2011 Fall Bardian

Bardian bard college fall 2011

dear bardians, I am honored to be serving as the next president of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s Board of Governors. Having had the pleasure of meeting alumni/ae at events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle over the last few years, I look forward to hearing, from many more of you, how we on the Board of Governors can best connect you with the College today, and with one another.

As our universe continues to grow through Bard’s many satellite programs, we have new opportunities to consider what constitutes a Bardian. The diversity of Bard’s alumni/ae population is one of its great assets—in this issue you will meet individuals serving in the military, as well as recent participants in the Bard-Rockefeller Semester in Science. The faculty remain one of the most important components of the Bard experience: highlights of the many achievements of Norman Manea and Robert Kelly, along with a remembrance of Adolfas Mekas, are also included in the pages that follow.

Many thanks to those of you who give regularly to Bard, and to those who participated in the recent Alum500 Campaign; Bard achieved its goal of 500 new gifts before the close of the fiscal year on June 30.

Alumni/ae donations, regardless of the amount, assist in the larger fund-raising efforts of the institution and demonstrate that a strong community remains interested in and supportive of the College today.

Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 Photo: Jim Marshall

Please plan to join us at the annual Holiday Party, scheduled for December 8 in New York City. It is the perfect time to reconnect with faculty, friends, and classmates. For those of you outside the tristate area, the Holiday Party provides a great excuse to spend a long weekend in the bright lights of New York City. I look forward to seeing you there!

Until then, Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 President, Board of Governors, Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

board of governors of the bard–st. stephen’s alumni/ae association Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, President Roger N. Scotland ’93, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary

Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, ’05 Young Alumni/ae Committee Chairperson

Steven Miller ’70, Planned Giving Committee Cochairperson Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 Karen Olah ’65 Patricia Pforte ’08

Robert Amsterdam ’53

Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52

Susan Playfair ’62

Claire Angelozzi ’74

Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60

Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79

David Avallone ’87, Oral History Committee Chairperson

Andrew Fowler ’95

Emilie Kate Richardson ’05

Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63

Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68

Reva Minkin Sanders ’56

Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69

R. Michael Glass ’75

KC Serota ’04

Eva Thal Belefant ’49

Eric Warren Goldman ’98

Barry Silkowitz ’71

Joshua Bell ’98, Communication and New Technology

Rebecca Granato ’99

George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochairperson

George Hamel III ’08

Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69

Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56

Boriana Handjiyska ’02

Walter Swett ’96, Nominations and Awards Committee

Jack Blum ’62

Dr. Ann Ho ’62, Career Connections Committee

Committee Chairperson

Carla Bolte ’71

Chairperson

Cochairperson Olivier te Boekhorst ’93

Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson

Charles Hollander ’65

Paul Thompson ’93

Cathaline Cantalupo ’67

Josh Kaufman ’92

Dr. Toni-Michelle C. Travis ’69

Thomas Carroll ’81

J. P. Kingsbury ’03

Brandon Weber ’97

Pia Carusone ’03

Richard Koch ’40

Barbara Crane Wigren ’68

Kathleya Chotiros ’98

Erin Law ’93, Acting Development Committee Chairperson

Dr. Dumaine Williams ’03, Diversity Committee Chairperson

Charles Clancy ’69, Planned Giving Committee Cochairperson

Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65

Ron Wilson ’75

Andrew Corrigan ’00

Isaac Liberman ’04

Matthew Wing ’06

Peter Criswell ’89

Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson

Norman Manea birthday celebration Photo: Karl Rabe

Bardian FALL 2011 departments

features 2

Levy Institute at 25

32

On and Off Campus

6

Listening Out Loud: Robert Kelly’s 50 Years at Bard

33

Books by Bardians

8

Breakthrough Biologists: Samuel Israel ’10 and Trillian Gregg ’10

38

Class Notes

12

SummerScape: The Summer of Sibelius

14

Churchill and FDR: Sir David Cannadine

18

“A Happy Birthday Is Compulsory”: Norman Manea at 75

cover Soprano Meagan Miller in the SummerScape production of the Richard Strauss opera Die Liebe der Danae

20

Military Life: A Bard Perspective

24

151st Commencement

Photo: Cory Weaver

30

Wild at Heart: Adolfas Mekas, 1925–2011

levy economics institute of bard college

levy institute at 25 The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has grown into an internationally recognized public policy research organization with a broad agenda and more than 40 research associates worldwide.

Its core belief—that sound policy can assure prosperity—is unchanged. Its new partnership with the Ford Foundation bears out this essential assertion.

The speed with which the subprime mortgage crisis spread from Wall Street to markets all over the world made it abundantly clear that financial institutions are no longer limited to their home turf.

With the Ford Foundation’s support, the Institute is examining systemic weaknesses in the financial sector and the need for broader regulatory oversight. A team of researchers, led by Senior Scholar Jan Kregel, is working to design a cohesive program of regulations that are compatible across different countries and financial regimes, while preventing regulatory arbitrage and protecting market players.

The annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, now held at the Ford Foundation’s Manhattan headquarters, provides a forum for the project’s findings.

as the subprime market imploded. . . many commentators referred to the burgeoning crisis as a minsky moment—a long-overdue recognition of the pathbreaking work of the late financial economist and levy distinguished scholar hyman p. minsky.

top row Janet Yellen, Vice Chair, Federal Reserve Board of Governors; Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University; Martin Mayer, The Brookings Institution; Jan Kregel, Levy Institute; Leonardo Burlamaqui, Ford Foundation; Andrew Sheng, China Banking Regulatory Commission second row Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor, Bank of England; Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Levy Institute; L. Randall Wray, Levy Institute; Sheila Bair, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation third row Wynne Godley, Levy Institute; Hyman P. Minsky, Levy Institute; audience at 20th Annual Minsky Conference fourth row Mercedes Marcó del Pont, Central Bank of Argentina bottom row James Bullard, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Paul A. Volcker Jr., former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; Rebeca Grynspan, Under-SecretaryGeneral, United Nations Photos: Harry Heleotis and Karl Rabe

Since 1991, this annual conference has attracted a roster of the country’s leading economic policy makers and pundits: Paul Volcker, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, Alan Blinder, Paul Krugman, James Bullard, Joseph Stiglitz, Timothy Geithner, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among many others. This year, the 20th Annual Minsky Conference—with 300 participants, the Institute’s largest to date— addressed the ongoing effects of the global financial crisis on the real (as opposed to the market) economy. Keynote speakers included Gary Gensler, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Sheila Bair, then head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Argentine central bank president Mercedes Marcó del Pont; Paul Tucker, deputy governor, Bank of England; Federal Reserve Bank Presidents Charles Evans and Charles Plosser, and Brookings Institution scholar Martin Mayer, whose profile of Minsky, The Man Who Got It Right, will be published next year.

When the Levy Economics Institute was founded, in 1986, the U.S. economy was on the rebound from recession, with consumer confidence high, inflation low, and the stock market booming. Most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation.

That year, the financial economist and future Levy Distinguished Scholar Hyman P. Minsky published his landmark book Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, in which he warned that unchecked financial growth would inevitably end in a fall. Wall Street, he believed, encouraged businesses and individuals to take on too much risk, generating ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. As a boom morphs into speculative euphoria, banks and other commercial lenders extend credit to ever more dubious borrowers, often creating new financial instruments—junk bonds in the 1980s, mortgage securitization in the 2000s—to do the job. The only way to break this pattern is for government to step in and regulate the moneymen.

“Apt intervention and institutional structures,” Minsky wrote, “are necessary for market economies to be successful.” However, since the 1980s, government supervision of the financial sector has been systematically weakened. The high (or low) point of this regulatory gutting was the Clinton-era repeal of

levy institute at 25 3

left Blithewood Photo: ©Peter Aaron ’68/ESTO

right, clockwise from top left Peter R. Fisher, BlackRock, Inc., and former Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Domestic Finance; Kevin M. Warsh, Federal Reserve Board of Governors; and Richard Sylla, Stern School of Business, New York University Gary Gensler, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Paul Krugman, Princeton University, London School of Economics, and the New York Times Alan Blinder, Princeton University Photos: Harry Heleotis and Karl Rabe

the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which was meant to prevent a recurrence of the rampant speculation that preceded the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Minsky, of course, was right. Today, in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the United States is facing persistent unemployment, curtailed spending, and stagnant growth.

Sound public policy—fiscal, monetary, and social—is critical to a broad recovery, and that is at the head of the Levy Institute’s agenda.

Underpinning the Institute’s macroeconomic research are two proprietary models, one domestic and one global, that are used to identify trends and potential problems in order to ensure timely policy responses. Its economic forecasting has remained consistently ahead of the curve: as early as 2004, the Macro-Modeling Team, established by the late Levy Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley and now headed by the Institute’s president, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, foresaw the spectacular implosion of the housing market and the unraveling of subprime mortgage securities at the end of the decade.

In May, the Institute sponsored a conference in tribute to Godley’s work, much of which ran counter to the orthodox economics of the last three decades. Godley argued that the size of the foreign trade deficit depended mainly on the size of the public sector deficit, while the exchange rate and an economy’s competitiveness affected mainly the overall level of output and employment. He applied to the macroeconomy an accounting framework that basically says, what the private sector lends (from savings) must be equal to what the government borrows plus what other countries borrow from us—in other words, everything must sum up.

In the now-famous paper “Seven Unsustainable Processes,” published by the Institute in 1999, Godley wrote that the rising debt-toincome ratio in the United States, driven by greater numbers of new loans relative to personal income, could not go on forever. In real terms, we were borrowing and spending more while making and exporting less. And since the economy’s momentum had become so dependent on rising private borrowing, it was almost entirely at the

4 levy economics institute of bard college

mercy of the stock market. If some event (such as the mortgage meltdown) were to bring private borrowing and spending to a halt, output could not grow fast enough to stop unemployment from rising. When that happened, wrote Godley, we would have “a severe and unusually protracted recession with a large rise in unemployment”—which is exactly where we find ourselves today.

Godley used an accounting framework based on double-entry bookkeeping to analyze the impact of potential market developments.

His macroeconomic forecasts were uniformly pessimistic, and frequently on the money: at the end of the go-for-broke ’90s, in a Levy Strategic Analysis, he warned that the growing imbalance in the global economy, fueled by burgeoning American private sector debt, was unsustainable—an accurate early assessment that few policy makers took seriously.

The Levy Institute’s main research and conference facility is Blithewood, a 19th-century mansion overlooking the Hudson River on the western edge of the Bard College campus. In the 1830s, owner Robert Donaldson of North Carolina gave the property the name Blithewood and commissioned Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the foremost landscape artists of the day, to design the grounds. In 1853 Blithewood was purchased by John Bard, who in 1860 donated part of the estate for the founding of St. Stephen’s College (which became Bard College in 1934). In 1899 Captain Andrew C. Zabriskie, a cattle breeder, numismatist, and antiquarian, purchased the estate and retained Francis Hoppin, an alumnus of the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, to design a manor house and garden. Hoppin produced a house in an eclectic, grand style, blending architectural and decorative elements from centuries of English mansion design with turn-of-the-century technology. Zabriskie’s son donated the rest of the estate to Bard College in 1951. The house and its formal Italianate garden were restored in 1986 with a grant from the late financier and Bard Trustee Leon Levy, who, with Papadimitriou, was instrumental in the Institute’s founding.

Blithewood is home to the annual Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar, which was instituted as an adjunct to the Ford-Levy project in 2010. This annual, 10-day program is designed for young finance professionals in the public and private sectors, as well as graduatelevel scholars. This year’s Seminar, held on the Bard campus in June, drew 48 students from 17 countries, and a faculty of 22 from government, business, and the academy. The facility also provides a collaborative learning environment for students in the College’s Economics and dual-degree Economics and Finance Programs, with access to its research staff, a dedicated library, and the Minsky Archive. Through a private grant, the Archive’s holdings are now being made available to researchers through the Bard Digital Commons website.

Like the College itself, the Institute encourages interdisciplinary work—in economics, political science, sociology, and history—in order to achieve viable policy solutions to complex economic, social, and sustainability issues. It also recognizes the imperative of public outreach. Its scholars regularly offer commentary on current events, and policy briefings with members of Congress provide a forum for bipartisan discussion of the issues. All of its publications—working papers, policy analyses, conference proceedings, and other research materials—are available on its website (www.levyinstitute.org), and the Levy Institute blog, Multiplier Effect, provides a real-time platform for addressing economic developments in the news.

Under Papadimitriou’s guidance, the Institute’s agenda continues to expand. It is currently helping the Central Bank of Ecuador set up

a department for economic research, which is critical to sound policy making. Under the auspices of the Labour Institute of the General Confederation of Greek Workers, the Institute is designing an emergency employment program for the social economy sector in Greece, along the lines of Minsky’s employer-of-last-resort policy proposal.

It has also joined with the Veblen Institute for Economic Reforms to copublish a series of public policy briefs in France, making these proposals accessible to a broader network of reform advocates and policy makers. Plans are under way to hold joint conferences on Minsky’s research on financial instability with Nankai University in Tianjin, China, and The Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) in Ankara.

And in July, the Levy Institute, in partnership with the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, announced that it is planning an MBA program in sustainability that will provide leadership education for building prosperous, socially aware, and ecologically sound businesses and not-for-profits: the emerging organizations of a just and sustainable world economy. Building on Bard’s tradition of innovative, interdisciplinary education, this program will set a new standard for sustainable education in business—both nationally and across the globe.

—Barbara Ross

levy institute at 25 5

Eventually after a few hundred or thousand years we begin to comprehend the incomprehensible—Dante, Aeschylus, Milton—and they become classics with great celebrity but diminished use. But till then the texts are of great power, startling, provoking, eliciting. Some grand provokers—Pindar himself, Li Shang-yin, Lycophron, H¨olderlin, Stein—still wait their turn, still turn us toward the poem we must write, the poem they force us to write, to make sense of what they do to our heads.

—Robert Kelly Photo: Richard Renaldi

6 robert kelly: 50 years at bard

robert kelly: 50 years at bard

listening out loud Roughly half a century after first arriving, as a budding “scientist of totality,” to teach and abide at Bard College, Robert Kelly ambled with ursine grace across the stage in Olin Auditorium and assumed the lectern. Dusk was gathering on a chilly evening, and the enthusiastic crowd—consisting of colleagues, students, administrators, and various representatives of the arts intelligentsia from surrounding communities and farther afield—was there to celebrate his eternally youthful tenure as Bard’s unofficial poet in residence.

“Everyone thinks 50 years is such a long time, but to be honest with you, it feels as if I’ve just moved in,” said Kelly, and he was only half joking. If any American poet over that same span could be said to embody Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new,” that poet has been Robert Kelly, who continually invents and reinvents his poetic practice, as well as his relationship to Annandale.

Over his five decades on campus, Kelly—since 1987 Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature—has made an indelible mark on Bard. He wrote the foundational document of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, which included such innovations as individual tutorials and group critiques, and served as the founding director of its writing program. He has codirected the College’s Written Arts Program (originally the Writing Program in Fiction and Poetry) since its inception, and he was the prime mover behind Bard’s sponsorship of Conjunctions, a leading literary journal.

Among his other contributions to the quality of intellectual life in the college community, Kelly initiated “Locus Loquitur,” a series of readings by non-Bard writers who lived in the area, and invited some of the greatest living poets—Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Diane Wakoski, Jackson Mac Low, and many more—to read and discuss their poetry on campus. But his most significant contribution has been as a teacher to several generations of aspiring poets and writers, whom he has instructed in the art of “listening out loud,” which is to say, listening to language and recording what it says with unswerving devotion and diligence.

“If poetry is indeed a kind of listening, few have heard it with greater constancy,” said Kelly’s colleague, poet Ann Lauterbach, in her introductory remarks to last April’s celebration, which was organized by the honoree’s wife, Charlotte Mandell ’90. “At times I have felt there is something nearly mythic and elemental in Robert Kelly’s poetic practice, as if he had direct access to the initial, abiding breath of the Muse. How else explain the fact of his authoring close to 60 books, even as he has ushered into the world scores of young writers over the past half century?”

Prior to reading a few poems from his protean oeuvre (which also includes several novels and volumes of short fiction), Kelly intoned a roll of thanks: to Annandale, for being “geomagically situated on the blue shale underlying Dutchess County”; to Leon Botstein, for “making Bard a place worth being in”; to the College itself, for allowing him to pursue his “secret agenda” of making everyone a poet; and to his colleagues in Written Arts, who constitute “something very strange in academia”: a department in which all concerned have genuine love and respect for one another.

The poems he read spanned his era at Bard: from his first book, Armed Descent (1961), to Uncertainties, a collection that was hot off the press—“I have a superstition,” he said, “about ending each reading with my most recent poem.” He swayed slightly as he read, enacting that form of reader’s tai chi most particularly tailored to his body; his tone and phrasing were intimate, as if he were reading to one person and not to several hundred. As he voiced this passage—“Just this once/not to be caught/in statement or story,/but to flow/justly/over the contours/of your body/in the liberty of light”—his words were accented by a flash of late sunlight on his wristwatch.

Following Kelly’s reading were two musical selections, both chosen, along with their interpreters, by the poet: César Franck’s Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue, splendidly played by pianist Robin FreundEpstein; and Olivier Messiaen’s “Louange à l’éternité de Jésus,” from Quartet for the End of Time, performed by Freund-Epstein and Shawn Moore ’11, on violin. The piece concluded with the violin climbing to the highest possible register, and Moore sustaining the final note for what seemed an eternity, until it faded, with a sigh, into the aether.

The fete at Bard was followed two weeks later by an event at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City, presented by The Brooklyn Rail and curated by Kimberly Lyons ’81, one of Kelly’s former students.

More than a score of writers and performers took part, among them Carolee Schneemann ’59, David Levi Strauss, Nicole Peyrafitte, Jonas Mekas, Kristin Prevallet, Michael Ives (visiting assistant professor of the humanities), Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Carey Harrison, plus a cohort of Kelly’s former pupils including Elizabeth Robinson ’85, Pierre Joris ’69, John Yau ’72, Thomas Meyer ’69, and Mary Caponegro ’78, Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing. To accommodate the dozens more who could not be shoehorned into the program, a reading in Kelly’s honor took place at the jazz club Zinc Bar the previous evening.

—Mikhail Horowitz

listening out loud 7

samuel israel ’10 and trillian gregg ’10

breakthrough biologists Bard College is proud of enrolling science students who not only distinguish themselves as undergraduates, but also go on to do exceptional research as Ph.D. candidates. Two such graduates are Samuel Israel ’10, who earned a B.A. in biology and a B.Music through the five-year, dual-degree program with The Bard College Conservatory of Music, and Trillian Gregg ’10, who graduated with a B.A. in biology.

While Israel studies neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, Gregg is a graduate student in biophysics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Both participated in the Bard-Rockefeller Semester in Science (BRSS), an intensive one-semester program at The Rockefeller University designed for advanced science students from Bard, particularly those in the fields of neuroscience, biochemistry, molecular biology, developmental biology, biophysics, and genetics. Both were mentored by Michael Tibbetts, associate professor of biology and the director of Bard’s Biology Program.

For Sam Israel, the beauty of research lies in being able to see things that no one else has seen before.

Research can be routine, he admits, but “there are these ‘eureka’ moments that make it all pay off.”

During his years of studying biology at Bard, Israel enjoyed several such “eureka” moments.

Perhaps his most significant occurred in the lab of Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator A. James Hudspeth, F. M. Kirby Professor at Rockefeller. Working in Hudspeth’s lab as part of BRSS, Israel studied the organization of neurons supplying the hair cells of the inner ear of a bullfrog, and he discovered a different number of synapses (points of contact) in different kinds of hair cells. “No one had found that before,” he says.

Equally satisfying was presenting his findings to Hudspeth (to whom the College awarded the 2010 John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science). “It was one of the scariest things I’ve done,” says Israel. “Jim is a respected scientist who grills anyone who gives a lab presentation. He’s notoriously hard to impress, and I’m the lowest of the low on the lab totem pole. But he was impressed.

That was one of the high points of my research career.” By the end of that experience Israel knew that sensory neuroscience was the field he wanted to pursue.

At Berkeley, Israel is focusing on pheromones in zebrafish. “In animals, pheromones are a segue between smell and taste,” he explains. “The alarm pheromone in zebrafish is a chemical that causes a fear response. We have a microscope that allows you to watch the fish’s brain in real time, recording exactly which areas are responsible for fear processing and behavior. Cool stuff!”

When asked how Bard prepared him for the research he’s doing now, Israel charts a series of steps.

Upon entering Bard, he enrolled in the Immediate Science Research Opportunity Program (ISROP), which taught first-year students the basics of research in molecular biology and biochemistry. The importance lay not in the subject matter, he says, but in the details: “Learning how to use pipettes; how to keep a lab notebook; how to do the little things around the lab that no one actually teaches you—that set me up for my first real lab experience the following summer.”

