Nations, and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. And I do miss the United States a lot.”

In 2009 Mark Steiner followed his debut CD by playing his second tour of Australia to promote Broken, his latest album, which is available on CD and limited edition 12” vinyl through Z-Man Records. A “cinematic odyssey of decadence,” Broken has received rave reviews in Australia, throughout Europe, and in Norway, where Mark has been living since early 2002. Playing now as Mark Steiner & His Problems, he toured Europe in early 2010 and plans to tour the United States later in the year.

’91

20th Reunion: May 20–22, 2011 Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu

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25th Reunion, Class of 1985 Gia Buonaguro is a marriage and family therapist in private practice working with individuals, couples, children, and teens in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Her practice “blends the Western framework of psychology with the Eastern teachings of personal wisdom.” She has also been an astrologer for more than 10 years. A lifelong student of all things esoteric, Gia says her readings are informed by her own experience with the healing arts and her master’s degree in clinical psychology.

Bradford Reed is composing the score for Ugly Americans on Comedy Central. He continues to perform on the pencilina (an original instrument of his own design) and has produced numerous records out of his studio in Brooklyn. He’s also showing his night photos of Brooklyn around New York City. More info at pencilina.com.

’89

Class correspondent Lisa DeTora, detoral@lafayette.edu When Adam Snyder isn’t looking after Jack, his four-year-old son, or working on film and TV sets in New York City, he is rebuilding the transmission on his ’65 Oldsmobile Wagon and fixing up a barn in Round Top, New York, with his friend Bradford Reed ’91.

’88

Tena Cohen began teaching Spanish at Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene in the fall of 2009 and is “happy as a clam!”

’87

Class correspondent David Avallone, ednoon@aol.com On Thanksgiving 2009, Susan Lyne, Bill Stavru, and Al Varady ’88 converged at Heather Mahoney’s new pad in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her daughter, Mona. Susan is creatively balancing being the single mom of her three-year-old son, Emmett McPhail Reardon, with being a real estate broker in Tivoli while working on her 100+-year-old farmhouse in Germantown, New York.

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Pat Ryan graduated from Golden Gate Law School in May with a juris doctor degree, and sat for the California bar exam at the end of July.

Unfortunately, they don’t release the results of that quiz until November.

’86

25th Reunion: May 20–22, 2011 Staff contact: Anne Canzonetti ’84, 845-758-7187 or canzonet@bard.edu Class correspondent Chris LeGoff, cak64@comcast.net Jim Browne continues to work with his independent film distribution company, Argot Pictures, which specializes in small-scale theatrical releases for documentaries—www.argotpictures.com. Additionally, after four years of working on programming for the Tribeca Film Festival, he has a new position as programmer for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (www. abudhabifilmfestival.ae/).

Delia Mellis “finally” completed her Ph.D. in U.S. history in 2008, and has been teaching in diverse settings, behind the ivy-covered walls of Barnard College and inside razor-wire fences for the Bard Prison Initiative. After many years in Brooklyn, she moved back to the Hudson Valley and lives in “sweet, lovely Rhinecliff.” She also teaches in the L&T program on campus, which always brings back moments—intense, sublime, ridiculous—from her own undergraduate August at Bard. Many of the people who make her current life so great are the same ones she ran with at Bard in the ’80s (and other alumni/ae with whom she has since intersected), which she believes is, among other things, a testament to the grace and significance of that place, those times.

’85

Marylin Quint-Rose had a work accepted in Bellwether 2010, a national sculpture competition held at City Hall Plaza Galleries in Bellevue, Washington, during the summer. The piece, Celestial Sphere in Utopia, is a four-foot, egg-crate sculpture. To see it and more, visit Quint-Rose.com.

’83

Tim Long wrote, directed, and produced the documentary Key West: Bohemia in the Tropics. The half-hour program, which was coproduced

30th Reunion, Class of 1980

by Miami PBS station WLRN, tells the story of how a radical New Deal economic experiment during the Great Depression turned the Florida island city into a tourist town.

National Cancer Information Call Center” has been accepted for poster presentation at the International Psycho-Oncology Society’s 12th World Congress of Psycho-Oncology, to be held in Quebec in May 2011.

’82

’73

Alice Knapp writes that “after several years of hollering about the issue,” she is pleased to report that her cohorts in Maine’s Consumers for Affordable Healthcare Coalition (CAHC) embraced her proposal to push legislation that would eliminate annual and lifetime aggregate health insurance benefit caps in Maine. The issue became CAHC’s legislative priority this past session. Alice wrote the original bill, got her legislator to sponsor it, and joined in meetings with legislative leadership to lobby its passage. The bill eventually passed the Maine House by an astonishing vote of 140-0 and was signed into law in March, making it the first such state law in the nation. (Alice notes that the federal health care reform bill prohibits lifetime caps but permits “reasonable” annual caps, “as if such a thing were possible.”) Truly universal, equitable health insurance remains Alice’s top priority, and her efforts continue to be focused at the state level.

’81

30th Reunion: May 20–22, 2011 Staff contact: Anne Canzonetti ’84, 845-758-7187 or canzonet@bard.edu

’80

At this year’s New York Press Association (NYPA) Better Newspaper Contest Awards (for the calendar year 2009), Mike Heller won first place and second place in the feature photo category, and first place in the picture story category. The newspaper he works for, Sag Harbor Express, won second place in the photographic excellence category— an award he can take only partial credit for, “but it feels good just the same!” This is the third year in a row that Mike has received awards from NYPA.

’75

Pamela Villars and Kevin Stein’s “Evaluation of an End-of-Life Peer Support Group Intervention for Cancer Information Specialists at a

Howie Good’s latest chapbook, Anomalies, was published by FootHills Publishing this year.

’71

40th Reunion: May 20–22, 2011 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu

’69

Class correspondent Elaine Marcotte Hyams, eshyams@yahoo.com Ellen Giordano Cartledge now has her “dream” job—marketing and special events director at the Kent Memorial Library in Kent, Connecticut. She writes: “Bard was very challenging. Afterwards, whenever I faced a difficult situation, I knew one thing: ‘I survived Bard—I can survive anything.’ Bard gave me a framework to view the world, and many enduring friendships that have enriched my life.”

Tina Chisena participated in a panel discussion about Japanese cloisonné at the Walters Gallery in Baltimore. At the Artists-Blacksmiths Association of North America Conference in Memphis, she was part of a collaborative project that demonstrated engraving and other metalworking skills. She sells enamelware through the Enamelists Gallery at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. To see some of her work, visit her website, www.tinachisena.com.

Elaine Marcotte Hyams writes that she remembers “Backgrounds of Western Tradition; Heinrich Blücher looking like the wisest meerkat of all; raiding the apple orchards on River Road every fall; ‘seminars’ Down the Road with Toomey, Oja, and Lensing; moderating twice; Tom Green lecturing behind a haze of cigar smoke; Elizabeth Stambler’s gentle personality and fiercely independent mind in The Bible as Literature; and several good friends.”

