2008 Spring Bardian

Bardian Bard College Spring 2008

The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation Opens “Juliet Begins to Breathe�

Bardians in Government John Ashbery: A Bard Celebration

cover Nighttime view of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation above A glass-walled seminar room is suspended over the north entrance of the Reem and Kayden Center. Behind the trees at left is Ludlow.

Laboratories in the Reem and Kayden Center look out onto the trees of the Annandale campus.

Dear Bardians, Welcome! Spring is a glorious season of renewal in Annandale, and an apt time to consider our connection to a special place that will always be familiar, yet constantly changing.

In late December a dozen Bard students took a swim in the Saw Kill in an effort to draw attention to the need to address climate change. In line with this effort, Bardians of all generations can take pride in the extraordinary new science building featured on the cover of this issue, which is heated and cooled entirely by geothermal energy, without the use of gas, oil, or electricity.

Bard’s commitment to education in the sciences in no way diminishes its dedication to the arts and humanities. The College takes great pride in the celebration of John Ashbery’s 80th birthday, and the tremendous gift of the John Cage archives.

Bard’s mission to apply the progressive values inherent in a liberal arts education goes beyond the Annandale campus.

This issue has an update on such an effort, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). I attended a BPI graduation ceremony at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, and the pride with which the incarcerated students described what it meant to discover the freedom of their thoughts and to earn a degree, was unforgettable.

Wonderful things are happening at Bard; yet the College cannot reach its full potential without the active support of each member of its extended family of alumni/ae and parents. There are many ways to get involved: • Affirm your belief in Bard by making a monetary contribution before the fiscal year ends on June 30 • Join the Alumni/ae Association mentor program by visiting http://www.bard.edu/alumni/career/ • Keep Class Notes vital by sending your news, suggestions, questions, and updated e-mail address to alumni@bard.edu • Join us on campus for the Commencement and reunion festivities on Memorial Day weekend, and for SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, previewed inside Thank you for your continuing interest in Bard.

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

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Walter Swett ’96, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Roger Scotland ’93, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary Olivier te Boekhorst ’93, Treasurer Jonathan Ames ’05 Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74, Regional Events Liaison David Avallone ’87, Oral History Committee Chairperson Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69 Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Joshua Bell ’98, Communications and New Technologies Committee Chairperson Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Carla Bolte ’71 Erin Boyer ’00 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Jamie Callan ’75 Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Charles Clancy ’69, Stewardship Committee Cochairperson Peter Criswell ’89 Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson

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

Jennifer Novik ’98 Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Matt Phillips ’91 Susan Playfair ’62 Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79 Allison Radzin ’88, Career Connections Committee Cochairperson Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Joan Schaffer ’75 Donna Shepper ’73 Barry Silkowitz ’71 George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochairperson Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69 Andrea J. Stein ’92 Paul Thompson ’93, Diversity Committee Chairperson Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Jill Vasileff MFA ’93, MFA Liaison Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, MFA Liaison Samir B. Vural ’98 Brandon Weber ’97 Barbara Crane Wigren ’68 Ron Wilson ’75 Sung Jee Yoo ’01

Bardian

14

4

16

SPRING 2008 FEATURES 4 VISIBLE SCIENCE The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation Opens

26 REQUIEM REDUX Leon Botstein and BBC Symphony Orchestra Resurrect a Masterpiece

14 JOHN ASHBERY A Bard Celebration

28 INTERNATIONAL EDUCATOR David Penberg ’77

16 BARD AT BAYVIEW

30 COGNITIVE SCIENCE Understanding the Mind

18 “JULIET BEGINS TO BREATHE” Bard Festival to Restore Prokofiev’s Original Romeo and Juliet 20 IN THE THICK OF AMERICAN POLITICS 22 TRANSFORMATION Clemente Course Changes Lives

32 HOLIDAY PARTY 2007

DEPARTMENTS 34 BOOKS BY BARDIANS 36 ON AND OFF CAMPUS

24 EVERYONE IS IN THE BEST SEAT 42 CLASS NOTES 60 FACULTY NOTES

visible science The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation Opens “Visible Science” was the eye-catching phrase printed on buttons handed to attendees, and on T-shirts worn by student docents, at the grand opening of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation.

The term refers to the visibility of science education at Bard, as well as to the way the Reem and Kayden Center, designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects PC, lets in natural light through the eastern glassfronted face of the building and through large windows in the faculty offices and classrooms that line the western wall. Also, says Mark Halsey, associate dean of the college and associate professor of mathematics, “The overall design is open and inviting, as opposed to the typical science building, where work is done in small spaces behind closed doors. The building is conducive to having students and faculty work together in large open spaces.” The Center’s 7,500 square feet of research laboratories can hold up to 75 students and faculty cooperating on research projects.

September’s well-attended opening brought the community and campus together to celebrate the sweeping 49,000-square-foot edifice where, in addition to students and faculty, science and liberal arts meet and mingle. And ground already has been broken for a 20,000-square-foot addition, scheduled for completion in the fall of 2008, so that the Reem and Kayden Center can accommodate the up-to-the-minute needs of the Chemistry, Biology, and Computer Science Programs. “After much study and planning, we decided the most cost-effective way to proceed was to expand the Center,” says Halsey. “The building was designed to be expanded quite easily, and we’re taking advantage of that.” Meanwhile, the Chemistry Program’s home in Hegeman Science Hall will be renovated for the Mathematics and Physics Programs.

4

right At the opening, Gabrielle H. Reem (center left) and Herbert J. Kayden (center right) were joined by their son, David Kayden (left), and daughter, Joelle Kayden. opposite page Top: Trustee Stanley Reichel ’65 and his wife, Elaine, in the Stanley A. ’65 and Elaine Reichel Biology Research Lab; Middle: Leon Botstein at the opening ceremony; Bottom: panelist Jeanne Narum (left) and Miche`le Dominy

Among the admirers of the Center are its benefactors, Reem and Kayden, who opened the ceremonially beribboned doors at the event. “The building is stunningly beautiful: its curvature, its colors, the rich tones of copper and wood,” Reem says, adding that she admires “conducive educational features” like “the open laboratories, which invite students to exchange knowledge and ideas, and the proximity of the offices of the mentors, which facilitates interaction between students and teachers.”

“Locating the building at the south end of the campus has expanded Bard College,” Kayden observes. “The concept of open laboratories, allowing free exchange of ideas, is facilitated by the beautiful design and construction of the building, attesting to Rafael Viñoly’s talents and expertise.”

Bard president Leon Botstein addressed the crowd outside the Center before Reem and Kayden opened the doors. The Center confirms “the beauty, power, and elegance of science and its centrality on our campus,” he said. “We are rethinking how to teach science, and are breaking the notion of the ‘best place’ to study science.”

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who sent congratulations and remarks, said in his letter, “The critical research-based, hands-on study that will be conducted in these beautiful new laboratory facilities will go a long way toward . . . inspiring young people to be imaginative and socially responsible scientists.”

During the day, model miniclasses—on global warming, the physical principles behind musical instruments, and robotic programming, among other topics—made ample use of the Center’s visually riveting circular spaces—three classrooms and the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium. The “pods” are variously cloaked in zinc, copper, and stainless steel and are used for liberal arts as well as science classes. The rounded walls of the three classrooms extrude into the plaza on the east side of the building.

A seminar room, on the Center’s second floor, is cantilevered over the north entrance to the building so that the teaching area, walled on three sides by glass, appears to be suspended in air.

6

Catherine O’Reilly, assistant professor of biology, took the front of Bitó Auditorium to offer visitors a class, “Hot Off the Presses: The 2007 IPCC Report on Global Warming.” O’Reilly contributed to the report from the Nobel Peace Prize– winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She made use of two large side-by-side video screens (which descended from the ceiling at the push of a button) to indicate the storm path during Hurricane Katrina, and presided over a lively question-and-answer session about carbon dioxide patterns in the atmosphere and how they are affecting humans.

Another miniclass, “Mobile Robots,” taught by Rebecca Thomas, associate professor of computer science, took place in the hardware teaching lab, one of two computer science laboratories. The floor-to-ceiling windows let light flood into the room where Thomas put a small Lego robot through its paces. Class participants, after examining the software that enabled the robots to perform simple tasks, took their own stab at programming the boxy ’bots.

Model classes also took place in the large biochemistry teaching laboratory, where Michael Tibbetts, associate professor of biology, examined genetics in fruit flies. In the pod classrooms, Matthew Deady, professor of physics, examined the sounds of the piccolo and tuba, and Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, discussed Lyme disease and biodiversity.

Those touring the building also saw the cognitive systems laboratory and zebrafish research facility. (The latter has improved lighting and heating technology to facilitate the breeding of the fish, which Bard researchers use to study neurobehaviorial psychology and genetic patterns.)

As attendees moved toward lunch, a roving robot, festooned with bright decorations for the occasion, stopped alongside Reem and Kayden. “Do you like my ribbons?” it asked, to Kayden’s appreciative chuckle. “It has a mind of its own,” said Reem, equally amused. Lunch was served upstairs, outside the faculty offices, where pockets of informal meeting space (replete with plasma screens for projecting computer images) overlook the lobby below, which is bedecked with posters of faculty and student science research, projects, and exhibitions. In addition to the tour, classes, and lunch, attendees at the grand opening also were treated to a blue-ribbon panel discussion, “Educating Future Scientists” (see page 12), and a concert by The Bard College Conservatory of Music Chamber Orchestra, which delighted visitors’ ears with selections by Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, conducted by Guillermo Figueroa.

Visitors to the Center for the opening were by no means confined to the Bard community. Richard Copp, who teaches science at Leonia High School in Leonia, New Jersey, and who worked with Kayden at New York University, was positive about the facility. “It’s very impressive,” he said. “I like what the architect did with the light, making it very open. People don’t work as well in a dark environment. This will create a richer environment for stimulation.”

7

The building’s high-efficiency geothermal heat system has received an Energy Star rating from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which offered rebates that saved 30 percent of the cost of the system.

The 72 underground geothermal wells preheat cold water, using the earth’s heat during cold weather, and use the earth’s temperature to chill water in the summer, thereby saving energy costs. The second-largest energy saver is the exhaust heat recovery system, which captures the heat of warm laboratory exhaust air and transfers it, through a glycol-water mixture, to basement recyclers. And, because 95 percent of the building receives natural light (through those huge glass walls and windows, treated with enhanced, superefficient glazing), the cost of artificial lighting also is reduced. The lighting installed in the building is highly energy efficient, and sensors turn off lights when offices and classrooms are unoccupied. NYSERDA estimates indicate that the energy-efficient measures will reduce the building’s annual carbon dioxide emissions by almost 329,000 pounds—the equivalent of taking 33 cars off the road.

The internal workings of the Reem and Kayden Center—along a central “spine”— are nearly as dramatic, visually and conceptually, as is the exterior. The mechanical room runs 150 feet along the length of the building. Most of the systems—heat and air conditioning, vacuum pressure, propane, exhaust—are accessible from a central catwalk above the laboratories. Valves adjust air intake and exhaust; all the labs receive a fresh-air exchange every 20 minutes. (Large air intakes are on the roof, hidden by a large screen that appears, from Annandale Road, to give the building an extra floor.)

Halsey notes that the increase in available lab area will support the College’s emphasis on research from students’ first year onward. “This is important for us at Bard,” he says. “We feel strongly that science is one of the liberal arts, and students and faculty now have this space to work in.”

8

Reem and Kayden, longtime researchers themselves—Reem in renal function, then pharmacology; Kayden in lipoproteins—put their minds to the question of what skills young scientists need to succeed in the 21st century. “In addition to basic science, they should be stimulated to think and work in new areas of science,” Kayden says. “Individual hands-on experiments are preferable to rote laboratory exercises.”

Reem’s advice for a successful career in scientific research is “to be flexible and think ‘outside the box.’” She continues, “If a working hypothesis is not supported by the experimental data, revise your thinking and try a new approach. If you hit an unexpected result, by all means pursue it; many discoveries are serendipitous.”

During the opening, Halsey looked around the new facility, teeming with eager and interested faculty, students, and guests. “This space is large and open, yet intimate,” he said. “The energy that this building has given to the faculty and students is amazing; you can feel it when you walk in.” Keesing agreed: “This space is transformative for me as a teacher. I can offer students distinct experiences—lecture, lab work, and small-group work—all in one place.” David E. Schwab II ’52, chair emeritus of the Bard College Board of Trustees, said, “This facility will affect the education of Bard students as a whole, not just those who are scientists. It will add to the interdisciplinary nature of education at Bard.”

—Cynthia Werthamer The following alumni/ae and friends generously joined Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden and the Board of Trustees in making possible construction of the Center for Science and Computation: László Z. Bitó ’60 and Olivia Carino, Stanley A. ’65 and Elaine Reichel, Booth Ferris Foundation, Fred L. Emerson Foundation, George I. Alden Trust, Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, estate of Leon Denison, Patricia Ross Weis and Robert Weis, Class of 1965 in honor of its 40th reunion, Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63, Dr. Ann Ho ’62, Fredric S. Maxik ’86, Don Kahn ’74, and the Class of 1992 on the occasion of its 15th reunion.

9

DISCUSSION OF SCIENCE EDUCATION ENLIVENS CENTER OPENING

Science education should be reconfigured in a sequence that is the opposite of the way science is now taught, according to Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, one of the panelists at the opening of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation.

Lederman, 1988 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, took part in “Educating Future Scientists.” Other panelists were Darcy Kelley, professor of biological sciences at Columbia University and recipient of a 2002 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor award; Jeanne Narum, director of Project Kaleidoscope, a science education advocacy group; and Rafael Viñoly, founder of Rafael Viñoly Architects PC, which designed the Reem and Kayden Center. Bard president Leon Botstein moderated the panel.

“The time has come to rethink how science is done.

We have a chance to do that here,” Botstein said in his opening remarks. “With this building, we open a new chapter on how to educate scientists. The faculty is at work on two efforts: to rethink the curriculum for the potential major and for the recruitment of the potential major.”

Lederman, who also has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, suggested that one concrete way to improve science education is to switch the order in which sciences are taught at the middle and high school level. The idea of teaching biology first, followed by chemistry, “then finally physics, the awesome, fearsome subject,” is “completely backwards,” said Lederman. With the discovery of quantum

12

theory in 1930 and of the structure of DNA in 1953, a different paradigm began to make more sense, according to Lederman: first mathematics; then physics, which “requires mathematics”; then chemistry, “which sits on physics”; and finally biology, 90 percent of which now depends on chemistry.

Kelley, who helped revamp the undergraduate science requirements at Columbia, said the resultant multidisciplinary core course, Frontiers of Science, attempts to transmit to students “the passion that drives us in our own work.” She said the researchers and teachers who developed Frontiers of Science “felt that it should be multidisciplinary, because new science is multidisciplinary.” But, she added, the faculty was the toughest obstacle to installing the new course. Eventually, she said, each department was won over by “one person, and it was usually the best person,” who believed the course could work.

As a result, she said, “Frontiers is succeeding in an extraordinary way—at the political level, within the university.” And the course has had a “profound effect” on science education at Columbia. “It’s given all of our students a common vocabulary and, to some extent, it’s inculcated in them the ability to think like scientists,” Kelley said.

Narum emphasized “assessing how we know what students are learning,” which is something Project Kaleidoscope emphasizes in advancing science education.

The goal, she said, is to instill in students “passion, community, and connections to the real world.” At the same time, however, Narum said, “There has to be widespread commitment to what student goals in the sciences mean for that campus community’s mission and identity. . . . Real science is carried out by teams, in settings where face-to-face communication and shared values create a common culture. How can students begin to develop a sense of membership in a science community from the very first day?”

Viñoly, in his address, said he listens to “scientists, not facilities managers,” when designing science buildings.

Scientists “are closer to the sources of progress than politicians, artists, or sociologists,” he said, and therefore, science might be viewed as trumping politics. “The mechanism inherent in science is that it points to the truth, which produces progress,” he said.

—Cynthia Werthamer

JOHN ASHBERY A BARD CELEBRATION Celebrated poet John Ashbery reached his 80th birthday with almost as many honors as candles on his birthday cake: the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Bollingen Prize in Poetry, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, among many others; and MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Fulbright fellowships. He even has been named officier of the Légion d’honneur in France, a country he lived in for 10 years.

He also received a weekend’s worth of accolades at Bard College, where he is Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature. The event, titled “This Feeling of Exaltation” (from “A Blessing in Disguise,” in Rivers and Mountains), featured poets and Bard colleagues Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature; Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature; Bradford Morrow, professor of literature; and Joan Retallack, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities. Also participating were poets Charles Bernstein, Peter Gizzi, Reginald Shepherd, and Cole Swensen, as well as art critic Jed Perl and literary critic and scholar Susan Stewart. A highlight was Ashbery’s reading of his own work, including a section of “Litany,” a poem for two voices, which Ashbery and Lauterbach read together.