8 samuel israel ’10 and trillian gregg ’10

Samuel Israel ’10 Photo: David G. Toerge | Black Star

That first lab experience was at Rutgers University, where Israel designed and executed a genetic cross that enabled the analysis of the neurons of touch-insensitive worms. “Night after night, sitting in a dark room, mating worms, I didn’t understand the relevance of my work,” he says. He designed a worm from a mutant lineage that could be manipulated by RNA interference (which controls the activity of genes) in neurons. Only then, after having found the correct strain of worm, did he realize the difficulty and improbability of his achievement: “For me, this discovery was a huge success. My work has had a lasting effect on the lab, and because of the experience, I learned to work in a team.”

He spent his first two years at Bard exploring different interests. Music was a big passion, and he studied medicine, working in a hospital where he observed cardiothoracic surgery. He also worked in a biochemistry and molecular biology lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. “UCLA satisfied my curiosity about structural biology, but the experience also increased my interest in neuroscience and cell biology,” he says.

At Bard, Israel discovered a talent for teaching. “When I took organic chemistry at Bard, I noticed some people having a hard time, and I was able to explain difficult things.” He became an official tutor, teaching everything from math and chemistry to ecology.

One big advantage of Bard, Israel found, is the balance the College creates between research and a personal life. “Today, I’m competing with people who literally spend all night in labs,” he says.

“They’re like machines. Bard does not have this hard-core, results-hungry atmosphere. It’s a more well-rounded way of thinking.”

In his fourth year at Bard, Israel participated in BRSS, which he considers one of the best aspects of the Bard Biology Program. “Bard is the only school I know of that allows you to work at Rockefeller as an undergrad,” he says.

breakthrough biologists 9

Tibbetts describes Israel as “exceptionally” bright and talented.

“BRSS was transformational for him,” he says. Tibbetts adds that when Israel later applied to graduate programs, he was granted interviews everywhere, including Harvard. “He told me that wherever he goes, someone knows Jim Hudspeth and has a story to tell about him.

His experience in that lab at Rockefeller opened doors at a level that Bard couldn’t have otherwise offered.”

Israel also took part in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), playing in Conservatory Orchestra concerts at local correctional facilities. At first, he was nervous. “There’s no barrier between you and the inmates.

Some of them had never heard classical music before.” He relaxed after his audience showed strong interest with standing ovations and questions. “We got every conceivable question,” he says: “‘How long did you practice?’ ‘How did you start?’ ‘How can I get my kids to learn this?’”

The Bard prison experience led him to become involved with the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison, teaching algebra.

“I’d tutored individuals, but never actually taught a class before,” he says. “It’s a great way to practice teaching.”

As for the future, Israel is leaving his options open. In 2010 and 2011 he received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Honorable Mention, which he says will set him apart from the average graduate student and enable him to become a successful scientist educator. But he also doesn’t rule out leading a research group for a pharmaceutical company or government lab. “Understanding how our brains and senses work is just as exciting to me now as when I was a child,” he says. “It is thrilling to discover things no one else has seen, and rewarding to teach these discoveries to others.”

Trilly Gregg, a Ph.D. biophysics candidate, is passionate about transmembrane proteins—specifically those that mediate membrane fusion.

Precisely this kind of passion has Gregg working in two separate labs at Wisconsin–Madison. One, run by James C. Weisshaar, chair of the Wisconsin chemistry department, uses fluorescent microscopy to study dynamic biological systems. The other, the Laboratory of Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI), focuses on advanced light microscopy, mainly for the imaging and experimental manipulation of living specimens.

In Weisshaar’s lab, Gregg examines eukaryotic cells—those of higher-level organisms whose cells contain complex structures enclosed within membranes, such as mammals or birds. Specifically, she looks at vesicle fusion: the merging of small, membrane-enclosed sacs that can store or transport substances. “It’s a pretty large field, but it’s not well understood,” she says. In the other lab, she works with a microscopy system called FRET-FLIM (fluorescence resonance energy transfer and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy), and she’s developing new microscopy techniques to study vesicle fusion.

Working in two labs at once is part of Gregg’s ultimate goal of starting her own biotech company. “I’m passionate about both the

10 samuel israel ’10 and trillian gregg ’10

instrumentation and the biology, and most labs study just one area,” she explains. “Jim’s group specializes in the biology, while LOCI studies the instrumentation. For years Jim had been looking for a student who could bridge the two labs and collaborate with LOCI; we worked it out so that I could be that bridge.”

Gregg’s own fusion of interests began in her sophomore year at Bard, when she took a course in metabolic disease and attended a lecture at Rockefeller University given by Swedish biophysicist Gunnar von Heijne. “I had never heard of biophysics before I went to that lecture,” she says. “But everything he talked about was so interesting.

That was it.”

That led to her later applying to Bard’s BRSS program. Given a list of Rockefeller professors willing to take on Bard students, she noticed that one name was missing: Sanford M. Simon, head of the Laboratory of Cellular Biophysics at Rockefeller (and a 2004 John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science recipient). Gregg had been fascinated by Simon’s research for years. “He works mainly with the trafficking of proteins through the nuclear pore complex of cells,” she says, “and he works with vesicle fusion. My two favorite topics.”

Gregg drove to Rockefeller and showed up at Simon’s office.

He told her that he didn’t usually take interns. Nevertheless, they sat and discussed science for an hour and at the end of it, he decided to make an exception. He gave her a project and a lab. “He liked the quality of my work,” says Gregg. “We began developing a new technique that would theoretically facilitate microscopy for cell biology researchers.”

As a result, instead of staying in the program for the usual one semester, Gregg remained for three years. “It was kind of an anomaly,” she says. “Sandy asked me if I was willing to stay and finish the remainder of my undergrad degree working in his lab and doing my extra courses outside, so of course I said, ‘Yes.’” Tibbetts explains that an essential ingredient of BRSS is that students spend the entire semester in the labs of world-class researchers without losing any time at Bard. “Only the most ambitious students attend, and every one of them follows up with a Senior Project in collaboration with the lab,” he says.

BRSS students, says Tibbetts, have time to develop a research question with the kind of depth that isn’t available elsewhere. “We want to make sure the Rockfeller researchers share our philosophy about what a research experience should be,” he says. “Researchers take part in BRSS because they believe in the program, not because they’re looking for cheap labor. They’re committed to developing skills among the undergrads.”

Gregg completed the rest of the courses required to finish her Bard degree at Hunter College and worked nights to support herself.

She was also lead author on a paper, “Development of a Novel Method of Macromolecule Delivery into Cells.” Her coauthors were Florence Koeppel, Elias Coutavas, and Simon. “Florence taught me

Trillian Gregg ’10 Photo: Larry Evans | Black Star

how to do cell culture, and Elias taught me how to do molecular biology,” says Gregg. “But the work on the paper is 100 percent mine, which is why I’m first author.”

Growing up, however, the New York City–born Gregg admits she would hardly have been considered Ph.D. material. Dyslexic as a child, she struggled with reading. It wasn’t until she took biology at Bard that something resonated. “Science challenged me,” she says. “You’re either right or wrong.”

She studied the neurons of zebrafish in Tibbetts’s lab. He encouraged her independent spirit. “He said, ‘Go figure out how to do it and come back once you get it right.’ It’s a great way of learning.”

After earning her Ph.D., Gregg has her sights set on an M.B.A., and on starting that biotech company in order to develop new research techniques and tools. She says her Rockefeller research experience made all the difference in her career: “It put me so far ahead in my ability to do research, think critically, and do good science.”

about brss BRSS began in 2007, the same year that The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, the state-of-the-art, 69,000-square-foot science facility, opened on the Bard campus and became its academic hub. BRSS was inspired by, and is run in conjunction with, Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs program (BGIA). “We’re still a new program, but the labs at Rockefeller are always impressed and thrilled with our students, and that’s important,” says Tibbetts.

Bard is grateful for the grant BRSS received in 2008 from the Blum Foundation, as well as for the continued support of Dr. Kayden and his wife, the late Dr. Reem.

—Ann Forbes Cooper

breakthrough biologists 11

above Heinrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. All Photos: Cory Weaver

No¨el Coward’s operetta Bitter Sweet 12 summerscape

Tero Saarinen Company

summerscape

the summer of sibelius It was an odd phenomenon: even though the 2011 Bard Music Festival (BMF) and SummerScape took place during the dog days of July and August, a cold blast of Nordic air issued forth from the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. This unseasonal frostiness was perfectly congruent, however, with the celebration of the life, times, and musical legacy of Jean Sibelius, Finland’s foremost composer. Sibelius (1865– 1957) was the honoree of this year’s BMF, and works by his contemporaries and artistic descendants in music, film, drama, and opera were featured in a typically rich array of SummerScape offerings.

This summer’s opera, Die Liebe der Danae by Richard Strauss (1864–1949), was selected in part because of Strauss’s affinities with Sibelius: both composers were masterful at painting nature in sound; both had brief flirtations with atonality, and then abandoned it; and both looked to the world of myth for subject matter. Reviews of the production were exuberant. “Under the direction of Leon Botstein, the American Symphony Orchestra exhibited both the lyricism and the humor of the score,” said Opera Today, which also noted of Meagan Miller, who sang the part of Danae, that “there were times throughout the performance, when during a lyrical passage, the audience was simply spellbound.” The New York Times was even more enthusiastic: “An opera needs to be able to catch fire onstage, and in the SummerScape production, directed with imagination and emotional nuance by Kevin Newbury, Danae certainly does. . . .

Exhilarating and moving, Danae has found its moment.”

Bard Music Festival

Another highlight of SummerScape was a production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, directed by Caitriona McLaughlin. “The work of a fine ensemble allows the potency of the play to shine through,” said TheaterMania of Bard’s production. Also on the festival’s bill were four dance performances by the Tero Saarinen Company and a sparkling production of Noël Coward’s first operetta, Bitter Sweet. As always, the film series drew enthusiastic throngs of cinephiles, this time for an exploration of Nordic cinema “before and after Bergman,” with movies by directors ranging from Mauritz Stiller to Aki Kaurismäki. Nor did crowds neglect the Spiegeltent and its annual fare of wildly inventive cabaret acts, multiethnic musical performances, and fun shows for the kids.

The 22nd Bard Music Festival—directed by Botstein, Robert Martin, and Christopher H. Gibbs, with Daniel M. Grimley as this season’s scholar in residence—offered the usual panoply of splendid orchestral, chamber, and choral concerts, along with panel discussions and lectures, all of them illuminating different aspects of the life and work of Sibelius and nearly 40 of his contemporaries. Some of the many memorable programs were “Finnish Modern,” devoted solely to works by Sibelius and his Finnish countrymen; “Nordic Purity, Aryan Fantasies, and Music,” which critically examined the attraction of six composers to the mystique of the northlands; and an all-Sibelius program that included four of his major works: Finlandia, Luonnotar, and his Third and Fifth Symphonies.

Richard Strauss’s opera Die Liebe der Danae the summer of sibelius 13

A World War II–era poster, featuring FDR (left) and Churchill Photo: ŠDavid J. & Janice L. Frent Collection/Corbis

14 sir david cannadine

sir david cannadine

churchill and fdr In commemoration of the late Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer, the College has established the Eugene Meyer Chair in British History and Literature, currently held by Richard Aldous. Bard also has launched a lecture series named for Meyer. Acclaimed historian Sir David Cannadine visited Bard to deliver the inaugural Eugene Meyer Lecture, which was introduced by Aldous and Bard President Leon Botstein.

Cannadine offered a fresh look at the complex alliance forged by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt more than 70 years ago and its lasting impact, not just on U.S.-British relations, but on global geopolitics.

Cannadine, Whitney J. Oates Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University, is the author of 12 books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, and Making History Now and Then. His current projects include a study of Winston Churchill, Anglo-America, and the “special relationship.” He also serves as general editor of the Penguin History of Europe series and is chairman of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

An edited summary of his remarks follows.

Winston Churchill made two early visits to the United States, in 1895, en route to Cuba as a war correspondent, and again in 1900, as a Boer War celebrity in search of lucrative lecture fees, who would soon be taking his seat in the British House of Commons. Although the grandson of a duke [and son of American heiress Jennie Jerome], Churchill was a self-made man, and there was much about the openness of American society that he admired. “This is a very great country, my dear Jack,” he wrote to his brother. “They make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I have never before experienced.”

Churchill was overjoyed when the United States came into the war on the Allies’ side in 1917, and he made speeches up and down the country praising President Wilson and welcoming the American troops. “So far as I can see,” he observed, “the great branch of the human family which speaks the English language . . . has reached complete unity of moral conceptions and practical aims.” When the EnglishSpeaking Union was set up shortly after the war, Churchill was one of the founding figures, and he spoke in characteristically high-flown terms about the brotherhood between Britain and America.

Nevertheless, Churchill did not entirely warm to America. The United States had been created on the presumption that all men were equal, deference and nobility were alike unacceptable, hereditary titles should be outlawed, and monarchy should be abolished. These were not sentiments to which Churchill was ever sympathetic. And as an imperial patriot, Churchill was not altogether happy about the sudden assertion of an American military might, which could threaten Britain’s global preeminence, even as it had recently helped to preserve it. Moreover, he did not warm to Woodrow Wilson, the self-styled champion of democracy, morality, and self-determination.

During the 1920s, there were only two effectively functioning great powers: Britain, whose empire was larger than ever, and the United States. They had been allies, but they were now sliding precipitously from friendship to rivalry. So anxious was Churchill about this that, in 1927, he went on record in the British Cabinet, saying that the United States was fundamentally hostile to Britain, and that war between the two nations was far from unthinkable.

Two lengthy visits to the United States—in 1929 [after the Conservatives were defeated and Churchill began a decade out of power] and in 1931—transformed his views. For the first time, Churchill journeyed

churchill and fdr 15

to the West Coast, and he attained a much more vivid sense of the abundance and potential of the United States. Even during the Depression, he was impressed by the scale and sophistication of American industrial production, and he noted that, unlike Britain, the most able men went into business rather than politics. He became convinced that the United States must provide the prime impetus to economic recovery, and that Britain should join forces with America to that end. “Only by joint action on the part of the English-speaking peoples,” he wrote, “can we hope for a revival of the wealth of nations by establishing stable values and regulating the commercial traffic of the world.”

As this suggests, Churchill abandoned his anxieties and became an ardent enthusiast of Anglo-American amity. As he saw it, the Englishspeaking peoples and their shared history unfolded along a predestined path to the two great democracies of the 1930s, with outstanding events along the way, such as the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and even the Declaration of Independence. This edifice of Anglo-American friendship was built around the growth of freedom and individual rights under the law. “Of these ideas,” he said in April 1939, “the Englishspeaking peoples were the authors, then the trustees, and must now become the armed champions.” Thus was already sketched out the strategy Churchill was soon to pursue during the Second World War. Yet, throughout the 1930s, this was not a cause that aroused much enthusiasm on either side of the Atlantic. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s main concerns were domestic. Churchill was in the most conservative phase of his career, whereas Roosevelt was in his most radical. Churchill was critical of the New Deal, especially what seemed its irresponsible determination to run a budget deficit and its strident attacks on “big business” and the social order. There was, then, nothing predestined about the Anglo-American alliance as it evolved during the course of World War II. When war broke out, Churchill returned to his position as First Lord of the Admiralty, and he began to correspond with Roosevelt.

They were not personally acquainted, and their exchanges were desultory. Only when Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 did their correspondence move into a higher gear. With Hitler triumphant in much of Europe, Churchill was clear from the very beginning of his government that the only way Britain could win the war, as distinct from survive it, was to draw America into the conflict. Even when Russia became Britain’s cobelligerent in June 1941, that opinion held.

Accordingly, Churchill did everything he could to woo Roosevelt.

Hence the constant transatlantic allusions in his speeches, as in his “finest hour” speech, where he held out the prospect that the whole world, including the United States, would “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age” if Britain failed to stand up to Hitler. Hence his lavish praise of Roosevelt in his broadcasts—“this great man”—and in his burgeoning correspondence. After a slow start, his courting of Roosevelt began to work. The two met for the first time off the Newfoundland coast [in August 1941]; after the subsequent summit of the Atlantic Charter,

16 sir david cannadine

Churchill delightedly told the House of Commons that the United Kingdom and the United States were now “mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage.”

This was easier said than done. Although Churchill and Roosevelt came to admire each other, they were also, and with good reason, distinctly wary of each other. FDR thought Churchill was a Victorian Tory, while Churchill regretted that Roosevelt sometimes showed signs of Wilson’s naïve and intolerant idealism. And each time the British gained help from the Americans, it came on tough terms. The LendLease Act [which gave FDR the power to sell, exchange, or lend equipment to any country whose security was deemed vital to the defense of the United States] compelled Churchill to give the Americans what he admitted was a “blank check on the whole of our transatlantic possessions.” And the Atlantic Charter, with its call for all peoples to live under governments of their own choosing, was a classic formulation of American anticolonialism and thus a direct threat to the continued existence of the British Empire.

Nevertheless, the next phase of the war, from December 1941 to September 1943, marked the high point of the Anglo-American alliance and of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship. After Pearl Harbor, Churchill rushed to Washington and delivered a triumphant address to Congress, where he spelled out the importance of AngloAmerican amity and expressed his regret that the two nations had been so far apart for much of the 1920s and ’30s. Churchill was also able to persuade the Americans to adopt his ground strategy, namely that the defeat of Germany should take priority over the defeat of Japan, and that in Europe the initial Allied effort should be in the Mediterranean, rather than on the French Atlantic coast.

When Churchill returned to the United States in the autumn of 1943, his hopes for a deepening of the Anglo-American alliance were high. On receiving, at Roosevelt’s prompting, an honorary degree at Harvard University, he urged that the temporary Anglo-American alliance might become the foundation of a common citizenship. But this was not the whole picture. And it was certainly not how Roosevelt saw things. For there weren’t only disagreements about strategy within the Grand Alliance; the relative strengths of its members began to shift, and not to Britain’s advantage. In Europe, the Americans began to demand the opening of a second front on the French Atlantic coastline. In Asia, the fall of Hong Kong and Singapore was a bitter imperial humiliation for Britain; thereafter, the Allied war effort in the Pacific was largely carried on by the Americans. And the American pressure on the British to advance their empire toward self-government continued unrelentingly. So when Churchill famously declared, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” those defiant comments were intended as much for Washington and Moscow as for Tokyo and Berlin.

From the autumn of 1943, the balance of power swung evermore away from Britain. This made it much harder for Churchill to get his

way—part cause and part consequence of which was the significant deterioration of his relations with Roosevelt. At the Tehran Conference, FDR set out single-handedly to court Stalin. As Churchill saw it, the two leaders were ganging up against him and against the British Empire. Throughout 1944, there were constant disagreements over Italy, Greece, and the invasion of the French Mediterranean coast.

When Roosevelt died [in April 1945], Churchill paid him tribute in the House of Commons as “the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.” Nevertheless, at the last minute, he decided against attending Roosevelt’s funeral, a sure sign of how far their friendship had cooled.

It is important to remember that despite these disagreements, the Grand Alliance did defeat the Axis powers; the Anglo-American collaboration was the closest component of the Grand Alliance; and Churchill had been proven right in his basic assumption that Britain could not win the Second World War without the military involvement of the United States. And though Churchill’s hand weakened throughout the war, he played it astonishingly well. The Americans disapproved of Churchill’s obsession with the Mediterranean, but by the end of the war Britain had acquired an enlarged area of control there: not just in Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, but also in Greece, Turkey, and Libya.

As soon as the war was over, the United States cancelled LendLease. The terms of the subsequent American loan to Britain were regarded by the British as exceptionally punitive, and the true extent of Britain’s economic and international weakness soon became apparent. In the late 1940s, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, and Palestine all became free. This decline in Britain’s imperial standing and the cooler relations between Britain and the United States caused Churchill great dismay. “America,” he told [former Secretary of Defense] Clark Clifford, “has become the hope of the world. England has had its day.”

But Churchill made two significant contributions to restoring Anglo-American relations in this difficult postwar period. In a speech he delivered in March 1946, at the invitation of President Truman, Churchill ranged widely over the contemporary international scene with two goals. He sought to alert the United States to the threat that Communist Russia presented to freedom and democracy now that an “iron curtain”—his phrase, launched upon the world in this speech— had descended across the continent “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” He also reiterated the need for the continued fraternal association between the two great English-speaking peoples, between whom there was “a special relationship.” Together, he argued, Britain and America could impose their order on the world, and in their intensified collaboration be the best, indeed the only, hope for the future.