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35th Reunion, Class of 1975 Pierre Joris’s book of essays, Justifying the Margins (Salt Publishing, London), was published in 2009, and two new books of poems are imminent. Pierre and his wife, Nicole Peyrafitte, have moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Follow them on http://pierrejoris.com/blog/. They are happy to report that their son Miles entered Bard this fall.

Linda Sitnick (Harrison) has volunteered for the past five years at the American Ballet Theatre in New York City and regularly participates in aqua aerobics at the 14th Street Y. She traveled to California to welcome her first grandchild. She remains in touch with her Blithewood hallmate, Carla Sayers Tabourne.

Gene Kahn writes, “I count as Year One of my adult life the day I set foot onto the Bard campus. I warn people that as a Bard graduate I ask lots of questions, so expect me to be a difficult case. If they can stand me after that, we usually get along pretty well.”

Ingrid Spatt is an associate professor of education at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York.

Roseanne Kantor is retiring after 25 years of teaching in New Jersey. A member of an artists’ cooperative, she exhibited some paintings and cutouts in a local restaurant and in the cooperative’s gallery. From Bard she remembers Robert Kelly, who “took me seriously while laughing at my ideas.”

Kadi Kiiss’s one year at Bard was important, personally and professionally. In 1966, Bardian Lhary Meyer introduced her to Lenny Lipton, coauthor of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Lenny used his royalties to found StereoGraphics Corporation, a company dedicated to 3-D. In Kadi’s 30-year career as a graphic artist, her projects included product logos and manuals for StereoGraphics, whose pioneering technologies and products are now used by NASA, medical science, and, yes, movies— Avatar and others.

Judy Beasley Mauran notes, “I loved Bard classes, Down the Road, fighting with Chris [her husband, Chris Mauran] . . . I had a wonderful time. However, I did not appreciate my Bard experience enough. I wish I had done more, been more open and flexible, experimented more. I still feel the impact of the entire experience. Bard turned my thinking around and continues to make me consider things in a different light.”

Dennis and Sharon Piendak write: “As a trained emergency first responder in Dracut, Massachusetts, Dennis runs shelters in emergencies and does disaster relief, medical triage, search and rescue after fires, and missing persons inquiries. Sharon does dress designs for weddings, proms, school show choirs, and theater groups. Their two grandchildren keep them busy as well.”

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Carla Sayers Tabourne writes: Love the spring weather Hate the political climate Glad for the first step in healthcare reform Sad about inaccuracies and scare tactics Concerned but not consumed and I’m Still fighting the good fight!

Devorah Tarrow recalls, “A great Bard memory was learning about the British empiricists in Professor Toomey’s terrific Backgrounds of Western Tradition course. I utilize ‘Backgrounds’ every day in my work and writing at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.”

Toni-Michelle Travis (Chapman), who teaches government and politics at George Mason University, has been included in Who’s Who in American Politics. She is also an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University for 2010–11.

Norman Weinstein writes: Thresholds, count them, Robert Kelly’s alchemical poetry brought me in, then geography, Blithewood, first love, walks on Hudson ice shaking, Pierre Joris translations, Tom Meyer’s lyricism, then over all too soon, lobster morning after graduation. & initiations into libraries of sex, & lingering doubt of any solid ground but water

40th Reunion, Class of 1970 Emilie Grieg Wolitzer’s one year at Bard is “still a vivid mélange of memories—sneaking into Tewksbury Hall after curfew, dance classes in a converted stable, turning 18 over my first pitcher of beer, intense German and Russian classes. It provided a foundation for my 34-year career teaching high school English and foreign language.”

’68

Class correspondents Diana Hirsch Friedman, wowdiana1@gmail.com Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com Stephen Kessler received the 2010 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Kessler was honored for his translation of Luis Cernuda’s Desolation of the Chimera (White Pine Press, 2009). A poet, publisher, and journalist who divides his time between Santa Cruz and Gualala, California, Kessler had two other books published in the past year—a translation of sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin), and a novel, The Mental Traveler (Greenhouse Review Press—see Books by Bardians in this issue).

Barbara Crane Wigren has started a new business as a residential organizer. Check out her website for information on her company: www.thewellorderedlife.com. She hopes to hear from any Bardians who need her services.

’67

Class correspondent Pamela Dendy Knap, pdknap@earthlink.net Don Moore was elected to a two-year term as president of the Hudson Common Council, one of three citywide elected officials of Hudson, New York.

Marika Glixman Taaffe lives in Massachusetts with her “mad scientist” husband. Her daughter, Sonya, is a classicist with numerous fiction publications; her son, Colin, is a mechanical engineer and sculptor. She writes: “Bard was perfect for me; every spring I send lilies-of-the-valley to Marion Hartung ’66 and fondly remember going ‘down the road’ for dinner.”

’65

Class correspondent Charlie Hollander, chas956@rcn.com

’63

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D., is a professor emerita of psychology and the author of 15 books and thousands of articles. She cofounded the Association for Women in Psychology, National Women’s Health Network, and International Committee for Women of the Wall. She is a new grandmother, of Lily Diana Chesler. She may be reached via her website, www.phyllis-chesler.com.

’61

Marilyn Fish-Glynn had a solo show of her photographs in May at the SoHo Photo Gallery in Manhattan.

’51

60th Reunion: May 20–22, 2011 Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu

’45

Dr. Stanley L. Falk writes, “Bard has certainly changed since my student days. There were 140 of us boys in 1942, down to only 40 in 1944, on a small campus with a dedicated faculty. Developments since then have been remarkable, thanks to the efforts of President Botstein and the continued excellence of Bard’s faculty.”

’40

Class correspondent Dick Koch ’40, dickkoch88@gmail.com or 510-526-3731 Dick Koch made it back to Bard for his 70th reunion and says it was well worth the effort. He writes, “It was a great weekend, and the weather cooperated. As part of the celebration, I brought my class ring, lovingly saved all these many years, and had the pleasure of donating it to the College at the meeting of the Board of Governors of the Alumni/ae Association. Question: will I make my 75th? Will I even make my 71st?

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45th Reunion, Classes of 1964–1965 Time will tell. In any case, let’s adhere to what’s written on a mantle in the basement of Hegeman: Floreat Collegium Bardianum, olim Sancti Stephani.” (Editor’s note: The translation is “May Bard College, once St. Stephen’s, flourish.”)

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts ’10

Alisa Baremboym, Thomas Torres Cordova ’07, Caitlin Keogh ’11, and Graham Anderson had an untitled four-person exhibition at 179 Canal Street in Manhattan, from March 12 to April 4. Anderson and Keogh showed delicately handcrafted furniture pieces, while Baremboym and Cordova’s mixed-media video installations, sculptures, and photos used digital/material juxtapositions to explore the intersections between technology and popular media.

Lauren Luloff was part of a group show at Triple Base (San Francisco) Gallery’s New York Pop-Up Gallery in March. The 5,000-square-foot exhibition space in Tribeca housed painting, drawing, sculpture, and video art by 11 emerging artists from San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.