In addition to readings, the September 14–16 weekend consisted of discussions of Ashbery’s oeuvre and a performance by the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bard president Leon Botstein. It was fitting that a concert be part of the festivities, because music has long been important to Ashbery. The product of a rural upbringing outside Rochester, New York, Ashbery attended Harvard and Columbia. He began writing when he was 8, but after graduating from Harvard, he experienced a writer’s block that lasted more than a year. Then he heard John Cage’s “Music of Changes” at a concert. The piece, based on the I Ching, consists of piano notes

14

and sounds, interspersed with silences—all dictated by chance. That experience led Ashbery to the writing method he calls “managed chance,” which he continues to use. He will, for instance, allow distractions—such as street noise or telephone conversations—to influence or enter into a poem. He’s been described (by Meghan O’Rourke in Slate) as “a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter.”

Ashbery does not discuss his poems, because, as he has indicated in various interviews, he is more interested in the act of writing (that “managed chance”) than in the finished poems themselves. He has called the subject of his writing “the experience of experience.” Gizzi, one of the organizers of the Ashbery tribute at Bard, wrote in Modern Review, “Ashbery has said . . . that narrative events interest him less than their effects, i.e., the stimulus for the poem is less important than what it generates, what thoughts it makes possible.”

But Ashbery does reflect on his writing process, and how it has changed over the years, saying, “My writing habits are much different now than when I was 18, when I used to write at night, having fled the parental living room and TV set. . . . In recent decades, I’ve tended to procrastinate until late afternoon; I can no longer write anything worthwhile at night, even a letter, so it becomes a question of waiting, but not too long. Although I don’t believe that the hours one wastes are part of the creative process, I do believe that procrastination is an important life force.”

With characteristic dry humor, he adds a statement about his writing implements: “I used to write with a pen, but in the early ’60s, I started producing very long lines influenced by Whitman. It got to the point where I couldn’t remember the end of the line by the time I came to it. I figured that if I worked on the typewriter I could catch the elusive final words more accurately. I still compose on an old Royal typewriter, like so many writers of my generation, hoping that the ribbon won’t give out before I do.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, Ashbery and colleagues Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest were dubbed the New York School of poets, influenced by the surrealist poets and abstract expressionist art. Ashbery taught at Brooklyn College in the 1970s and ’80s, before coming to Bard. At the same time, Koch was teaching at Columbia University. Their friendship influenced Ashbery as a teacher, he says: “What I learned from Kenneth was not to be afraid of teaching or of poetry, but just to wade in and do it. One of his most valuable lessons was when I was planning to write a Ph.D. dissertation and didn’t know how to go about it. He said, ‘You have to include some new information which nobody has ever come up with before.

This is very easy, since very little is known about anything.’ Encouraging as this was, I never did write the dissertation.”

He has, however, published more than 20 books of poetry, as well as art, literary, film, and cultural criticism ranging from kitsch to classical. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which refers to a 16th-century painting by Parmigianino, won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent volume is Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (see Books by Bardians, p. 34), which Publishers Weekly called “an essential book.”

Oh yes, and there’s one more honor he could hardly have anticipated in his much-lauded career: he has been named inaugural poet laureate of mtvU, the online “university” of the MTV music channel, which broadcasts to 750 campuses nationwide—clearly a nod to Ashbery’s pop culture side. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.

—Cynthia Werthamer

Ashbery writes in a method he calls “managed chance,” which allows distractions, such as street noise, to influence or enter into a poem. He does not discuss his poems because he is more interested in the act of writing than the finished poem.

Special thanks to Charles P. Stevenson Jr., chair of the Board of Trustees. Additional thanks to the Office of the Dean of the College, Robert Kelly, Ann Lauterbach, Bradford Morrow, and Joan Retallack. Poets & Writers, Inc. (with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency) partially funded the September 14 poetry reading.

15

bard at bayview The pioneer students of Bayview are having an impact on that prison’s general population.

Other inmates are now striving to pass the GED Test so that they too can attend the Bard Prison Initiative program.

16

I walk west through Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on my way to meet fellow Bardians.

I won’t be meeting them at some upscale gallery, however, but at Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium-security women’s prison on the corner of 20th Street and 11th Avenue. I will hand over my cell phone to prison guards and lock my possessions in a locker in the visitor’s lobby. I will be escorted through security checks and past the general inmate population to a colorful and orderly classroom where Bard’s courses are taught.

In 2001, while an undergraduate at Bard, I was part of a group that taught a writing workshop at Beacon Correctional Facility, a minimum-security women’s prison not far from the Annandale campus. We were planting the seeds of what was to become the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). Approximately five years earlier, the U.S. Congress had eliminated public funding for college education in federal and state prisons. As students in a progressive college, we felt a responsibility to counteract these political trends and share our education with our incarcerated neighbors. BPI was formed with the goal of establishing satellite college campuses within New York prisons. Those satellite campuses would offer a range of courses across the liberal arts curriculum.

BPI has come a long way. In 2005, the first 15 students to successfully complete the BPI program graduated with associate of arts degrees from Bard College. As of September 2008, the number of incarcerated students acquiring degrees will have grown to 200, according to Max Kenner ’01, director of BPI. The program at Bayview, begun in September 2006, is the first college-credit program that BPI has established in a women’s prison. The initial impetus was generated within Bayview, when a small group of women there banded together and approached professors on the outside about teaching noncredit courses. This venture ultimately turned into the Learning Center for Women in Prison from which money was raised to bring Bard’s program into Bayview. Currently, nine women are enrolled; as with other BPI offerings, those who complete the program will obtain associate of arts degrees from Bard.

On the last day of the spring semester at Bayview, I sat in on Fundamentals of Written English Language, one of the BPI courses offered. Idra Novey, an adjunct professor in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia University, asked the members of the class to share their goals for the next semester. The students shuffled in their seats, and the first student began, “I need to carry a notepad with me while I am at work. That way I can scribble down my ideas while they are still fresh.” This constraint did not correspond to my undergraduate experience. Bayview women usually work more than eight hours a day—doing anything from office (or kitchen) work to jobs that take them out of the prison daily. Many of them have children.

Iris Bowen, a soft-spoken African American woman in her forties, said, “I have kids who are just attending college now. By my going to Bard, they are motivated, even more, to succeed in college.”

The students in the Bayview program are required to have passed the high school equivalency exam, otherwise known as the General Education Development (GED) Test. One of the students, Erica Mateo, age 20, was an eighth-grade dropout and passed the GED at 16, while in prison. She said she grew up in what some people call the ghetto, and going to college has given her insights that she hopes to bring back to her community and make life a little better there. Mateo declared, “My eyes have never been so wide in my life.”

Most of the Bayview women would not have had the opportunity to go to a college like Bard, were it not for their incarceration. However, as Mateo said, “The message isn’t ‘go to prison for an education.’ We are people who want to return to society. This is the first step to becoming a better person.”

Bayview’s superintendent, Catherine Cook, who was instrumental in implementing the BPI program there, echoed Mateo’s thoughts. “Eventually these people are going back out on the streets. Do we want embittered, uneducated people or do we want productive members of society?” Studies conducted by the United States Board of Education, National Institute of Justice, and Correctional Education Association all conclude that providing an education to people in prisons lowers recidivism rates.

Many of the students in Bard College’s Bayview program want, upon their release from prison, to work as social workers in the low-income and working-class neighborhoods they come from. Marlene Tejada, a self-assured Hispanic woman in her late 20s, stated bluntly, “My life experience is an asset. I may not have wanted it, but I have it. When I get released I am going back to my community. A successful future was not a reality before Bard College.”

Tejada is the first in her family to attend college.

The pioneer students of Bayview are having an impact on that prison’s general population.

Other inmates are now striving to pass the GED Test so that they too can attend the BPI program.

These successes, in turn, fuel BPI. A plan is in motion to open the Bayview program to all of the medium-security prisons for women in New York, says Kenner. Women who are accepted and eligible will be moved, by the New York State Department of Correctional Services, to Bayview, where they will enroll in BPI. —Molly Snyder-Fink ’01

The creative team (left to right): Mark Morris, choreographer and founder, Mark Morris Dance Group; Leon Botstein, Bard College president and music director, American Symphony Orchestra; and Simon Morrison, scholar in residence, 2008 Bard Music Festival

“JULIET BEGINS TO BREATHE” BARD FESTIVAL TO RESTORE PROKOFIEV’S ORIGINAL ROMEO AND JULIET

By Deborah Jowitt Last May, choreographer Mark Morris went to Bard to receive an honorary degree at the College’s Commencement exercises. To hear him tell it, he arrived at President Leon Botstein’s house, and introduced himself (“Hi, I’m Mark”). Formalities over, Botstein asked, “Would you be interested in a Romeo and Juliet that we just found?” He was referring to Sergey Prokofiev’s original version of the music that accompanies the well-known ballet—a score unearthed by musicologist Simon Morrison in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.

Here’s how Morris remembers the ensuing conversation: “I said, ‘Oh, the one with the happy ending?’ (as a funny joke). He said, ‘How did you know?’”

This apparently casual invitation was the prelude to an epochal project that will be unveiled at Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts from July 4 through 9— one of many events focusing on Prokofiev during SummerScape 2008. Mated to new choreography by Morris, the ballet music as Prokofiev intended it to be heard will premiere almost 73 years after he completed his piano score and was embarking on the orchestration.

18

The scenario, on which the composer collaborated with a good friend, theater director Sergey Radlov, did indeed have a happy ending. As Morrison, the scholar in residence for this year’s Bard Music Festival, explains, “What [Radlov] was interested in doing was making the central drama of the ballet one about representatives of the old feudal order versus the young progressives’ spirit. . . . He wanted to privilege the energies of youth. And so they had to live.”

You might think that this idea would have found favor with a government that had vehemently toppled an old order and was affirming a new life for the proletariat. And it might have done so had Prokofiev composed his music during the 1920s, that heady decade when the arts flourished in Russia, or, failing that, well before the Committee on Arts Affairs, established by Stalin in 1936, began to root out art that could be perceived as experimental, tainted by formalism, or at odds with the regime’s policies. The people should be exposed to the classics denied them under the Tsar. A ballet titled Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare was a betrayal of a theatrical and poetic masterpiece. The lovers had to die. The scheduled premiere by the Bolshoi Ballet was postponed. Then cancelled.

In 1940, when Prokofiev attended the Leningrad premiere of Romeo and Juliet, as choreographed by Leonid Lavrovsky and performed by the Kirov Ballet, he was, according to Morrison, horrified by the way his music sounded. He had, under duress, replaced “Juliet Begins to Breathe” with “The Death of Juliet” and plundered his 15-minute fourth act to provide the solo variations that Lavrovsky demanded for his stars, Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev. He had yielded to “requests” to cut some numbers and expand others. But he was unprepared for other changes. Yuri Faer (the conductor who had been one of the highly critical listeners at the Bolshoi Theater when Prokofiev first auditioned his piano version in 1935) had added repeats and thickened the orchestral texture without consulting the composer.

Many choreographers have since set ballets to that Stalin-approved orchestration. What the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Botstein, will play at Bard to accompany Morris’s ballet is the leaner, more dramatically and musically coherent music that Prokofiev wrote when he was still full of illusions about the new Russia and in love with Shakespeare’s tale. The performance will also include eight numbers that have never been heard by the public. Morris, an extremely musical choreographer, says that what he likes best about this original score is that “it’s more through-composed, less chopped up.” To him, the established version is “a little bit grandiose.” Another reason he’s excited about the project is that “I’ve never seen a company that’s not a classical ballet company use this [music].” Morris’s dancers are earthier, lustier. He, set designer Allen Moyer, and costume designer Martin Pakledinaz are talking about locating the ballet in the very early Renaissance: “So it’s pre-ballet, obviously, and sort of rough.”

Dramaturgically, Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare is a challenge. Morris began preliminary work on it at the same time that he was choreographing a piece for the San Francisco Ballet’s 75th anniversary season (it premieres this spring to a commissioned score by John Adams). “You know, I don’t have a company of 80 people,” he says. “Working with the San Francisco Ballet, I’m reminded of that every day.” The Mark Morris Dance Group numbers 19.

There will be no hordes of Capulets and Montagues hurling vegetables across a Verona piazza.

Thanks to the Fisher Center and the Morris Dance Group’s co-commissioners—Cal Performances, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Virginia Festival, and London’s Barbican Centre—audiences in several cities will see and hear this brand new old work. But on July 5 at Bard, the previous day’s fireworks will herald the rebirth of a beleaguered musical masterpiece.

Deborah Jowitt is principal dance critic for the Village Voice and teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her most recent book is Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance.

19

IN THE THICK OF AMERICAN POLITICS Politics rank among the least respected professions, according to a recent Gallup poll. But this has not daunted three Bardians—idealism intact and ready to make their mark— who have entered careers in state and federal government.

Betsaida Alcantara ’05

20

In 2007, Betsaida Alcantara ’05 joined the staff of U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) as press aide. It was a natural step for someone who started her social and political activism as a child, organizing for migrant labor rights, with her father, a minister. Born in the Dominican Republic, Alcantara grew up in Goshen, New York, where her work began on behalf of immigrant workers in the area. “For as far back as I can remember, I’ve always coupled my academics with some sort of action,” she says.

While pursuing political studies, Alcantara headed Bard’s student-based Migrant Labor Project, whose mission is to improve conditions for migrant laborers in New York State. As part of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program, she interned at Central American Legal Assistance. After graduation, Alcantara worked at the Workers’ Rights Law Center of New York in Kingston, until her winning of a competitive fellowship from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute brought her to Washington, D.C. As a policy fellow, she first worked for U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), then for Senator Menendez, who invited her to stay on as staff.

“My day is guided by what’s happening on the Senate floor,” says Alcantara.

“One minute it’s a press release on Darfur; next, funds for New Jersey firefighters; then children’s health insurance. I’m reminded daily of what’s at stake.” Alcantara’s responsibilities include monitoring the news and using her fluency in Spanish to translate press releases and deal with the Spanish media.

“As one person, I can’t change the government, but I’m working for a senator who cares about this country and the direction we need to take—and is an effective leader,” says Alcantara. “When I hear him speak on the Senate floor, it makes me proud.”

A “blindly sent” letter asking to work on the presidential campaign of (then) Vermont Governor Howard Dean in 2003 set Pia Carusone ’03 on a fast track to a political career. “My time with the Dean campaign, first as an intern, and later as campaign staff, was my first working experience in American politics,” says Carusone, who concentrated on international relations and the AIDS crisis in South Africa while at Bard.

In 2004, Carusone worked on one of Massachusetts’s most hotly contested state representative races. “We lost, but it was my first leadership position and it would lead to more,” she says. “I wanted to manage a federal race, House or Senate, for a candidate whom I could feel passionate about.” She found John P. Sarbanes of Maryland.

“He comes from a long family tradition of public service and social justice, so it was an easy fit.” Carusone managed his bid for Congress. Sarbanes won and brought her to Capitol Hill as his communications director and press secretary.

How has her perspective changed since the 2006 election? “Fifty-one freshmen came in—the biggest class since the mid-’70s, and not your average politicians,” she says. “They were elected because people are fed up with the current course in Iraq, health care, and ethics; they represent a tidal change in the American electorate. You walk the halls of Congress, see these new faces, and think: this would never have happened before 2006. It’s great to be working for a member of that team.”

With the 2008 presidential election looming, Carusone will break into the national scene as communications director for the New Hampshire Democratic Party. “New Hampshire is the ‘perfect storm’ of political action and events, not only because of the primaries, but because of a critical senate race. The voters here are extremely engaged, and it’s definitely where the action is,” says Carusone.

For Matt Wing ’06, press officer for New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, government work was far from his mind at Bard. “My concentration was literature,” says Wing. “My Senior Project was on Flaubert.” Still, working with his adviser, Marina van Zuylen (professor of French and comparative literature), taught Wing to value not only literature’s “big ideas,” but also the nuts and bolts of writing: “Grammar, syntax, sentence structure. She forced me to take complex ideas and express them simply—not to reduce their meaning, but to communicate them better. I look to that every day in my work,” says Wing.

Wing’s baptism into real-world politics began in the New York State legislature. Awarded the New York State Senate’s Richard J. Roth Journalism Fellowship, Wing found himself in the Senate majority pressroom, “in a bull pen with five other people, answering phones, writing press releases, talking points, and speeches,” he says. It was a particularly exciting time in Albany, according to Wing: “In my first three months, Eliot Spitzer was inaugurated as governor and an FBI investigation involving Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno was announced. Then there were fights on the budget and campaign-finance reform—everything happened!”

After the fellowship, Wing joined the Attorney General’s press office in New York City. “Working for the state’s chief lawyer requires a different set of priorities than those needed in the legislature,” says Wing. “The focus is on cases that will protect the people of the state.” Confessing that he works harder and longer hours than he did in Albany, Wing sees his new responsibilities as even more rewarding. “When you are part of something you really believe in, work is not the same as just having a job,” he says. “It’s something you want to be doing, and that has been a tremendous benefit.”