Ultimately, American policy became more robust toward Soviet Russia and more sympathetic toward the British Empire, which it now seemed more important to support as a means of containing communism. For Churchill himself, the “iron curtain” speech was a triumph and a tonic. He reemerged as a world statesman with important things

to say about the present and the future. Buoyed, he began his war memoirs as soon as he returned to Britain. Churchill had many reasons for wishing to write them: to make money, to give his version of events, and to tell an extraordinary tale as only he could do. Additionally, he wanted to demonstrate the fundamental importance of the AngloAmerican alliance back then and, by implication, now and in the future.

By the time the concluding volumes were published, Churchill was back in Downing Street and eager to re-create, with Truman and then with Eisenhower, the old wartime collaboration. His hope was, in part, that such a renewed association might yet be a prelude to the more thoroughgoing union of the English-speaking peoples on which he had long set his heart; and in part, that there might be a chance to broker a deal between the Americans and Russians, a deal which the recent invention of the hydrogen bomb made ever more necessary.

The problem was that neither Truman nor Eisenhower was remotely interested. Fond as they were of Churchill, both presidents were convinced that he was living too much in the past. Although Churchill made three visits to the United States as prime minister between 1951 and ’55, his hopes went unrealized. It was impossible to conceal the fact that he was an aged and diminished man, that Britain was a poor and diminished nation, and that the so-called “special relationship” mattered more to the United Kingdom than it did to the United States.

When Churchill paid his final visit to the White House in 1959, he again dwelled on the themes of the continuing greatness of Britain, the importance of the Anglo-American alliance, and the unity of the English-speaking peoples. It was his last transatlantic trip. Nonetheless, there was one final flourish. In 1963, President Kennedy proclaimed Sir Winston Churchill to be an honorary citizen of the United States. This sunset salute gave Churchill particular satisfaction. “I have,” he observed, “received many kindnesses from the United States of America, but the honor which you now accord me is without parallel. . . . In this century of storm and tragedy, I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples.”

As Churchill’s life ebbed away, his reputation in the United States went from strength to strength. His death [in 1965] was front-page news across the country, and his state funeral was in many ways the quintessentially Anglo-American occasion, with Eisenhower present as a guest of the family and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” sung at the service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. But as with the ceremony granting Churchill American citizenship, there was a discordant note; for the official American representation at the funeral was disappointingly meager. President Johnson was unwell and he was unwilling to send Vice President Humphrey in his stead. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, had to pull out at the last minute because he caught the flu.

This glitch on a day of grandeur reminds us that in death, as in life, Churchill’s relations with the United States were a complex combination of grandiloquence and grittiness, rhetoric and realism, hope and disappointment.

churchill and fdr 17

Portrait of Norman Manea by David Levine Illustration: ŠDavid Levine

18 norman manea at 75

norman manea at 75

“a happy birthday is compulsory” A long-overdue salute to the man widely acclaimed as Romania’s greatest living novelist took place over two days in June, in Annandale and Manhattan. Norman Manea, Bard’s writer in residence and Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture, was honored on his 75th birthday with a two-day symposium on his life and work at the Bard Graduate Center on West 86th Street. A more intimate affair, an afternoon with Manea and his friends and colleagues, took place on the Bard campus the Sunday before the symposium.

Presented by the College and the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (RCINY), the symposium brought together European and American scholars, literati, journalists, critics, publishers, and educators for a spirited series of talks and panels. (Among those in attendance was the novelist Philip Roth, an old friend of Manea’s, who sat next to Norman’s wife, Cella.) Variations to a Portrait: Norman Manea in Dialogue with Robert Boyers—a video produced by Bard and RCINY, with the assistance of Casey Asprooth-Jackson ’00 and Max Weinman ’11— received its inaugural screening, and Francine Prose, novelist and Bard Distinguished Writer in Residence, offered reflections on Manea’s memoir The Hooligan’s Return. Jonathan Brent, discussing the essay on censorship in Manea’s book On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, pointed out, among other things, how Romania’s weird mix of the far left and far right—its strange brew of Stalinism and Nazism—created and sustained a surrogate world of kitsch.

Of particular note was the dramatic reading of an excerpt from The Hooligan’s Return by Romanian actor (and former minister of culture) Ion Caramitru—who, in the words of one participant, brought a “surprising, vivid presence of the Romanian language” to the event that “drew astonished remarks”—and a coda to that reading by cellist Sophie Shao, a faculty member of The Bard College Conservatory of Music, who played Bach’s Suite No. 6 in D Major.

The Bard Graduate Center on the Upper West Side was a fitting choice for the celebration, as Manea has always had a special relationship to New York City. It was the place where his “exile found its residence,” as he wrote in an essay titled “Dada Capital of Exiles” (published in Conjunctions 55): “Like America itself, although so utterly different, New York can only be comprehended ‘synthetically.’ This festively incoherent capital of Dada is a spectacular fusion of freedom and pragmatism. Misery and magnificence, seduction and neurosis create and recreate the dynamic, unmistakable spectrum of New York life.”

Manea has experienced the pain and uncertainty of exile for the greater part of his life. In 1941, as a Jewish boy in Bukovina, Romania, he was deported along with his family and the entire Jewish community of that region to a concentration camp in Ukraine. He survived, and at the war’s end returned with what was left of his family to Romania; the horrific ordeal became the basis for some of his most indelible short stories, including “The Sweater” and “Proust’s Tea.” Manea’s literary career began in the mid-1960s, when he published work in the short-lived but extremely influential Romanian avant-garde magazine Povestea Vorbii. From the beginning, he was critical of the Communist regime, and after 20 years of vexing the censors in essays, novels, and short fiction, he was forced into exile in 1986. Since then, an international community of writers, critics, and readers has embraced his work, which has won him, among numerous other honors, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992); the New York Public Library’s Literary Lion Medal (1993); France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Médicis étranger (2006); and most recently the title of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in the French Legion of Honor (2009). Nobel laureates— Heinrich Boll, Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk—have praised both his writing and his principled stance against dictatorship, and critics have placed him in the distinguished lineage of such modern masters as Bruno Schulz, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka. Bard, in particular, has benefited from his stature in the world literary community; each year, Manea has brought writers such as Pamuk, Claudio Magris, and Nuruddin Farah to campus as part of his Contemporary Masters course.

“Norman Manea’s journey through history and life has made his voice distinct and unique in the Romanian literary landscape,” said Corina Suteu, director of RCINY. “He is among those very few writers who still believe that, even when everything else seems to have lost its meaning, books still have a meaning. This is why celebrating him is so important.”

The Sunday gathering at Bard brought together Manea’s two worlds—his friends and colleagues at Bard and his host of international admirers. After lunch at Finberg House, the honoree was presented with a chocolate birthday cake upon which was written, in lavender icing, “Dearest Norman, a happy birthday is compulsory” (a play on the title of his book Compulsory Happiness, which did not escape the author’s notice). He blew out the candles to a warm chorus of “Happy Birthday.”

—Mikhail Horowitz

a happy birthday is compulsory 19

alex weinstein ’07, malia du mont ’95, john hambley ’06

military life: a bard perspective Public service is an important component of a Bard education and often becomes a goal for life after Bard.

Over the years, numerous Bard alumni/ae have chosen the military as a way to serve their country. Three of them—Malia Du Mont ’95, John Hambley ’06, and Alex Weinstein ’07—talked to the Bardian about their military experience, sharing the challenges they have faced and the sense of accomplishment they’ve felt from their service.

Malia Du Mont majored in Chinese at Bard, then earned a master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is an Army reservist who has been called to active duty several times since she enlisted in 1999. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia. John Hambley majored in political studies and served a four-year tour of duty as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He is now a senior consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife, Christine Gasparich ’08. Alex Weinstein, a political studies major, worked in Manhattan for three years as a paralegal and a financial services adviser. When he turned 27, he signed up for the Marines and was accepted as an officer candidate. He currently lives in northern Virginia near Marine Corps Base Quantico.

20 alex weinstein ’07, malia du mont ’95, john hambley ’06

At the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial, Washington, D.C. from left Alex Weinstein ’07 Malia Du Mont ’95 John Hambley ’06 Photo: Dennis Brack | Black Star

joining weinstein: From an early age, I wanted to join the military. I actually thought about enlisting in the Marines right after high school, but my parents convinced me to go to college first. When I did sign up, they were totally gung ho about my joining. My father was in the naval ROTC in college, and my grandparents were a doctor and nurse as civilians at a military medical treatment facility. I knew the Marines would be a good fit for me because they require a high level of ability in leading and inspiring others and in meeting physical challenges. I also have to say that I joined the Marines because I wanted to be deployed and see combat. du mont: I spent a lot of time studying politics and international affairs, at Bard and Harvard, so it made sense for me to join the reserves, where I specialized in military intelligence. My parents are academics and my mother is a pacifist. I didn’t tell them I was joining the reserves until I had already enlisted. My mother simply said, “We’re very proud that we raised you to make independent decisions.”

I realized later that my family was affected by this choice I made, without being part of the decisionmaking process. And I realized that’s a lot to ask a family. hambley: Several members of my family were in the naval service; my grandfathers were Navy pilots in World War II. I was the only marine in my family. At Bard I knew I wanted to join the military because I wanted to be truly engaged in defense and peacekeeping operations all over the world, especially after the Iraq war began. I chose the Marine Corps because I thought it would be the most challenging of all the branches of the military.

being an officer weinstein: I was commissioned as a second lieutenant on August 14, 2010, when I finished Officer Candidates School (OCS). OCS has a failure rate of about 35 percent. Candidates can’t even submit the entrance application until they can meet the physical requirements. I had to do 100 crunches in two minutes and 19 dead-hang pull-ups, and run three miles in 18 minutes, 30 seconds. That got me a score of 293 out of 300. You can’t submit an application unless you score 290 or higher. The physical challenges, like the hikes with 70 pounds of gear on your back, are another way they weed people out.

It was incredibly difficult, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.

After OCS I went to the Basic School, which is the equivalent of two years of college compressed into six months. In January 2012 I’ll start my stint as a communications officer, with a platoon of 40 people under me. I’m glad I can still see combat as a communications officer—on patrols, on convoys, or through insuring that fighters on the ground can communicate effectively. hambley: By the time I was discharged, I had earned the rank of captain. Part of my four years of active service included Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, where new college graduates are molded into marines in 10 weeks. The transformation is incredible. I also attended an infantry officer course, ground intelligence training, and sniper training.

I came out of officer training as a first lieutenant, assigned to the Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. I served as a scout sniper platoon commander, and eventually took command of an infantry company. Despite that, one of the biggest challenges is establishing mutual trust with combat veterans. It can be overwhelming. But the Marine Corps teaches you to adapt and overcome, and to lead from the front and always by example. du mont: Currently, I’m the commander of Headquarters & Headquarters Company of the 323rd Military Intelligence Battalion, at Fort Meade, Maryland. I have 103 soldiers in my company. Most of them are not intelligence soldiers; they have other support roles. My major responsibility to them is making sure they have the training and tools they need to do their job. After spending all day at my civilian job, I usually spend at least an hour each evening working on various military issues, even when I’m not reporting for duty.

military life: a bard perspective 21

deployment du mont: I was in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, when there was little media coverage. People forgot we were there. My local paper in Ohio interviewed me and they asked me how I liked Iraq.

I was stationed at the main headquarters and performed strategic intelligence and analysis, studying trends in Afghan governance and insurgent operations. At the strategic level, intelligence is similar to journalism—a lot of research and writing. As part of the staff of Lt. General Karl Eikenberry [U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan until July 2011], I wrote the daily intelligence briefs. It was a great job. I met Senator [Hillary] Clinton and I briefed her, and I was part of the team that briefed Defense Secretary [Robert] Gates.

When my tour in Afghanistan ended, I went to Belgium for one year to work for the U.S. European Command’s Intelligence Directorate as the senior analyst on the Afghanistan Team, which is located on the NATO base outside Brussels. hambley: My unit was just returning from Iraq when I joined them after officer training, so I was deployed in May 2009 with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) to the Middle East for seven months.

Our tour finished in December 2009. After the Haiti earthquake occurred in early January 2010, we were deployed to Haiti for three months for humanitarian assistance operations. The situation in Haiti was grim; the entire country was devastated, and no one knew yet how many people had been killed or how we were supposed to help. The U.S. Navy dropped the marines ashore and we stayed for three months. We assisted with riot control, provided security, and helped with UN food distribution and health care operations. weinstein: I’ll most likely be deployed to Afghanistan, which is what I want. I don’t want to be stateside.

diversity and equality hambley: Regardless of the branch, the military is one of the most diverse organizations there is.

There are rich kids and poor kids, and people from all over the country. As an officer, one of my biggest challenges is finding a way to mold 50 marines from every conceivable background into a cohesive fighting unit. du mont: Before 9/11, reservists weren’t integrated and there was no sense of “one team, one fight.”

One of biggest changes I’ve seen is in the attitude toward reserves, which has changed completely, for the better. Nobody cares if you’re a reservist or an active soldier anymore—we all contribute. It’s given me some great opportunities.

Even better is that the military is a leading sector for ethnic and demographic diversity. I see the uniform as the great homogenizer. No matter what color or gender someone is, he or she is a soldier.

People expect me to have a great story about being a woman in the Army, but that does not define my experience. I’ve never felt any discrimination. I’m a commander.

We don’t have as much socioeconomic diversity as we could: when I enlisted, there weren’t many people joining up who were enrolled in master’s programs in Harvard or other elite educational institutions. But things are improving. Politically, it’s interesting also. I was in a car once with three other soldiers: a conservative, a Green, and a Democrat. I remember thinking how great it was, that we were all in the vehicle together, having a discussion. weinstein: I have trained with men and women in the Marines who’ve come from all across the country, and many were born outside of the United States. The military has zero tolerance for racism and sexism. I have immense respect for the women in the Marines; they have displayed inspiring leadership. There is no glass ceiling.

22 alex weinstein ’07, malia du mont ’95, john hambley ’06

a path to other careers hambley: As a marine officer, you’re expected to make difficult, complex decisions that have a direct impact on the enlisted marines that you are responsible for and which, in many cases, could also have a strategic consequence, good or bad. The Marine Corps trains its officers to thrive in chaotic environments and to take decisive action in the midst of extreme uncertainty. That’s a skill that carries over to any postmilitary career. weinstein: Marine Corps officer training teaches you how to organize people and things in the same manner as what’s taught at an elite M.B.A. program. What’s more, people in the military have more responsibility at a younger age than in other sectors, and employers really appreciate what you learn here. I don’t know if I’ll have a long-term career in the Marines, but I’m not opposed to it. I’d like to stay in the government/defense sector. du mont: My military experience has given me flexibility and options in my career that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Currently, I’m special assistant to the chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and America’s security affairs. I work at the Pentagon but it’s a civilian job. From 2002 to 2006, I was an Asian security analyst with the CNA Corporation.

military life du mont: I love being in the military. I love the sense that I’m doing something necessary and important for my country. And there’s a real sense of brotherhood in the military. The uniform means many things: expectation, duty, and honor. The military is not a job but a lifestyle, one that affects you and your family. weinstein: The military prizes flexible, creative, and independent thinking. The enemy does have a say in any battle, so a leader who can think on his or her feet is a valuable weapon. hambley: It’s an amazing life, but a really tough life. There’s enormous sacrifice. My wife sacrificed a lot, but she was patient and supportive. Nineteen- and 20-year-olds have never had such a large burden placed on their shoulders as they do in today’s world. The ability to handle extremely difficult situations is something only the military can teach.

bard’s role du mont: Bard prepared me well to be an intelligence analyst because it helped me learn to write.

My writing ability has been the foundation of my professional career. Yes, Bard encourages people to be independent, and I’ve been able to do that in the military. My adviser at Bard, James Chace [the late Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law and Administration], served in the Army in World War II and he talked about it all the time. Chace’s devotees, of whom I was one, were open to studying the military and learning about it. Bard wasn’t the antimilitary environment people expect. hambley: Liberal arts is the best form of education for military officers. Decisions on the ground are never an exact science; they are always a combination of military, economic, cultural, and political factors. Bard taught me the importance of thinking, not in black and white, but in changing shades of gray—viewing problems through a variety of lenses and perspectives. weinstein: Bard helped me to think creatively, to look at problems from many different angles. In one class at Basic School, 12 of us had to develop a battle plan. Ten of the students came up with a plan that I was sure would quickly send many soldiers to meet their maker. I re-engineered the plan, and later the captain who taught the class commended me; my plan was very creative, he said. I had a total Bard moment.

—William Stavru ’87

military life: a bard perspective 23

24 one hundred fifty-first commencement

commencement 2011

one hundred fifty-first commencement Red and white confetti flew through the air and blanketed the tent at Bard’s 151st Commencement.

Graduates, their families and friends, and honorees delighted at this barrage of College colors, festooning the Commencement festivities for the first time.

Remarks by The Right Reverend Mark S. Sisk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and College President Leon Botstein emphasized the close of Bard’s 150th anniversary and the connection between the College’s milestone and the landmark of Commencement for the 403 undergraduates and 172 graduate students.

Sisk, who delivered the commencement address, is a member of the College’s Board of Trustees.

Honorary degrees were awarded to geneticist David Botstein; civil rights advocate Christopher Edley Jr., dean of Boalt Hall, the University of California, Berkeley, law school; Sari Nusseibeh, philosopher and president of Al-Quds University; brothers Richard M. Sherman ’49 and Robert B. Sherman ’49, prolific songwriters who gave the world the ditties of Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; lighting designer Jennifer Tipton; and Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio’s legal affairs correspondent.

commencement address by the right reverend mark s. sisk, bishop of the episcopal diocese of new york

The Right Reverend Mark S. Sisk Photo: Karl Rabe

Mr. President, fellow trustees, members of the faculty and administration, parents, friends, and family, to the graduating students, to those that are receiving honorary degrees, as my previous speakers have said, congratulations.

You have each, in your own way and in your several different capacities, reached another important milestone in life’s journeys. This is no less than for Bard College itself, which, as we know so well, is celebrating its 150th year. For the president, the trustees, administration, and faculty, today marks another turning of the page, one of those brief but sweet moments in education when it is possible to savor the joys of a job well done, another year complete, a new class of graduates ready to step out and meet the larger challenges of life that lay before you. For friends and family, this is a day to rejoice, to celebrate with those who are about to cross one of life’s most important thresholds.

For parents, the joy of this moment can only be rivaled by their joy at first seeing you and holding you in their arms as a newborn infant. These two joys will perhaps be nearly rivaled by their joy as they make the last college tuition payment. Having made a few such payments myself, I understand.

And, finally, to you, the graduating seniors who have met and engaged the exciting and challenging opportunities that your years at Bard have afforded you, congratulations; well done.

one hundred fifty-first commencement 25

As the bishop of New York, I take the greatest of pleasures at being given this opportunity to speak today. In a sense, I feel toward Bard College itself rather as I imagine your parents feel about you. I, or rather more precisely as the president has told us, my predecessor in office, Bishop Horatio Potter, worked fervently for the establishment of this institution and dreamed great things for it, and great things have been achieved. The original goal of Bard, as you will recall, then called St. Stephen’s College, was to provide excellence in education for the leaders of the church. Those first students were, in large measure, being prepared to attend the General Theological Seminary in New York City, which, by serendipitous coincidence, I attended myself and now serve as its chairman of the board of trustees.

In the mid-19th century, the expectation was that clergy would not only be pastors to their congregations, but they would be civic leaders as well. And they were. In addition to tending to their flocks, they founded hospitals, orphanages, homes for the homeless, education for the indigent, and food for the hungry. More important still, they encouraged the members of their congregations to take up their challenges of serving the poor and promoting the common good. In short, the graduates of St. Stephen’s College were being prepared to be prominent among those who provided leadership for all manner of civic good works. Those founders were dedicated to the vision of a learned clergy working to civilize and improve a very harsh society.

I am proud to say that all of this was and is entirely consistent with the core values and long traditions of the Episcopal Church.

Now, 150 years on, times have changed, and they have changed in some very important ways. Through the fruitful work of generations past, civic leadership has now been opened much more broadly than it once was. No longer is the community dependent upon a small cadre of people to be its leaders. A broad base of educated citizens is our hope as a community. In response to these shifting circumstances, St. Stephen’s College has become Bard College, and though its graduates rarely go on to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, nevertheless the core values of the founders of St. Stephen’s College a century and a half ago do live on. We continue to devote ourselves to the education of the leaders of society, leaders who are committed to furthering and strengthening the life of the human community. This is what a college education ought to be about.

It is inspiring for me to be associated with a college that continues to embrace that college view. Frankly, too often can it be said that a college education in some places is really little more than a very expensive vocational school. However, education, in the spirit of Bard College, offers a different and more classical perspective. In this view, education is intended to equip one to live life in all its depth and complexity, recognizing always that we live in the midst of, and as a part of, a larger community. To be certain, there are things that need to be learned, skills that need to be acquired in college. But foremost among

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those is the capacity to think. That is the goal and the spirit of the education that is offered here.