Oraib Toukan’s The Equity Is in the Circle is included in the 11th Istanbul Biennial, which runs through November 8. She had a fall 2009 residency at Delfina Foundation in London, giving talks at Delfina, London College of Communication, and InIva, and received a production grant from Brussels-based Young Arab Theater Fund for work on Trying Nation States. She was also featured in Kiosk, a project/exhibition organized by David Horvitz ’11 in May at Golden Parachutes in Berlin (the exhibition also had work by Lucy Raven, Bard ’09).

’09

Biswamit Dwibedy had his first poetry collection, Ozalid, published in April by 1913 Press (see Books by Bardians, this issue). He now works for the India Foundation for the Arts in Bangalore.

’08

Debra Baxter’s 2009 show at Howard House in Seattle was reviewed in the May issue of Sculpture magazine.

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’07

Corinne Botz had a book of photographs and texts, Haunted Houses, published by Monacelli Press, an imprint of Random House.

Chris Curreri was in a group show in Toronto titled Restricted. The February exhibition presented work that examined the myriad gestures of the human form, investigating issues relating to sexuality, corporeality, and the psychological realm.

Paolo Javier has two books forthcoming: the feeling is actual (creature press, 2010) and Megton Gasgan Krakoom (Cy Gist Press, 2010).

His radio play, Wolfgang Amadeus Bigfoot, was staged as part of Semiospectacle: A Literary Revue at Performance Space 122 in March.

He cocurated P||R||O||J||E||C||T||I||O||N||S, a live film narration series at the Bowery Poetry Club in May, and was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts in August.

’06

Munro Galloway gave a talk at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, in May, in conjunction with a show of paintings and prints at Ohio State University.

Anna Vitale is at work on a Ph.D. in literary studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For the last two-and-a-half years, she has taught creative writing at Eastern Michigan University. This year, she gave several readings: in Detroit with Avery School writing faculty cochair Anselm Berrigan; at the Totally Awesome Fest in Ypsilanti; and at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. She had several poems published in West Wind Review and Wolf in a Field, and Mondo Bummer published her book Breaststa. She coedits the online audio journal at textsound.org.

’05

Amra Brooks had her novella California published by Teenage Teardrops Press. The story, about growing up on the West Coast in the mid 1970s and early 1990s with divorced parents who are posthippie punk rockers, resists a linear coming-of-age narrative and allows memory to serve as the organizing principle, creating a space for the reader to move forward and backward at the same time. The California native recently relocated to Pennsylvania, where she teaches writing at Muhlenberg College.

55th and 50th Reunion, Classes of 1955 and 1958–1961

’04

Adriana Farmiga continues to serve as a programming adviser to the nonprofit La Mama Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village. She is also collaborating artistically with Academy Award–nominated actress Vera Farmiga on an up-and-coming independent film titled Higher Ground.

Allison Gildersleeve had a two-person show with Erik Jeor at Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York, that ran from April 27 to May 29.

Stanya Kahn presented an exhibition, It’s Cool, I’m Good, at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects from March 13 to April 24, 2009.

Diane Torr’s new book Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance, coauthored by Steven Bottoms, was published in June

by University of Michigan Press. Man for a Day, a feature film on Diane’s work by Berlin filmmaker Katarina Peters, premieres in October at the 53rd International Leipzig Documentary Film Festival.

’03

Samuael Topiary premiered her epic performance piece Landscape with the Fall of Icarus at Dixon Place Theater in Manhattan on May 18.

The piece exposes the symbolic and poetic resonances between the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus and the legacy of contemporary culture’s most mythological empire, New York City. The show, directed by two-time Bessie Award winner Miguel Gutierrez, then toured California, and will play at New York’s Abrons Arts Center from November 11 to 20.

’01

Michelle Handelman’s four-screen video installation Dorian, a Cinematic Perfume premiered at Participant Inc. in New York City in May 2009, and was also included in Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from February to April. The MIT exhibition, which explored cross-dressing and its centrality to the development of the current avant-garde, featured videos, installations, photographs, and performances, and was favorably reviewed in the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, and other media. Handelman also showed Blood Sisters, her feature documentary on the leather-dyke scene, at the Brattle Theatre in February. Dorian will be reinstalled at Art-ClaimsImpulse, Berlin, and Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas.

60th and 70th Reunions, Classes of 1950 and 1940

(left to right): Brandon Grove ’50 and his guest, Nancy Ely-Raphel; Richard Koch ’40; Anne Rice and her husband, John Rice ’50; Naomi Rothfield ’50 and her husband, Lawrence Rothfield

Holly Lynton has a solo exhibition at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, this October. She also participated in an exhibition this summer at the Storefront Artists Project gallery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which was curated by Mass MoCA curator Susan Cross.

A little over a dozen years ago Jennifer Riley became part of the Bard community, moved home and studio to New York City, continued exhibiting her work, began writing art criticism, and last year started curating shows. She thanks all of the faculty and peers that she met in Annandale who continue to support and encourage her endeavors.

’93

Leslie Fry completed a public commission in Tampa in April: an outdoor sculpture in cast stone titled Nest Builder.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy ’09

Taryn Morris completed her first year in the ecology doctoral program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She plans to conduct research in her home country of South Africa—specifically, in the Cape Floral region of the Western Cape, which supports one of the richest diversities of flora in the world. Her research will enhance understanding of how anthropogenic pressures, such as the introduction of invasive alien plant species, can influence diversity, structure, and functioning of this and other unique and fragile ecosystems around the world. Taryn is a recipient of the Schlumberger Foundation’s prestigious Faculty for the Future fellowship, awarded to women academics in science and engineering from developing and emerging countries.

’08

Takuma Mohri is a policy analyst for Japan NUS CO., Ltd., in the Global Environment Unit. He periodically attends the Meeting of Parties to the 1972 London Convention and the 1996 London Protocol, working to build a framework of domestic regulations that transpose these treaties.

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’07

Michael Foster is the biology educator in the Youth Initiatives division of the Education Department at the American Museum of Natural History. He creates curriculum, designs courses, and teaches in the areas of biodiversity conservation and ecology for high school and undergraduate learners. In addition, he helps museum scientists improve their mentoring skills and develop recruitment methods that reach increasing numbers of traditionally underrepresented students.

Kristen Wilson is project director of youth and human development at Cornell Cooperative Extension, Ulster County, New York. She directs A Healthy Kingston for Kids, an initiative of the 4-H Youth Development Project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The initiative aims to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic in Kingston, through environmental and policy change.

’04

Jon Griesser is vice president of Spring Hill Solutions, LLC, an environmental consulting firm based in Burlington, Vermont, that specializes in carbon management, clean energy, and business sustainability. Serving as project manager, he helped the city of Burlington complete its Climate Action Plan. When he’s not busy at work or finishing his M.B.A. at Champlain College, Jon is an active community volunteer. He serves on the steering committee for the Burlington Walk and Bike Council, and was recognized with a Vermont 2010 Bicycle and Pedestrian Volunteer Award for his efforts to improve infrastructure and outreach.