—Jan Weber

Pia Carusone ’03

Matt Wing ’06

21

TRANSFORMATION CLEMENTE COURSE CHANGES LIVES Marcellus Arnold of Washington, D.C., a 50-year-old with a rocky past, was determined to get his life together. He’d been off drugs for two years and had done well on the General Educational Development Test that qualified him for a high school diploma. His teachers urged him to check out an educational program they had seen described in a flyer. It promised a lot: “The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities is based on the belief that an encounter with the humanities can promote your personal growth and development, enrich your life, deepen your cultural awareness, improve your powers of thought and self-expression, and help create important new educational opportunities.”

Since 1995, the Clemente Course has provided college-level instruction, for college credit, to economically disadvantaged adults. Today, the Bard Clemente Program in Washington is one of 15 that Bard sponsors in U.S. cities. Nationally, the course has enrolled more than 2,500 students, more than 1,500 of whom completed the course; of the latter, more than 1,400 earned college credit.

Behind these impressive numbers are the admirable people who carry out the program.

“The D.C. Clemente Course is among the most successful in the country—graduating 18 students last year, its largest class ever—largely thanks to Mary Janney, its director,” said Ted Bertrand-Dewsnap ’82, Clemente Course national director. For Janney, who has devoted her professional life to giving people a shot at a better education and a better job, starting the Clemente Course in Washington in 2000 was a natural step.

22

At his first meeting with Janney, Arnold knew he had to pass a reading test. He assumed that she would select an article from a Washington newspaper, but the Clemente course stretches its students from the start, and Janney handed Arnold, who had never set eyes on Shakespeare, a copy of Hamlet. He read very well and was accepted into the course.

Each year, Janney recruits five instructors from the area to teach college-level courses in American history, literature and poetry, art history, moral philosophy, and critical writing and thinking. Instructors at local universities are eager to add the Bard course to their duties, she says. They praise the “mature” level of discussion among the students, and note the pleasure of teaching highly motivated adults.

Classes meet twice a week for eight months at the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC), the Clemente Course’s dynamic partner in Washington. LAYC helps with recruitment and fund-raising and provides a welcoming environment for students who might initially feel uncomfortable on a college campus. The program dissolves financial barriers by providing books, carfare, and child care, and charging no tuition. Bard grants certificates of achievement to students who complete the course and six college credits to students who perform at a high level. The Bard credits can be transferred to any institution of higher learning.

About half of the Washington students finish, reports Janney, who attends every class and notices who is absent. She tries to find those who miss more than one class. Sometimes she can’t. Students drop out, she says, because of work schedules, illness, children’s needs, or “internal obstacles.”

Arnold did not drop out. He found support from his fellow students and learned to respect someone else’s opinion, whether or not it matched his. He is now studying for a B.A. in health services administration at Southeastern University, with a 3.5 grade point average.

He is a licensed addiction counselor and volunteers for organizations that help adults get high school equivalency diplomas.

Jesse Contreras attended the first Clemente Course offered in Washington, in 2000. She was 19 at the time, with a job and a little boy, but she told herself, “Bard is going to let me see if I am able to go to college.” Today she works for Manna, a nonprofit organization that assists low-income families in Washington with home ownership. She has attended two years of classes at George Washington University and plans to earn a degree in criminal justice.

Sheila Mirza, 23, is a 2005 Clemente Course graduate. She dropped out of high school in New York after September 11, 2001, when she felt herself the target of anti-Muslim harassment.

She moved to Washington and got a job with the Youth Leadership Support Network (YLSN), an arts, education, media, and training network. At that point, finishing high school was not on her mind, but she met Mary Janney, who encouraged her to take the Clemente Course.

“I think almost all of the students in my class felt the same way,” says Mirza. “It was a nopressure, no-competition practice course to give us the courage to study more. The professors wanted us to succeed, no matter what we were going through. Even when I showed up late, the teacher would say, ‘Welcome, Miss Mirza.’” Mirza now works in the LAYC AmeriCorps Office and is part of the Civic Engagement Team at Powell Elementary School in Washington.

The Clemente Course has transformed its director, too. Although Janney never equated intellectual acuity with a college education, she says she did not realize how intelligent so many unschooled people are. “I am impressed with the fact that intellectual talent is everywhere,” she says.

—Jane Casey Hughes Jane Casey Hughes reported on development, health, and technology for the Voice of America for 25 years with side jobs in Princeton; Pittsburgh; Conakry, Guinea; and Lima, Peru, working for public radio and television and as a translator.

23

EVERYONE IS IN THE BEST SEAT —john cage Slapsticks, cowbells, claves, ratchet, slide whistle, toy piano—an unsuspecting visitor to the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on the evening of September 27, 2007, could easily have imagined that the odd array of instruments on stage was part of a program for “Spike Jones and His World.” But when the five musicians of Nexus began to perform Dance Music for Elfrid Ide—an exhilarating, recently resurrected work by John Cage—it made no difference whether listeners were nestled in the orchestra, parterre, or balcony of the Sosnoff Theater: everyone was in the best seat.

The occasion was a John Cage Tribute Concert, part of a twoday celebration to commemorate the placement of the John Cage Trust at Bard College. The concert, which featured the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) Musicians and Nexus, included three distinctive Cage compositions and the world premiere of For John, an homage written by the MCDC Musicians. It was followed on September 28 by two stagings (or “iterations”) of Cage’s epic Lecture on the Weather, among whose ample cast of performers were the artist Jasper Johns, poet and Bard professor John Ashbery, Bard College president Leon Botstein, and Merce Cunningham himself—Cage’s partner and collaborator for more than 45 years and the beneficiary of his estate. (The two programs were organized in conjunction with the MCDC’s residency at Dia:Beacon.)

John Cage (1912–92) was widely considered the éminence grise (albeit a very elfin one) of the American avant-garde in the second half of the last century. As a composer, his innovations—a short list would include his use of the prepared piano, his introduction of chance processes into the writing and performance of music, and his incorporation of unpredictable, nonmusical sounds into musical works—continually challenged ideas as to what was considered possible or permissible. But he was equally important as a writer and philosopher, offering a radical rethinking of what constitutes “music” and how we listen to it. (He had a particular genius for distilling his thought into aphorisms—e.g., “There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”) His reach, moreover, extended into many other spheres: the visual arts, theater, dance, and even the identification and culinary appreciation of mushrooms (he was Merce Cunningham a cofounder of the New York Mycological Society).

24

The John Cage Trust, formed shortly after the composer’s death, oversees the dissemination of, and access to, all of Cage’s published and unpublished works, and arranges or serves in an advisory capacity for their presentation in concerts, performances, workshops, recordings, art exhibitions, projects, and educational programs. Now officially housed in Annandale, the Trust’s holdings include music and text manuscripts, archival and commercial recordings, Cage’s personal library, artworks, and lots of ephemera (annotations of chess games, appointment diaries, edible paper, even Christmas ornaments). “Really, there’s something of potential interest to nearly anyone working at Bard College, regardless of discipline,” says Laura Kuhn, director of the Trust and Bard’s inaugural John Cage Professor of Performance Art. Among the Trust’s wealth of materials are copious amounts of unpublished or unperformed works, and the reclamation and realization of these, as published texts and/or staged performances, is an especially exciting prospect. “It seems each year that passes unearths yet another composition that was either totally unknown or considered lost,” says Kuhn. One of these pieces was Dance Music for Elfrid Ide, which Kuhn discovered in a long-neglected box in the library of Mills College, where Cage taught in the late 1930s.

“It’s amazing to think that you can actually hear a new work by John Cage 15 years after his death,” said Garry Kvistad, a member of Nexus, shortly before his ensemble’s animated reading of Dance Music, a threemovement percussion piece, at the tribute concert in September. “This one was written for the thesis project of Elfrid Ide [a student of Cage] in 1940, and we suspect that it hasn’t been performed in the United States since. We’re calling it a U.S. premiere.”

In addition to offering a fresh look at Cage works that have fallen into obscurity, the Trust’s trove should prove a boon to scholars. “We have areas of Cage’s work that are prime, so to speak, for sustained scholarly attention,” says Kuhn. “His writings as a whole have not yet been properly addressed, and we are anxious to move forward with a proper catalogue raisonné of his visual work. There are also stores of materials within our archives that have yet to be delved into that Nexus, performing John Cage’s Dance Music for Elfrid Ide are particular to one or another large work . . . These will serve focused graduate study in the future.”

Finally, to ensure that artists, audiences, cultural historians, and the merely curious continue to engage with Cage in the best possible ways, the Trust will organize and present more concerts, performances, and other public events.

“I’m working now with Joan Retallack [John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities] toward the formation of an international John Cage Symposium, slated for September 26 to 28, 2008,” says Kuhn, who worked as an assistant to Cage when he was composing and staging his Europeras 1 & 2 at the Frankfurt Opera in the mid 1980s. “We might also contemplate doing a campuswide ‘musicircus,’ inviting everyone to participate over the course of an afternoon as a performer in simultaneous presentations of pieces . . .

Cage’s principle of musicircuses is well-suited to Bard College, and it would nicely make use of [the campus’s] many unusual and quite beautiful spaces.”

—Mikhail Horowitz

25

Requiem Redux LEON BOTSTEIN AND BBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA RESURRECT A MASTERPIECE A mystic, pacifist, and socialist, the British composer John Foulds (1880–1939) was too much the stubborn individualist to fit in with the musical milieu of his time. Yet his monumental tribute to the dead on all sides of the Great War, A World Requiem, struck a plangent chord with the public when it premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in 1923, on the occasion of the first British Legion Festival of Remembrance. The work, which comprises a staggering 20 movements, and whose choral sections include lines from John Bunyan and a poem by Kabir as well as Biblical references, was embraced by an audience still very much in mourning for its fallen soldiers. For the next three years, it was performed annually, on Armistice Day. And then, abruptly, it was dropped from the festival, and never performed again.

“Never,” however, came to a ringing close on November 11—Remembrance Day—2007, when Bard College president Leon Botstein led the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its chorus, along with three other choirs, in a triumphant resurrection of Foulds’s long-neglected magnum opus. Fittingly, the concert took place in the Royal Albert Hall, the last (and only) venue to host this music, more than eight decades ago.

26

It was an ambitious undertaking, but Botstein—the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra—and his musicians carried it off with aplomb, more than satisfying the tough London critics. Reviewing the concert for the Guardian, Tim Ashley wrote, “Botstein conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra with eloquent gravitas and the choral singing, from the combined forces of the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony and Crouch End Festival choruses, was superb in its mixture of hushed grief and exaltation.” The Daily Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett remarked that it was a “wonderful occasion,” with “the conductor Leon Botstein, who held this army together with a sure hand, [deserving] special mention.”

Paul Hughes, executive director of the BBC Symphony, was responsible for engaging Botstein for this project by Roger Wright, director of BBC Proms and long-time controller of BBC Radio 3, the UK’s preeminent cultural radio station. The choice of the right conductor to restore this long-shelved epic to the rosy glow of the concert hall was no accident. Now in its 19th season, Botstein’s annual Bard Music Festival has made a practice of “rediscovering” lost or little-known works by greater and lesser composers. (Some recent examples have included works by Ethel Smyth, Herbert Howells, and Frank Bridge that are rarely performed in the United States, and Carl Czerny’s Fugue in C Major, Op. 177, No. 1, which exists only in manuscript.) In an interview with Jessica Duchen of The Independent, Botstein, noting that Foulds’s artistic concerns are a good fit with the growing popularity of “so-called ‘spiritual minimalist’ music,” went on to explain why he thought A World Requiem was ripe for revival: “[It] is a lush, intense, spiritual work with a strong mystical streak. I’m sure that audiences will respond to

“Botstein conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra with eloquent gravitas, and the choral singing . . . was superb in its mixture of hushed grief and exaltation.”

its lyricism. It’s clear that Foulds must have had a political commitment to accessibility in his musical style: the work is expressive, direct and idealistic, building on the post–First World War ideologies of pacifism and world cooperation.”

More than anything, the undeniable candor of the work makes it irresistible for a contemporary audience, a tonic for sensibilities that are steeped in irony. “We’re often a little allergic to anything that we feel is hypocritically exaggerated . . . anything oversentimental or kitsch,” Botstein said. “But I feel this work does not have that quality. It’s disarmingly, vulnerably authentic in its emotions. This was an honest man.”

Foulds, who immigrated to India in 1935, died of cholera there, just shy of his 60th birthday. During his four years on the subcontinent, he was engaged in trying to create a synthesis of Eastern and Western music, an idea that was very much in advance of his time. Although his lighter works continued to be performed in England, he was lampooned in the press and disregarded by the British musical establishment. He would no doubt have been astounded to see approximately 4,000 concertgoers turn out for his great Requiem on a chilly autumn day in the Third Millennium.

The first performance of A World Requiem in 81 years was recorded live by Chandos Records, which released it as two surround-sound SA-CDs in January. Audiences may never see another live staging of this prodigious work, but they will now have the opportunity, at least, to hear it as it was performed on the occasion of its glorious resurrection in November 2007.

27

INTERNATIONAL EDUCATOR DAVID PENBERG ’77 There are people born to stay and others born to go away.

There are some who leave because they have a far away love, or because they like a street, a library . . . in some other part of the world.

—Pablo Neruda Passions and Impressions

28

Midwood High School, Brooklyn, is quintessentially urban: faded hallways echoing with the clamor of some 4,000 students crammed into a building designed (in 1940) for 2,300— an easy stand-in for the 1950s movie Blackboard Jungle. More than 3,000 miles away, Benjamin Franklin International School (BFIS), a private school of 400 students, occupies a refurbished villa in the middle of a residential suburb of Barcelona, Spain. BFIS is now David Penberg’s world work space—just as Midwood High School; La Universidad de La Salle, Bogotá, Colombia; Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China; Washington Houses Community Center, East Harlem, New York; the American School Foundation (ASF) in Mexico City, Mexico; and Bank Street College of Education, New York City, were in earlier years. Essential locations in the 30-year career of an educator, teacher, learner, learning consultant, and global citizen.

New York–born Penberg received his Ph.D. in education from the University of British Columbia in 1999, and what he refers to as “an extra graduate education” from living and teaching abroad. “Travel is an opportunity to experience ‘a little of everything in this world,’” he says, quoting his favorite poet, Pablo Neruda. “I think that I’ve always had to leave home to rediscover home. And I have always come back enriched, wiser, smarter, more grounded—personally and professionally.”

The notion of entering the field of education for the stability it provides is anathema to Penberg. “I never thought of becoming an educator for the purposes of security; I never saw myself going a traditional route,” he says. “So it’s not about comfort, or choosing the conventional.” Rather, for Penberg, it is more about discomfort and understanding the special advantage of being the outsider, or, as he puts it, “needing to figure things out, dealing with differences, suspending judgment, learning to listen, adapting. . . . As educators we can’t afford to lose that alertness, and that mind-set toward learning, that entering new cultures and languages engenders.”

The same sensibility that had helped Penberg to teach successfully in Colombia and China, bring innovation to a school in Mexico, develop leadership skills at New Visions for Public Schools (an organization dedicated to improving the quality of education in New York City’s public schools), and work with inner-city youth in New York, had enabled him to enter Midwood High School in 2007, as an education consultant (and outsider), and work effectively with the community (children, parents, teachers, and administrators). “It’s always about the kids,” says Penberg, “and providing the conditions, opportunities, and leadership that create a genuine learning community. I am very deliberate about encouraging people’s capacities and development, no matter where I am in the world.”

For Penberg, Bard president Leon Botstein is a mentor and significant role model whose approach to entering and changing a professional learning community mirrors Penberg’s own. The approach centers on creating and nurturing new ways in which to

enhance the personal, emotional, and educational growth and development of all students.

“Leon is a conductor,” says Penberg, “and I see that as a metaphor for his style of leadership. He assembles a diverse range of thinkers, of doers, of educators, taps into it, and creates the conditions for people to flourish—that’s what good coaching is all about.” In 2004, when Penberg was chief academic officer and codirector of ASF, he invited Botstein to be a visiting scholar at the institution. “In the short time he was there,” says Penberg, “Leon shook things up, talking about the advantages of the school’s commitment to the arts in its curriculum.” In a speech made during that time, Botstein emphasized the need “to serve as a bridge to an increased sense of social responsibility and community involvement” (ASF Newsletter, October 2004).

In the fall of 2007, Penberg began his most recent appointment, as director of BFIS. Asked about his approach to his first professional experience in Europe, Penberg listed his priorities for entering a new and unknown community, whether it is in Brooklyn or Barcelona: “You don’t go with baggage to impose or intrude. You begin the delicate process of getting to know the community and having the community get to know you, of finding out what people think about that world, what they’re proud of, what they feel challenged by. This involves an openness and the ability to have ongoing conversations with multiple members of the community.” During an introductory speech to his new staff, Penberg affirmed his philosophy that education is fundamentally, in his words, “a social process that is, at its core, communal. We learn through interaction and interdependence with people—not apart or separate from them. For education to be truly vital requires the widest degrees of exposure, variety, and contact with the world.”