You who are graduating here today have been prepared to live reflectively and to take your place as leaders within the larger community. You have acquired some skills. Your native abilities have been challenged and, to some extent, honed. But, above all, it has been Bard’s goal to teach you, to encourage you to think, to express ideas clearly, and to question wisely. It is, however, important to note that this questioning is not that of a cynic, as though the answers that you are seeking are desiccated abstractions that do not touch your soul.

On the contrary, it is our hope that you have been taught to question as a critic, who, in the midst of life, is in the relentless pursuit of truth.

The object of your education has been to prepare you for life, for the world, the way it is in all its wondrous, mysterious grandeur, as well as in its sometimes awful tragedy. The object of the exercise is to engage life fully, to engage it in all its ragged reality. Life cannot be lived in general, it can only be lived in particular. It cannot be lived for self alone. For it is only in others that we discover our true selves.

I would go on to say that each and every one of you is called to do precisely this. Each of you has the vocation to face the world as it is and then to commit yourself, with all the considerable gifts and advantages that are yours, to work to make it the place that it ought to be, a place where justice is available to all, where the weak need not be lost in their weakness or the poor defeated in their poverty, a place where the homeless and the helpless are sheltered and the injured receive care, a place where peace is the familiar spirit and war the stranger.

As daunting as the challenge of finding the common good might be—and I know that it is daunting—it is the only challenge that is truly worth spending the work of your precious life to achieve. In order to engage in that lifelong work, I hope for you one essential thing: that you not be afraid. Do not be afraid of anything. By this, I’m not suggesting that you ought to take foolish risks just for the thrill of it. Your life is worth more than that. What I am talking about is the fear that paralyzes, the fear that stifles, the fear that silences your yearnings, the fear that lets you be satisfied with the safe rather than the best, the fear that dictates that we conform to the comfortable rather than the discomfort of striving for the larger good, the fear that so easily separates people into warring groups. I urge you not to be afraid of the truth no matter how challenging it might be. Do not be afraid of difference no matter how profound. Do not be afraid of failure no matter how crushing. Do not be afraid of success no matter how disorienting it might be. Remember always that you are part of the created order, a member of the larger community that both needs and deserves your participation and your leadership. And as you leave this beloved familiar place, a place you have come to know and to cherish, remember that life, precious life, is fleeting. Don’t miss it.

charge to the class of 2011 by leon botstein

President Leon Botstein Photo: Karl Rabe

When John Bard founded this College in 1860, the United States was on the brink of a bloody and brutal civil war. No matter how sophisticated the revised narrative of the history of this nation has become, the simple fact remains that among citizens, particularly those like John Bard with deep religious convictions, the divide between North and South centered on a matter of principle, the basic incompatibility between slavery and the claims of the Declaration of Independence, with its eloquent and inspiring defense of political equality and liberty. John Bard believed that extending the reach of education could strike a blow for truth and justice.

One-hundred-fifty years later, despite the restoration of the Union, massive immigration, unequaled material prosperity, the development of the means of travel and communication that have helped break down regional barriers, unprecedented access to schooling and nearly a century in which the United States has been a major force in international affairs, we find our nation—our democracy and our political life—in a dismal, discouraging, and dangerous state. In the darkness that surrounds us, there seem to be no principles at stake at all. Instead of the specter of violent conflict that surrounded the birth of this College, we are witness to the leveling of public discourse that even threatens the meaning of intimacy and privacy. Our public life is marked by a terrifying amalgam of half-truths, clichés, and slogans that actually mask, if not cynicism, then passivity about politics and the prospect of progress in our collective destinies. Our freedoms will not be taken from us by tyranny. We are letting them atrophy through disuse and negligence. We permit our freedoms, our political rights, to be stripped of any potent content.

One would think that in a true democracy, government is every citizen’s best ally. Public intervention—the role of government—in our lives ought to be a virtue, since it is ourselves, the citizenry, that theoretically in a free society shapes and defines government. But the leading trend in politics today celebrates less government and the notion that government threatens individuality and excellence. And we are unwilling to contest this idea as we shy away from dissent and debate and retreat into labels and epithets. Consider what has happened to that historic idea that taxation with representation is a hallmark of freedom. Taxes should be a privilege, an honorable right we exercise and not a burden. Yet those among us who can afford to pay more in taxes seem to have the worst case of an all-too-common hypocrisy. The wealthiest will, for example, move out of New York for just enough time to avoid taxes—upending their life just to pay less—and yet they expect clean streets, police protection, fire brigades, and perhaps even good schools. We tolerate and applaud corporations who elude taxation and sympathize with their need to compete, exempting them from a proper contribution to society as a whole.

In today’s politics we seem unable to persuade others about what government should do, can do, and must do, and concentrate only on the evils of government, about waste, inefficiency, bureaucracy, and unwarranted intrusion. And yet we wonder why our schools fail to compete, and let our businesses struggle with the rising cost of health care and retirement. We sit by, seemingly helpless, as the inequality of wealth—the gap between the very rich and the poor—widens.

Faced with the massive scale of society we, without much critical examination, have reduced freedom to mean merely private initiative. We have left the motivations of private enterprise undisturbed.

We are content with little more than the assertion of the right to property, the right to own. Individual ambition, the desire for wealth, and the marketplace all conspire—we assume—to bring about the best of all possible worlds for all and not merely the privileged. We act as if all that matters in the pursuit of happiness—a moral term in the 18th century—is our isolated individuality, as if cultivating a sense of civic duty and obligation to others and forming a social order mirrored in the rule of law in government, and in agreement, collaboration, and collective action, were all at odds with authentic personal freedom.

president’s charge 27

The opposite is true. We will flourish as free individuals only to the extent that the shared space we inhabit—in terms of the health of the world we live in and the health of the human community—renders liberty possible. We need government—fair government and good government—not just less government. We who are more fortunate need to care for those who are, and will remain, less fortunate—the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the very young, and the very old—and well beyond the scope of the charity of a few.

If this nation is to avert a decline, and if we are to create the conditions for our best selves to thrive not only materially but also in terms of originality, imagination, and wisdom, then a renewal of our sense of civic duty must come about—a vigorous commitment to the public good and to a public realm free of the rigidities and uniformities imposed on us by the media and fashion.

The indispensable step to that renewal of our shared destiny as citizens is education. We need a major national investment in public education, not the privatization of our schools. We need stronger public and private colleges and universities, not higher levels of tuition and fees. This, for example, can be accomplished only by collective will and by a public policy we create and control as citizens.

So to the Bard Class of 2011: I ask you to take away from your alma mater its deep and abiding faith in the link between education and democracy, a commitment to the political life of a free society, and to a lasting sense of civic duty and responsibility. Learning and knowledge define the principles for which we must fight. The slavery that threatens us lies in our embrace of thoughtlessness and false simplicity and a smug satisfaction and in our collective resistance to complexity and ambiguity. Help rebuild our faith in what we can discover, learn, imagine, create, and do together, both in and apart from government, and in the ways we might take responsibility for our well being and the well being of our neighbors. The active use of our freedoms requires that we use the traditions of learning to define our laws and practices, and guide our public realm so that the lives of citizens all over the world mirror values that reach beyond comfort, convenience, idle fictions, and conformism. This vision led John Bard to create the college. This vision defines the essence of Bard today. May each of you keep it alive in the fabric of your separate lives.

Congratulations to you all.

SAVE THE DATE

MAY 25–27, 2012 ALUMNI/AE WEEKEND AND 152nd COMMENCEMENT

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honorary degree recipients

from top, left to right Richard M. Sherman ’49 Robert B. Sherman ’49 David Botstein Sari Nusseibeh Christopher Edley Jr. Jennifer Tipton Nina Totenberg Photos, this page and right: Karl Rabe

the president’s awards ceremony Richard F. Koch ’40, a long-time supporter of the College who attended Bard when it was part of Columbia University, received the Bard Medal, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest honor. Koch, who has served on the alumni/ae association’s Executive Committee, spent his career as an electronics designer and technical writer. Observing that 71 years have passed since his graduation, he said, “As I look out, I see so many friends I’ve collected over the years.”

Richard C. Friedman ’61, whose research includes seminal work in sleep loss, affective disorders, and male homosexuality, was the recipient of the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science.

He was cited for his ability to combine “his insights as a physician with his skills as a researcher,” an ability he attributed to having studied with Theodore Sottery, who taught chemistry at Bard from 1929 to 1963.

Adam Yauch ’86, who received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters, is a founder of the rock band Beastie Boys and is also a film director and producer. Acknowledged for going beyond “the outsized ego” of a rock personality by advocating for the freedom of Chinese-occupied Tibet, he in turn acknowledged his gratitude to Bard: “I really treasure the time I spent here. . . . It opened my eyes to music in a different way.”

Pia Carusone ’03 is chief of staff for Gabrielle Giffords, the Democratic congresswoman from Arizona who was shot and critically injured during an informal meeting with constituents in Tucson in January 2011. Carusone, accepting the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, said that although “little can prepare someone for such a catastrophe, I have no doubt my professional success is due to the education I received at Bard.”

Fiction writer Ann Beattie, whose stories and novels display an “unsentimental portrayal of the postsixties generation,” received the Mary McCarthy Award, which is given in recognition of engagement in the public sphere by an intellectual, artist, or writer. Beattie, who also has an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other prizes, holds the Edgar Allan Poe Chair in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Jean M. French, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History, was honored with the Bardian Award after 40 years of teaching at Bard. She was instrumental in establishing art history as a major at Bard, and conducted groundbreaking research on Romanesque sculpture in France. In accepting the award, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s recognition of longtime members of the College community, she said, “Bard students can be truly remarkable, and I’ll miss them very much.”

president’s awards ceremony 29

adolfas mekas, 1925–2011

wild at heart It was a warm day, but a light breeze was blowing as the cortege wound slowly, like the crawl of credits at the end of a film, from the Chapel of the Holy Innocents to Bard cemetery. The procession was dignified, but hardly solemn; pomp and circumstance would not have befitted the man being laid to rest. In fact, a Gypsy band, leading the march with fiddles, accordions, a big bass drum, and a slightly wobbly sousaphone, would have been just the right touch.

In the wake of his death on May 31, the students, colleagues, and comrades-in-arms of Adolfas Mekas were at no loss for adjectives to describe him: wild, gregarious, zany, anarchic, brilliant, buoyant, outrageous, and unpredictable.

The one adjective conspicuous by its absence was “boring.”

“As often as not, a conversation with Adolfas would lead to a non sequitur about Lithuanian rabbits, Mussolini, the many ghosts of Bard, or to a film reference,” remembered Syd Johnson ’87. “Or he might quote a philosopher. He was a performer, a clown who entertained himself as much as he entertained others, with an absurdist sense of humor and a Dadaist sensibility. . . . He was the kind of teacher, mentor, and comrade who would push you off the ledge, then jump with you, with a mirthful giggle.”

Mekas, professor emeritus of film, taught at Bard for more than three decades. From his arrival in 1971 to his retirement in 2004— the year he was honored with the Bardian Award—he was the person most responsible for planting and cultivating what eventually became the College’s highly regarded and immensely popular Film and Electronic Arts Program. In those heady early days, though, in keeping with the tenor of the times, the program was unofficially known as “The People’s Film Department.” As Jan Peterson ’78 recalled, “Adolfas was our leader—through his persistence he managed to pull together a film department that was equipped with splicers, camera lenses, a Moviola for editing, and finally the Arri BL and the Nagra recorder for sound sync shooting.”

Mekas also directed the fledgling Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts from 1983 to 1989. According to his old friend and colleague Robert Kelly, “His work in the graduate school was all the richer because he understood, as few artists do, the immense integration of all the arts in our common work.”

Born in Semeniškiai, Lithuania, Mekas and his brother, Jonas, were liberated from a concentration camp by British soldiers in May 1945 and, after several arduous years as displaced persons, found their way to the States. They reinvented themselves as writers and filmmakers, launching the influential journal Film Culture—an American counter-

30 adolfas mekas, 1925–2011

part to Cahiers du Cinéma—and founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York City, which is still in operation. The brothers Mekas were at the crest of an American new wave in independent film, one that introduced the work of such seminal figures as Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs, Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, and not least of all the brothers Mekas. Adolfas’s madcap feature, Hallelujah the Hills, was wildly praised at its debut—Time magazine called it the “weirdest, wooziest, wackiest screen comedy of 1963”—and is today considered a classic. “We had more fun making it than watching it,” Mekas told the Kingston, New York, Daily Freeman in 1983. “We [the actors and crew] didn’t know each other before the filming, but we all became friends for life.”

“Friends for life” pretty much sums up the feeling of his former students, too. Adolfas and his wife, the chanteuse, filmmaker, and film curator Pola Chapelle, opened their home to Bard’s aspiring young film artists, creating a bond with them that far outstripped the formalities of the classroom. Many were the nights that, under the benevolent gaze of St. Tula, the patron saint of cinema (whose halo is an empty film reel), Adolfas, Pola, and his students would typically dine on a sumptuous spread and discuss movies and moviemaking until sunrise.

“Adolfas was much more to me than just my film professor and college adviser,” said Philip Pucci ’85, a film editor. “He was my mentor, my grandfather, my father, my friend, and a brother-in-arms . . . If it were not for Adolfas having taken me under his wing, I would never have had any success of any kind at Bard, let alone been able to build any sort of career for myself in the motion picture and television industry.”

Those sentiments are echoed by scores of former students, many of whom, like Pucci, went on to big things beyond Bard—screenwriters Erica Beeney ’96, Anne Meredith ’86, and Robert Avrech ’73; soundeffects maestro Andy Aaron ’76; and animator Jeff Scher ’76, to name but a few. Any of them, without much prodding, will gladly offer up Adolfas quotes and anecdotes that are as numerous as frames in a feature-length film.

Once, while watching a few students having a hard time with the Moviola, Scher remembered, Adolfas picked up a huge, empty, 2,000foot metal film can. “He said, ‘If you really want somebody to think you know your way around an editing room, just throw things.’ And he threw the can onto a pile of metal reels. Then he tossed a few cores into another can, and kicked over another pile of cans with his foot. The sound was cacophonous in that tiny triangular room. At the time I thought it was just funny, but in retrospect it seems to be a very fitting metaphor for film, art, show business, and maybe life in general.”

Adolfas Mekas Photo: China Jorrin ’86

At the time of his death, the indefatigable Mekas was working on a new film, about the martyred philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned as a heretic by the Inquisition in 1600.

As the New York Times reported in its obituary, “Mr. Mekas described Bruno as ‘the first beatnik’ and called the film, with typical cheek, Burn, Bruno, Burn.” A retrospective of Mekas’s films takes place at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City from October 20 through 27; in late November, another tribute will be held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore, India.

In addition to his wife, Pola, and his brother and erstwhile collaborator, Jonas, Adolfas Mekas is survived by a son, Sean, and another brother, Costas. To that list, he and Pola would no doubt also include the many former students who constitute a large, loving, extended family, one whose ties have only deepened over time.

“he was the kind of teacher, mentor, and comrade who would push you off the ledge, then jump with you, with a mirthful giggle.”

One more memory, as recorded by Syd Johnson in her film column for Alm@nac, an arts weekly published in Kingston, New York: “I remember a rainy winter night at Bard. I walked to the Chapel of the Holy Innocents—where Mozart’s gorgeous Requiem was to be performed—wearing a fedora, as I did in those days. Adolfas was there, already seated. I approached him, removed my hat, and a brimful of rainwater spilled right into his lap. He laughed and laughed, because it was the kind of thing that only happened in movies, and that made it good. That was Adolfas: high art, slapstick humor, laughing all the way.”

—Mikhail Horowitz

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On and Off Campus Welcome Class of 2015 The Class of 2015 has arrived, from 39 U.S. states and 37 countries. Each of the 497 first-year students—science Olympians and congressional interns, organic gardeners and ROTC officers, black belts and puzzle masters, cheerleaders and chefs, circus performers and sea-turtle researchers, and Republicans, Democrats, independents, and anarchists—brings something special to the College.

Some have taken gap years; many have studied or done community service abroad, in countries such as Haiti, South Africa, Senegal, and Mongolia.

Members of the class have volunteered at soup kitchens, orphanages, and with international rescue groups. They are published writers, museum and theater interns, and have worked with famous photographers. They are also musical; performing—on instruments ranging from accordion to violin—with bands, orchestras, and ensembles. Welcome, Class of 2015!

Soros Grant Benefits Center for Civic Engagement Philanthropist and financier George Soros, chairman of the Open Society Foundations, has given the College a $60 million challenge grant for its Center for Civic Engagement. The Soros gift will allow Bard College to strengthen its worldwide network of projects, which include assisting lowincome students in struggling high schools in New Orleans and partnering with the first liberal arts institution in Russia.

Although many of Bard’s initiatives have been in place for 10 years or more, its Center for Civic Engagement was created recently to bring them under one umbrella. “We want Bard to serve as a model of a private institution’s engagement in the public interest, a model that other institutions will emulate,” said Jonathan Becker, vice president and dean for international affairs and civic engagement. “In order to do that, we need to unite our wide array of activities in such a way that is comprehensible to the outside world.”

All donations to Bard College’s 150th Anniversary Campaign qualify as a match to the Soros challenge. More information is at www.bard.edu/ 150th-campaign, or contact Kieley Michasiow at 845-758-7624 or kmichasi@bard.edu.

Campus Marks September 11 Anniversary Bard student filmmakers captured the stories of students and faculty, exploring the impact of 9/11 on the world ten years later. Their film and a panel discussion were among the ways the College marked the anniversary of the attacks, which killed more than 2,900 people. College President Leon Botstein was featured panelist in the group moderated by Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities.

Class of 2015 arrives. Photo: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

Board of Governors Leadership Changes Hands Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 is the new president of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, replacing Walter Swett ’96, who served in the position for the last four years. “I look forward to connecting with the ever-expanding universe of Bard alumni/ae through the undergraduate and graduate programs, and the College’s recent innovative satellite programs both in the United States and around the world,” she said.

An award-winning book designer and editor, she has developed more than 70 art books for nonprofit and commercial publishers and has lectured nationally on photography, book design, and publishing.

Swett, looking back, said, “Leading the alumni/ae association for the past four years has given me the opportunity to meet inspiring people committed to Bard’s future who graduated last year and those who graduated 60 years ago. All of us were able to attend Bard because of the support of those who came before us and it is great to see the transformation in people as they realize how gratifying it can be to be a part of Bard today.” He is a principal at Dynamic SRG, a political consulting firm that worked for Democrat Kathy Hochul in her upset victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.

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9/11 Memorial, North Memorial Pool, New York City Photo: ©Jefferson Siegel/Pool/Corbis

Simon’s Rock Welcomes New Provost Peter Laipson is the new provost of Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College and a vice president of Bard College. He comes to Bard after 12 years of leadership and teaching at the Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. He most recently was dean of faculty at the academy, where Simon’s Rock founder Elizabeth Blodgett Hall served as headmistress for 14 years. Laipson succeeds Mary B. Marcy, who after seven years as provost of Simon’s Rock became president of Dominican University of California.

Laipson is a historian whose research focuses on gender roles and relations in late 19th- and early 20th-century America. He has taught at Bowdoin College, the University of Michigan, Tufts, and Harvard. Laipson holds a B.A. from Brown University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Michigan.

New Trustee Assumes Place on Board The Board of Trustees of Bard College welcomes new Trustee George F. Hamel Jr., a founder and chief operating officer of ValueAct Capital. He and his wife, Pamela, are the parents of three sons: George ’08, John, and Luke ’12. Prior to founding ValueAct in 2000, Hamel was a partner at Blum Capital Partners for four years, where he was primarily responsible for client services, development, and reporting. Before joining Blum, Hamel was partner in the investment management firm Private Capital Management, Inc., responsible for client development and administration, regulatory Trustee George F. Hamel Jr. compliance, reporting, and trading. Hamel was also president of Carnes Capital Corporation, an affiliated NASD member broker dealer. He was previously president of Signet Investment Corporation, the investment subsidiary of Signet Banking Corporation, and was a financial consultant at Merrill Lynch.

Songwriters Hall of Fame Honors Alumnus In recognition of his hit songs, performed by talents such as Linda Ronstadt (“How Do I Make You”) and the Pretenders (“I’ll Stand

by You”), Billy Steinberg ’72 has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame along with Tom Kelly, his songwriting partner.

The two began working together in 1981.

Their many credits include five No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart: The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame,” Heart’s “Alone,” Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”

They have also written or cowritten songs for Pat Benatar, Belinda Carlisle, The Devinyls, Billy Steinberg ’72 Photo: Bruce Hulse Bette Midler, Roy Orbison, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, Carrie Underwood, and others.

Steinberg received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard in 2010.