’92

Deborah Meyer DeWan, a graduate of Bard CEP’s predecessor, the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, is the deputy director of the Ashokan Foundation and director of development and community relations for the Ashokan Center in Olivebridge, New York. She was brought on staff to help with the transformation of the former Ashokan Field Campus into a 21st-century learning center for sustainable living, artistic expression, and community building under the visionary leadership of renowned musicians Jay Ungar and Molly Mason.

Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture ’07

Jennifer Klos, an associate curator at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, cocurated Sketch to Screen: The Art of Hollywood Costume, which was on view from May 6 through August 15. The exhibition included more than 85 original costumes, design materials, and sketches that explored the vital artistic contribution of costume designers to film over the past century. Having studied costume history at the BGC, Jennifer contributed her knowledge to the creation of the museum’s first fashion exhibition.

Ezra Shales’s book, Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era, a revision of his Ph.D. dissertation, was published by Rivergate Books, an imprint of Rutgers University Press, this summer. The cover was designed by Doug Clouse ’07. Ezra’s book describes the New Jersey city at the dawn of the 20th century, and the ways its industrial production inspired the public library to found

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the Newark Museum Association—a project in which cultural literacy was intertwined with civics and consumption. According to Edward S. Cooke Jr. of Yale University, Ezra’s “deft handling of a wide variety of source material—from visual and material culture to performance culture, from educational philosophy to economic policy, and from craft romanticism to scientific management—distinguishes this book as an important contribution to design history, used in the broadest and best sense.”

’06

Daniella Ohad Smith was a guest lecturer at the school of design at Haifa Institute of Technology in Israel for the 2010 spring semester. Her talks focused on Israeli domestic culture from 1948 to 1977, and her work in this area was featured in a profile published in Globes, Israel’s leading financial newspaper. She also published an article based on her Ph.D. dissertation, “Hotel Design in British Mandate Palestine: Modernism and the Zionist Vision,” in the March 2010 Journal of Israeli History.

’05

Charlotte Nicklas received a Ph.D. from the University of Brighton, U.K., in May. The title of her dissertation was “Splendid Hues: Color, Dyes, Everyday Science, and Women’s Fashion, 1840–1875.”

’04

Jennifer Scanlan, an associate curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, cocurated Craft Revolution: The American Studio Movement, 1945–1969, which ran from June 23 to September 19. She is also an instructor in the Historic Preservation Program at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, teaching courses on the history of American interiors. Additionally, this summer she taught a course titled “The Meaning of Handmade: Craft Practices in Contemporary Art and Design” at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

’00

Ayesha Abdur-Rahman is enrolled at the Postgraduate Institute of Archeology in Colombo, Sri Lanka, as an M.Phil./Ph.D. student. She writes that she is excited to be back researching and studying the evolution of furniture in Sri Lanka. In November 2009 Ayesha attended the second annual Workshop on the Decorative Arts in Colombo. She is working on a digital documentation project on the decorative arts of Sri Lanka, mainly colonial period furniture and brassware vessels.

Anne Eschapasse is executive assistant in charge of special exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). She is preparing a Jean Paul Gaultier retrospective, which will tour the United States and Europe in 2011–2012. She is also coordinating the reinstallation of the museum’s decorative arts galleries, scheduled to reopen in the fall of 2011. The MMFA has one of the richest modern and contemporary decorative arts collections in North America.

Rick Kinsel is executive director of the Vilcek Foundation, which was established to recognize the significant contributions of immigrants to the American arts and sciences. Located in New York City, the Foundation achieves this objective by awarding the annual Vilcek Prizes and by hosting immigrant artists at its gallery. In spring 2010, the Foundation launched an exhibition based on the international hit television series Lost, which focused on the diverse immigrant and firstgeneration talent behind the series. Besides Kinsel, two other Bardians

were involved with the exhibition: Joyce Li, Bard ’06, who helped coordinate the media outreach, and Edith Johnson ’11, who documented costumes, props, and ephemera from the series.

’98

Alicia Priore is executive assistant to Frederick W. Beinecke II, president of Antaeus Enterprises, Inc.

Center for Curatorial Studies ’09

Fionn Meade, curator at the SculptureCenter and an independent curator/critic in New York City, curated Entr’acte, an exhibition at the Galerie Catherine Bastide in Brussels that was essentially a revision and expansion of his CCS thesis project. At the SculptureCenter, Fionn curated Knight’s Move, a survey of new work from New York–based artists. He also collaborated in the organization of a project titled Nachleben at The Wyoming Room on the Lower East Side.

’08

Vincenzo de Bellis, cofounder of Peep-Hole in Milan, curated Gabriel Kuri—Soft Information in Your Hard Facts at Museion in Bolzano, Italy.

The exhibition presented recent works that used a vast range of materials, such as plastic, cement, stone, chipboard, nylon, and various readymades altered only by their contextual associations.

Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, a partner in Dorsch Gallery in Miami, participated in this year’s VOLTA art fair, which focused on current art production and relevant contemporary positions.

Milena Hoegsberg, an independent curator in New York City, curated Nanna Debois Buhl: Looking for Donkeys at Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Canada, where Ryan Doherty ’07 is curator. The exhibition documented Debois Buhl’s recent body of works, which examine traces of Denmark’s colonial past.

Terri Smith, an independent curator living in Connecticut, curated Beside Himself—Exhibiting Male Anxiety, on view at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon, in May. The exhibition combined art and cinema with everyday objects and fabricated vignettes to explore how the relationship between masculinity and anxiety manifests itself in cultural production.

Niko Vicario is enrolled in a Ph.D. program titled “History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art” at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did a curatorial residency this summer in Berlin at Program, Initiative for Art and Architecture. Niko and Ute Meta Bauer edited Engaged: 20 Years of the MIT Visual Arts Program, a DVD of moving image work and documentation of other projects that was published

by ASPECT magazine.

’07

After seven years in Manhattan, Özkan Cangüven has moved back to Istanbul, where he is codirector of Rampa Istanbul, a new gallery of contemporary art.

Max Hernandez-Calvo is in Spain at the Universidad de Málaga, where he is working on interdisciplinary research projects with the Economics Department.

Ruba Katrib, assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, curated Cory Arcangel: The Sharper Image—Arcangel’s first U.S. solo museum show—in March. The exhibition featured 30 of Arcangel’s multimedia works, which always appear to radiate a liquid-crystal halation.

’06

Montserrat Albores Gleason, an independent curator, curated Lynne Cooke. 3 Shows, 1993.1999.2007 at Petra in Mexico City, where she lives.

The show examined the curatorial practice of Cooke, and documented three of the exhibitions she curated in the years cited in the title.

Geir Haraldseth, writer and independent curator, is back in Oslo after a curatorial residency at Capacete in São Paulo. Last spring Geir organized a two-person show in Malmö, Sweden, which featured Zachary Kitnick, Bard ’07, who also participated in the thesis projects of Jen Mergel ’05 and Summer Guthery ’09.

Zeljka Himbele-Kozul and William Heath cocurated Mercury Retrograde: Animated Realities at Big Medium in Austin, Texas. This is the second exhibition they have done together—as Zeljka put it in an online interview, “It’s become an annual curatorial summer camp for both of us.”