In an essay written in 2002, while he was a faculty member of Bank Street College, Penberg wrote, “I have learned as much from the places I have been as from the students I have taught. The cross-cultural life is circular and reciprocal, composed of relationships forged between people and places. . . . What else do we bring to the children in our classrooms but our biographies, either full or empty, of what we have seen and recorded, the evidence of our having lived in the world?”

—Jan Weber

29

COGNITIVE SCIENCE: UNDERSTANDING THE MIND While questions about the mind have occupied philosophers and laymen for thousands of years, the study of cognitive science—how intelligent systems receive, use, and communicate information—is a relatively new academic domain, which requires collaboration among scholars hailing from many subject areas. The fields of neuroscience and psychology contribute to a greater understanding of the brain, thought, and human behavior, but the questions asked in the field of cognitive science address a larger scope: Do only humans have minds? What is the relationship between language and thought? What is consciousness? In order to find satisfactory answers to these questions, investigators must step outside of traditional territory.

Debates about the nature of mind are also topics of long-standing interest at Bard. Sven Anderson, associate professor of computer science, sees a natural affinity between cognitive science and Bard’s curriculum. “If Bard is a ‘place to think,’ then shouldn’t an understanding of thought be a central part of our scholarly pursuit?” he asks.

Over the past few years, Cognitive Science: Languages of the Mind has been one of the College’s most popular classes. The course is team taught, involving instructors from five different disciplines: biology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It attracts students from every division of the Lower and Upper Colleges.

Along with precalculus, one of the prerequisites specified in the course description is “a willingness to engage a broad variety of ideas and approaches from the natural, mathematical, and social sciences.”

Since the course was first offered, during the spring of 2005, Anderson and his team-teaching colleagues have noticed that enrollment has increased significantly every semester. “What’s more,” says one of those colleagues, Rebecca Thomas, associate professor of computer science, “at the end of each semester, students asked us, ‘How can I keep pursuing this subject?’” As a result, the faculty members began talking about finding a way for students to combine their interests in the fields that make up the study of cognitive science. The solution was to create a secondary

30

concentration. Anderson and Barbara Luka, assistant professor of psychology, took the helm, working together to secure approval from the academic divisions involved and from the College committees that oversee curricular changes. In the summer of 2007, the new secondary concentration in cognitive science was formally approved, and students began moderating into it in the fall semester.

The program was founded with the pedagogical goal of supporting current students, and attracting new students, who are interested in theories of mind. The College also aims to encourage more students from the arts, social sciences, and literature to examine contemporary research in neuroscience, genetics, and computer science. Bard faculty members see these goals as representative of the College’s commitment to the sciences and to interdisciplinary studies. Anderson believes that a scientific understanding of how brains create our experience—in the sense that we cannot separate our brains from our experience— can have a profound influence on the arts and humanities, linking them to the most current advances in rapidly growing fields such as robotics, genetics, and neuroscience.

“For example,” he says, “one new area of research explores the neural basis of humans’ appreciation for music.

Some cognitive scientists theorize that music perception may be parasitic on the mental structures that make language possible. Others think the answer may lie in the need for our neurons to predict ‘what comes next’ in a world where predicting regularities, like hearing the next footfall of a predator, can mean the difference between life and death. Cognitive scientists are deeply interested in understanding not only how we process musical information, but also why we find it pleasurable. The very notion of pleasure itself has found its way into the field of development robotics and machine learning. We know how to make robots learn to respond and thrive in their environment, but building robots that can learn is not the end of the problem. Our intelligent learning machines need the drive to push them through a developmental sequence. Lacking drive or desire, robots don’t know what they should learn,

and they may waste time learning details about the environment that serve no purpose. The underpinning of learning may well be desire, pleasure, and love of beauty—subjective notions that science has often held at a distance.”

Jonathan Raye ’09, who is concentrating in computer science, was delighted when Thomas, his adviser, told him that the courses he’d been taking in psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology qualified him for a secondary concentration in cognitive science. Raye says that cognitive science appeals to students, like him, who have fundamental questions about the distinction between mind and brain. Through computational modeling, researchers can test hypotheses of how complex intelligent behaviors may arise from more simple dynamic systems. Perception, memory, learning, and reasoning—all cognitive behaviors— can be explored using computational models. Many current researchers in the field use computer simulations of neural networks to explore the information-processing abilities of large groups of interconnected neurons. One of the strengths that Anderson brings to Bard’s cognitive science students is his background in linguistics and his research specialization in neural-network modeling.

Raye is particularly interested in the ways that certain biologically inspired algorithms can be implemented in a variety of contexts. “The area of so-called genetic algorithms is actually what pointed me toward computer science in the first place,” he says. “One of the most tantalizing prospects of genetic algorithms is that they might evolve simulacra of biological consciousness. It’s incredibly exciting for me to think that, a few hundred years down the road, a computer may be able to instantiate many of the processes of human consciousness.”

Like Raye, Jordan Bielsky ’08 came to cognitive science by way of philosophy, neuroscience, and psycholinguistics, though Bielsky’s concentration is philosophy. He arrived at Bard, as a transfer student halfway through his sophomore year, looking for a college where he could coordinate his courses and get to know his professors. Last semester he did just that: “All four of my classes prompted discussions about the origins of consciousness: Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Cognitive Science, and From Genes to Traits—an evolutionary biology class. The classes were all in direct dialogue with each other, and that was . . . well, it was wonderful.”

The program’s faculty members also appreciate the interdisciplinary collaboration that the new program brings. As a research psychologist, Barbara Luka represents one perspective on the study of mind. She explains

that her colleagues—Frank Scalzo, in neuroscience; Mary Coleman, in philosophy; and Anderson and Thomas, in computer science—“provide additional perspectives that help students develop an understanding of mind. By establishing a secondary concentration in cognitive science, we are able to develop a structure of collaboration between

Jonathan Raye ’09 (left) and Jordan Bielsky ’08

faculty colleagues and our students that keeps our course offerings and instruction at the forefront of relevance in each of our respective disciplines.”

Cognitive science at Bard also engages a broad spectrum of the faculty in cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. Says Anderson, “Speakers at recent Psychology Program colloquia, for example, have discussed topics such as computational linguistics and zebrafish neural receptor systems—both unusual topics in this context—while talks in the Math and Computer Science Programs’ colloquia have covered such disparate subjects as Hodgkin-Huxley neuron models [mathematical models that describe how action potentials in neurons are initiated and propagated] and the role of chaos in predicting epilepsy.”

Raye believes that he and his fellow cognitive science students are ahead of the game, academically and, perhaps, professionally. “I’d say that cognitive science is going to become increasingly important as a discipline, and it’s very important for Bard to be part of this movement,” he says.

“We’re going to see cognitive science–inspired theory and computation being applied on Wall Street, in engineering, in biological modeling, and across the corporate world.”

—Kelly Spencer

31

Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Holiday Party 2007 The annual Holiday Party drew a capacity crowd of 390 Bardians to New York City’s Union Bar on December 7. This terrific response, the largest ever in Holiday Party history, included at least 125 alumni/ae from the classes of 2006 and 2007, a big contingent from the mid 1960s, and a sizable group from the late 1980s, reports Jessica Kemm ’74, director of alumni/ae affairs. The Board of Governors was well represented, led by Walter Swett ’96, its president. Faculty attendees included Christopher Gibbs, Michèle Dominy, Robert Martin, William Mullen, Peter Sourian, and Stuart Stritzler-Levine. Leon Botstein, in a particularly festive gold bow tie, greeted alumni/ae as they arrived. Alumni/ae office staff ran out of glow-in-the-dark admission bracelets, but the party was never short of food, for nourishment and thought. Lost in a swirl of partygoers, the Bardian photographer was forced to stand above the crowd in order to photograph it.

Within that crowd, the earth tones and black generally favored by Bardians were offset with flashes of color that recalled other seasons: a leaf-green sports jacket; dresses of cerulean blue, scarlet, and sunlight; a knit hat in blaze orange; multihued threads woven into a jacket; and a paisley shawl in deep pinks, reds, and purple.

For those who couldn’t bear to leave, the after-party party burned brightly into the night, right at the Union Bar.

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

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

by John Ashbery ecco Published during the year he turned 80 (see page 14), Notes from the Air shows the breadth and depth of John Ashbery’s recent writing. Spanning 10 of his collections, the poems were chosen by Ashbery to represent his best work of the period, from April Galleons (1987) to Where Shall I Wander (2005), a National Book Award finalist. Publishers Weekly called Notes from the Air “essential.” Ashbery is Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature. À contre-coups collected by Annette Lucas, photographs by Jane Evelyn Atwood ’70 éditions xavier barral This book comprises the stories of 15 French women, identified by first name only, from different backgrounds. All have experienced domestic violence. They tell how they escaped from that violence, bettering their lives in the process. The accompanying photographs are visual testimonies to the women’s strength and determination. Jane Evelyn Atwood, based in Paris since 1971, is the 2005 winner of Bard College’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Brookland

by Emily Barton picador Prue Winship is a girl living in Revolution-era Brooklyn (known then as Brookland), whose dream is to carry on her father’s successful gin-distilling business. The sight of New York across the East River ignites the 10-year-old’s imagination, and she envisions a bridge connecting the two cities. Emily Barton’s writing style is sprightly and flavored with 18th-century inflection. Barton, winner of the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, is assistant professor of writing.

Prague: Artˇel Style

by Karen Feldman ’91 artˇel books Karen Feldman has lived in Prague since 1994, when she was hired to oversee a start-up shampoo business; she ended up founding her own luxury Czech crystal company. This guide to her adopted city is based on her years of observation and research in finding everything from the best tourist sites to the best chocolate. She includes unusual tourist information, such as helicopter rides and veterinary services. Her interviews with knowledgeable locals add to the lively text.

May Day

by Robert Kelly parsifal press Love for the ordinary, expressed in sparkling language, characterizes this latest collection of poetry by Robert Kelly. With sensuality and spiritual depth, Kelly describes the world while recognizing that the poet has only words with which to evoke the indescribable (“We talked about what is left / when language is gone”). Kelly is Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature.

34

A Voice from Elsewhere

by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Charlotte Mandell ’90 state university of new york press The modernist literary theorist Maurice Blanchot here wrestles with the writing of Louis-René des Forêts, Paul Celan, Michel Foucault, René Char, and others, as well as with the shape of writing itself: he speaks of what “reaches us through the extreme tension of language.” Blanchot is also a philosopher, musing on the fundamental mystery of what makes literature. Charlotte Mandell has translated many of Blanchot’s works.

Government Spending on the Elderly edited by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou palgrave macmillan By 2020, the percentage of elderly in the U.S. population will rise, while the working population declines. Will this create, as pundits predict, a fiscal crisis and political instability?

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics and president of The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, here collects essays that analyze government fiscal policies and Social Security Trust Funds, examine ways for retirees to retain benefits, and offer other suggestions for improving the lot of elderly citizens in the United States.

Novels in Three Lines

by Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Sante new york review books Félix Fénéon, one of the quirkier, lesser-known great 20th-century French literary stylists, spent part of 1906 writing short news items for Le Matin. These three-line briefs possess starkness, humor, and the ring of poetry, which Luc Sante is careful to retain in translation.

In a comprehensive introduction, Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, also deconstructs Fénéon and his writing.

Stephen Shore photographs by Stephen Shore; text by Christy Lange, Michael Fried, and Joel Sternfeld phaidon Stephen Shore’s photographs of everyday American scenes reveal the beauty to be found in the ordinary. This overview also shows how Shore helped lay the groundwork for the incorporation of color photography into the world of art. The text and photographs in this book offer the first complete look at Shore’s long career: his time at Warhol’s Factory, experiments in conceptual photography, and continuing exploration of emerging techniques.

Shore is Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts.

Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds edited by Kristin Waters ’73 and Carol B. Conaway university of vermont press This collection of essays, the editors write, aims to correct “the prevailing view that no long-standing black women’s intellectual traditions exist.” The book’s focus ranges from Maria W. Stewart, one of the first women in the United States to speak publicly to an audience of mixed race and sex in the 1830s, to Patricia Hill Collins, author of a 1991 classic on black feminist thought. Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions was awarded the 2007 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians for best anthology on African American women’s history.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS | 35

ONANDOFFCAMPUS

Magic Realist Wins Bard Fiction Prize Salvador Plascencia, of El Monte, California, has won the 2008 Bard Fiction Prize for his first novel, The People of Paper (McSweeney’s, 2005; Harcourt, 2006). Part memoir, part lies, the novel’s form takes its cue from magic realism and metafiction— columns of text run in different directions across the page, sections are blacked out, and a name has been scratched out of the book.

After his wife leaves him, Federico de la Fe and his daughter depart Las Tortugas, Mexico, and head for Los Angeles. With the aid of a local street gang and the prophetic powers of a baby Nostradamus, they engage in an epic battle to find a cure for sadness. Mechanical tortoises, disillusioned saints, a woman made of paper, and Rita Hayworth are some of the players in this story of war and lost love. The writer George Saunders calls The People of Paper “harrowing and gorgeous, experimental in the truest sense: it creates new means to explore essential and timeless emotional subjects.”

Since 2001, the Bard Fiction Prize has been awarded annually to a promising writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. Winners receive $30,000 and appointment as writer in residence at the College for one semester.

Mary Caponegro, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature

Class of 2007 Creates Social Choice Fund for Endowment Giving Motivated by their commitment to environmental and employment responsibility, the members of the Class of 2007 have, through substantial monetary contributions, created the College’s first “social choice” endowment fund. Comprising half of the Class of 2007’s gift (the other half of which is devoted to bringing distinguished speakers to Annandale and to facilitating political discussion on campus), the money is invested in stocks and mutual funds that reflect socially responsible values. A portion of the returns will support Bard’s annual operations. Representatives of the Class of 2007 hope that their efforts will spur other like-minded alumni/ae, families, and friends to give to the Bard Social Choice Fund.

“We saw an opportunity to support both our school and an increasingly popular social cause, through corporate investments,” said Mikaela Gross ’07. “As part of a global socially responsible investing movement, we want to promote and support businesses that are environmentally conscious and fair to their workers. The fund also offers socially conscious alumni/ae an alternate avenue for their monetary donations to Bard.”

The gift from the Class of 2007 moves Bard to the forefront of a growing number of schools that are adopting socially responsible endowments. Williams, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges, for example, have also shifted a portion of their endowment investments so as to more closely reflect the ideals of their schools.

The Bard fund is currently managed by Neuberger Berman, whose socially responsive investing branch proactively invests in firms with a demonstrated positive human rights, labor relations,

36

and Writing; Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature; and Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center fellow, make up the selection committee. Past recipients include Nathan Englander (2002), Emily Barton (2003), Monique Truong (2004), Paul LaFarge (2005), Edie Meidav (2006), and Peter Orner (2007).

and environmental record. To ensure that the Bard Social Choice Fund is meeting the investment and ethical goals established by the Class of 2007, a committee, made up of students and administrators, will meet regularly to monitor progress. Any recommended changes will be reported to the Board of Trustees of Bard College.

To give to the Social Choice Fund, send a check (made out to Bard College) or provide credit card information in the envelope attached to this issue. To make a gift online, visit www.bard.edu/giving, choose Make a Gift to Bard, select Bard College, then click on Area of Giving and select Social Choice Fund.

If you have any questions, call Matthew Soper, director of development, at 845-758-7505, or e-mail him at soper@bard.edu.

Mellon Grant Supports New Science Faculty The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Bard a three-year grant in support of the College’s efforts to engage students more directly in the intellectual challenges and rewards of science.

Specifically, the Mellon funds will be applied to the salaries and start-up laboratory expenses for four new faculty members, one each in biology and mathematics (2007–08), one in chemistry (2008–09), and one in computer science (2009–10). The new faculty will work with current mathematics and science faculty to implement an innovative program of teaching general education in science to nonscientists and to restructure the way undergraduates major in science.

Family Weekend 2007 Bard hosted its annual Family Weekend October 26–28. During a flurry of events, family, students, and faculty mingled. After a welcoming reception hosted by the Parents’ Network, guests were invited to an “Ask the Deans” session with Michèle Dominy, vice president and dean of the College, and Erin Cannan, dean of students. Families then had the opportunity to dine in Kline Commons (Bard’s main dining room); cheer on Bard’s women’s soccer team; watch a movie in the Bertelsmann Campus Center; attend a Bard Music Festival American Symphony Orchestra performance conducted by Bard president Leon Botstein; and compete in the popular Family Spelling Bee. On Saturday, family members sampled classes, including Introduction to Computing: Robotics and First-Year Seminar: Galileo.

The Office of Admission held an open house and campus tours; the Parents’ Network convened its annual meeting; Ian Buruma, Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, led a panel, “Anglophilia and Imperialism”; Botstein gave an “Ask the President” session; and students and faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music performed. Other highlights were tours of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation; varsity crosscountry championships; a ’60s rock presentation by music historian Barry Drake; and horticultural and historical walking tours. Numerous art exhibitions held during the weekend included Keith Edmier 1991–2007 and Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibitions of Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection at the Center for Curatorial Studies.