Summer Project Bolsters Math Research Bard College held an eight-week Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Mathematics and Computation, a summer program that allowed Bard students to work with faculty members on research projects in pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and mathematical computation. The sophomores and juniors were exposed to theoretical constructs, computational techniques, and real-world applications, to develop the background and skills to prepare them for further study or employment in a mathematics-related career. Greg Landweber and Lauren Rose, both associate professors of mathematics, oversee a three-year National Science Foundation grant for the REU program; this was its second summer.

Participating students received a stipend, free campus housing, a food allowance, and money for travel expenses.

Books by Bardians Trio: A Corpus Christi Trilogy

by Eve La Salle Caram ’56 plain view press This poetic trilogy set in Texas presents two of Caram’s much beloved novels—Dear Corpus Christi (1991) and Rena, a Late Journey (2000)—alongside a new short novel, Looking for Johnny, which tells the enchanting story of an older woman’s search for a long-lost relative.

Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet ’64 coffee house press In exquisitely crafted prose, Ducornet (recipient of Bard’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 1998) explores one psychoanalyst’s descent into insatiable erotic hungers and dark sexual affairs with patients, strangers, men and women alike that threaten to devour his meticulous life and marriage.

How to Begin? Envisioning the Impact of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi edited by Özge Ersoy CCS ’10 ccs bard Introducing a set of responses to the yet-unbuilt Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, this thesis project by CCS graduate Ersoy collects essays by artists, curators, writers, and critics who conjecture how the museum may affect contemporary art and culture in the Middle East.

In the Garden with Dr. Carver

by Susan Grigsby ’82, pictures by Nicole Tadgell albert whitman & company This children’s picture book of historical fiction tells the story of young Sally, living in rural, early-1900s Alabama on the day that famed African American scientist and agriculturalist George Washington Carver shows up and teaches her community how to farm for self-sufficiency.

The Liquidation of Exile: Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s

by David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies anthem press This incisive study is the culmination of more than a decade of research on the subject of intellectuals in exile. Kettler—himself a member of the “second wave” generation that emigrated from Germany as children—draws on sources and representative case studies relating to the diaspora of intellectuals from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

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Early Colleges Celebrate Commencement

Kyrgyzstan’s AUCA–Bard Partnership Graduates 131

Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) celebrated its ninth commencement on June 27 at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. BHSEC administrators handed out associate’s degrees to 114 graduates from the Manhattan campus and 47 from the Queens campus. All graduates—121 in Manhattan and 52 in Queens—received New York State Regents diplomas. Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief academic officer and senior deputy chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, spoke to the group and Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of The Rockefeller University, gave the commencement address. Student speakers were Alexandra Scott Jason of BHSEC Manhattan and Catherine P. Sbeglia of BHSEC Queens.

The 2011 graduates are attending a variety of colleges and universities this fall, including Columbia and Yale; four chose Bard. Five graduates are Posse Scholars, winning four-year full-tuition leadership scholarships to a Posse Foundation Inc. partner college.

The American University of Central Asia (AUCA), located in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, became the first university in Central Asia to award degrees that are accredited in the United States, giving out 131 dual degrees with Bard College on June 11. AUCA hosted nearly 1,000 students, faculty, parents, guests, and well-wishers at the Kyrgyz National Philharmonic for its commencement ceremony. Special greetings were offered by Bard College President Leon Botstein; Kanat Sadykov, minister of education and science of the Kyrgyz Republic; and U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Pamela Spratlen.

More than 220 students, in total, graduated this year from AUCA, a regional institution that serves students from throughout Central Asia. Bard and AUCA established a partnership to enhance the liberal arts components of AUCA’s teaching and curriculum in 2009.

Bard High School Early College Commencement. Photo: Courtesy of Thornton Studio

American University of Central Asia commencement. Photo: Marie Regan

Arendt Center Conference Looks at Telling the Truth; Offers Prize

Goldman Touches Students’ Lives with Scholarship

On October 28–29, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities hosts its annual fall conference at Bard College, “Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts.” Arendt, writing 40 years ago, noticed that unwelcome facts are tolerated only to the extent that they are transformed into opinions.

In her essay “Truth and Politics,” she suggests that such “defactualized” politics demands truth telling. In a world without facts, we risk undermining politics as Arendt understood it: to create a common world, however unruly, disorderly, and argumentative. The conference hopes to examine the contemporary loss of facts and help participants imagine new forms of truth telling.

The Center will offer an award for the best student video of a discussion between Bard students and their parents relating to one of the talks or the entire conference. The video should be edited to less than 30 minutes. Deadline is December 1. The winning video will be screened at Bard. The student winner will receive a $500 prize and an Arendt Center Award for Civic Engagement.

Eric Warren Goldman ’98 handed out his 40th eponymous scholarship during the 151st Commencement weekend. Awarded annually since 1982, often to multiple people in the same year, the Eric Warren Goldman Scholarships follow the tradition of alumni/ae giving back to Bard. Through his targeted philanthropy, Goldman has made a difference in the lives of qualified and deserving undergraduates in economics and the social sciences at Bard and supported them in their studies.

Recipients have included former Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors president Walter Swett ’96, lawyer and former alumni/ae association governor Reginald Bullock ’84, and Boriana Handjiyska ’02, director at Alkeon Capital Management, who was recently appointed to the alumni/ae association Board of Governors.

Goldman’s generosity and commitment to Bard is also shown through his ongoing work with the Board of Governors and the Bardians in Finance alumni/ae group. And Goldman regularly meets with recent graduates to discuss their career plans and encourage them to remain involved with their alma mater. “The immense pride and satisfaction I derive from the creation of this scholarship is most satisfying now, as I establish contact with the recipients as they develop careers, lives, and families around the world,” Goldman says.

Raptors Take Home Conference Sportsmanship Award Bard has won the Skyline Conference Sportsmanship Trophy for the second consecutive year. The College won team Sportsmanship Awards in men’s soccer and men’s basketball and compiled 80.19 points out of a possible 110 (in 11 sports) to take home the sportsmanship award. This was Bard’s final season in the Skyline Conference, as the Raptors joined the Liberty League this fall.

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Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman during the Mahdiyya, 1885–1898

by Robert S. Kramer ’79 markus wiener publishers This book explores a Sudanese “holy city” at the turn of the 20th century, during a period of intense political and social upheaval when many Muslims believed that the end of time was approaching and the world was coming to an end.

Taking Flight, Standing Still: Teaching toward Poetic and Imaginative Understanding

Change in Action reception. Photo: Chris Kendall ’82

Marieluise Hessel Addresses Change in Action As the keynote speaker for Change in Action’s end-of-year reception, Bard Trustee Marieluise Hessel spoke about leadership qualities that are useful in the real world, incorporating the story of how she became a leader and what she learned along the way. Her talk was funny, meaningful, and perfect for the leadership development program that began in spring 2010 to provide students with practical and theoretical educational opportunities.

For more than 20 years, Hessel has provided leadership to Bard College and its Center for Curatorial Studies. Her generosity has included permanent loans of contemporary art to the Marieluise Hessel Museum, the museum building itself, the gift of more than 14,000 art publications to the CCS library, and continued support of the graduate program.

Blinky Palermo Retrospective among CCS Exhibitions On exhibition at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies through October 31, Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977 is the first North American retrospective of the work of German artist Blinky Palermo (1943–1977). Curated by Dia Art Foundation’s curator-at-large Lynne Cooke, the exhibition traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, and Sculpture Garden before coming to CCS Bard and Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York, concurrently.

If you lived here, you’d be home by now—cocurated by artist Josiah McElheny, CCS Executive Director Tom Eccles, and Cooke—focuses on the theme of “the domestic” and differences in viewing and evaluating contemporary art in a public vs. domestic environment. The exhibition includes works by artists such as Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, and Cindy Sherman—drawn from the extensive Marieluise Hessel Collection of contemporary art—as well as new projects by McElheny and borrowed works by artists such as John Chamberlain. It will be at CCS through December 16.

by Richard Lewis ’58 touchstone center publications and codhill press This collection of Lewis’s recent essays and reflections provide inspirational and thought-provoking insight into teaching as a way to deepen a child’s imaginative world and poetic sensibility as the basis for all learning and understanding.

My Spiritual Journey by the Dalai Lama with Sofia Stril-Rever, translated from the French

by Charlotte Mandell ’90 harper one This new autobiography by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama traces, in his own words, his personal and spiritual journey from boyhood in rural Tibet (“As a Human Being”), to monkhood in Dharamsala (“As a Buddhist Monk”), to leadership in exile (“As the Dalai Lama”).

Carnal Knowledge

by Malerie Marder ’93 violette editions The first monograph to be published of Marder’s work, this stunning collection of nude photographs spanning 1996 to 2007 captures the artist, her family, loved ones, and others—set in familiar yet anonymous places like hotel rooms, shower stalls, dimly lit kitchens—in sexually charged yet strangely detached moments of intimacy and awkwardness.

Taking the Field: A Fan’s Quest to Run the Team He Loves

by Howard Megdal ’07 bloomsbury Combining personal memoir with baseball history, Megdal’s passionate and humorous book chronicles the journey of a loyal Mets fan who, tired of lifelong disappointments, finally decides to take matters into his own hands and become general manager of his beloved team.

Lola, California Grads, Faculty Receive Guggenheim Fellowships The Guggenheim Foundation’s latest fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars include five graduates and two Bard faculty members. Alumni/ae recipients were Duncan Hannah ’75 and MFA Program graduates Chaya Czernowin ’88, Janet Echelman ’98, Michelle Handelman ’01, and Corin Hickory Hewitt ’08. Also receiving fellowships were Penelope Umbrico, a member of the MFA faculty, and Lisa Sigal, visiting assistant professor of studio arts in Bard’s undergraduate program.

by Edie Meidav, writer in residence farrar, straus and giroux In Meidav’s newest novel, two childhood friends—Lana and Rose, or Lola One and Two as they were called as girls—reunite after a lifetime of choices has separated them. Rose is desperate to reconcile Lana with her father, a famous guru of neuroethology, who is serving his final days on death row for the murder of her mother.

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College Hosts Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas Participants in the 66th general meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS) were welcomed by College Chaplain Bruce Chilton ’71, executive director of the Institute of Advanced Theology and Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion; faculty from the programs of Religion, Theology, and Jewish Studies; and members of the Institute of Advanced Theology. The event took place at the Annandale campus August 2–6.

Papers included Margaret Mitchell’s “Peter’s Hypocrisy, and Paul’s: Two Hypocrites at the Foundation of Earliest Christianity?” and Jan Van der Watt’s “On Ethics in John’s Gospel and Letters.”

Longy School of Music Merges with College The Longy School of Music has found a partner in Bard. College President Leon Botstein and Longy President Karen Zorn announced the merger, which should be completed this fall. “As merged institutions, our impact will be expansive,” says Botstein. “The intellectual and musical exchange will result in opportunities to boldly change the direction of music education in this country.”

Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Longy has been a leading degree-granting conservatory and school of continuing and preparatory studies for nearly a century. In the last several years, its graduates have gone directly to top orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and Zurich Opera House Orchestra.

Longy is collaborating with Bard to develop new graduate degree programs at Longy in music pedagogy, as well as a music program for students at the Paramount Bard Academy in Delano, California.

Distinguished Awards Go to Alumni/ae and Students A number of recent graduates, and two students, have received prestigious awards, including Jeremy Carter-Gordon ’11, who won a Watson Fellowship, which funds 12 months of independent study and travel outside the United States. He plans to spend the year traveling to England, France, Italy, Georgia, and Germany, and discovering how cultural ideas such as nationalism, gender roles, and class are expressed through dance. Ada Petiwala ’12 received a 2011 Critical Language Scholars grant from the U.S. State Department to spend the summer studying Arabic in the Middle East.

Several Bard graduates are Fulbright scholars, including Thomas Murphey ’11, who is spending the year in Austria, and Rachel Heidenry ’11, who is in El Salvador. Ephen Glenn Colter ’94 will be headed to Brazil. Lindsey Longway, a senior at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, was awarded a Fulbright research grant to study in Slovenia. Fulbright English Teaching Assistant grants went to Bard graduates Nicholas Hippensteel ’09 and Dan Severson ’10, and to Faye Donnelley and Morgan Vinyard, who both graduated from Simon’s Rock last spring.

Conservatory violinist Luosha Fang ’11 traveled to Auckland, New Zealand, to compete as one of 18 semifinalists for the 2011 Michael Hill International Violin Competition. Cellist Emma Schmiedecke ’14 won the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra’s Young Artists Competition and will perform the Lalo Cello Concerto with the Bergen Philharmonic in Teaneck, New Jersey, on October 29.

Summer Math Program Employs Graduates, Students The College hosted the Summer Program in Mathematical Problem Solving, a three-week residential math program for New York City middle-school students, in July. Many of the participants come from middle schools partnered with the Bard MAT Program. Math instructors included Bard math major Erin (Boyer) Toliver ’00. Among the residential counselors were Bard math major Jackie Stone ’11, who served as the undergraduate Trustee Leader Scholar director of the Bard Math Circle, and Jeff Pereira ’13. The program was featured in the New York Times in July.

Bard Takes Silver for Being Green The College has obtained a silver rating in the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS), a voluntary framework for colleges and universities that gauges progress toward sustainability and offers recognition for sustainability leadership. The ratings include bronze, silver, gold, and platinum.

New BHSEC Opens in Newark Raymond Peterson, founding principal of the first Bard High School Early College in Manhattan, is now heading the latest BHSEC in Newark, New Jersey. “I’m excited to be part of bringing Bard’s early college program to Newark public schools,” Peterson says. Peterson joined Bard College in 1982 as part of its Language and Thinking Program, later became director of the College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, and in 2001 took the helm of BHSEC, the first public early college in the country, with a two-year college degree program built into four years of high school.

Dumaine Williams ’03 is the school’s dean of students. “This is a very exciting time in Newark—a time of renewed energy and change,” says Williams, who got his doctorate in molecular and cellular pharmacology before entering the field of education. “Bard is at the forefront of this change, bringing our early college program to the students of Newark and helping to redefine the public education landscape of the city.” BHSEC has an additional campus in Queens.

Conservatory Students, Alumni/ae Perform around the World Dawn Upshaw, acclaimed soprano and artistic director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program of The Bard College Conservatory of Music, hosted vocal program alumni/ae who performed at the 65th Ojai Music Festival in Ojai, California, on June 9. Upshaw was the festival’s music director. Performing in “Voices: The Next Generation” were Julia Bullock ’11, Ariadne Greif ’10, Rachel Schutz ’09, all sopranos; Katarzyna S˛adej ’10, mezzo-soprano; Jeffrey Hill ’11, tenor; and Jeongcheol Cha ’11, bass-baritone. Kayo Iwama, head of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was among the pianists. “They put together an intriguing and unconventional program of art songs in the first half and arrangements of folk songs in the second. The voices were exciting. The singers displayed personality both in song and in their stage manners,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Ribbon-cutting ceremony at BHSEC Newark. Photo: Karl Rabe

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

by Anna Moschovakis MFA ’98 and writing faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts coffee house press This powerful second collection of poems by Moschovakis explores the realities and ironies, humanity and inhumanity, of our technologyand consumerist-driven world. With almost hypersensitive poetic eloquence and a razor-sharp wit, these poems tackle our era’s biggest issues with nuance and grace.

My New American Life

The László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building. Image: Deborah Berke & Partners Architects LLP

Annandale Campus Busy with Construction Kline Commons, the main dining facility on campus, expanded during the summer, with a new dining room that adds almost 200 seats. The College also built another apartment-style Village Dorm, heated and cooled with a geothermal heat-exchange system, near the other nine environmentally friendly dormitories for Upper College students.

The Avery arts complex will become larger in 2012 with the completion of the Bitó Conservatory Building, a gift from László Z. Bitó ’60. Construction has started on the freestanding, 16,500-square-foot facility with a connection to the Edith C. Blum Institute on the west side of that building. In addition to practice studios, the Bitó building will include a flexible performance space available for campus-wide use. New squash courts are being built at the Stevenson Gymnasium, and more class space and weight and cardio rooms are being added. Thanks to the generosity of various alumni/ae donors, the former Cappuccino’s restaurant, opposite the main entrance to campus, will become the new site of the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs and the first upstate home of Two Boots, a popular pizza restaurant from New York City started by former Bard parent and one-time Bardian Phil Hartman.

New Orleans Program Change Benefits More Students Bard’s Early College in New Orleans Program, overseen by Director Stephen Tremaine ’07, has moved into two Bard campuses. Students will complete their required high school courses in the mornings at traditional public schools; after lunch, they ride a school bus to one of the two Bard Early College Centers, where they’re enrolled as half-time Bard students. (Bard classes were previously held on the campus of each partner high school.)

Students from every zip code in New Orleans and from nearly all of the city’s public high schools are now enrolled in the Bard program.

Recent BGC Exhibitions Feature Hats, Cards, and Textiles Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, appears at the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture in New York City through April 15, 2012. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Jones, the world’s foremost hat designer, collaborated on the exhibition, which displays more than 250 hats chosen with the expert eye of a milliner. Also on display, through January 1, is American Christmas Cards, 1900–1960.

Knoll Textiles, 1945–2010, the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to a leading producer of modern textile design, took place from May 18 to July 31.

by Francine Prose, Distinguished Writer in Residence harper At the heart of Prose’s wry new novel is Lula, a 26-year-old Albanian woman, living in New York City during the Bush-Cheney era, whose time is running out on her tourist visa. Becoming a nanny for a teenage boy who lives in New Jersey with his executive father, her life takes a turn when three Albanian “brothers” unexpectedly show up.

Zandra Rhodes: Textile Revolution: Medals, Wiggles and Pop 1961–1971

by Samantha Erin Safer ’04 antique collectors’ club Presenting previously unpublished photos, drawings, and textiles from the artist’s personal archives, this book focuses on the early designs of pioneering textile designer Zandra Rhodes, whose revolutionary impact on the fashion world is still being celebrated today.

The Mourning Wars

by Karen Steinmetz ’73 roaring book press A retelling of the gripping true story of Eunice Williams, a 7-year-old Puritan girl from Deerfield, Massachusetts, who was taken captive

by Mohawk warriors in 1704 and raised as one of their own. The novel delves into Eunice’s inner life and the impossible choices she must make about family, love, loyalty, and faith.

The Door in the Forest

by Roderick Townley ’65 knopf books for young readers In Townley’s newest novel for young readers, Daniel and his friend Emily are determined to penetrate “door in the forest”—a quicksand island, overgrown with vines, and guarded by poisonous snakes.

Magic and mystery abound in this tale of friendship.

The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating

by Kiera Van Gelder ’00 new harbinger publications In this candid, captivating, and witty memoir, Van Gelder chronicles her struggle with the debilitating and notoriously difficult-to-treat condition of borderline personality disorder, documenting a period of personal devastation that led to recovery through compassion.

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Class Notes

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Reunions 2011 1. Class of 2010 2. Class of 2006 3. Class of 2001 4. Class of 1996 5. Class of 1991 6. Class of 1986 7. Class of 1981 8. Class of 1971 Photos: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00, 1-5; Ben Gancsos, 6-8

Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend 2011 brought back graduates spanning 70 years of Bardians. Some come every year; reunion or not, they know that there is nothing quite like Annandale in May, or the familiar feeling of looking out over the Hudson from the Blithewood lawn, surrounded by old friends and family, and mingling with all the happy, newly minted alumni/ae. This year, alumni/ae gathered for cocktails in a tent before feasting on barbecue, dancing to the oldies, and admiring the spectacular fireworks.

Highlights of the weekend featured the impressive list of alumni/ae honored at the President’s Awards Ceremony, including Pia Carusone ’03, the youngest-ever awardee; Adam Yauch’86, from the Beastie Boys; the indomitable spirit of the Class of ’81 and its live music performance at the Annandale Road House; the evocative photography of the late Peter Kenner ’66, on display at Woods Studio throughout the weekend; the high-energy alumni/ae–student rugby game; and the delight on the faces of the graduating seniors to see, being honored on the same stage as they were, Richard and Robert Sherman ’49, the brothers who penned some of Disney’s most famous songs.

BardCorps: Under the leadership of College archivist Helene Tieger ’85, the Bard Oral History Project set up shop in the middle of campus as BardCorps.

In the spirit of the NPR project StoryCorps, the Bard project converted a 1962 Land Yacht Airstream trailer into a mobile booth in which alumni/ae were invited to sign up and share their memories of Bard as part of the Bard College Archives. The Airstream was on loan from Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, and decorated in vintage style from the home collection of Director of Alumni/ae Affairs Jane Brien ’89. According to Tieger, more than 20 interviews were recorded for the archives from alumni/ae ranging from the Class of ’52 to ’06. Interviews are being archived online at www.bard.edu/archives.