’05

Cecilia Alemani, curator of special projects at Artissima in Turin, Italy, was the managing editor of I’m Not There: A Satellite Publication of the 8th Gwangju Biennal, a sourcebook edited by biennale artistic director Massimiliano Gioni.

Lyra Kilston, formerly an editorial researcher at Modern Painters magazine, made the big move back to Los Angeles (where she grew up) to become managing editor for East of Borneo, a new online publishing initiative under the auspices of CalArts. The site features commissioned essays and media on contemporary and postwar art in the L.A. area.

Lyra works alongside Stacey Allan ’04, editor of East of Borneo.

Erin Riley-Lopez, an independent curator in New York City, organized Untitled, an exhibition at The Center for Worker Education, The Halls at Bowling Green. Untitled featured the work of photographers Jimmy Fountain and Catherine Kunkemueller.

Pelin Uran, an independent curator in Istanbul, and Camilla Pignatti Morano, an independent curator in Rome, cocurated This Story Is Not Ready for Its Footnotes at Rome’s Ex Elettrofonica.

’03

Ingrid Chu is a partner and codirector of Forever & Today, which presents storefront projects in New York City. In April, Forever & Today presented an installation conceived by Heather Rowe, a sculptor, and Kevin Zucker, a painter, that was reviewed by the New Yorker.

Jimena Acosta Romero, an independent curator living in Mexico City, is part of the curatorial team of Present Future, a special section of Artissima 16 in Turin, Italy, dedicated to emerging talents. She curated Las Líneas de La Mano at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáreo and wrote an essay for the catalogue. In January and February 2009, she cocurated criteria . . . there is no such place as away just out of sight . . ., an exhibition about sustainability, at Columbia College Chicago.

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’02

Cassandra Coblentz is an associate curator at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) in Arizona. She is working with local architects on a major new installation, which will be the first of a series of such exhibitions at the museum. Cassandra also curated Looking Through the Other End of a Telescope at SMoCA. After six years at Yale University, Jenni Sorkin has completed her Ph.D. in the history of art and has accepted a Postdoctoral Pacific Standard Time Residential Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Jenni is revising her book manuscript, Live Form: Gender and the Performance of Craft, 1940–1970, for publication, and helping to organize a symposium in conjunction with the collection of 20+ shows on modernism in Los Angeles slated for the fall of 2011.

’01

Dermis Péres León, an independent curator and critic in Madrid, has been invited to participate in Manifesta 8 Murcia, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art that is scheduled to open October 1. Khaled Hafez, an Egyptian artist, invited Dermis to collaborate on his project with Martina Corgnatti, the Italian critic and curator. Dermis also participated in the 17th African Film Festival at the New Museum in New York.

’00

Mercedes Vicente, curator of contemporary art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand, presented Darcy Lange: Video Works at Electronic Arts Intermix in New York City.

Jeffrey Walkowiak, codirector of the Sara Metzer Gallery in New York City, curated To Believe for Visual AIDS, which was on view in June at La Mama La Galleria.

’98

SAW Video and the National Gallery of Canada presented Sarah Cook at the National Gallery Lecture Hall to launch her latest book and monthlong writing residency in Ottawa. Sarah is the coeditor of CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), and an independent curator and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sunderland and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England.

’97

Brian Wallace, curator at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, curated a retrospective of the career of Carolee Schneemann, Bard ’59, which ran through mid-July. The exhibition received a glowing review from the New York Times (May 27, 2010).

’96

Regine Basha, an independent curator in New York City, had back-toback shows opening this summer: Seedings, at Dallas Contemporary in Texas, and Not A Place, An Outlook, a curated film series at Governor’s Island in New York. She also cocurated Substitute Teacher at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

After 10 years as head of public programs at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, Elena Pellegrini returned to school to obtain an M.S. Ed. in higher education administration at CUNY Baruch College.

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In Memoriam ’13

Abraham Mendoza, 19, died on August 20, 2010, as the result of a fall while hiking in the Catskills. A sophomore and a peer counselor at Bard, he was a graduate of Lane Technical High School in Chicago. He was pursuing a dual major in chemistry and photography. A play that he coauthored, Sub-Prime Youth, was presented last year by Chicago’s Free Street Theater Company. His survivors include his father, Susano “Ruben” Mendoza; his mother, Evelia Mendoza; and a younger brother, Alexander.

’11

Maka Geller died at her home in New York City on July 6, 2010. She was studying to be a psychologist, and her passion and talent for helping people were confirmed, according to her family, by a great outpouring of testimonials at her funeral service and on her Facebook wall. A voracious reader and a free thinker, she could discuss philosophy for hours on end.

She was a gifted athlete, having been a gymnast since she was a toddler, and often climbed the tallest trees at Bard. She studied and traveled in Japan for several summers, and spoke Japanese fluently. Her survivors include her parents, Daryl and Fujie Geller, and her brother, Shawn.

’06

Emily Brostoff died on May 11, 2010. She majored in philosophy at Bard.

Her survivors include her parents, Leon and Teresa Kissane Brostoff, and her siblings, Noah and Miriam.

’87

Frederick Louis Reynolds died on May 21, 2010. He graduated from Simon’s Rock College of Bard and from Bard, where he majored in American studies. He spent his career as an exotic flower importer with a passion for orchids. His survivors include his mother, Joan Reynolds; his wife, Tammie Guerard Reynolds; his daughters, Teale and Mia, his son, Frederick; and a brother and a sister.

’75

Margaret Murphy Steward, 56, died on March 30, 2010. She was born in Italy, the daughter of a Foreign Service employee. She majored in cinematography at Bard, then went to the University of South Florida for a geology degree; there she met and married oceanographer Robert Steward. She worked as a geologist but found it unfulfilling, and returned to art. She became a photographer, painter, sculptor, and mixed-media artist, once winning a $10,000 prize at a Florida arts festival. In addition to her husband, her survivors include her mother, Olga Murphy Goldsmith, and her daughter, Mirella.

’66

Ingrid Schlecht Walker died on March 5, 2010, at her home in Bethesda, Maryland. A native Washingtonian, she worked in social services and taught English. She was passionate about social justice, travel, and the arts. She was married to fellow D.C. native Bob Walker ’65 for nearly 40 years, until his death in 2006. They met at high school and went on together to Bard, the University of Connecticut, and a life in New England. Her survivors include her son, Christopher.

’65

Allen B. Berzal died on August 1, 2009. He attended Bard and finished his studies at Villanova University in Philadelphia. After a tour in the United States Navy, he returned to the Hudson Valley, where he started out in the family mushroom business. By the end of his career, he owned Nelson Redi Mix Asphalt Plant and Nelson Supply in Saugerties. His survivors include his wife, Catherine, and a daughter, Tasha.