Science Innovation at Simon’s Rock Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College launched its pilot Science Seminar, an innovative science-teaching model that joins First-Year and Sophomore Seminars in forming the backbone of the curriculum. Two groups of 12 to 15 students participated. Simon’s Rock received $300,000 from the Davis Education Foundation to help implement the groundbreaking initiative, which began in August 2007.

At Simon’s Rock, as at most colleges, the science and mathematics general education requirements often segregate students with a strong interest in these subjects from those who are less interested, according to Sam Ruhmkorff, dean of academic affairs. The Science Seminar will change the way science is taught at Simon’s Rock by presenting the same general education curriculum to all students.

The seminar features interdisciplinary methods and an unconventional approach to teaching actual experimental science.

In the seminars (each of which includes math and science majors and nonmajors), students “do” science alongside the faculty— experiencing the way scientists work by asking questions and setting out to learn the answers, as opposed to studying only what has already been established. During the program’s inaugural year, Science Seminar projects address the topic of global climate change. This foundational topic lends itself to a broad range of interdisciplinary exploration, such as statistics, thermodynamics,

paleontology, atmospheric chemistry, and computer modeling of large-scale physical systems; and inquiry-based research focused on local environments, such as the Berkshire and Hudson River regions. As part of this science initiative, Gidon Eshel, a renowned climate scientist and Bard Center Visiting Fellow at Simon’s Rock, joins the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Simon’s Rock. He will teach, consult, and develop curriculum.

Don Roeder (right), faculty member since 1977 in environmental studies and botany, leads a Science Seminar at Simon’s Rock with students Colleen Marshall (left) and Alexandra Alizadeh participating.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 37

The “True Simplicity”: BGC Presents Shaker Design Shaker Design: Out of This World, an exhibition of more than two centuries of chairs, tables, cabinets, and other household objects by members of the Shakers, the longest-lasting utopian community in America, is currently on view at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC). The exhibition, which also includes rarely seen “gift drawings” and works made by Shaker artisans for non-Shakers, runs through June 15 at the BGC Gallery, 18 West 86th Street, Manhattan.

Founded in England around the time of the American Revolution by the visionary Mother Ann Lee, the Shaker movement took root in New York and New England and, at its peak, had established communities in several Midwestern states. Guided by a gospel of simplicity, members of the sect produced furniture whose spare elegance and innovative joinery continue to influence contemporary designers.

Organized by Jean Burks, senior curator at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, the exhibition presents more than 150 objects, many of which have heretofore never been seen outside of private collections. Also on display are works in the “American Fancy” style, a popular arts and crafts movement of the 19th century that was rejected by the Shakers and that markedly contrasts with the austerity of their work. An accompanying catalogue, published by the BGC and Yale University Press, culls the latest scholarship in Shaker design by experts in the field. For information about related lectures and panels or group tours, call 212-501-3011 or e-mail programs@bgc.bard.edu.

BHSEC Ranked with Top Schools Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) received accolades last fall from the Wall Street Journal and Manhattan Media. The WSJ included BHSEC in its international “How the Schools Stack Up” survey, and Manhattan Media noted BHSEC as an outstanding high school in its New York City–based Blackboard Awards 2007.

The WSJ ranked secondary schools by determining the percentage of students going on to eight “highly selective” colleges— the University of Chicago, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Pomona, Princeton, Swarthmore, and Williams. Looking at the high schools attended by first-year students at those institutions, the Journal limited its survey to schools with a senior class of at least 50 students.

Rankings were based on the number of students sent to the eight institutions, divided by the high school’s number of graduates in 2007. The Collegiate School in Manhattan topped the list; out of a graduating class of 50, 13 students went to the eight institutions, for a success rate of 26.0 percent. BHSEC, founded in 2001, had a success rate of 7.8 percent (10 students out of 128 graduates), just under that of the venerable Horace Mann School (14 of 177 graduates) in Riverdale, New York, and the distinguished National Cathedral School (6 of 76 graduates), in Washington, D.C., which both had a success rate of 7.9 percent.

Manhattan Media, the publisher of several neighborhood newspapers and magazines, created the Blackboard Awards in 2002 to “highlight notable achievements by schools across all of New York City’s educational systems.” One school from each of the public, independent, and religious categories at three grade levels—elementary, middle, and high school—is selected for an annual “outstanding” award. BHSEC was the chosen independent school in the Outstanding High School category, alongside the private Horace Mann School, and the religious (Jesuit) Loyola School.

38

The Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, dressed in modified formal attire and surrounded by a denuded forest of fabricated trees, performed his “FOLKSONG” at the Center for Curatorial Studies’ exhibition space in Chelsea, Manhattan, over 10 days in October 2007.

Kjartansson had appeared at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art in May, as part of CCS student Markús Andrésson’s thesis exhibition, Repeat Performances: Roni Horn and Ragnar Kjartansson.

SEEN & HEARD SEPTEMBER The American Symphony Orchestra (ASO), with Leon Botstein, music director, performed works by Brahms, SaintSaëns, Dvorˇák, and Jacques Ibert at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on September 14 and 15.

Neurologist Samuel Koszer gave a talk, “Chaos Theory and the Brain,” on September 20 at The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation.

Alexei Kudrin, Russia’s minister of finance, delivered a lecture, “Russian Contemporary Financial Policy,” at Weis Cinema on October 23. Leon Botstein introduced Kudrin, whose talk was sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute, Economics Program, and Institute for International Liberal Education.

Turkish filmmaker Zeki Demirkubuz visited campus on September 24 for a screening of Destiny, his most recent movie.

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program presented the first of its fall lectures in the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series on September 27. “Iraq after the Petraeus Report” featured guest lecturers Colonel Jeffrey D. McCausland and Major James Spies.

OCTOBER Farideh Koohi-Kamali, author of The Political Development of the Kurds in Iran: Pastoral Nationalism, gave a lecture, “Kurdish Nationalism in Iran,” on October 4.

Also on October 4, The Bard College Conservatory of Music presented a concert by faculty member and clarinetist Laura Flax, flutist Bart Feller, and guest artists Simon Boyar, Marka Gustavsson, and Linda Mark.

Colonel Cindy R. Jebb of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point spoke with Bard students on September 18, on the topic of human and environmental security in the Sahel, the African region between the Sahara desert and the fertile region to the south of it. Col. Jebb (seen here with Bard professor Jesse Shipley) is a professor and deputy head in the Academy’s Department of Social Sciences. She was invited to Bard by the Academy/Bard Exchange and Model United Nations Program.

Hungary’s Lituus Quintet performed works by Bach, Bartók, and others during an October 11 concert at Olin Hall.

The Levy Economics Institute hosted a workshop, “International Comparisons of Economic Well-Being,” on October 11–12.

The Bard Center presented a concert by the Da Capo Chamber Players on October 12 at Olin Hall.

On October 16, the French Studies and Literature Programs hosted a joint reading by French poet Franck André Jamme and John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature and a translator of Jamme’s work.

The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra performed a program of works by Mendelssohn, including the Concerto for Violin in E minor and the “Hebrides” Overture, on October 19 at Olin Hall.

On October 20, the CCS Hessel Museum of Art premiered Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibitions of Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection. The show ran through February 3.

Imagine creating a photographic record of every day of your life. That was the plan of Jamie Livingston ’79, whose Photo of the Day project was shown at the Bertelsmann Campus Center in October. From 1979 until his death in October 1997, Livingston recorded his life through Polaroid images, one each day. The exhibition was presented by the Jamie Livingston Project, which also has created a scholarship in Livingston’s memory.

Italian novelist and translator Antonio Tabucchi, writer in residence at Bard, gave a talk, “Eulogium: In Praise of Literature,” on October 23.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 39

Peru Earthquake Relief In August 2007 an earthquake flattened Ica, Peru, the hometown of Carlos Apostle ’11. The quake killed his aunt and uncle, along with more than 500 other people in the region, and left more than 50,000 homeless. Apostle had to make a difficult decision. Should he fly to Peru to join the rescue and rebuilding operations, or stay at Bard, where he and his firstyear classmates had just begun the Language and Thinking Workshop (L&T)? Apostle’s classmates urged him to remain at Bard. “They said, ‘If you stay here you can raise money to send back, and encourage people here to help out in other ways,’” Apostle recalls.

They were right: during L&T, Apostle and more than 90 of his classmates formed an organization that they called the Bard Coalition for Peru Relief (CPR). In less than three weeks they raised more than $1,000, which they donated directly to COPEA (Comunidad Peruana Americana), a Peruvian American organization that provided free medical care to the earthquake’s victims. When the school year began, Apostle and CPR continued their fund-raising efforts—they organized dances and sold wristbands, and by the end of the fall semester they had raised nearly $3,000. Members of the group hope to visit Peru in 2008 to help out in the rebuilding efforts.

Apostle, a Trustee Leader Scholar who grew up in East Boston and is the first member of his family to attend college, plans to concentrate in biology. His goal is to become an orthopedic surgeon, but he says that his work with CPR has sparked another interest: social work.

Faith in a Pluralistic World In a world marked by religious divisiveness, Paul E. Murray ’71, visiting assistant professor of religion, seeks to advance a unified vision of contemporary Christianity—one that is not necessarily denominational. Hosted by Bard’s Institute of Advanced Theology (IAT), Murray’s three-day symposium “Toward Open Christianity” took place last year at Bard, with more than 150 people in attendance, and was recorded on DVD. “There was a tremendous need for a gathering of this kind,” says Murray. “Christianity has become something that people know they need to understand, even if they are not personally religious, because of its impact on the world today.”

Last year, IAT also hosted “Public Policy and Politics of Religious Tolerance,” a conference chaired by three esteemed scholars: Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism; Bruce D. Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion; and William Scott Green, senior vice provost and dean of undergraduate education at the University of Miami. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, John Templeton Foundation, and Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, the conference explored the theory and practice of world religious systems, including those of the pre-Christian West, ancient Israel, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

This spring, IAT presented “The Golden Rule in the Religions of the World,” a conference cochaired by Chilton and Neusner, with support from the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. Green also attended this conference, giving the keynote address, “Defining the Golden Rule.” Additional speakers offered analytical perspectives and discussed how the Golden Rule figures in ancient Israelite scripture, Graeco-Roman religion and philosophy, Confucianism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

40

Bardians Place in Skyline Race The Skyline Conference cross-country championship meet was held at Bard on October 28, 2007. The men’s team—(left to right) Fred Pavlich (coach), Aaron Ahlstrom ’10 (captain), Samuel Share ’11, Lucas Pipes ’08, David Silberberg ’11, Jeremy Novak ’11, and Maksim Tsikhanovich ’11 (missing is Taylor Lambert ’11)—finished in second place overall. Ahlstrom won the individual title. The women’s cross-country team finished in third place. In the past six years, the women’s team has captured three league titles, and the men’s team has captured two titles and four second-place finishes. This spring, Bard’s Department of Athletics and Recreation is starting a new varsity sport, track and field. The cross-country teams will provide the core of athletes to build these new teams.

BMF Gala Honors Pierce Charles E. Pierce Jr., retired director of The Morgan Library and Museum, was honored during the October Bard Music Festival Gala in New York City for his contribution to the wellbeing of one of the world’s great repositories of autographed and annotated libretti and scores. A leader in the Morgan Library’s transformation into a major New York City cultural institution, Pierce strengthened the Morgan’s manuscript collections and scholarly access to them during his 20-year tenure.

Pierce received a B.A. and Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and taught at Vassar College, where he held the Henry Noble MacCracken Chair in English. Pierce’s specialty is Samuel Johnson; his book The Religious Life of Samuel Johnson (1983) remains a cornerstone of Johnsonian scholarship.

Bard president Leon Botstein presented Pierce with the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters, which recognizes a significant contribution to America’s artistic or literary heritage. “The understanding of our musical heritage and our capacity to expand our grasp of music history is dependent not only on performance, but on archival preservation and scholarship,” Botstein said. “The Morgan Library, under Dr. Pierce’s leadership, mirrors the highest ideals in the task of studying the art of music and bringing music into the public sphere.”

Bard Hosts Inaugural Mid-Hudson Undergraduate Math Conference The new Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation was the setting for the first MidHudson Mathematics Conference for Undergraduates. The October event consisted of 18 presentations by undergraduate mathematics students; a plenary presentation, “The abc Conjecture: An Introduction,” by Rob Benedetto, assistant professor of mathematics at Amherst College; and a panel on graduate study in mathematics. “This is the first program of a new conference series whose purpose is to create an environment that encourages students to engage in mathematical research and connect with other mathematics students in the MidHudson region of New York State,” said conference organizer Lauren Rose, chair of the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Bard.

Participating institutions included Bard, Elmira, Hobart and William Smith, St. Francis, and Vassar Colleges; CUNY’s City College and College of Technology; New York University; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; SUNY Purchase; University of Guelph; United States Military Academy at West Point; and University of Washington. The program was presented jointly

by Bard, Marist, and Vassar Colleges and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Mathematical Association of America, and Bard’s Mathematics and Computer Science Programs and Office of the Dean of the College.

The John Ashbery Poetry Series presented readings by Bill Berkson and Jennifer Moxley on October 25 at Weis Cinema.

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program sponsored a discussion with Yannick Glemarec, United Nations Development Programme Global Environment Facility, and Graciela Chichilnisky, professor of statistics at Columbia University, on “Can Market Mechanisms Address Climate Change?” The October 25 event was part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.

NOVEMBER The Colorado Quartet performed an all-Beethoven concert on November 3 at Olin Hall.

Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature, read from recent work on November 6 at Weis Cinema.

The Bard Center Concerts presented “Songs of Weimar” on November 4 at Olin Hall. Featured performers included vocalist Libby Shapiro and pianist Jed Distler.

The Human Rights and Jewish Studies Programs presented a conversation between Israeli novelist Michal Govrin and Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture, on November 8.

Nobel laureate in literature Orhan Pamuk, writer in residence at the College, gave a talk on November 13 at Olin Hall, as part of Norman Manea’s Contemporary Masters course.

On November 15, Eileen Myles—described in the New York Times as “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk female writerperformers”—and Bob Perelman, author of 16 volumes of poetry, read from recent work at Weis Cinema, as part of the John Ashbery Poetry Series.

Willis Sparks, analyst at the global political risk advisory firm Eurasia Group, gave a talk, “The J Curve: Why Nations Rise and Fall,” at New York City’s Bard Hall on November 15.

DECEMBER Mark Danner, Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, delivered a lecture, “Beyond Endless War: Terror, Iraq, and the American Search for Solvency,” on December 3. It was the inaugural lecture for the James Clarke Chace Chair in Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, held by Danner.

Urban planner Michael Haggerty ’01 returned to campus on December 6 to talk about recovery plans for public education in New Orleans.

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, conducted the Bard Orchestra in a December 18 performance of her composition Made in America, which was nominated for three Grammy Awards.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 41

CLASSNOTES

ALUMNI/AE EVENTS SPRING 2008 For more information, call Tricia Fleming in the Alumni/ae Office, 845-758-7089, or e-mail alumni@bard.edu.

ELDRIDGE STREET SYNAGOGUE SUNDAY, MARCH 16 Alumni/ae and their guests are invited to join a private tour of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, the first great house of worship built on the Lower East Side by Eastern European Jews. Organized by Randy Buckingham ’73.

time 11:00 a.m. place 12 Eldridge Street, New York City cost $15 per person THE KREEGER MUSEUM SATURDAY, MARCH 29 Alumni/ae and their guests from Washington and environs are invited to view 19th- and 20th-century paintings in a tour of this Phillip Johnson–designed museum. Organized

by Joan Schaffer ’75.

time 2:00 p.m. place 2401 Foxhall Road, Washington, D.C. cost $15 per person 12TH ANNUAL CITIES PARTY FRIDAY, APRIL 11 Information: Liz Dempsey BHSEC ’03, ’05 and Rebecca Granato ’99, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochairs lizmdempsey@hotmail.com rebecca.granato@gmail.com

’38 70th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Contact: Phil Gordon ’43, 617-451-8017 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’40 Class correspondent Dick Koch, 516-599-3489

’43 65th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Contact: Phil Gordon ’43, 617-451-8017 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’44 A painting and a number of drawings from the Seena and Arnold Davis Old Master Collection were loaned to the exhibition Body & Soul: From Exploration to Expression at the OSilas Gallery at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York. The exhibition was on view in September and October 2007.

’47 Francis Hale Whitcomb writes that he is “fortunate to enjoy living and exploring in northern Vermont and to have made it to my 60th Reunion in May of 2007.”