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Helene Tieger ’85, College archivist, inspecting the Land Yacht Airstream trailer Photo: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

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class notes 39

2012 Commencement Reunion Weekend: May 25–27, 2012 Please submit all Class Notes to alumni@bard.edu. The Bardian reserves the right to edit for space and style.

’09 Noah Levine spent the past two years in San Francisco and now lives in Brooklyn. He’s pursuing a career in magic. noahlevinemagic.com

’08 Ashleigh McCord is an admissions counselor with Sea Education Association, a nonprofit educational organization based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

SEA offers a hands-on ocean studies-and-sailing experience to college and high school students.

Rushaine McKenzie is pursuing a graduate degree at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

Nick Shapiro taught for Stephen Tremaine ’07 in Bard’s Early College in New Orleans Program this year. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford.

Genya Shimkin is moving to Seattle, where she will work on a master of philosophy degree in community-oriented public health practice at the University of Washington. She is looking forward to riding ferries, wearing Wellingtons, and sporting Orioles gear at Mariners’ games.

Sarah Elia ’06 on her wedding day with Alexandra Stefans ’05 and Sarah Garvan ’06 Photo: Amy Nightingale ’06

survival,” to obtain her Ph.D. in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ramy Nagy participated in “Inspire for Change,” a conference in Cairo, Egypt, earlier this year. Ramy spoke about the role of collaboration and communication in advancing innovation in Egypt. He also founded Beena (beenaproject.com).

Ariel Stess earned an M.F.A. in playwriting from Brooklyn College this year.

’07 5th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu Emilia Allen is happily globe-trotting, stage managing, and directing opera and theater in Florida, Massachusetts, Italy, and wherever the next gig takes her.

Anesa Kratovac has worked as a paralegal in New York, an English teacher in Prague, and on an organic farm in Portugal. She received her M.A. in political science from Central European University.

Emilie Richardson has started a solo law practice in Toledo, Ohio. She plans to focus on juvenile defense work, but also will try her hand at other areas of the law. In addition, Emilie is teaching legal research and writing at the paralegal department of a local community college.

Emily Sauter has started a blog, Pints and Panels: Beer Reviews in the Sequential Tradition. After Bard, she received an M.F.A. from the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. Emily also writes articles for cheersforbeers.com and wants to get her cicerone (beer sommelier) qualification.

’04

The oil paintings of Jivan Lee (BCEP ’07) were in two exhibitions in 2011: a solo exhibition at Milagro Gallery in Taos, New Mexico, and a national juried exhibition at Hudson Gallery in Sylvania, Ohio. His work is online at jivanleefineart.com.

Elizabeth Anderson and 11 other fiction writers from around the world were chosen as fellows to attend the 2011 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices.

Mia McCully was recently promoted to associate director of the Bard College Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City. She’s looking forward to seeing old friends at her five-year reunion at Bard next spring (May 25–27, 2012).

Angie Smith exhibits her photography in galleries in Los Angeles and New York. She is represented by Redux Pictures, and shoots for clients including the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and Forbes.

David Moser worked as a writing instructor for the Bard Al-Quds Honors College in the West Bank. He starts at the London School of Economics this fall.

Genevieve Wanucha is working on her first book, a nonfiction work for Simon & Schuster, in which stories of brain disorders explore the science of emotion.

For more information, visit genevievewanucha.com.

’06 Sarah Elia and Yoshiki Miyazawa were married in Saugerties, New York, on June 12, 2011. Alexandra Stefans ’05, Amy Nightingale, and Sarah Garvan joined them for their big day.

’05 Bettina Hajagos successfully defended her dissertation, titled “Toxoplasma gondii employs secreted metalloproteases for host cell invasion and intracellular

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Gregory Wieber collaborated on a music creation and performance app for the Apple iPad called polychord. It was selected by Apple for its Staff Favorites list and made the top of the App Store charts (music category). The app is a synthesis of design, music, and technology. Duncan Malashock ’05 served as a technical consultant on the project.

’03 Lydia Anderson is the dramaturge-in-residence for Holland Productions in Boston. This summer she worked on Hideous Progeny, a play about the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Eben Kaplan was married in June to Jennifer Robinson. Bardians from across the country descended on Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, for the festivities.

Pia Carusone, Sarah Mosbacher ’04, and Tavit Geudelekian ’05 were members of the wedding party. Bianca D’Allesandro, Mollie Meikle, Lisa Savin, and Rafi Rom were also in attendance. Ice pops were served.

Joy Lai spent the summer traveling, teaching, and learning in Lesotho and South Africa, as a recipient of a Fulbright curriculum development grant for integrating arts and social studies. She moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2010 and teaches in a democratic public charter school. She found a kindred spirit in Tereza Topferova Bottman ’95 and joined the Portland Pie Appreciation Society and Book Club with Claire Mitchie ’02, Elissa Nelson ’98, and Megan Savage ’98.

After working as a social justice organizer and human rights educator, Emma Kreyche began her doctoral studies at New York University in 2007.

Her research focuses on cultural politics of U.S.–Latin American relations in the 20th and 21st centuries, and specifically on questions of race, nationalism, popular movements, and iterations of U.S. imperialism in the Americas.

Jesse Sposato is a freelance writer, drummer, and art-school model living in Brooklyn. She writes for the Greenpoint Gazette, Appolicious, Feminist Review, and Useless magazine, among others, and is on Big Jewcy’s list of people who should be recognized. Jesse plays the drums in Holy Hail and Love Tribe.

’01 Lori Fromowitz is enrolled in the master’s program in speech-language pathology at MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Saul Jacobowitz lives with his sweetie, Laura Costello ’02, in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Nick Kramer and Liz Homberger were married in 2010 in Vermont. After honeymooning in Israel and Jordan they returned home to Los Angeles.

Guests included Dan Buckley, Nick Buffum, Emily Cervini, Moriah Kinberg, Anne McPeak, Paul Paradiso, Alex Richards, Alison (Hammer) Woodhead, Sam Morgan ’03, Michael Bortnick ’00, Peter Christian ’11, and another Bard friend, Hank Baker.

Bianca D’Allesandro ’03, Jennifer Robinson, Sarah Mosbacher ’04, Pia Carusone ’03, Rafi Rom ’03, Lisa Savin ’03, Mollie Meikle ’03, Eban Kaplan ’03, and Tavit Geudelekian ’05 Photo: Rita Pavone

’02 10th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu Dorothy Albertini has a new website, dorothyalbertini.com, which features her publications and artwork.

Amy Clark writes a column called “Smart People on Bad Days” every Monday for the Weekly Dig (digboston.com). Get in touch via smartpeopleonbaddays@gmail.com.

Daniel Cummings married Maha Saab in November 2010. He had solo shows of paintings at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and a Los Angeles gallery called ACME. Tate DeCaro recently became development and communications coordinator for NeighborWorks Rochester, a nonprofit organization that assists first-time homebuyers to purchase homes in the Greater Rochester area and creates sustainable communities though energy services, home improvement loans, and neighborhood revitalization. Tate is also working with Tamara Plummer and Imran Ahmed on the Class of 2002 10-year Reunion Planning Committee.

Have ideas on how to make this a particularly memorable occasion? E-mail alumni@bard.edu with your contact information, and be sure to join us May 25–27, 2012, for this exciting milestone!

Kerry Downey returned to Bard in last spring with her New York City–based arts collective Action Club, to inhabit Sasson Soffer’s public art sculpture Hello America (1980) for a monthlong project. For details, visit inthishello.tumblr.com.

Erin Horahan has completed her first year in the Master of Architecture Program at UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Design.

Cynthia Kane and Beau Macksoud ’03 have published Take a Hike: The Best 50 Routes in the Community of Madrid. The first hiking guidebook about the community of Madrid to be written in English, it includes histories of 26 classic Spanish towns.

Angela Ross is living happily in Seattle. She is halfway through medical school and plans to graduate from Bastyr University in June 2013 with a degree in naturopathic medicine.

Noah Sheola has completed a master’s degree in library and information science. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and performs with the improv comedy group Stranger than Fiction.

Erin Weeks-Earp is finishing her Ph.D. at Columbia University Teachers College, where she has participated in international research and traveled to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Her family is Vladimir and David.

’00 Jennifer Glynn had two films premiere at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. She produced the feature film Maria My Love and the short film Mr. Stache.

Thomas Lannon is assistant curator in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.

’99 Emily Scarfe received an M.A. in architecture in 2011 from the University of Texas at Austin and will complete an M.A. in landscape architecture in December. She still has her St. Tula T-shirt from the “People’s Film Department.”

’98 Linda Post presented a solo exhibition, WHEREVER, at Art Palace in Houston earlier this year. She is an assistant professor of art and a digital media coordinator at Stephen F. Austin State University.

’97 15th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu Julia (Wolk) Munemo is living, writing, and momming in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She will drive from there to her 15th reunion (May 25-27, 2012) with her sweet husband Ngonidzashe ’00, and her monstery and beautiful sons. class notes 41

Chach Sikes is a 2011 Code for America fellow, and is using her web talent to make American city governments more open, transparent, and participatory.

Nicole Willis-Grimes and her husband, Jesse Wadhams, welcomed twin boys, Samuel and Robert, this year. All are doing well in Reno, Nevada.

’96 In 2010, Sutton Stokes moved to Elkins, West Virginia, with his wife, Amy, and son, Coen. When not exploring the woods, Sutton works as a writer.

’95 Tereza (Topferova) Bottman teaches high school language arts, ESL, and drama 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 living in the United States. She also is launching a podcast in conjunction with Roma Rights Network (romarights.net/v2/).

’94 Sara Dilg and her husband adopted their daughter, Hailey, from the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families in 2010. Hailey is now a happy, loving, and very sweet five-year-old girl.

’93 Jonathan Durham and Margaret Loftus ’92 live in Vermont with their three boys (Keelan, Tobin, and Wendell) in an old church and raise sheep, chickens, pigs, and vegetables. Jonathan works from home as a network engineer and Margaret heads up the Board of Directors of the Wellspring Waldorf School in nearby Chelsea.

’92 20th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu Josh Kaufman recently joined the Bard–St. Stephen’s Board of Governors and is excited to start working on his 20th reunion. He encourages all Class of ‘92 Bardians to save the date (May 25–27, 2012) and get involved in this momentous occasion. Contact alumni@bard.edu for more information and make sure Bard has all your current contact information.

’90 Francie Soosman helped with the redesign of the Bardian. She still lives in Tivoli, New York, where you can find her at Fabulous Yarn or Tivoli Bread and Baking.

’89 Chris Steussy helped to organize a seminar, “The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt: The Problem of Evil and the Origins of Totalitarianism,” held from June 26 to August 5 on the Bard campus. It was Chris who initially suggested Bard as the location for the event, which was one of the annual National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for School Teachers.

’87 25th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu

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Bill Stavru finally returned to the East Coast to pursue a master’s degree in urban planning from University of Delaware. He also is a certified personal trainer and teaches a boot camp twice a week. He spends most of his free time training in Brazilian jitsu and mixed martial arts. Bill is heading up his 25th Reunion Committee, along with Raissa St. Pierre, Anne Wallace, David Avallone, and Danny Cherubin, and they expect all classmates and friends to join them in Annandale on May 25–27, 2012. Contact alumni@bard.edu for details.

’82 30th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu Steven Colatrella lives in Padua, Italy, with his wife, Silvia Bedulli, and daughter, Ines Elizabeth Colatrella. Steven is an adjunct associate professor of government and sociology for the University of Maryland University College Europe. His most recent books, still in the works, are Global Governance and World Revolution: Austerity and Political Crisis in the 21st Century and The Making of Democratic Civilization.

Geoffrey Stein’s painting Andy Takes a Train was in a benefit exhibition, Single Fare 2: Please Swipe Again, at Sloan Fine Art in New York City. The show raised funds for the Transportation Alliance and New York Alliance for the Arts. He looks forward to seeing classmates at their reunion in May and encourages everyone to make sure the Alumni/ae Office has their up-to-date information, as plans are getting under way soon.

’80 Anne Finkelstein exhibited The High Line Series, a solo show of paintings, digital photomontages, and a multimedia presentation, at SB D Gallery in New York City in March.

’77 Bruce Wolosoff is writing an opera based on the children’s novel The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley ’65.

’75 Duncan Hannah received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of fine arts. Duncan, who “has very fond memories” of his time at Bard, has been exhibiting his paintings in the United States and England since 1980. He divides his time between Manhattan’s Upper West Side and West Cornwall, Connecticut. To see more, go to duncanhannah@blogspot.com.

Pamela Villars and Kevin Stein’s “Evaluation of an End-of-Life Peer Support Group Intervention for Cancer Information Specialists at a National Cancer Information Call Center” was accepted for poster presentation at the International Psycho-Oncology Society’s 2011 World Congress of PsychoOncology.

’74 Lisa Harris’s most recent collection of poems, Excavating the Present, is a semifinalist in Tupelo Press’s First or Second Book Contest. The collection has also shown as a collaborative installation at Bright Hill Gallery in Treadwell, New York.

Mardi-Ellen Hill has completed The Spell of Vaugirard, a book/game series that serves as both a business vehicle and a legal thriller. She says her new entertainment franchise model presents an innovative platform for copyright in a wireless world. For more information, contact Mardi-Ellen at mardiellenh@aol.com.

Islands, of which she was the founding president; in Ecuador she is on the executive board of the Centro de Desarrollo Integral, a foundation that offers psychological assistance and courses with a holistic, Jungian approach.

Katya (Rosenberg) Bock celebrated her first year of retirement this summer.

She has kept busy traveling and volunteering.

After working as the registrar at Manhattanville College for 20 years, Denise Ahearn Carson retired to beautiful Germantown, New York. She volunteers at an animal rescue group in Hudson, watches sunsets over the Catskills, and takes strolls on the Bard campus. She enjoys seeing how the place has grown but still feels the same.

Michael and Wenny DeWitt have moved from Jane Street (West Village) to John Street (Financial District). Their new address is 99 John Street #2308, New York, NY 10038.

Betsey Ely is working on two projects at Bard, the Arboretum and the cemetery. She says both need funding, so if anyone is thinking about the future, they can fund the preservation of an ancient tree or a plot.

Carole Fabricant retired from UC Riverside in 2010. As a retirement present for herself, she took a two-month trip to Europe. She is now back in Santa Monica and working on a novel.

Charles Hollander and his wife, Janet, now have a grandson, Griffin. Janet retired last year while Charles did a nine-month stint with the Census Bureau.

Don Hurowitz’s grandson, Spencer, turned two this summer. Daughter Kate is still at Google, son Dan is farming in the middle of Chicago at a nonprofit called City Farm, and twins Mike and Noah are in college.

Upper Fifth (2010), Duncan Hannah ’75

’72 40th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu Lis Semel is beginning her tenth year on the faculty at Berkeley Law and tenth year as director of the Death Penalty Clinic. The latter continues to represent clients facing capital punishment at trial, on appeal and in postconviction, and is also involved in cases that have the potential to effect system-wide change in the administration of the death penalty. Lis plans to attend her reunion in May and looks forward to seeing everyone.

’71 Kathryn Hill lives in Juneau, Alaska, in the summers and in Maharashtra, India, in the winters. She volunteers in Juneau for Turning the Tides, a group trying to ban plastic bags, and in India for Prithvi, which seeks to empower rural women.

’70 Ray Stato is a Shakespearean and classical actor living in New York. He wants to hear from all his old friends and acquaintances. You can reach him on linkedin.com.

’65 Class Correspondent: Charlie Hollander, chas956@rcn.com Jim Banker and his wife, Michele, went to the UK and the Norwegian fjords in June to join Ed Fischer and his wife for their 40th wedding anniversary.

Katya (Kohn) Bernasconi travels between her homes in Switzerland and Ecuador. In Switzerland she is involved with Swiss Friends of the Galapagos

David Jacobowitz retired three years ago. He now volunteers for bicycle advocacy, teaches bike safety, and helps out with supported bike rides. He has taken several bike rides with Richard Pargament and plans to do more.

George Lynes retired nearly ten years ago, but is still active on the executive board of the New Jersey Association for College Admission Counseling.

Susan Mountrey retired 16 years ago as a social worker for child abuse in New York City. She now writes, paints, putters, and enjoys her three children and four grandchildren.

Richard Pargament retired from his consulting business four years ago. Since then, he’s been working on research and consulting projects—including a juvenile justice initiative sponsored by a major national foundation, and institutional research for Bard High School Early College in New York City. He’s also become an avid cyclist. This past January, he biked over a hundred miles in one day on Hawaii. He can be reached at RichardPargament.com.

Richard Sahn is still teaching sociology at Penn College. He and his wife, Monica, celebrated their 21st anniversary this year.

Harvey Sterns completed his 40th year at the University of Akron. The Board of Trustees presented him with a special resolution for his service as the founding director of the Institute for Life-Span Development and Gerontology and for the 35th anniversary of the Institute.

Rod Townley’s seventh novel for young readers, The Door in the Forest, was published in 2011 by Knopf.

Alan Wallack and Robin (Liebmann) ’68 celebrated their 44th anniversary this year. They are snowbirds with a house in Sarasota, Florida, where he is a sponsor-relations coordinator for an independent film festival. In summer

class notes 43

they live in Princeton, where Robin is a realtor and Alan serves on the boards of a Jewish newspaper and the Jewish Federation.

’12 Andrew Lampert took part in Electronic Arts Intermix’s 40th anniversary program in New York with a screening and a discussion of his new work. The event, titled Andrew Lampert Presents: Andy Lampert, took place on May 31.

Joe Zerga has been living in Las Vegas since 1973. He also has a summer home in Whitefish, Montana. After Bard he went south to Pace University and got a degree in accounting, and then earned a master’s degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in tax law. He recommends looking up online “Zerga Tenet Redding” for insight into one of the largest healthcare scandals in American history.

Boru O’Brien O’Connell had a piece commissioned for the online magazine Triple Canopy as part of its “Internet as Material” project. The piece, State Changes, was featured in Triple Canopy’s 12th issue, titled Black Box, which was released in May. The piece can be viewed online at www.canopycanopycanopy.com.

’64

’10

Retired handyman Andrew McPherson is rebuilding, from the foundation up, a one-story camp into a two-story passive solar home on Galway Lake in New York.

Paul Branca had a solo exhibition at Scaramouche in New York City. The exhibition, titled Waitings, was accompanied by an essay written by David Everitt Howe, and ran from June to August.

’63 The novels in The Locator series by Richard Greener will be the basis for the Fox TV series The Finder, beginning in January 2012 on Thursday nights at 9 p.m.

Rayna Meshorer Harman is a court-appointed special advocate for Los Angeles County, serving in the Antelope Valley in Southern California.

’62 Ann Ho married Harry Harper on April 14, 2011, after a 38-year courtship and 38 years of devotion to each other. Ann Ho, Susan Playfair, and Penny Axelrod ’63 write that they plan to attend their 50th Reunion, May 25–27, 2012. “Please do join us!” For more information, to update your contact information, or to sign up for a committee, contact alumni@bard.edu.

Graham Collins participated in the group exhibition Perfectly Damaged at Derek Eller Gallery in Manhattan from June to August.

Lauren Luloff was featured in the group show Painting Expanded at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York in July.

Maria Mykolenko curated an exhibition of contemporary music and sound at Chashama 461 Studio Gallery, New York, in June. The exhibition, titled A Diversity of Sound, featured work by a group of emerging New York composers that included Maria herself and Alfredo Marin ’11.

’09 César Alvarez’s band The Lisps released its third LP, Are We at the Movies? on Extropian Records in May.

’53 Sherman Yellen’s newly revised musical Blackbird (formerly Josephine Tonight!), for which he wrote the libretto and lyrics, with music by the late composer Wally Harper, will be staged by West Coast Black Theatre Troupe (wbttroupe.org) in Sarasota, Florida, in April and May 2012. Yellen’s memoir, Spotless, is forthcoming from Martin Sustainable Books.

’52 60th Reunion: May 25–27, 2012 Contact: Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, 800-BARDCOL, alumni@bard.edu Kit Ellenbogen and David and Ruth Schwab write: “We are amazed and delighted to be celebrating our 60th reunion this year, and we encourage all classmates and all others from the Classes of ’49 to ’55 with whom we went to Bard to save the date and make plans to be on campus from May 25–2, 2012.

Contact the alumni/ae office to get involved and make sure they have all your updated contact information. Start calling your friends—we want to see you.”

’40 Class Correspondent: Dick Koch, dickkoch88@gmail.com or 510-526-3731

’08 Coinciding with her opening at Seattle’s Platform Gallery, Debra Baxter premiered her first book with Publication Studio, Wanting is Easier Than Having, in July. The book and accompanying exhibition contained images of Baxter’s work and process, and included poems by writers asked to address the space between wanting and having.