’55

M. Edgar Rosenblum, 78, died on April 18, 2010, in Woodstock, New York. Following his studies at Bard, he went on to a successful career as an arts consultant and theater producer. He was best known for his 26-year tenure as executive director of the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, during which time (1970–96) the theater came into national prominence, producing many plays that eventually enjoyed critical success on Broadway. Partnering with artistic director Arvin Brown, Rosenblum produced The Shadow Box and The Gin Game, both of which won Pulitzer Prizes for drama; the latter play also earned a Tony Award for Jessica Tandy, and another play, The Changing Room, earned a Tony for John Lithgow. In 1991 Rosenblum headed a delegation to the People’s Republic of China, where he forged a bond between the Long Wharf and the Shanghai People’s Art Theatre; he returned to China two years later to mount a touring production (in Chinese) of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Prior to his involvement with the Long Wharf, Rosenblum managed the Woodstock Playhouse and an art gallery, Polari, on the theater’s grounds, from 1960 to 1972. He was the founding president of the National Corporate Theatre Fund, and also served as president of the League of American Regional Theaters and the American Arts Alliance, now known as the Performing Arts Alliance. At the time of his death, he was executive director of the California International Theater Festival.

A great friend of Bard College, Rosenblum served on reunion committees and was active in other alumni/ae events and programs. His survivors include his wife of 50 years, the former Cornelia Hartman; a daughter, Jessica; and a brother, Robert.

Faculty Leslie Scalapino, 66, a beloved faculty member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and a writer whose variegated career saw the publication of more than 30 books of poetry, prose, plays, genrestretching fiction, essays, and collaborative works with visual artists, died on May 28, 2010, in Berkeley, California. She earned a bachelor’s degree in literature at Reed College and a master’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Scalapino taught every summer from 1992 through 2008 in the Avery School’s M.F.A. program.

As a writer, Scalapino was unconstrained by any single format or formula; she was in a state, as she put it, of “continual conceptual rebellion.” Beginning with O and Other Poems (1976), her work was variously influenced by her travels throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe; the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and other modernist and postmodernist writers; Japanese Noh drama; the practice of Zen Buddhism; and the work of such contemporaries as Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, and Alice Notley. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her

selected poems were published by UC Press, Berkeley, in 2008; two posthumous books were released in June and July, and a third—a revised and expanded edition of How Phenomena Appear to Unfold—will appear this fall. In addition to her own work, Scalapino enthusiastically promoted the work of other writers—O Books, the publishing outlet she founded in 1986, released nearly a hundred titles by innovative writers.

Leslie Scalapino is survived by Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years. Two performances of her Noh play Flow—Winged Crocodile were presented in her honor at Poet’s House in New York City on June 19 and 20, followed by a June 21 memorial at The Poetry Project.

Staff Charles “Charlie” Patrick, 86, director of athletics at Bard from 1958 to 1979 and one of the Bard community’s more colorful and cherished members, died on June 10, 2010, in Lakeland, Florida. An accomplished tennis player and a good-humored, inspiring teacher, he almost singlehandedly built up the College’s athletics program at a time when, according to Bard president Leon Botstein, “being physically fit and athletic were not hallmarks of the Bard personality.” Patrick and his wife, June, were long devoted to the College and lived on campus for many years in Hopson Cottage. He was an early recipient of the Bard Medal, the highest award of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association. Upon his retirement, another tribute paid to him was the naming in his honor of his favorite corner of the Faculty Dining Room.

Patrick was instrumental in rescuing the College from a potentially disastrous situation. As Leon Botstein recounts it: “The record should show that Charlie Patrick’s personality and the enormous respect he was accorded in the surrounding communities played crucial roles in shielding Bard from what might have been a catastrophe in the 1970s. Before Vice President Papadimitriou was hired to oversee and modernize the financial structure of the College, day-to-day fiscal management was hardly marked by foresight and good information. During the first year of my presidency, in the fall of 1975, I was startled to discover that a serious cash-flow crisis was imminent. We sought to engage a consortium of banks to refinance the College, but Bard’s reputation for fiscal stability was not strong. It was then that Charlie mentioned that Jack McEnroe, president of the largest bank in the area, later a trustee of the College, was a friend and neighbor. Owing to Charlie’s friendship with Jack, Bard was able to secure the refinancing and was saved from insolvency.”

Born on the Greek island of Lesvos, Charles Patrick moved to Highland, New York, at age 6. He earned a B.A. from SUNY Cortland and an M.A. from Columbia University. A U.S. Army veteran of World War II, he was one of the first members of the United States Professional Tennis Association and served for many years as the staff pro at both the Saratoga Golf and Polo Club and the Indian Creek Club in Miami. Until relatively late in life “he routinely trounced men half his age playing the game he loved and mastered,” reports his daughter Holly. In addition to his wife, his survivors include three daughters—Lynda Patrick, Holly Kotiadis, and Wendy Lorenzo—and a son, Chuck. A memorial service was held on August 6, 2010, in the Blithewood Library.

Doris J. Tremper, 73, died on March 23, 2010. A lifelong resident of Dutchess County, she was employed by Bard for many years in what was then known as the Accounts Payable office. Her survivors include her husband of 47 years, Lawrence P. Tremper; a daughter; and a son.

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FACULTYNOTES Susan Aberth, associate professor of art history, published a review, “Zurcidos Invisibles: Alan Glass, Construcciones y Pinturas, 1950–2008,” in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas and an article, “Isabel De Obaldia: The Law of the Jungle,” in Neues Glas/New Glass.

Thomas Bartscherer, assistant professor of humanities, published “To Read What Has Never Been Written” in Lothar Baumgarten: Seven Sounds, Seven Circles (Kunsthaus Bregnez, 2009). He was appointed consulting editor of The International Literary Quarterly and named to the editorial board of The Point.

Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies, edited and introduced a new reader, Ethnonationalism in India (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Daniel Berthold, professor of philosophy, published “Passing-over: The Death of the Author in Hegel’s Philosophy” in Southern Journal of Philosophy.

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In Washington, D.C., he participated in a policy summit for New York State college presidents organized by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). He delivered the Commencement address at Rye Neck High School in Mamaroneck, New York, and “The Politics of Art and Culture: Education and Democracy” at Grinnell College, Iowa, for the Scholars’ Convocation series cosponsored by Grinnell’s Liberal Arts in Prison Program. For the annual Lyrica Society Dialogues, sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, he gave a keynote address on Jews and the 19th-century choral tradition. Botstein also participated in two symposia: “Wagner and Anti-Semitism,” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and “Between Hope and History: When Disaster Strikes,” at the New York Institute for the Humanities, where he spoke about the relationship between music and suffering. He appeared on The Open Mind, a public affairs TV show, and on Bloomberg Radio’s On the Economy.

Jonathan Brent, Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature, published “Inside the Gulag Museum” in The New Criterion.

He was appointed executive director and CEO of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. His documentary film based on his book Stalin’s Last Crime won the Terre(s) d’Histoire Award in 2010.

Robert J. Culp, associate professor of history, received a New Perspectives in Chinese Culture and Society fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The fellowship supports a research conference, “Intellectuals, Professions, and Knowledge Production in Twentieth-Century China.”