’48 60th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Contact: Nancy Levin Edelstein ’48, nanced@aol.com Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’49 60th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008

WALKING TOUR OF HARLEM SATURDAY, APRIL 5 A walking tour of Harlem with renowned Manhattan historian Joyce Gold (named the “doyenne of city walking guides” by the New York Times). Organized by George Smith ’82 and Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68.

time 2:00 p.m. place Meet at City College, 138th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, New York City

cost

$25 per person

BARD ALUMNI/AE READING WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9 Alumni/ae read from work inspired by their Bard experience. Organized by Jamie Cat Callan ’75. If you are interested in reading, please contact the Alumni/ae Office.

time 7:00 p.m. place KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York City cost $5 per person, plus one-drink minimum

42

Contact: Nancy Levin Edelstein ’48, nanced@aol.com Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’52 Class correspondent Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net In January 2008 Jud Levin produced and directed The Ship from Delos, a play about the trial and demise of Socrates that Plato, the preeminent writer of dialogue, “never knew that he wrote.” In writing the play, Jud cut and pasted from Plato’s last three dialogues. The first scene is a truncated version of a prequel that Jud wrote several years ago about Xantippe, through whom we learn much about Socrates before we meet him. Jud may take a very small role in the production as well.

’53 55th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Contacts: Naomi Bellinson Feldman, nada1500@comcast.net; Charlie Naef, cnaef@verizon.net; Roger Phillips, rphillips@wingedkeel.com Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

In the spring of 2007 Jane Jaffe Young was reelected for a third term as chapter chair of the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York’s chapter of the Professional Staff Congress (the faculty/staff union of CUNY). She was also selected as the New York State United Teachers Member of the Year for Higher Education for 2007. She was planning on retiring this spring, but has decided to stay on for the foreseeable future.

Class correspondent Naomi Bellinson Feldman, nada1500@comcast.net

’63

Sherman Yellen was in Chicago last August for a staged reading of his 1976 musical Rex, which he originally wrote with composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Sheldon Harnick. Sherman and Sheldon revised and rewrote the musical and presented their new version at Chicago’s Stages: A Festival of New Musicals, where it enjoyed an enthusiastic reception. Bard classmate Naomi Bellinson Feldman of Chicago attended as his guest. Sherman is working on his memoir, Absent Friends, and is the proud grandfather of a 2-year-old wunderkind, Vivian Jane.

Class Correspondent

’54

Penny Axelrod, axelrodp@earthlink.net Rayna Meshorer Harman writes that she and her husband, Dr. A. Jay Harman, share their creative and ongoing personal endeavors, along with their love for dancing, music, film, reading, current events, and their home state of California. After retiring from teaching four years ago, Rayna returned this fall as a part-time high school teacher of biology, anatomy, and physiology at the Hillcrest Christian School in Granada Hills. She would love old friends to be in touch at raynamh@gmail.com.

Joanne Maaloe Burdick invites all Bardians who visit Cape Cod to stop by the Burdick Art Gallery in Wellfleet Center.

Since retiring in 1999, after 30 years of teaching in the art and design department of Endicott College, McAlister Coleman has been attending an open studio for life drawing at least two times a week.

’56 Early in 2008 Plain View Press will bring out a new short novel

by Eva LaSalle Caram, Looking for Johnny, the last of a trilogy of her “Corpus Christi” novels. All three books will be reprinted in a single volume.

’57 The website featuring Anna Ivara’s documentary work is www.akqltd.com.

’61 The Martin Eagle Trio has a new recording, The Hipster, which is available at www.cdbaby.com/martineagletrio and for digital download at iTunes. If any Bardians are in the Triangle area of North Carolina, the trio is the house band at a jam Martin runs at the Blue Corn Cafe in Durham every Tuesday evening.

After practicing public interest law for decades in California, Eleanor Chatzky Eisenberg moved to Arizona in 1997 to become executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

She retired in 2006, but returned to working rather quickly and is now the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Arizona. She has three adult children and one grandchild, Miaja, born on April 12, 2007. Eleanor had the joy of meeting Miaja during a trip east to attend her 50th reunion at the Bronx High School of Science.

Apple Tree, a kinetic sculpture by Roger Phillips ’53, stands on the northeast corner of 100th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. Constructed of stainless steel and painted aluminum, 12.5 x 8 x 3 feet, Apple Tree was permanently installed in July 2007 at the George Washington Carver Houses across from Mount Sinai Hospital. The piece is owned by the New York City Housing Authority.

CLASS NOTES | 43

Church of South India. Their focus was to learn about the strengths and struggles of the Dalit population. Johanna also met with transgendered parishioners in the diocese, with the goal of providing assistance to them upon her return to the States. Their grandson Evan Shafer, 7, was on the winning team for Math Olympiads and placed third out of 46 children.

’68 40th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008

Race for A Cure, Central Park in New York City, September 9, 2007 (left to right): Cynthia Hirsch Levy '65, Board of Trustee member and Board of Governors member; her sister, Diana Hirsch Friedman '68, Board of Governors; Nancy Ribeck Chan; and Eric Goldman '98, Board of Governors.

Contacts: Steve Blackman, sblackma@bellsouth.net; Bob Edmonds, rcedmonds@edmonds-law.com; Diana Hirsch Friedman, wowdiana@optonline.net; Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com; Paula Fuchs Blasier, pf.bard1968@gmail.com; Linda Boldt, lboldt6683@earthlink.net; Cathi Cantalupo, ceecee@rcn.com; Gary Comorau, GNCHome@kgsi.com; Jim Fine, jlfine@mac.com; Harvey Blake Fleetwood, jfleetwood@aol.com; Gail Grisetti, ggrrisett@odu.edu; Anita Deidamaia McClellan, adm@anitamcclellan.com; Anne Morris-Stockton, annasenf@yahoo.com; Thomas Noonan, tk.noonan@verizon.net; Richard Ransahoff, ransohr@ccf.org; William Sherman, wsherman@nydailynews.com; Ann-Sargent Wooster, volcano3@earthlink.net; Jonathan Wyner, jswcpm@aol.com; http://group.google.com/group/bard68-ish Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Class correspondent Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com

’65 Jonathan Greene, with photographer David Spear, went to China in 2006 to oversee the printing of the photographic book Visible Spirits, featuring photographs taken in Mexico. Jonathan designed and published the book for his Gnomon Press, which he started right after graduating from Bard. Unfortunately, Visible Spirits is the last new title the press is publishing. For more information, visit www.gnomonpress.com/Gnomon.html. Jonathan’s latest book is Hut Poems, published by Mountains and Rivers Press.

Janet Hinshaw-Thomas continues to provide immigration counseling for low-income clients. She enjoys her work, particularly when she wins her cases! She has “three-and-a-half grandchildren.”

Robert L. Walker, whose obituary appeared here in the spring 2007 issue, has been honored with a memorial scholarship at Worcester State College, where he taught from 1970 until his unexpected death in May 2006. The Dr. Robert L. Walker Memorial Scholarship in Writing will be awarded to schoolteachers who are pursuing excellence in writing as part of their curriculum and who are taking courses at Worcester State College.

’67 Class correspondent Pamela Dendy Knap, pdknap@optonline.net In 2007 Johanna Shafer and her husband, Mike, took a pilgrimage with the Episcopal Diocese of New York to the Diocese of Madras,

44

In the summer of 2007, Vicki Ranks Parker and her husband, Dennis, embarked on a new stage of life—retirement. Vicki educated herself in the interior design field and worked in the trade for almost 25 years, opening her own interior design practice in 1996. Dennis’s career was in corporate finance. They moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1984 and now split their time between Williamsburg and their second home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They have two married children, an adorable granddaughter, and another grandchild on the way. Over the years they have enjoyed visits from Bardians Mina Eaken, Bob Kirk, and Henry Nelson.

’69 Class correspondent Elaine Marcotte Hyams, eshyams@yahoo.com William Dreskin lives in San Anselmo, California, with his wife, Wendy, who teaches environmental education. They have two daughters, Tanya and Leila. William is a writer, author, and fine art photographer, and has been a college music instructor. His e-mail is bdreskin@comcast.net, and his website is www.dreskinfineart.com.

After 14 years in Oxford, England, Elaine Marcotte Hyams moved to Ithaca, New York, where her husband is now a professor of medieval history at Cornell. Elaine has often visited Palestine (the West Bank) and Israel. She considers her travels “an ongoing, nuanced crash course in Middle East politics.”

Gene Kahn was invited to submit an essay to POZ magazine, a monthly journal dealing with the medical, social, and political

Blair Goodman, blair@hvc.rr.com; Barbara Grossman, bsg51@aol.com; Emily Matlin, ematlin@verizon.net;

aspects of HIV/AIDS. His essay about sailing appeared in the June 2007 issue; in it, he talks about the quiet that can be found out on Long Island Sound, and how looking after the needs of a sailboat can serve as a distraction from the more insidious worries of living with HIV. You can find the story, “Summer Share,” at www.poz.com.

Gene lives in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, and would love to hear from other Bard people. His e-mail is emkahn@earthlink.net.

Karen Zabrensky, jshkz@comcast.net Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Peter Minichiello “toils happily” as director of development at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He oversees the funding for the world’s largest orchestral organization, which includes the Boston Pops and Tanglewood. Peter lives in Boston and in Columbia County, New York, and can be reached at pmagenda@aol.com.

Rob Stephenson has lived in Toronto, Canada, since 1971. After a year doing medieval studies, he married Lucia in 1973 and joined Scotiabank. Their daughter, Kate, studies veterinary medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland. Rob and Lucia plan to eventually retire to their Lake Huron cottage in summer, and Sarasota, Florida, in winter.

Carla Sayers Tabourne continues to assist in governmentsupported initiatives to develop the profession of recreation therapy (RT) in Taiwan and, soon, Hong Kong. She was the keynote speaker at two international conferences in Taiwan in May 2007: the Seventh International Conference on Sports and Leisure Management, held at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, and the International Conference on Therapeutic Recreation Services for Aging Populations, at Mei-ho Institute of Technology in Kaohsiung. Carla consults with RT Ph.D. faculty at universities in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to develop academic degree programs and work with clinical agencies to develop RT services.

’71 For the past five years, Cynthia Gayneau has spent most of her time in France, playing country-western music with a French group. She continues to write music and is working on two recording projects, one with her French band and one solo. She gets to the United States about once a year to visit family, usually on the West Coast. It has been years since she has been to Bard, and she has lost track of many old friends. She would love to reconnect.

Her e-mail is bottemusic@hotmail.com.

’72 Robert Wesson lives in Bellingham, Washington, where he worked as a vessel master for many years. He now works for the Washington Department of Ecology as an oil transfer inspector, protecting the marine environment. He looks forward to hearing from old friends at wesson@zeninternet.com.

’73 35th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Contacts: Adrianne Balcom, adrianne@adriannebalcom.com; Randy Buckingham, 212-972-9884; Arli Epton, eptona@yahoo.com;

Randy Buckingham’s watercolors will be shown at the North Light Gallery in Millinocket, Maine. The gallery is located near Mount Katahdin in a landscape that has inspired artists for years, including Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church.

Elizabeth Cheslak and her husband, Ted Cheslak ’71, live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For the past 25 years Elizabeth has worked with birthing families as a labor and delivery nurse. She also loves to travel and write. Ted has his own law practice and remains passionate about philosophy, international affairs, hunting, and fishing. They have three grown sons: Cyrus, who graduated last spring from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a bachelor’s degree in government; Ben, a United States Army veteran of the war in Iraq, who now attends the Columbia University School of General Studies in New York City; and Sam, who is on a break from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

Jana Vengrin lives in the Hudson River Valley near Bard. She writes that, after 25 years of paying various dues, she has finally gotten to where she wants to be professionally, working as a psychiatric nurse practitioner doing psychiatric evaluations, medication management, and therapy in various settings, including her private practice in Rhinebeck. She writes, “My kids are all good people and young adults now. I am divorced. Life is good.”

Classmates can get in touch at janagale3@gmail.com.

’75 Callie Williamson practices law in North Carolina and continues her work in the social history of Roman law. Her 2005 book The Laws of the Roman People: Public Law in the Expansion and Decline of the Roman Republic was selected winner of the 2005 American Historical Association’s James Henry Breasted Prize for the best book in English on any period of history before the year 1000.

’76 Susan Stevens Emmons opened her own design studio in 2002 focusing on glass, textiles, and interior design. Her current work includes corporate branding, residential work, and commissioned art. For more information, visit www.susanemmonsstudio.com.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her 14-year-old son, Will, and is an adjunct assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s Department of Architecture. She enjoys all of what Oregon has to offer, is an avid skier, and in 2006 summitted Mt. Hood with the American Lung Association, in honor of her father.

Walter Holland, Ph.D., lives in New York City with his partner of 20 years, Howard Frey, who is Manhattan regional operations controller for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. After pursuing modern dance in New York City and performing in loft concerts during the late ’70s, Walter earned a degree in physical therapy in

CLASS NOTES | 45

and pianist/Hammond organist Wayne Peet, released in 2007 on pfMentum. Emily is working on a new CD sponsored in part by a grant from the American Composers’ Forum. She continues to cohost the new music radio show Trilogy on KXLU 88.9FM (and at www.kxlu.com), and has joined the board of directors of Newtown Arts, which sponsors and promotes arts and new media events in Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.emilyhay.com.

Aren Stone married her partner of 25 years, Mary Ann Kowalski, in a ceremony at Cambridge City Hall in Massachusetts in May 2004. They have a 19-year-old son, Eli, who wants to be a photojournalist. They live in Cambridge with an old greyhound and some cats. Aren spends her days teaching 2- and 3-year-olds and says she learns more from them than they do from her.

’80 Kevin Hyde researches and develops wildfire risk assessment and decision support systems. He works under contract with the United States Forest Service in Missoula, Montana. A system he developed for active fire analysis has been integrated into federal policy and another for post-fire erosion risk analysis is undergoing field-testing. He cycles year-round, hikes and skis the mountains, performs with an a cappella group, and continues to make photographs.

Kevin Hyde ’80 in the Bitterroot Mountains, conducting a survey of an area burned in 2006

1985. During this time he continued to write poetry and fiction and was a dance reviewer for the New York State Council on the Arts. He studied poetry with Alfred Corn, Ann Lauterbach, William Matthews, and Grace Schulman. Later, after earning advanced degrees in creative writing and English literature, he joined the adjunct faculty of the New School University. His writing credits for poetry, fiction, and criticism are extensive.

’82 Lauren Bufferd is the facilities manager for the Parthenon Museum, a small art and history museum in Nashville. She is married and has two sons, Garrett, 11, and Miles, 8. She is always up for visits from Bardians.

Karen Carter lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is “raising a circus artist and constantly working on her house.” She has also gotten back to playing a little saxophone.

Two of Geoff Stein’s paintings were included in Works by London’s Top 25 Graduates the Salon Summer 2007 Show at the Salon Gallery in London.

’78 30th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008

’83

Contact: Mary Caponegro, caponegr@bard.edu Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu

25th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008

John Galczynski works in real estate and web development. Recent projects include www.ADGUSTO.com, www.SALESNET.org, and, still in development, www.TextNet.us, which will provide a student trading post for college textbooks. Also under development is software to help students do research more effectively.

’85

In addition to concert tours in Europe and Canada, Emily Hay continues to perform and record actively in the “Left Coast” experimental music scene. Her most recent recording projects are We Are, a studio recording with percussionist/phonographer Marcos Fernandes and bassist/electronics artist Lisle Ellis, released on Public Eyesore Records in 2006, and the self-titled trio CD of improvisations and grooves with world percussionist Brad Dutz

46

Staff contact: Matt Soper, 845-758-7505 or soper@bard.edu

Kaitlyn Granda lives with her husband, Steven, and their 4-year-old son, Lewis, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For the past seven years Kaitlyn has been a practicing physician assistant. Since 2004 she has been lead clinician at the Walltown Neighborhood Clinic, a program of Lincoln Community Health Center and Duke University that takes care of low-income patients without insurance.

She loves her work and finds it very rewarding and never dull, although it is quite a change from dancing, which she majored in at Bard and did for her first career. She writes, “I feel lucky to have had two interesting and inspiring life works.”

After 10 years as a parish church administrator, Jennifer Fox Yaffar has made a challenging career move to pursue her interests

’88

in marketing and promotion. She is now sales coordinator for Tri-Media Marketing, Inc., an advertising and promotional specialities company. For more information, visit www.tri-mediaonline.com. If any Bardians are in need of promotional products, she can be reached at jyaffar@mac.com. Her three sons are now young men between the ages of 15 and 20 and are beginning to develop their futures. Jennifer and her husband, Xavier, are looking forward to their future together as empty nesters.

Contacts: Cormac Flynn, Cormac_Flynn@verizon.net; Amy Kupferberg, artgirl22@earthlink.net; Allison (Villone) Radzin, afradzin@yahoo.com Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu

’86 Class correspondent Chris LeGoff, cak64@comcast.net Tim Vogl lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife, Sue, who is from Montana, and whom he met as a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in Haiti, where they both served from 1998 to 2000. They were married under a full moon in a fragrant pine forest in Missoula, Montana, in 2001. Tim is the executive chef and owner of A Culinary Affair Personal Chef Services, a successful small business in Tucson’s Old Pueblo. He has the best dog in the world, named Shadow, and still loves Jimi Hendrix.

Beth D. Weinstein is a communications and marketing director in international public health in Asia and Africa. She is also working on a photography exhibition of communities in Africa without close access to water.