Sabrina Gschwandtner is an artist, writer, and curator whose work bridges the fields of conceptual art, handcraft, activism, and social history. In 2002 she founded KnitKnit, a limited edition artist’s publication (www.knitknit.net).

Her book, KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave, was published in 2007 and is in prominent collections around the country.

’07 In May, Chris Curreri and Eric Gottesman each had featured exhibitions in the CONTACT Photography Festival 2011, for which the artistic theme was the tension between humanity and nature. Chris’s exhibition, held at the University of Toronto Art Center, was titled Something Something. Eric’s exhibition, held at TPW Gallery in Toronto, was titled Paths that Cross Again.

’06 Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts ’14 Sabisha Friedberg performed her sonic poem, “The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within a Sphere,” at the Clocktower Gallery in New York in April. The work was presented by Art International Radio, and broadcast live on AIR’s online station.

Jamie Fennelly released a CD and accompanying vinyl album for his ongoing solo project, Mind Over Mirrors, in June. The album, titled The Voice Rolling, is distributed by Digitalis Recordings in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Mary Weatherford had a solo show at Brennan & Griffin in New York City.

The show, titled Cave at Pismo, ran from May to June.

’05 John Jurayj had two sets of his work featured in a solo exhibition titled Undead at Participant Inc in Manhattan. The two sets, both dealing with

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emotion and public memory regarding a number of political events in the Middle East, ran alongside one another during June and July.

In June, Annette Wehrhahn curated a show at Soloway, the gallery she opened last year with Munro Galloway, Pat Palermo, and Paul Branca ’10 in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. The show, titled Feelers, featured the work of three contemporary artists: Branden Koch, Dani Leventhal ’10, and Kevin Hooyman.

’09 Lindsay Chapman works for Legrand North America as a corporate sustainability analyst. She facilitates internal sustainability teams to accomplish yearly goals that range across social, environment, and governance foci.

Katherine Galbraith works for Center for Neighborhood Technologies, the organization where she did her internship while at Bard CEP. Kate is the center’s environmental justice and transportation policy contractor.

’04

’08

Matt King had a solo show at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. The show, titled Continental Drift, ran from June to August.

Amy (Barton) Fagan works as a sustainability planner with Versar, Inc., in Virginia.

Versar is a global project management company that provides sustainable solutions to government and commercial clients in construction management, environmental services, munitions response, telecommunications, and energy.

Laurel Sparks and Carrie Moyer (Bard ’02) were featured in the small group exhibition Affinities: Paintings in Abstraction at D’Amelio Terras Gallery.

The show, which ran from June to August, also featured former Avery School faculty member Polly Apfelbaum. The exhibition was curated by Kate McNamara CCS ’07.

Marc Swanson has a solo exhibition, Perspectives 175: Marc Swanson: The Second Story, at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston. The exhibition opened on June 30 and will run until October 9.

’03 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a multimedia, multicharacter solo performance piece by writer/performing artist Samuael Topiary, explores the symbolic and poetic resonances of the Greek myth of Icarus. For more, visit topiaryfilms.org/icarus.

’01 In June, Holly Lynton was a featured artist at the Flash Forward Photography Festival in Boston. She also took part in the festival’s small group exhibition, titled Fresh Works: A Sampler of New England Photographers.

Jennifer Riley and Avery School faculty member Stephen Westfall took part in Draw the Line, a group exhibition at Allegra LaViola Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The exhibition ran from June 29 to August 6.

Jonathan VanDyke put on a 40-hour performance incorporating and responding to the works of Jackson Pollock. The performance, titled The Long Glance, took place at Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo in late May.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy ’11 Vanessa Arcara is employed by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation as the manager of food and events for High Line Park. She will be an official presenter at the 2011 AASHE Conference (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education) in October, discussing the integration of strategic communications into campus sustainability initiatives, with an emphasis on food issues in particular.

’10 Lisa Jaccoma wrote an article titled “What’s Wrong with Green Marketing, and How to Fix It,” which appeared in June on GreenBiz.com.

Jessie Mee works for the United Nations Development Programme’s Ecosystems and Biodiversity team as a specialist in results, reporting, knowledge, learning, and communications. She is based in Pretoria. Mee first started working with UNDP in 2008 as an intern in Bratislava, on a Luce grant.

’07 Tatjana Rosen is an associate conservation scientist in the Livelihoods Department at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bozeman, Montana. She currently works to address and mitigate human-carnivore conflicts.

Tim Treadwell is the manager of research and analysis at the California Center for Sustainable Energy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating change for a clean energy future.

’05 Jon Griesser is the project manager at EarthShift, a firm that provides sustainability consulting, software, and training services in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Total Cost Assessment (TCA). John works with corporations and institutions to inform their decision making about the social, economic, and environmental consequences that flow from their activities.

Ben Hoen works as a principal research associate for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Electricity Market and Policy Unit. He is under contract with LBNL to investigate individual and community responses to a number of different renewable energy sources. He recently conducted a nationwide analysis of the impact of wind facilities on local property values and an analysis of solar energy systems’ effects on home transaction prices.

Dane Klinger is a Ph.D. candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University.

Erin Wood is employed as an environmental planner for the City of Austin, Texas, with the Watershed Protection Department. Her work entails the development of water quality regulations, modeling and analysis of policy impacts and alternatives, and nationwide benchmarking of environmental strategies.

Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture ’10 Alexis Romano contributed an essay to the catalogue edited for the exhibition Yohji Yamamoto at the V&A, which was on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from March 12 to July 10. He spoke at the accompanying symposium on May 6.

’08 Victoria Esterlis Motlin is the senior decorative arts editor at Artnet.

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’06 Sarah Archer started a new job this summer as chief curator at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. She will also be a guest curator for Bright Future, an exhibition about new designs in glass, at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery.

Emily Klug is the senior project coordinator in arts administration at Pace Gallery, New York, where she is focusing on conservation projects and international gallery operations.

’03 Remi Spriggs Dyll is assistant curator of the Bayou Bend Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her article, “The Glassware of James Hogan and James Powell and Sons” appeared in the Journal of Glass Studies.

Gabi Ngcobo, founding director and curator of the Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg, will take part in the 11th Lyon Biennale, A Terrible Beauty Is Born, curated by Victoria Noorthoorn ’98. Gabi is also a lecturer at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg.

Andrea Torreblanca is a coordinator at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros–La Tallera, Mexico City. She has also curated two exhibitions independently: El Hoyo, a video projection by Neli Ruzic and Marie-Christine Camus, two artists who were part of the CCS Bulletin Board project; and Proyecto Trámite: Museo, which works around the idea of the museum and exhibition strategies with language and text.

Scott W. Perkins, curator of collections and exhibitions at Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, received a grant to work on his dissertation on Eugene Beyer Masselink. In late 2010, Scott edited and contributed an essay on architect Bruce Goff’s designs for interiors in the accompanying book for Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind, an exhibition he helped to curate at the University of Oklahoma. His essay, “Air,” accompanied the photographs of Thomas R. Schiff in Wright Panorama: Elements of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture in 360 Degrees (Orange Frazer Press, 2010). Another essay, on Zaha Hadid’s 2002 museum expansion project for Wright’s 1956 Price Tower, will appear in Richard Longstreth’s forthcoming book, Additions, Subtractions, and Adjacencies: Preserving While Modifying the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright (University of Virginia Press).

Center for Curatorial Studies ’11

Gabi Ngcobo ’10 and Sohrab Mohebbi ’10 Photo: Letitia Smith

Nova Benway attended “The Family of Man” International Workshop in Durham, United Kingdom, in June, and then went on to attend “The Human Snapshot,” an international conference exploring humanism and universalism in contemporary art and photography, in Arles, France.

’09

Kelly Kivland is an curatorial associate in the curatorial department at the Dia Art Foundation.

Nathan Lee is the CCS Curatorial Fellow from 2011 through 2012.

Natasha Llorens has enrolled in the Ph.D. program in art history at Columbia University.

Manuela Moscoso, an independent curator based in New York City, curated Even in the Quietest Moments, featuring work by Patricia Dauder, Cristóbal Lehyt, and Dushko Petrovich, which ran from June 29 to August 5 at New York’s Vogt Gallery.

’10 Michał Jachuła is the curator at Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok, Poland. In the fall, he curated Autopis: Notes, Copies and Masterpieces, by the New York City– based Polish artist Anna Ostoya, at the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw.

Ginny Kollak organized To See an Object, To See the Light (Vedere un Oggetto, Vedere la Luce), an exhibition with Pádraic E. Moore and Pavel S. Py´s, as part of the 2011 Young Curators’ Residency program at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The show was presented at the Fondazione’s exhibition space in Guarene d’Alba, an 18th-century palazzo just outside of Turin.

Sohrab Mohebbi, Queens Museum of Art Van Lier Fund Fellow, curated The Hidden Location, the first New York museum installation by Egyptian video artist Hassan Khan.

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After curating full time in Ottawa for more than a year, Mireille Bourgeois returned to Nova Scotia to help revive what she describes as a “rough and tough” arts scene. She lives in Halifax and works as the director/curator at the Centre for Art Tapes, a nonprofit media arts organization. The Centre focuses on the production of media arts, and it has residencies for artists and curators, workshops, exhibitions, and screening events.

Summer Guthery is the independent curator and founder of The Chrysler Series, a program of screenings, readings, and performances on an upper floor of the Chrysler Building in New York City. She has worked with artists Dexter Sinister, Shannon Ebner, Rosalind Nashashibi, Alex Waterman, Will Holder, Michael Portnoy, and also with the comics of Ad Reinhardt. “The real kicker is the space is on a floor with a balcony, so the view behind the performer/reader/screening is a massive metal gargoyle jutting out over the city,” she writes.

Christina Linden hosted a discussion in San Francisco with UC Berkeley professor Anne Walsh following a screening of Igor Grubi´cs East Side Story, which presented documentary footage from the first Gay Pride parades in Belgrade and Zagreb. Christina is an independent curator/critic in Oakland, California.

Fionn Meade, curator at the SculptureCenter, New York City, organized a screening series at Anthology Film Archives in relation to the exhibition Time Again, which he curated at the SculptureCenter. He also curated the exhibition After Images at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels.

Kate Menconeri, an independent curator based in the Bard area, curated Works on Paper/Chad Kleitsch at The Camera Club of New York in May and June. In conjunction with Kleitsch’s exhibition, Tim Davis, associate professor of photography at Bard, presented new writings inspired by the works on view.

’08 Vincenzo de Bellis, independent curator and founder of Peep-Hole, a project space in Milan, curated Five Easy Pieces at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin.

Vincenzo and Chus Martinez ’01 were among the speakers at Art 42 Basel, which took place in June.

Dan Byers, associate curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, curated the exhibition Ragnar Kjartansson: Song. He is currently working on the 2013 Carnegie International, which he is organizing as part of a three-person curatorial team with Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski.

After three years of working independently, Milena Hoegsberg left New York City to return to her Scandinavian roots. She is the acting chief curator at Henie Onstad Art Center outside Oslo, where she works with Tone Hansen, the museum’s new director.

Nicole Pollentier is working on her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Pittsburgh.

’07 Ruba Katrib, assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami Beach, received a curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to organize “New Methods,” a symposium focusing on contemporary arts organizations that provide education for working artists throughout Latin America. There are eight organizations working in the field, along with individual artists such as Oscar Muñoz, Pablo Helguera, Judi Werthein, and George Yúdice, among others.

Kate McNamara is the director and chief curator of Boston University Art Gallery.

Rebeca Noriega is an independent curator living in Puerto Rico and teaching in the M.A. program in cultural administration at the University of Puerto Rico. Rebeca is also the associate curator of the third San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, to be held in April 2012.

’06 Montserrat Albores Gleason, an independent curator in Mexico City, curated George Brecht, an exhibition concerned with scores for events (such as Brecht’s Three Chair Event), which ran at Petra gallery from June to September.

Geir Haraldseth, a curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design of Norway, together with Trude Iversen (former curator in residence at CCS) and others, have formed a union for both independent and institutional curators. They are working to establish a stipend program and an archive for curators working in Norway.

Zeljka Himbele Kozul curated Mark Tribe:“The Dystopia Files” at G-MK in Zagreb, Croatia. Tribe, an American artist, has gathered an archive of protest footage, which serves as a base for creating site-specific video installations in gallery and museum spaces.

’05 Jyeong-Yeon (Janice) Kim is enrolled in the Ph.D. program for visual culture studies at Korea University in Seoul. Jyeong-Yeon is also director of Seoul’s

Art+Lounge Dibang, a nonprofit cultural space. Dibang is an archaic word for threshold in Korean.

Yasmeen Siddiqui, formerly the curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, is now the public arts planner for the city of Louisville, Kentucky. In May, Yasmeen, in collaboration with Gabriela Rangel ’01, the director of visual arts at the Americas Society, curated For Rent: Consuelo Castañeda, a series of “interventions” in the gallery by filmmakers Ross Birrell and David Harding, playwright Carmen Peláez, and author José Manuel Prieto.

’04 Elizabeth Zechella is an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

’03 After working in the United Kingdom for seven years, Robert Blackson is now director of exhibitions and public programs for Tyler School of Art’s Temple Gallery, at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Kate Green passed her Ph.D. exams in modern and contemporary art history at the University of Texas in Austin, and is researching and writing her dissertation on Vito Acconci’s performances, films, and videos from the first half of the 1970s.

John Weeden is executive director of the UrbanArt Commission in Memphis, which was recently named one of the top seven cities in the world for young artists by Flavorpill, an international online journal of art and culture. The UrbanArt Commission was credited as a primary driver of this phenomenon.

’02 Sandra Firmin, curator of the art gallery at the University at Buffalo, organized Artpark: 1974–1984. Both a publication and exhibition, it chronicled the seminal years of an innovative summer residency program during which a diverse group of artists created temporary public artworks in Lewiston, New York.

During its heyday Artpark successfully balanced a populist mission with the commissioning of some of the most compelling avant-garde art of its day. The publication (Princeton Architectural Press) features color documentation of these site-specific and performance artworks, both in the process of being created and the act of being experienced.

Having finished a postdoctoral residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Jenni Sorkin is an assistant professor of critical theory, media, and design at the University of Houston.

’01 Ilaria Bonacossa curated Il baciamano (A Nobleman Kissing a Lady’s Hand), a project by Ian Kiaer, as part of the Venice Biennale. Ilaria is a curator at Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation for Art in Turin.

Dermis León, art critic for Arte al Limite, Art Nexus, and the Curatorial Bureau in Madrid, curated Des-Habitable, an exhibition about architecture and urbanism in Latin America, at the Spanish Cultural Center in Lima, Peru.

Chus Martínez, head of department at documenta und Museum in Kassel, Germany, took part in a discussion in connection with 100 Notizen — 100 Notes / 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, a presentation of dOCUMENTA (13)’s notebooks at Artists Space, New York City.

Carina Plath is curator for painting and sculpture at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany.

Gabriel Rangel, director of visual arts at the Americas Society, participated in a conversation with Fernando Bryce apropos his exhibition El Mundo en Llamas, which was on view during May and June at Alexander & Bonin in New York City. class notes 47

’99 Henry Estrada is back in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, working as senior manager at Public Art San Antonio.

Ben Portis is a curator at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, where he organizes about 12 exhibitions and projects annually.

Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz und Gaffron received her Ph.D. with the publication of her dissertation, “Creativity as a human right!” Georg Jappe. Forms of applied aesthetics, about the influential literary art critic Georg Jappe (1936– 2007), who helped promote Cologne and Düsseldorf as major centers for contemporary art in the 1960s and ’70s.

’98 Sarah Cook cochaired the Fourth International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, held in September at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). She also curated a group exhibition, hosted by LJMU, together with the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology. She is a member of the advisory panel for the Journal of Curatorial Studies, soon to be published by Intellect Press, and is completing a book on new media that took ten years of research, to be published this fall by Riverside Architectural Press. In 2010, her book Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media was published by MIT Press, and is already in its second printing. This spring, she will be curator in residence at the University of Edinburgh.

Malgorzata Lisiewicz is on the faculty at the University of Gdansk, Poland.

’97 Rachel Gugelberger, an independent curator in New York City, curated Library Science at Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut, which opens in November and runs through January 2012. The exhibition examines the public’s changing role toward libraries as they convert their classification tools and/or entire holdings to digital formats. She also cocurated (with Reynard Loki) Data-Deluge, which opens in the spring and runs through August at the Ballroom, Marfa, Texas.

Melissa Hiller is the director at the American Jewish Museum in Pittsburgh.

’96 Pip Day, an independent curator in Mexico City, organized the conference: “Not I: The Performative Speech Act and the Sovereign Subject,” at Tlatelolco in Mexico City. It was the first event in the long-term research project for which she received an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ curatorial research fellowship last year. The project also involves a series of workshops this fall, and an exhibition in 2012.

Sydney Jenkins, director of the gallery at Ramapo College of New Jersey, curated Haitian Art Excerpts: From Renaissance to Diaspora, a group exhibition featuring works from prestigious private collections and contemporary artists.

In Memoriam ’35 The Rev. John D. Mears, 99, of East Aurora, New York, a retired Anglican priest who was a prisoner of war during World War II, died Saturday, August 13, 2011. He was believed to have been Bard’s oldest living alumnus.

Born in New York City, Rev. Mears was a graduate of the former St. Stephen’s College (now Bard) and the General Theological Seminary. He was ordained into the Episcopal priesthood in the Philippines in 1939, and while

48

serving as a missionary there, he, his wife, and his daughter spent more than three years as prisoners of war under the Japanese regime.

Liberated by American troops in 1945, the family returned to the United States, where Rev. Mears served as rector of a New Jersey church for eight years and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Philadelphia Divinity School.

He went on to serve as rector of St. Clement’s Church in Buffalo, and then served 22 years at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Buffalo, from which he retired in 1978. In retirement, Rev. Mears continued to serve as rector at numerous parishes throughout western New York, including Sacred Heart of Mary in North Collins and, most recently, St. Peter’s Christian Church in Forestville.

Last fall, Rev. Mears and his wife, Dorothy, visited Bard for the first time since the reverend’s graduation 75 years previously. He met with Bard chaplain Bruce Chilton ’71 and College archivist Helene Tieger ’85, and regaled them and his other hosts with tales of his life at St. Stephen’s—including the day that he and one of the dogs belonging to the College’s warden, Bernard Iddings Bell, fell through the ice while walking on the Hudson, and were saved by the grace of God, “who had other plans” for the reverend.

In addition to his third wife, the former Dorothy Dodd, Rev. Mears is survived by two daughters, Kathleen Carmichael and Charlotte Stovall, and a son, John G. Mears.

’38 Louis W. Koenig, 94, of Garden City and Westport, New York, died on April 27, 2011. A noted scholar of the presidency, he taught political science at New York University for 36 years. He then became a visiting distinguished professor at Long Island University, where he taught until 2009. Prior to his long tenure at NYU, he taught briefly at Bard. The author of several books, he is best known for his classic text on the presidency, The Chief Executive (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964). He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Eleanor White Koenig; his daughter, Juliana; and a grandson, Garrett Wulbrecht.

’39 John C. Honey, 94, a longtime trustee of the College who had a remarkable career in public service and higher education, died on May 17, 2011. He did his most important work in the area where government intersects with postsecondary education. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, he worked in Washington, D.C., with the National Science Foundation, in its formative years. Subsequently, he served as an education adviser to the Carter administration and developed a long-term plan for the federal role in postsecondary education. He also served as the Carnegie Corporation’s officer in charge of public affairs and as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other government and state agencies on issues related to higher education and government. He was the author of many government-sponsored books and other publications, including Beyond Utopia: Science, Values, and the Citizen (Vantage, 1996).

Honey was first elected to the Board of Trustees of Bard College in 1977, served as its secretary from 1981 to 2004, and was elected life trustee in 1991.

He chaired the Board’s Committee on Institutional Growth for many years, and was instrumental in developing several of the College’s five-year plans and mission statements. He was overseer emeritus of the Board of Overseers of Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, having served the Board for more than 20 years. He taught at Bard as a visiting distinguished professor in the Division of Social Studies in the early 1990s. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Bard in 1992, and one of the student residence halls on the Annandale campus was named Honey House in his honor.

Honey was professor emeritus of public policy at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, where he taught from 1968 until his retirement in 1998,

and where he also served as vice president for research and governmental affairs. Upon retirement, he and his wife, Mary, moved to Rhinebeck, New York, where they participated in many community activities. Honey served on the Village Planning Board and the Rhinebeck Town Board, and also founded and served on the Rhinebeck Farmers Market Board. A lifelong Democrat, he served as chairman of the Rhinebeck Democratic Committee.