Laurie Dahlberg, professor of art history and photography, has an article, “At Home with the Camera: Modeling Masculinity in Early French Photography,” in the anthology Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1780–1914 (Ashgate, 2011).

Mark Danner, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, delivered “Torture and the Forever War: Living in the State of Exception” as part of the 2010 Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Stanford University.

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Projects by four students in a clinical psychology research lab taught by Beth S. Gershuny, associate professor of psychology, were accepted for presentations at the Eastern Psychological Association conference in New York City.

Jacqueline Susan Goss, associate professor of film and electronic arts, screened a documentary, Stranger Comes to Town, for the Creative Capital Foundation film showcase at the Museum of Modern Art, from April 30 to June 6.

This past summer Marka Gustavsson, visiting assistant professor of music, performing with the Colorado Quartet, premiered a new string quartet by Keith Fitch in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; a piano quartet by Daniel Godfrey at Bennington’s Chamber Music of the Northeast; and a string sextet by Eric Chasalow at the Portland Chamber Festival.

Kenneth Haig, assistant professor of political studies, was selected by the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation as one of the handful of “new generation” Japan scholars who will spend part of the next two years meeting with officials in the new administrations of the United States and Japan to discuss common policy dilemmas and new directions for U.S.–Japan relations.

Peter Hutton, professor of film, was awarded a grant in filmmaking from the Peter S. Reed Foundation.

Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, received a National Science Foundation grant as principal investigator for the project “Investigating a rapidly emerging epidemic of babesiosis in upstate New York.” Coinvestigators of the project are Richard Ostfeld and Michael Tibbetts, associate professor of biology. She was also one of five specialists to be interviewed by the New York Times for the July 27 article, “More Ticks, More Misery.”

Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger, faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, collaboratively known as eteam, received 2010 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships.

Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature, gave a talk, “The Given and the Chosen: A Meditation,” in February at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. Her talk, presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, was part of SVA’s Spring 2010 “Art in the First Person” lecture series.

Kristin Lucas, assistant professor of studio arts, participated in “Seven on Seven,” an event that paired seven technologists with seven artists for one day and challenged them to develop something new through a collaborative process. Their ideas were unveiled in April at the New Museum in New York City.

Barbara Luka, assistant professor of psychology, presented research on cognition and figurative language at the Fourth International Conference on Cognitive Science in Tomsk, Russia, in June. Her paper, “Do emotion words prime figurative meanings? An investigation of anger, fear, happiness, and sadness,” coauthored by Eszter Nucz (PIE ’07–’08), Patrick Bova ’11, and Anna Katsman ’11, will be published in the conference proceedings. Luka also received a grant from the Northeast Center for Special Care for two student research internships to study recovery from traumatic brain injury.

Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture, was presented with France’s highest cultural honor, the insignia of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in a ceremony held at the French Embassy in New York in April.

Medrie MacPhee, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence, had a solo exhibition of new paintings, What It Is, at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York, from May 27 to July 2.

Robert W. McGrail, assistant professor of computer science and mathematics, published an article, “On the Algebraic Structure of Declarative Programming Languages,” in the Elsevier journal Theoretical Computer Science.

Emily McLaughlin, assistant professor of chemistry, received an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Undergraduate New Investigator grant for her project “Development of novel methods toward the synthesis of non-proteinogenic amino acids and other biologically relevant nitrogen containing scaffolds.” She was also awarded a grant from the CEM Corporation to promote microchemistry.

Edie Meidav, visiting assistant professor of writing, was awarded a 2010–11 fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation to work on a new novel.

In May Bradford Morrow, professor of literature, spoke on a panel, “Artistic Witness to Atrocity,” with Edward Hirsch and Ian Buruma, Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, at a conference, “The Wisdom of the Survivor,” at Pace University. Morrow’s essay “A Wild Bookery” is included in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, chronotopes and dioramas (Dia Art Foundation, 2010).

Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism, received a grant from Carey Wolchok to finance the development of an undergraduate/faculty seminar, “The Social Vision of Early Christianity and Judaism.” An interview with Neusner, “A utopian document, a utopian law,” appeared in the March 4 edition of the Jerusalem Post.

Bankrupt Greece” in the Financial Times (February 19), and several columns in KATHIMERINI, including “A New ‘New Deal’ for Job Creation” (January 24), “How the Wall Street Investment Banks Sank Greece” (March 7), “The Future of the Euro: Europe’s Threat and Pity” (May 2), and “The European Mega Loan Fund Is No Panacea” (May 16). He delivered a talk, “Economic Outlook for the U.S. and Global Economy,” at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece, in March. He also joined the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Analysis.

John Pilson, visiting assistant professor of photography, screened Frolic and Detour at the Museum of Modern Art from July 21 to August 9 in conjunction with the exhibition series “9 Screens.”

James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, was named the 2010–11 Birkelund Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Romm’s research at the Cullman Center focuses on the moral philosopher Seneca and his pupil Nero, who inherited rule of the Roman Empire at age 16.

Lauren Lynn Rose, associate professor of mathematics, and Gregory Landweber, associate professor of mathematics, received a grant from the National Science Foundation for their project “REU: Site: Bard College Summer Research in Mathematics and Computation.”

Julia Rosenbaum, visiting assistant professor of art history, wrote the text for Fans, a permanent online exhibition at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum. She was awarded a 2010 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship at the Newberry Library.

Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts, received the 2010 Culture Award from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie in September.

Amy Sillman MFA ’95, faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, is the recipient of a 2010–11 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She had a solo exhibition of new works, Transformer (. . . or, how many lightbulbs does it take to change a painting?), at Sikkema, Jenkins & Co. in New York, from April 15 to May 15.

Keith O’Hara, assistant professor of computer science, took part in a collaborative project at the Georgia Institute of Technology. With a National Science Foundation grant, the group will study the use of robotics as a context for learning introductory computing. O’Hara will use a portion of the grant for research at Bard.

Maria Q. Simpson, professor of dance, received an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the setting of the Continuous Replay, a seminal work of the Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company, to be performed by Bard students at the 2011 faculty dance concert.

Lothar Osterburg, visiting associate professor of studio arts, presented a solo exhibition, Architecture of Memory, at ICPNA (Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano) in Lima, Peru, from March 10 to April 18.

Osterburg was awarded one of five 2010 Academy Awards in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

George Tsontakis, Distinguished Composer in Residence, gave an interview in Chronogram about the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, which performed short works by five promising young composers at Woodstock’s Colony Café in May. The program was the culmination of the first Highpoint Composition Seminar—a forum for emerging talent brought into being by the effort and vision of Tsontakis.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college and president of the Levy Economics Institute, was interviewed in January

by Joe Gomez at KTRH Houston about job elimination during the recession; in February by Paul Davis at American Banker on what impact the Federal Reserve’s raising the discount rate might have on banks; and in May by Ron Fink at CFOZone regarding the powers of the ECB. Papadimitriou published “Promoting Economic Growth and Development through an Employment of Last Resort Policy” in Bulletin of Political Economy (December), “Holiday from the Eurozone Would

Penelope Umbrico, faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, presented solo exhibitions at LMAKprojects in New York (As Is) and at p|m Gallery in Toronto (Broken Sets (ebay)). She also received an Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

Stephen Westfall, faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, is a Rome Prize Fellow and just completed a residency at the American Academy in Rome.