’87 Class correspondent David Avallone, ednoon@aol.com Anthony De Stefano works at the Anderson School in Staatsburg, New York.

After two years in San Francisco, serving as assistant principal of Gateway Charter High School, Christina Griffith returned to New Mexico in July 2006, and is director of college and civic engagement at Amy Biehl High School in Albuquerque. She also facilitates workshops on the essential link between scholarship and social justice. Beyond her school world, she is often found exploring desert landscapes with her partner, Peter, and his 7-yearold son, and furthering her studies of New Mexico’s Hispanic and Native American spiritual traditions. She welcomes contact with any Bard alums who find themselves under Southwestern skies.

Thea (Mohr) Saks and her husband, Daniel, have started a T-shirt company with the motto, “Not the same ol’ skull and crossbones.”

For more information, visit www.themightysquirm.com. Daniel is also the set designer for the television series Criminal Minds.

Their daughter Kira, a kindergartener, is a budding artist; she sold her first painting at age 4.

20th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008

Amy Kupferberg earned an M.F.A. in 2003 at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 2002 Amy was a visiting artist at Pratt, and in 2005 a visiting instructor for drawing. For 2005–06 she was awarded a residency at the Henry Street Settlement. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in and around New York. For more information, visit www.amymkupferberg.com.

Even though Nora Laudani has had every weird day job (including temping at the Zsa Zsa Gabor Wig House) since graduating, she “continuously thanks her lucky stars” to be working in dance, music, and film. Highlights include dancing at Dance Theatre Workshop (favorably reviewed in the New York Times), and choreographing for Arthur Aviles’s Boogie Down Festival. Arthur and Nora were last on stage together performing her full-length show Jabbering Head at DIA, HERE, Surf Reality, and The Point, all in New York. New York Times reviewer Jennifer Dunning called them “an authoritative and sensitive performing duo.” Years after collaborating with Brad Anderson, Nora now scores her own films, three of which have been accepted into the Martha’s Vineyard Independent Film Festival. She has done voiceover work for David Sedaris, PBS, and NPR, played Ms. Li on MTV’s Daria, and toured nationally for one year as Cindy in the Real Live Brady Bunch. This year marks her third Blowout Variety Show, which welcomes the participation of any Bardie far and wide. Her e-mail is NLaudani@aol.com.

Alison Radzin received her MBA in management and an international business certificate from Iona College in May 2007.

She is senior director of sales strategy for Turner Broadcasting.

’89 Class correspondent Lisa DeTora, detoral@lafayette.edu Lisa DeTora is at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses dealing with Disneyland, dinosaurs, writing, “our friend the atom,” and pandemic influenza. Her 2007 summer travels included Tempe, Sedona, San Diego, Barstow, the Grand Canyon, and Disney’s California Adventure. She also picked strawberries with Dave Gracer and his family. The summer’s biggest disappointment was being forbidden to eat at the Road Kill Café on historic Route 66.

Dave Gracer is the husband of Kim and father of Sonia. He teaches at the Community College of Rhode Island and the state prison, runs an edible insect company (“which,” he writes, “considering what it is, is going pretty well”), and is writing an epic poem. Dave is a seasonal mushroom hunter, an occasional minister,

CLASS NOTES | 47

and a circus arts instructor. He likes being busy and would enjoy being in touch with a few more old friends.

Dominick J. Reisen was a panelist at a symposium entitled Historic Preservation, Past, Present, and Future: What Should We Be Preserving and How, hosted by the Greater Oneonta Historical Society of Oneonta, New York. This symposium dealt with preserving buildings, artifacts, and scenic vistas. Dominick is serving his fourth term as president of the Otsego County Historical Association and is the author of three books relating to the history of Otsego County, New York.

’90 Brenda Lee Rogers volunteers at the archaeology lab at Moorpark College in Moorpark, California, does tai chi, kick boxing, and belly dancing, and “keeps busy being Mom.” She is a founding member of the Thousand Oaks Tai Chi Fan Club, and attended the 2007 World Tai Chi Day celebrations in Los Angeles.

’91 Michele Tracy Berger was promoted to associate professor in the curriculum in women’s studies at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. She is also an adjunct professor in the department of political science. In the 2006–07 academic year Michele received an American Association of University Women American Fellow Award for her work on African American motherand-daughter communication on health and sexuality.

Scott Licamele was appointed vice president of Renaissance Capital Ukraine in the summer of 2007. His focus is on institutional equity sales for clients based in the United Kingdom and the United States. Scott was most recently vice president of equity sales at Alfa Capital Markets USA, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Alfa Bank. Renaissance Capital is the leading investment bank in Russia, Ukraine, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The firm has market-leading positions in each of its core businesses—mergers and acquisitions, equity, and debt. Scott can be reached at slicamele@gmail.com.

R. Gordon Noble moved to New York City in August 2005 and works at the American Museum of Natural History, in the Hayden Planetarium and the museum’s audio visual department. On July 22, 2007, he wed Abby Zidle, a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, at the West Park Winery in Upstate New York. The event was attended by Dean Simpson ’89, who gave a reading in the ceremony and an excellent toast at the reception. After their honeymoon in Nevis/St. Kitts, Gordon and Abby are happy to be settling into married life in Astoria, Queens.

’92 Class correspondent Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu David Cote lives in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. He has written two popular companion books to the Broadway hit musicals

48

Wicked and Jersey Boys, in addition to essays for the annual Best Plays Theater Yearbook. He continues to review theater of all kinds, from Mel Brooks to the Wooster Group, for the weekly magazine Time Out New York. He blogs at http://histriomastix.typepad.com.

Jonathan Golodner lives in West Hollywood, California, with his wife, Christine. He is an Emmy-nominated sound effects editor, and has worked on projects such as Apocalypto, John from Cincinnati, Medium, Party of Five, Dawson’s Creek, and many more.

He also earned his juris doctor degree and, in June 2007, hung his own shingle in entertainment law.

Marc Madenwald lives in Seattle with his wife, Tawny, and 6-year-old daughter, Clara. Marc is a group manager in worldwide partner program operations at Adobe and is on the board of trustees of the Northwest School. He is enrolled in the Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Yasmin Padamsee and Eben Forbes have moved back to the United States (to Cambridge, Massachusetts) from Laos and Nicaragua, respectively. Yasmin and their daughter, Ziya Zella, are both back in school. Ziya has joined a playschool and Yasmin has joined the Mid-Career Masters in Public Administration Program at Harvard University. Eben is taking a brief break after an intense year in Nicaragua as the manager of a local development organization.

You can contact either Eben or Yasmin at ebenforbes@yahoo.com.

Aaron Phillips works as a director of photography, shooting mostly music videos and commercials and the occasional documentary or narrative. He lives in downtown Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

Ellen Vincent (Wickersham) opened Philadelphia Community Acupuncture in August 2007 with her partner, Korben Perry. On the third floor of an old firehouse in West Philly, they provide affordable acupuncture treatments in a community setting and are part of a growing international movement to make acupuncture more accessible to everyone. For more information, visit www.phillyacupuncture.com.

Stefan Weisman is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, and teaches at The Juilliard School and City College of New York. For more information, visit www.stefanweisman.com.

’93 15th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Contacts: Erin Law, erinjlaw@gmail.com; Olivier te Boekhorst, Olivier-teBoekhorst@idexx.com; Roger Scotland, rs235@columbia.edu; Paul Thompson, brass@sprintmail.com Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Andrew Browne and Fan Wenli were married in Shanghai in May 1996. He writes: “It’s a pity I didn’t take Chinese at Bard!” After a job change, Andrew now works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He would love to hear from any Bardians at abrowne123@yahoo.com.

After practicing law as a public defender and in private practice in Philadelphia, as a prosecutor in Saipan, and in private practice in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Aaron Romano settled down with his wife (and law partner) Cynthia in his hometown of Bloomfield, Connecticut. They have a beautiful daughter, a house, and a dog, and enjoy practicing criminal defense, immigration, and civil litigation. They are expanding their firm and would like to hear from Bard students graduating from law school or seeking to move to Connecticut to practice. Aaron would love to hear from old friends at fernandezandromano@sbcglobal.net.

’94 Georgia Hodes earned her doctorate in behavioral neuroscience from Rutgers University in May 2007. Her dissertation examined the effects of antidepressant treatment on neurogenesis during puberty. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, studying the involvement of the serotonin system in depression. She married Christopher Wood, a stone carver and photographer, in September 2005 in Beacon, New York, overlooking the Hudson River. Neela (Weber) Woodard ’93 was her maid of honor, and the mother of the bride was Frances Hodes ’61.

Also in attendance were Patrick Regan ’93, Marty Jacobi ’93, Kelly Robinson ’93, Laura Wickens ’93, and Sarah Smith ’93.

Georgia is interested in hearing from Bardians in the Philadelphia area at g_hodes@yahoo.com.

Dickson Jean finished a fellowship in psychosomatic medicine at New York University–Bellevue Medical Center and joined the faculty at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine as an assistant professor of psychiatry. He is part of the mental health team in the Jack Martin Fund Clinic, which specializes in care for people living with HIV/AIDS. Sarah Neilson moved to the Boston area to pursue a master in city planning degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is part of the program’s International Development Group and plans to combine her new degree with her background in South Asian studies.

Sharon Becker Oldham and Brad Oldham proudly announce the birth of their son, Grant Becker Oldham, on June 5, 2006.

Despite her initial reservations, Sharon has discovered that children really are fun! She stays very busy raising Grant, working as a freelance proofreader, and volunteering at the Humane Society of Greater Dayton.

happy to see Jill Wright and Debbie Shepardson in September 2006 during a visit to Washington, D.C. In June 2007 Kapil Gupta organized and hosted a send-off for five new Bard students from Bangladesh, joining the class of 2011.

Cohosting the event were Imteaz Mannan ’97 and Nabila Rahman ’98. Kapil is a foreign-service officer serving at the United States Embassy in Dhaka. He completed one year of consular work and is now doing economic reporting.

Sarah Popdan is pleased to announce (albeit belatedly) the birth of her daughter, Calla Li, on August 4, 2006. Calla’s rascally brother, Lucian, is now 4. Sarah writes that she spends her days with them, “listening to National Public Radio, drinking too much coffee, and fondly remembering Bard as not just a place to think, but a time during which I was able to complete a thought.”

In July 2007 Sutton Stokes left a job he had held for four years and moved to Missoula, Montana, with his wife, Amy. The impetus to move out west was Amy’s new dream job doing field wildlife research. Sutton is trying to find book publishers, magazine editors, and other clients who will pay him to go out into the field with her. While excited about the move and the new challenges, Sutton reports that the flight with their drugged cat in carry-on baggage was “no picnic.”

Ilyas Washington earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California at Los Angeles. After a postdoctoral research fellowship in Columbia University’s Department of Chemistry, he was appointed in 2007 as an assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at Columbia University Medical Center, where he and his team investigate the use of light to drive ATP syntheses in humans. He is also working on the creation of nanosized intracellular organelles for the management of oxidative stress and oxygen delivery. His work has broad implications for many diseases of aging and has been published in Nature, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, and Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences.

’97 Class correspondent Julia Wolk Munemo, jmunemo@roadrunner.com Jamie Blackman is pursuing his master’s degree in library and information science, and is actively creating and submitting genre fiction for publication.

’96

’98

Class correspondents

10th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008

Abigail Morgan, abigail@floatchinesemedicalarts.com; Gavin Kleespies, gwkleespies@hotmail.com

Contacts: Josh Bell, Joshua.bell@thecolbertreport.org; Kate Massey, Katherine_Massey@omb.eop.gov; Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663 or whitmore@bard.edu

Krista David works part-time for a nonprofit organization that serves people with severe mental illness. She lives in Helena, Montana, and enjoys hiking with her husband, Len Lantz, and their daughter, Lucy, in the surrounding mountains. Krista was

Class correspondent Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com

CLASS NOTES | 49

’99 Evyenia Kollia relocated to Seattle two years ago and works as a dentist in private practice. She is “enjoying the West Coast lifestyle,” and also spends time in Athens, Greece.

Sharon Levy received her master of fine arts degree from the University of California, San Diego, in the fall of 2007 after her thesis exhibition The Wood. She and her longtime beau then moved to Los Angeles, where she had her first major solo show, Project Room 1: The Wood, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

’00 In the summer of 2007, David Gruber completed his doctorate in English at the University of Denver. That fall he started in his new position as assistant professor of English at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. He welcomes correspondence from classmates or others at adequatelandscape@gmail.com.

Tracy J. Priest was married in the fall of 2006 to Jimmy Buff, an outdoor adventure writer and WDST (100.1FM ) program director.

The Reverend Bruce Chilton ’71 performed the service in Palenville, New York, where the couple lives. After graduating from Bard, Tracy traveled in Japan and Europe before attending Pratt Institute in Manhattan, where she earned a master’s of library science, interning at the New York Public Library, the Explorers Club, and the Samuel Dorsky Museum. While completing her master’s degree, she worked in the Visual Resource Collection at Bard.

Tracy is now the director of the Palenville Public Library.

’01 In 2007 Jennifer Stackpole appeared in several films, including two features—A New and Accurate Map of the World and I Sell the Dead—and shorts One One-Thousand, The Painter, and Mother Mary. She also performed on stage in Numbers, which won Best Play and Best Director in the Manhattan Repertory Theatre’s Summerfest. For more information, visit jenniferstackpole.com.

’02 Spurred on by her participation in the Bard Prison Initiative, Emily Benedetto interned in 2001 with the Correctional Association of New York. She continued to be active with the association’s Coalition for Women Prisoners until 2006. That same year Emily received a master’s degree in social work from Hunter College, with a concentration in community organizing and social planning. While pursuing her degree, she worked with two organizations devoted to improving circumstances for currently and formerly incarcerated people, and also coordinated a successful statewide campaign to ban the placement of mentally ill individuals into solitary confinement in New York State prisons. She is now the assistant to Dr. David Hamburg, chair of the United Nations Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention. Emily lives in Brooklyn with her domestic partner, Richard Lovejoy.

50

Emilie Courage is in her second year of a three-year apprenticeship as a guide dog mobility instructor at Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California. She lives in San Francisco and can be reached at ecourage@guidedogs.com.

Jennifer Bottacari Dean graduated from Fordham University School of Law in May 2005, married Jeff Dean in September 2005, and was admitted to practice law in Illinois in November 2005.

She is now a landlord/tenant attorney in Chicago.

Toni Fortini and Allen Josey were married in October 2007 at the family restaurant of Brigette Blood in Vermont. Toni worked in the president’s office and Stevenson Library after graduation, and Allen worked at Bard for 11 years as residence director, director of student activities, director of the campus center, and assistant dean of students. The couple moved to Vermont in 2005, and work at the University of Vermont in Burlington. Allen is the director of operations of the campus center, and Toni, having earned a master of library science degree in 2007, works in the library.

Clarisse Labro graduated from the Yale School of Architecture with a master’s degree in May 2007 (unfortunately, the same weekend as her first Bard reunion). After being the teaching assistant on the Yale Building Project (a Yale first-year design and construction project providing affordable, single-family homes to low-income families), she is moving back to Paris with her American partner, also an architect. They will both find architectural work and start a new life together in the “old city of lights.” She writes that they look forward to hard work and the European lifestyle.

’03 5th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Contacts: Pia Carusone, piacarusone@gmail.com; Bianca D’Allesandro, biancaball@gmail.com; Eben Kaplan, ebenkaplan@gmail.com; Robert Lee, rlee20@yahoo.com; Meghan Mazzacone, Meghan.Mazzacone@gmail.com; Mollie Meikle, mollie.meikle@gmail.com; Rafi Rom, rom.philly19144@gmail.com; Corey Sullivan, coreyfrancissullivan@gmail.com; Dumaine Williams, dumaine@gmail.com Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663 or whitmore@bard.edu Amiri Ayanna and husband Ariel (né Lundeen-Goldschlag) Ayanna ’02 moved to Germany in September 2007 with their son, Henry, age 4. Amiri, who has a master of arts degree in German literature, received a Fulbright research grant at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, where she is taking courses in medieval German literature and paleography to aid her study of the female hagiographic tradition in the sororum vitae of Dominican nuns from 14th-century Thuringia. Her article “Renegotiating the Body of the Text: Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Terminology of the Sublime” will appear this summer in issue 20.3 of Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Ariel received his juris doctor degree magna cum laude in 2006 and practices financial services law at the international law

in Johannesburg, South Africa, building a house with New York University’s Canterbury Club, and part of her summer studying in Costa Rica.

After two years as assistant director of Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York, Risa Grais-Targow has been named deputy director, managing internship placements and the day-to-day program.

In August 2007 Alexander Hirschhorn Klebanoff began work at Ruth/Catone in New York City, a private consultancy for collectors of modern and contemporary art in all media. The primary focus of his position is research, including art-historical and market analysis of offerings and continual research of acquisitions. In addition, with Gabriel Catone and Andrew Ruth, he will have the opportunity to survey the galleries, dealers, auctions, and fairs of the contemporary market and track developing artists’ careers for new work.