In addition to his wife, to whom he was married for 68 years, he is survived by three children, Martha, Tim, and Margaret; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren; a brother, Thomas; and several nieces and nephews.

Dominick Anthony Papandrea, M.D., died on June 17, 2011. He grew up on the family farm in the Hudson Valley and, following a childhood bout of pneumonia, decided to become a doctor. After graduating from Bard, he attended Albany Medical College. World War II drew him into the U.S. Navy Medical Corps. After the war, he returned to Albany to set up a private practice, and helped establish the Department of Urology at St. Peter’s Hospital, where he served as staff. After retiring from private practice, Dr. Papandrea was assistant medical director at the Albany County Jail, Albany County Nursing Home, and Ann Lee Home, and medical director of the Villa Mary Immaculate. He retired from medicine at the age of 79. He was a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees and the New York Giants, an inventive cook, and a lover of gardening, reading, visiting the library, walking, and completing crossword puzzles. He is survived by his wife, Marie; three daughters—Virginia Papandrea, Mary Ellen Papandrea, and Dorothy Welch— five sons, Michael Haack, Anthony Papandrea, Daniel Papandrea, James Papandrea, and Dr. John Papandrea; and two stepchildren, Patricia Spain and Chris Brignola.

Joseph C. Pickard Sr. died on May 25, 2011. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army and was awarded the American Defense Service Medal; the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, with six Bronze Stars; the World War II Victory Medal; and the American Campaign Medal. He worked for Inolex Corporation in New York City for 30 years and was a founding member of the Oyster Bay Power Squadron. He is survived by his wife, Mary; a son, Joseph; and a brother, Wallace.

’43 Lester Segarnick died on June 22, 2011. During basic training in 1942, he scored so high on the math exam that he was sent to Bard, where he was trained as an engineer to help rebuild a bombed-out Europe as part of the Army Special Training Program. After D-Day the program was scrapped, and Segarnick was shipped across the English Channel to join the Allied Forces.

He was with the U.S. troops that met the Red Army at the Elbe River outside Berlin near the end of the war. Chapters he wrote about his war years are posted online and can be found by searching his name and “war years.”

Postwar, he continued graduate training in mathematics at New York University, and became a math teacher and military contract specialist for the Department of Defense. Upon retiring, he joined Navy procurement at the request of Congress to help the military improve competitive bidding in response to the infamous “$600-toilet-seat fiasco,” and was involved in rewriting military procurement for all bases worldwide.

During his high school years in Brooklyn, Segarnick was invited by the New York Yankees to try out for the team. According to his son, David Segarnick ’78, he was a great fielder, but he couldn’t hit a major-league fastball. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Esther, and two daughters, Maxine (BCEP ’13) and Lahna.

’45 Robert Peckett Coffin died on April 25, 2011. He was born in Montréal and lived in Stuart, Florida, for 40 years. An Army Air Forces veteran of World War II, he flew L-5 Sentinels in the South Pacific. Prior to retirement, he worked for Coffin Turbo Pump Co. in Englewood, New Jersey. His survivors include his wife, Sue Canniff Burns Coffin, and three daughters—Katherine Coffin, Roberta Linkletter, and Tanzy Coffin.

Frederick Eisler Jr. died on February 14, 2011. A resident of Boynton Beach, Florida, he is survived by a son, Frederick Eisler III; a daughter, Caroline Dan; and a stepdaughter, Pamela Knight.

’50 Patricia McAvoy died on March 2, 2005. Born in New York City, she had a long career in the airline industry and later taught English as a second language for a number of years. She earned two master’s degrees, in communications and linguistics, from Georgia State University. She liked calling herself a model—not to connote physical glamor, she said, but to demonstrate achievement: “By modeling my presence in a Georgia State classroom, I’m showing these young people the possibilities of old age.” She is survived by three nephews, John, Robert, and Thomas Bradley.

’53 Patricia R. Solotaire died on February 28, 2011. Born and raised in New York City, she earned a master’s degree in English from New York University. She was a writer, and also worked as a real estate broker for many years in the greater Portland, Maine, area. She also directed the Allagash Institute at the University of Southern Maine, and worked at Veritas Associates with her life partner, Robert Doucette. She enjoyed taking her dogs to agility training and competitions throughout New England. In addition to Doucette, her survivors include a daughter, Lynn Kemna; two sons, Matt and Benjamin; a sister, Susan Rose; and five grandchildren.

’54 James McKibben Green III died on June 16, 2011. Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, he attended Georgia Military Academy and Washington and Lee University as well as Bard. Co-owner of Palmetto Sash and Door Company, he also founded Carolina Door Lite Company and Carolite Products, and was active in both the Southern Sash and Door Jobbers Association and Carolina Lumber and Building Materials Dealers Association. In 1965 he founded Greenhall Plantation in St. Matthews, where the family raised Arabian horses and Labrador retrievers. He was a nationally recognized horse show judge, ringmaster, and announcer, and an officer in the International Arabian Horse Association and South Carolina Equine Advisory Council. He was instrumental in establishing the Orangeburg chapters of Ducks Unlimited and the South Carolina Waterfowl Association. He was predeceased by his first wife, Louise Pinckney, and he is survived by their children—James M. Green IV, Rebecca Green Cates, Elizabeth Green Stewart, and Jane Green Rowland—and by his wife, the former Marian Cusac.

’55 Barbara Davis Brockelman died on February 26, 2011. Born and raised in New York City, she worked at Bantam Publishing and moved to Durham, New Hampshire, with her husband, Paul, in 1963. The Brockelmans became active in the University of New Hampshire college community during the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s. In the early ’70s, Barbara and some friends started the first women’s consciousness-raising group in New

class notes 49

Hampshire. During this time she also became a psychotherapist, initially working at the UNH Counseling Center before moving to Portsmouth in 1976 and opening a private practice with a focus on women’s issues. In 1984, she opened Gallery 119 in downtown Portsmouth with Priscilla Van Loon. After retiring from counseling she became a member of Salmon Falls Mills Studios in Rollinsford, where she painted in oils. She had a passion for books, movies, live theater, and gourmet cooking. In addition to her husband, she is survived by a daughter, Mira, and a son, Tom.

His memoir, Deep Water: A Sailor’s Passage, was published by Haworth Press in 1995; at the time of his death, he was contacting publishers for his unpublished novel, Jesse’s Key. An enthusiastic fixie (fixed-gear) bike rider, he often led neighborhood bike tours and regularly participated in monthly group bike rides for Transport Alternatives, to raise awareness for bike-friendly streets in New York. He is survived by Mitchell Adair, his domestic partner; two brothers, Roy and Ronnie; and two beloved dogs, Freida and Tulip.

’71 ’62 Stephen E. Blumberg died on December 1, 2007. He was a member of Kesher Zion Synagogue in Reading, Pennsylvania. His survivors include his wife, the former Jane Switzenbaum; two sons, Leonard and Alan; his mother, the former Evelyn Rosenfeld; two brothers, Peter and Lee; and two grandchildren.

’67 Marylyn Berkowitz Rosenblum, an educational technology innovator, died on May 26, 2011. She was raised in the Bronx and in Tenafly, New Jersey, and attended Boston University and Bard before moving to New York City. She spent three decades as an executive and consultant in educational technology and was a pioneer in educational software, electronic information resources, and early Internet content at CBS, Trintex (Prodigy), Grolier, Broderbund, and other companies. After many years away, she returned to school and completed her bachelor of science degree at Empire State College in 2003. She spent summers in Maine reading, knitting, picking blueberries, baking, and canning. She was a founder of the Taconic Knitting Program, which teaches incarcerated women to knit for themselves, their communities, and their loved ones. She is survived by her husband, Harry Rosenblum Jr.; two sons, Harry and Aaron; and a brother, Stan Berkowitz, and a sister, Barbara Kleyman.

’68 The Rev. Dr. Erica Brown Wood, a major figure in the Episcopal church, died on May 10, 2011. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she worked briefly at the Hartford Times, and earned an M.A. at Queens College and a Ph.D. in labor force economics from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. An Episcopalian by birth, she obtained her M.Div. at Bexley Hall, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, and began a career of service in four dioceses: Central New York; Washington, D.C.; Eastern Massachusetts; and Central Pennsylvania.

While in D.C., Rev. Wood became the first woman to be the president and warden of the College of Preachers at Washington National Cathedral, which she also served as a canon. She was on the Executive Committee of the Metropolitan Dialogue and was a trustee of the Theological Consortium. In Massachusetts, she was visiting scholar and acting Anglican director of global and ecumenical studies at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, and then interim rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in West Roxbury. She completed her career in Pennsylvania as priest-in-charge at St. James Episcopal Church in Lancaster, having served as rector at St. Luke’s in Mount Joy. She was also a member of the Board of Directors at the School of Christian Studies, examining chaplain in theology and contemporary ethics, a member of the Bishop’s Advisory Board on Clergy Misconduct, and a judge of the Ecclesiastical Trial Court. She was particularly proud of being trustee of the Anglican Theological Review as an institutional representative for the College of Preachers. She is survived by her two sons, Leet and Chris.

’69 Eugene Kahn, 64, died on June 8, 2011. After graduating from Bard, he worked briefly as a newspaper reporter and then devoted himself to being a writer.

50

Jessica Ross Tate died on June 5, 2010, in Concord, New Hampshire. Born in New York City, she attended the Parsons School of Design and then earned a B.A. in art and theatrical design from Bard and an M.A. in education from Bank Street College. She was an early childhood teacher for 39 years, residing for 24 of them in New York City, where she taught kindergarten and parenting classes, wrote and illustrated two children’s books, and catered parties and dessert functions. She also taught at Concord Heights Preschool and Neighborhood Family Center for 15 years. An avid baker and cake decorator, she catered pies to restaurants on Mount Desert Island, Maine, where she often spent her summers. She is survived by her husband, Paul; a daughter, Meredith Tate; and her mother and two sisters.

’72 James Elliot Garner died on April 3, 2011. He was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and grew up in Springfield, New Jersey. After graduating from Bard he earned master’s degrees in English and psychology at Montclair State College and Columbia University, respectively. He worked for the New Jersey State Treasury and Department of the Lottery, and retired from the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services as a research scientist. He also taught English and psychology at New Jersey Institute of Technology, College of New Jersey, and other state colleges. He served on the East Windsor Township Council from 1994 through 1997. His survivors include his parents, Eleanor and Sidney Garner; a brother, Robert Garner; and his longtime friend and companion, Joan J. Tomlin.

’77 Frances Mayer died on April 26, 2011. Born in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn, she graduated from Bard with an art degree, and later took graduate courses in English and education at Hunter College. She worked at the Morgan Library & Museum and Barnard College, and as a public school teacher in New York City. For the past 12 years she taught English at Paramus Catholic High School. She is survived by her husband, Michael Folie; a son, Brendan; a daughter, Elizabeth; and a brother, Ted Mayer.

’79 Michael Dylan Griffin died on April 3, 2011, while living in Berlin. He was the author of City of Granite, Nationwide Butterpump (with Bill Rangel), Kicks in the Eye, The Undertow Rose, and Measure of My Crazy. His prose received the written praise of Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Richard Meltzer, and Lydia Lunch.

His survivors include his partner, Hüseyin Gümüs; two brothers, David and Patrick; a daughter-in-law, Michele Griffin; and three grandsons.

’91 Monica Davies Lombardi died on May 14, 2011. Born in Poughkeepsie, she spent most of her life in New York’s Hudson Valley and later moved to Vero Beach, Florida. An educator, writer, and scholar, she graduated from Bard with a B.A. in history, and received an M.A. in social studies education from Nova Southeastern University. Survivors include her children, Elyse Lombardi

and Frank J. Lombardi III; her mother, Loretta Davies; and four brothers— Nicholas, Guy, and Matthew Lombardi, and Anthony Davies.

’99 Clare Amory, 35, died on February 24, 2011, following a battle with cancer.

She was a lead vocalist in the metal band Feast, and a percussionist, vocalist, and performer with the New York–based Lake and the experimental electronic group Excepter, which released recordings on the Paw Tracks label. Canada’s Exclaim! magazine called Excepter’s 2010 double-disc Presidence “a truly hypnotic record,” while 2008’s Debt Dept. earned the magazine’s Mark of Excellence. She also participated in the Boredoms-organized drum performance Boa Drum 77 and was featured in the improvisational dance Skint at The Kitchen in Manhattan. In addition to playing music, Amory founded Flesh and Bone Pilates, based in Brooklyn. According to her partner, Nathan Corbin ’00, during her years at Bard she was known as an “instigator” for organizing skinny dips and night drives, among other nocturnal activities. In addition to Corbin, she is survived by her parents, Carolyn and Jim Amory, and three sisters, Katy Amory, Ruth Hedges, and Robin Spencer.

’08 Jonathan Nocera died on July 3, 2011 after a yearlong battle with brain cancer.

A gifted musician who was devoted to the jazz program at Bard, he played guitar and operated Proliferate Music, which he described as “an independent record label for the fringe.” “[He was] the deepest musician with the biggest ears of anyone I’ve ever met,” wrote Emma Alabaster ’08, whose debut album was produced by Nocera, who also lent his electric guitar to several tracks.

“He introduced me to an absurd amount of music, and knew how to play just the right track at just the right moment to hook me in. . . . I think at least half of my iTunes library is from him.” Nocera is survived by his mother, Paula, and father, Michael.

’09 Bradley D. Strange, 24, died on April 21, 2011, from cardiac arrest. At an early age, possessed of a curious mind that never stopped asking questions, he was drawn to philosophy, and accumulated a library of philosophical and religious books that numbered in the hundreds. He played the didgeridoo, and practiced chanting and Tuvan throat singing. He graduated from the Shipley School, where he was active in theater and music, and continued acting at Bard, where he developed a deep interest in East Asian culture, anthropology, and filmmaking. He spoke Mandarin Chinese and was drawn to the ancient traditions of rural culture and the beautiful sound of the Tibetan singing bowls. He continued his study of anthropology and Asian history and culture at the University of Delaware, and longed to return to East Asia, including the remote provinces of China and Tibet. His survivors include his parents, David and Lynn Strange; two sisters, Whitney and Tori Strange; and a grandmother, Barbara T. Butler.

’10 William “Bill” Cranshaw died on May 16, 2011, while riding his bicycle north of Searcy, Arkansas. At the time of the accident he was almost midway through a cross-country trip with three Bard classmates, Paul Cavanagh, Hannah Liddy, and Samuel Steffen. He had a love of learning and a curiosity that extended to almost everything, especially insects, plants, and music. His high-school peers voted him one of the most musical members of his class, despite the fact that he neither sang formally nor played an instrument while at school. He also loved American literature and many of the postmodernists, and language—he spent time in Morocco to learn Arabic and, earlier this year,

in Guatemala to learn Spanish. He planned to pursue graduate study in literature at the University of Rochester, which had awarded him a full scholarship and stipend. He is survived by his parents, Sue Ballou and Whitney Cranshaw, and a brother, Sam.

’11 Justin Michael Berkley-Straus died on May 30, 2011. Born in Corvallis, Oregon, he attended Montessori Children’s House and Gordon School and graduated with honors from Providence Country Day, where he was a member of the tennis team and chess club. He was accepted to five colleges with scholarships; he chose Bard. He majored in neuroscience and planned to do his graduate studies in neuropharmacology. His passions were reading, chess, Magic Cards, ceramics, electronic music, and a good debate. He is survived by his parents, Dr. John Straus and Dr. Mara Berkley; a brother, Noah AnStraus; and two grandparents, Murray Straus and Estelle Nagler.

’13 Katherine Marion Blake, 27, of Red Hook, died April 1, 2011, at Kingston Hospital. Known as Kate to her family and friends, she was an aspiring teacher attending Bard when, in September 2010, she was struck by a car as she was crossing Route 9 in Red Hook, an accident that eventually led to her death. A stylist by profession, she lived her life immersed in the pursuit of beauty through her two main passions, fashion and art. Her many friends attest to her kindness, charm, imagination, and wit. She is survived by her parents, Catherine and T. Whitney Blake Jr. ’93; and three brothers—William, Teddy, and Samuel Blake ’11.

Staff Tim Mulligan, 73, the director of external affairs at the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, died peacefully at his home in Brooklyn after a long battle with cancer on September 7, 2011. Educated at Philips Andover, Yale University, and the University of Paris, he spent the first 22 years of his career as an editor for This Week, Good Housekeeping, and Family Weekly magazines. In 1985 he began a decade of service as head of public affairs for the New York State Council on the Arts, supporting Kitty Carlisle Hart’s vision and reflecting her ebullience in venues throughout the state. Beginning in 1995, he worked to expand the international reach of the Bard Graduate Center, launching the Center’s global travel program and inaugurating its annual Iris Awards for outstanding contributions to the decorative arts.

As a public affairs consultant, Mulligan advised the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mariners’ Museum, and a host of corporate clients, while his witty and insightful freelance pieces appeared in such national magazines as Omni, Conde Nast Traveler, and Travel & Leisure. An original and much-praised travel writer, he was the author of The Traveler’s Guide to the Hudson River Valley (currently in its fifth edition), The Traveler’s Guide to Western New England and the Connecticut River Valley, and Virginia: A History and Guide. He coedited the 2006 collection, The Battle of Hampton Roads: New Perspectives on the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia. But according to his death notice in the New York Times, “even these accomplishments hardly begin to convey his infectious wit, his incomparable elegance, his peerless taste, and his innate modesty. He was a scholar, a gentleman, an arts champion, and a loving and endlessly delightful friend.” He is survived by his partner of 46 years, and spouse of three heroic weeks, John O’Keefe.

class notes 51

By the Sea (2011), Duncan Hannah ’75, oil on canvas

Board of Trustees of Bard College

Charles S. Johnson III ’70

Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs

David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus

Mark N. Kaplan

Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs,

Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair

George A. Kellner

Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair

Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65

Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary

Murray Liebowitz

Anne Canzonetti ’84, Assistant Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7187, canzonet@bard.edu

Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer

Marc S. Lipschultz

Joy McManigal, Program Associate, 845-758-7089, mcmanig@bard.edu

845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu Jane Brien ’89, Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu

Peter H. Maguire ’88 Fiona Angelini

James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee

Roland J. Augustine

Martin Peretz

Leon Botstein, President of the College+

Stewart Resnick

Mary Smith, Director; Ginger Shore, Consultant; Cynthia Werthamer, Editorial Director;

David C. Clapp

Roger N. Scotland ’93*

Leslie Coons Bostian, Ann Forbes Cooper, Mikhail Horowitz, Ellen Liebowitz, Editors;

Marcelle Clements ’69*

The Rt. Rev. Mark S. Sisk,

Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Francie Soosman ’90, Designer

Asher B. Edelman ’61

Honorary Trustee

Robert S. Epstein ’63

Martin T. Sosnoff

Barbara S. Grossman ’73*

Susan Weber

Sally Hambrecht

Patricia Ross Weis ’52

George F. Hamel Jr.

+ ex officio

Ernest F. Henderson III, Life Trustee

* alumni/ae trustee

Marieluise Hessel

52

Published by the Bard Publications Office

©2011 Bard College. All rights reserved.

1-800-BARDCOL annandaleonline.org

john bard society news Do you have an IRA that you need to draw down this year?

If you are 70 1/2 and are planning to make a donation to Bard from your IRA, we encourage you to do so before the December 31, 2011, deadline. The charitable IRA provision allows individuals 70 1/2 and older to donate up to $100,000 tax free. The process is simple and the benefits may be significant.

Kit Ellenbogen ’52 says, “I’ve been working for 60 years. I have all these IRAs, and with my 60th reunion coming up next year, it seemed like the perfect time to take advantage of this option. Bard really changed my life and made everything I ever wanted come true.” Ellenbogen, who attended Bard with significant scholarship aid, has been a lifelong supporter of the College, sits on the Bard– St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, and was the first in a long line of Ellenbogens to attend Bard.

She received Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service in 2008.

You may designate your donation if you like: scholarships, athletics, or maintenance of Bard’s beautiful 500acre campus are just some uses for which Bard welcomes your gift. To donate to Bard using your IRA, you need to

send a note to your IRA plan administrator, requesting that a specific amount from your IRA be sent directly to Bard.

Making sure the donation goes directly to Bard allows you to receive the maximum benefit.

If you like this way of supporting the College, please contact your IRA plan administrator and Debra Pemstein at pemstein@bard.edu or 845-758-7405. (All inquiries are confidential.)

All Bardians who make gifts directly from IRA accounts to Bard automatically become members of the John Bard Society (JBS) and are invited to an annual luncheon in New York City, among other benefits.

JBS Bardians don’t necessarily have fortunes to give; JBS Bardians are grateful to have the good fortune to be part of Bard.

The charitable IRA provision expires at midnight on December 31, 2011. Consider making your donation now.

This material is for informational purposes only. Please contact your professional adviser to make sure this technique is right for you.

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