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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 Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer Fiona Angelini Roland J. Augustine + Leon Botstein, President of the College David C. Clapp Marcelle Clements ’69, Alumni/ae 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 Stewart Resnick Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee The Rt. Rev. Mark S. Sisk, Honorary Trustee Martin T. Sosnoff Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52

Image Credits Cover: Cory Weaver Inside front cover–1: ©Scott Barrow 2: Don Hamerman 3: (top to bottom) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00; Scott Barrow; Cory Weaver; Fred Greenspan ’75; courtesy of Thornton Studios 4: Courtesy of Brooke Jude and the Rippel Electron Microscopy Facility at Dartmouth College; image by Brooke Jude with a field emission scanning electron microscope.

7: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 10–15: Karl Rabe 16: Courtesy of Bard College Archives and Special Collections 18–19: Cory Weaver 20–21: ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto 22: Fred Greenspan ’75 23: John Duke Kisch ’76 24: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 25: (top) Courtesy of Thornton Studios; (bottom) Karl Rabe 26: Courtesy of Olivia Carino 28: Chris Kendall ’82 30: Ben Gancsos, Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00, Karl Rabe 31: Karl Rabe 32–35: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 36–39: Ben Gancsos 40–41: Karl Rabe Back cover: Courtesy of Bard College Archives and Special Collections

+ 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, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Kevin Trabucco, Designer ©2010 Bard College. All rights reserved.

Printed at Quality Printing Company, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, using soy-based inks on recycled paper

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JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS Members of the John Bard Society and the Legacy Club Bard salutes the following members of the John Bard Society and the Legacy Club—supporters of the College who believe that future generations should benefit from a Bard education. If you agree, please consider including Bard in your estate plans. This is easily done and will provide you with immense satisfaction, knowing that you are helping to nurture Bardians of the future.

For further information, please contact Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, at pemstein@bard.edu or 845-758-7405. All inquiries are confidential.

John Bard Society

Robert ’53 and Marcia Amsterdam Anonymous Members F. Zeynep Aricanli ’85 Judith Arner ’68 Neil and Nancy Austrian Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Robert C. ’57 and Lynn A. Bassler Stephen H. ’74 and Laurie A. ’74 Berman Laszlo Z. Bito ’60 and Olivia Carino Anne T. Brown Mary S. Burns ’73 George M. Coulter ’51 Peter J. Criswell ’89 Arnold J. ’44 and Seena Davis Michael ’65 and Wenny DeWitt John A. Dierdorff Robert C. Edmonds ’68 Hannah Kit Ellenbogen ’52 Elizabeth W. Ely ’65 Barbara W. Flanagan ’60 Eric W. Goldman ’98 Philip H. ’43 and Sandra Gordon Gail C. Grisetti ’68 Frederick Hammond Helen Hecht Rosalind Smith Holt Marie T. Horhota Mark N. and Helene L. Kaplan Mary-Margaret Kellogg Richard F. Koch ’40 Lenore Latimer Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 William V. Lewit ’52 Gregory Lindin ’43 Steve Lipson ’65 and Serl E. Zimmerman Robert J. MacAlister ’50 Margit Malmstrom ’66 Marie McWilliams Adolfas Mekas Anne M. Morris-Stockton ’69 Mary L. Nathan ’76 Brian Nielsen ’71

Karen Olah ’65 Daniel F. O’Neill ’79 Ellen Kaplan Perless ’63 and Robert Perless Janice H. Rabinowitz ’51 Max Reimerdes Drs. Irwin and M. Susan Richman Anne Atwood Rieder Justus Rosenberg Louise T. Schulman ’51 David E. Schwab II ’52 and Ruth Schwartz Schwab ’52 Herbert J. Schwarz Jr. ’49 Martin Sosnoff Beth Uffner Mildred J. Van Tienen Renee Weiss ’51 Jonathan S. Wyner ’68

Legacy Club

Ruth D. Alpert ’73 Claire Angelozzi ’74 Richard P. Bernhard ’51 Jack A. Blum ’62 Catherine S. Boccard ’85 Katya R. Bock ’67 Jilliene F. Bolker Schenkel ’73 John P. Boylan ’67 Laurel Meinig Brewster ’71 Randy F. Buckingham ’73 Regan Burnham ’69 Elizabeth Cheslak ’73 Richard L. Chorney ’63 Michael Colefax ’63 William B. Coleman Howard F. Dratch ’68 Harvey Edwards ’51 Luisa N. Facciolo ’74 Lilja Finzel ’69 Marilyn Fish-Glynn ’61 Emily Fisher John F. Goldsmith ’40 Ellen Rotman Green ’76 Merry C. Grissom ’94

Barbara Grossman ’73 Hon. Brandon H. Grove Jr. ’50 Rayna M. Harman ’63 Ernest F. Henderson III Barbara S. Herst ’52 Elaine S. Hyams ’69 Joseph O. Iannacone ’93 Grace L. Judson ’79 Jessica Post Kemm ’74 Zina Klapper ’73 and Douglas Zwick ’75 Kevin Klenner ’84 David Kliman ’79 Peter Kosewski ’77 Spyros Kotzambassis ’85 Susan Kramarsky ’73 and Lawrence Merrill ’71 Michael Lawrence ’65 Mrs. Mortimer Levitt Dr. Jeffrey A. Levy ’67 Norman Manea Kyle Maxey ’05 Michael A. McMillen ’68 Ray Mellett ’65 Steven H. Miller ’70 Richard N. Naylor ’68 Thomas K. Noonan Amy J. O’Hara ’92 Dominick J. Reisen ’89 James N. Rosenau ’48 Michael D. Rosse ’55 Penelope I. Rowlands ’73 Dr. Stanley I. Schwartz ’46 Judith A. Shepherd ’60 Lewis J. Silvers Jr. ’50 Eve Caroline Stahlberger ’97 Lisa Foley Stand ’80 Geoffrey Stein ’82 Dr. James A. Storer ’43 Dr. Marika R. Taaffe ’67 Carla Sayers Tabourne ’69 William O. Walker ’52 Norman C. Weinstein ’69 Wendy J. Weldon ’71 Francis Whitcomb ’47

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Celebrating Bard and Bardians ALUMNI/AE DAY Saturday, October 16 Parents Day 1962: checking in at Blithewood

Opening reception for Bard in Black and White: Selections from the Bard College Archives; lunch with Leon Botstein in the President’s House; hands-on classes in science, writing, and photography; alumni vs. varsity men’s basketball game 1-800 BARDCOL or annandaleonline.org/events

FAMILY WEEKEND Friday, Saturday, Sunday, October 22, 23, 24 Campus tours, forums, sample classes, concerts by the American Symphony Orchestra annandaleonline.org/parents St. Stephen’s basketball team, 1933–34