Toni Fortini ’02 and Allen Josey on their wedding day in October 2007 in Vermont.

firm Dechert LLP, in the firm’s Munich branch. He is the recipient of a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) graduate study grant to earn a master of law degree in European business law, also at the LMU in Munich. Ariel recently published an article in the University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Labor and Employment Law titled “Aggressive Parental Leave Incentivizing: A Statutory Proposal Toward Gender Equalization in the Workplace” (Vol. 9, 2).

’04 Kelly Burdick is an editor at Melville House Publishing and also serves as residence director at Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City.

Jacques del Conte works at Vanity Fair during the day and does freelance photography assignments at various other times.

Emily Sullivan Sanford has been teaching English to children of kindergarten and elementary school age in Berlin, Germany, since 2005.

’06 Dylan Flynn moved to New York City in April 2007 and works in the Human Resources Department at The Juilliard School.

After graduation, Bard’s star basketball player, Adam Turner, whose dream is to someday coach college basketball full time, became Bard’s assistant basketball coach under head coach Chris Wood. He learned the day-to-day responsibilities of the job, how to structure a practice, and what it takes to become a good coach.

Although Turner left coaching at Bard to accept a position with the Hoop Group (the largest basketball instructional organization in the world) as director of its Pocono Invitational Basketball Camp (training camps for middle and early high school players), he still comes back to the College during his vacations and helps to work out the team, keeping in touch with the players and program.

Kurtlan Massarsky works at Lincoln Center in New York as the manager of event marketing, sales, and sponsorship for the New York City Opera. He specifically hopes to develop a younger audience for City Opera with programs like “Big Deal” and “University Nights.”

Amelia Overbay-Day received her master of arts degree in myth and society from the University of Wales, Lampeter, in June 2007.

She published several poems and stories this year in online journals under the pseudonym A. S. Morgan. For more information, visit atrophiedannie.blogspot.com.

’05 In 2005–06, Elizabeth Graham interned with AmeriCorps at the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic, working with preschoolers with mental illness and/or behavior disorders. She is pursuing a master’s in social work at New York University and, in 2007, completed an internship at Beth Israel Medical Center, working with mentally ill adults. Also in 2007 Elizabeth spent her spring break

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Correspondent Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, ABTOK@aol.com

’87 Baylor University in Waco, Texas, began an artists’ book collection with the purchase of all 15 of Maddy Rosenberg’s available artists’ books. She was the curator for Fast Forward: Flushing 2107, at Flushing Town Hall, from May 3 to June 16, 2007, and Singular Objects from The Artistsbook Library at Proteus Gowanus at the Brooklyn College Library, from May 30 to September 15. She talked about that exhibition and artists’ books at It’s All About the Book, a symposium at Brooklyn College for librarians in the metropolitan area. She was a curator for Play, a yearlong exhibition that opened in September 2007 at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn, and was also the designer for the companion book.

CLASS NOTES | 51

’93

’02

A painting by George J. Farrah, from his “Green City” series, was used for the cover of the New England Review (Vol. 27, No. 2, 2006). The image can be seen at http://cat.middlebury.edu/~nereview. George had a solo show at Flanders Contemporary in Minneapolis in the summer of 2007.

For more information, visit http://www.flanders-art.com/. He also has a solo show at the Jadite Gallery in New York City, scheduled for February 2008. The gallery’s website is http://www.jadite.com.

Carrie Moyer has exhibited at the New York City galleries CANADA and John Connelly Presents, and in California at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and Mills College Art Museum in Oakland. She is an assistant professor of painting at Rhode Island School of Design and writes for Modern Painters and Art in America.

Adam Simon will have his third solo exhibition at artMovingProjects in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this spring. His Fine Art Adoption Network, a collaboration with Art in General, has more than 200 registered artists, with approximately 250 artworks adopted. For more information, visit www.fineartadoption.net.

’97 David Newton is an assistant professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. David enjoyed an artist residency at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock in the summer of 2007, which reminded him of how much he misses Bard. He was in a two-person show at MPG Contemporary in Boston in the summer, and a solo show at the Catherine J. Smith Gallery at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, in the fall. He has also been in two group shows in Beijing. To see his work, visit www.davidnewtonsculpture.com.

Nick Tobier’s recent projects include public performances in sites ranging from the #22 Fillmore bus in San Francisco to a public wading pool in Toronto, The Tent Show at Kunsthallen Nikolaj in Copenhagen, and a new solo performance, Piggy Boys, at the Minnesota Fringe.

’01 Michelle Handelman has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Media and Performing Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. During October, her video and photo work was featured in the “Season of Art” Campaign Fall 2007 at Bloomingdale’s in New York City.

Holly Lynton is living in London for the year with her husband, David, and children Madeline (5) and Toler (2). Her work was in a group exhibition at Contemporary Art Projects in London’s East End in the fall of 2007. Also that fall, she was included in E8: Aljira Emerge 8 at Aljira in Newark, New Jersey, and at a show at the General Electric headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Robert Manchester is senior curator at the Yellowstone Art Museum, Montana’s leading museum for contemporary art. E-mail him at curator@artmuseum.org.

52

’03 Paul Chan was artistic director of the Waiting for Godot project in New Orleans last fall. The city was home to outdoor site-specific performances of the Beckett play by the Classical Theater of Harlem: in the Gentilly section, at a house abandoned after the flood, and in a street crossroads in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Thousands of people attended the five free performances over two November weekends. Chan lived in New Orleans for several months, before and after the performances, teaching in public schools and universities. Writing in the New York Times, Holland Cotter called Chan “the center of the New Orleans project and the imagination behind” it.

Jennifer Hayashida and Benjamin Gerdes received an award made possible by the Art and Martha Kaimmer Fund of the HRK Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. The award allowed them to travel to Sweden to conduct field and secondary research into the life and significance of the “Match King,” Swedish industrialist Ivar Kreuger (1880–1932), founder of the matchstick empire Swedish Match. Their travels, undertaken in the summer of 2007, informed their project Room of the Sun (working title), named after the room housing the planetarium that Kreuger built in his Park Avenue apartment in New York. A Different Practice, Jennifer’s translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg’s influential book En annorlunda praktik, was published in late 2007 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Alisdair MacRae participated in Anthem, a group show curated

by Bard CCS alumnus and Aboriginal Curator in Residence Ryan Rice ’04 at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario.

The show travels to the Banff Centre for the Arts this spring.

’04 Matt King has moved self and studio to Richmond, Virginia, to take a full-time teaching position in the Sculpture and Art Foundation Programs at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.

’05 In the summer of 2007 Fawn Krieger was awarded a travel grant from the Art and Martha Kaemmer Fund of the HRK Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. She spent several weeks in Berlin researching and documenting Trümmerbergen, mountains of architectural rubble transported by groups of German women after World War II to dedicated sites throughout the city.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

’05 Aubrey McMahon is an environmental analyst who handles natural resources assessments at AKRF, a New York metropolitanregion consulting firm that specializes in writing environmental impact statements.

’06 Megan Haidet moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey, and now works at the Morris Land Conservancy.

Phototactic Behavior in Sewn Slides, a work by Sabrina Gschwandtner MFA ’08, was included in the exhibition Material Pursuits at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum. See ’08 Class Note for more details.

Dane Klinger gave a presentation on the sustainable seafood movement at the American Fisheries Society’s Fisheries Conversation Foundation benefit dinner in San Francisco.

Brett McLeod has returned to teaching at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks.

’07

’07

Paolo Javier is the author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books) and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada Books), which received a Small Press Traffic Book Award. He recently completed a play, Lunatic, and a chapbook of his ongoing comic book collaboration with Ernest Concepcion, the original brown boy, was published by Sona Books in the fall of 2007. His work appears and/or is forthcoming in the journals FO A RM, W13, and Tinfish, as well as in the anthology War and Peace 3: The Future. In September 2007 he began his term as a writer in residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. He edits 2nd Ave Poetry and lives in New York.

For more information, visit http://blog.myspace.com/paolojavier and www.2ndavepoetry.com/.

Rachel Bowen and Jon Sarno ’06 have seen their efforts at Solaqua Power & Art—a renewable-energy business incubator located in Chatham, New York—continue to lead to new successes.

Solaqua was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Program, to help create a solar-powered regional foods restaurant and brew pub at Solaqua Power & Art. This 25-kw solar voltaic system will provide more than 90 percent of the electrical energy required for the restaurant’s operation.

Caitlin Parker conducted research and gathered video footage in the fall of 2007 in the area surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, including the abandoned city of Pripyat and other villages within the “exclusion zone” being taken over by flora and fauna. Her work there was made possible by a grant from the Art and Martha Kaemmer Fund of the HRK Foundation and the Jerome Foundation.

Lindsey Lusher of Transportation Alternatives assisted in organizing National Park(ing) Day in September 2007. New Yorkers took over car parking areas to create miniparks for a day.

More than two dozen such miniparks were created as a result of Lindsey’s team’s efforts.

Amanda Schneck is the green energy project manager at Coneco Engineers & Scientists in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Amanda assisted with the start-up of a geothermal business at the company.

She works together with an engineer on business plans that incorporate geothermal technology into housing developments.

’08 In the summer of 2007 Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library at the Fogg Art Museum purchased the entire set of Sabrina Gschwandtner’s ’zine KnitKnit for its permanent collection.

Sabrina had work included in the exhibition (and catalogue) of Material Pursuits at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vermont, in the fall of 2007. Also in the fall, Sabrina had work screened in the program Between the Lines: Emerging Voices in American Literature and Film, presented in conjunction with the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Her book KnitKnit was published by STC Craft/Abrams in September.

Center for Curatorial Studies

’96 Regine Basha, an independent curator in Austin, Texas, was a participant in everything must go! in Berlin. It involved collaboration with nearly 100 artists, writers, theorists, and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. Other CCS connections in everything must go! included Vasif Kortun, founding director of CCS; Chus Martinez ’01; and Maria Lind, incoming director of the CCS Graduate Program.

CLASS NOTES | 53

Sydney O. Jenkins, director of the Art Galleries, Ramapo College of New Jersey, curated Collection PARALLAX. Once again, he

Mercedes Vincente curated Activating Korea: Tides of Collective Action at New Zealand’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, where she is

expanded upon the research he did at CCS for his thesis exhibition, where he merged work from the folk art arena into a contemporary context.

curator of contemporary art. This exhibition, she writes, is “my first attempt to engage with Asia, new grounds for me!” Mercedes was at Harvard and in New York City this fall, conducting research for a book on New Zealand video pioneer Darcy Lange.

Mara Jayne Miller, managing director of 511 Gallery in Chelsea, has opened a branch of 511 in Lake Placid, New York, and reports having had a great first season. Both galleries exhibit a mixture of contemporary art and “back room” projects for museums and private collectors in 19th- and 20th-century art.

Goran Tomcic, an independent curator, writer, and artist, was part of the group show Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy at White Box in New York.

’98 Formerly curatorial director at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Jessica Hough curated “Don’t Let the Boys Win”: Kinke Kool, Carrie Moyer, and Lara Schnitger, her first exhibition as director of the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland.

Victoria Noorthoorn, an independent curator from Buenos Aires, was the guest curator of Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy at the Americas Society in New York City, where Sofia Hernández ’00 is curator and programs manager. The exhibition featured Argentine contemporary artists from 1960 to 2007.

Zhang Zhaolui was appointed art director of Joey Change Art Consulting, located in Beijing’s “art compound,” an environment similar to New York’s SoHo in the ’80s or Chelsea in the ’90s.

’99 Jennifer Dunlop-Fletcher, formerly exhibitions coordinator at the Getty Research Institute, has accepted the position of assistant curator in architecture at SFMOMA. Henry Estrada, after almost five years as project director at the Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives, has moved to Los Angeles to help build a new cultural center. He will oversee a planned opening in 2010 in El Pueblo Historical District, in his new position as director of exhibitions and programs at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes.

’00 Jyeong Yeon Kim, after traveling back and forth between London and Seoul, has settled with her children in Seoul, where she will continue her career as an independent curator and critic. She was a curator for the Busan biennale and several other exhibitions.

After almost four years at SFMOMA, Gregory Sandoval has moved to Seattle, where he is manager of public programs at the Seattle Art Museum. He is responsible for developing and overseeing public programming for the museum’s three sites: the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the Olympic Sculpture Park, and the newly expanded Seattle Art Museum.

54

Jeffrey Walkowiak, codirector of Sara Meltzer Gallery, curated Weekend Without Makeup at PS 122 Gallery in Manhattan.

’01 Olga Kopenkina, independent curator and art critic, curated Terror Tactics at apexart in New York City, an exhibition that featured films and videos concerned with “issues related to paranoid sensibilities.”

Maria (Chus) Martinez, director of Frankfurter Kunstverein, curated MACBA at the museum, a selection of works from the Buseu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

’02 Jenni Sorkin received a Graduate Research Award from The Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design. Jenni is studying for her Ph.D. in art history at Yale University.

’03 José Luis Blondet has moved from Dia:Beacon to the Boston Center for the Arts, where he has accepted the position of curator of visual arts.

Ingrid Chu, director of development and special projects at Moti Hasson Gallery in New York City, curated Shinique Smith: All Purpose and wrote the foreword for the catalogue accompanying the show. Ingrid is also director/curator of RED-I Projects.

’04 The autumn/winter 2007 issue of the art journal Afterall features an essay, “On Transcript,” by Claire Barliant, associate editor at Modern Painters in New York City.

“Un-Natural Resources,” an interview with Luc Tuymans by Yasmine Van Pee, was published in the October issue of Modern Painters. Yasmine, a Belgian writer and curator based in San Francisco, is currently working toward a Ph.D. in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has focused mainly on the overlaps between contemporary art and music.

’05 Jenny Moore, project curator at The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and director of the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, is curator of the newly launched Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program.

Lyra Kilston, editorial researcher for Modern Painters, led a public “conversation” as part of On the Town, a work-in-progress at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, where Yasmeen Siddiqui is curator.

Simone Subal, director of Peter Blum–Chelsea, organized a film program to accompany the exhibition Chris Marker: Staring Back.

As part of a special project for the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Pelin Uran, independent curator from Turkey, cocurated nightcomers, a program of short videos shown throughout the night in the streets of Istanbul.

’06 Montserrat Albores Gleason’s exhibition Doppelgänger: Reality’s Double was awarded the MARCO–06 Award for Young Curators.

Erica Fisher, who has been working in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the past year, has accepted the position of project curatorial assistant in modern and contemporary art.

Kerryn Greenberg, assistant curator at Tate Modern, London, curated The Irresistible Force, the first in a new series of exhibitions in the museum’s Level 2 Gallery dedicated to emerging international artists.

Geir Haraldseth, who has a curatorial residency at Kunstwerke in Berlin, cocurated Case Study: Art and Commerce as part of the 30th anniversary celebration of Fotogalleriet in Norway. He also curated a show titled Culture Clash at the artist-run space Bastard, and was mentioned in Contemporary magazine’s annual for 2007.

Mariangela Mendez, winner of the Ramapo Curatorial Prize, presented in other words at Ramapo College, where Sydney Jenkins ’96 is director of the gallery. Mariangela is on the faculty at Universidad de los Bogota, Colombia.

As exhibition coordinator, Amy Mackie has wrapped up her involvement in Art in General’s 25th Anniversary Exhibition and accepted a permanent position as curatorial assistant at the New Museum in New York City.

’07 Max Hernández Calvo is administrator of education programs at Dia:Beacon.

Florencia Malbrán was awarded a Hilla Rebay International Fellowship by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. During the year, she will work in the curatorial departments of the Guggenheim Museums in New York, Bilbao, and Venice.

Amy Owen is director of exhibitions at Artists Space in New York City.

Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program

’07 Catharine Erhardt Clohessy has accepted a teaching position as an English instructor at Pomperaug High School in Southbury, Connecticut. She will be teaching 11th-grade American literature and 9th-grade world literature. During the summer, she was a member of the high school’s Curriculum Development Committee.

She writes, “The two weeks of working closely with brilliant colleagues were enormously satisfying and a great preparation for the year to come.”

Liv Halvorsen is living in South Korea and teaching English, journalism, speech, and debate at Korea International School.

’08 Deirdre Donaldson is living in Kingston, New York, and teaching 9th- and 10th-grade global studies at Kingston High School.

Kathleen (Katie) Fenn is teaching 7th-grade life science at Pine Plains Middle School. She hopes to get the Pine Plains district involved with MAT so that, one day, she can have a student teacher from the Bard program in her classroom.

Aaron Schumacher is teaching statistics and journalism at Mott Hall High School in Harlem.

In Memoriam

’40 Benedict S. Seidman, 86, who served Bard for many years as an alumni/ae trustee, trustee associate, member of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni Association, and overseer of Simon’s Rock College of Bard, died on November 26, 2007.

After earning a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, he worked as a journalist and then as a businessman, presiding over the Metro Group of Long Island City for more than 30 years.

He served in World War II and was awarded a Purple Heart.

Seidman was first elected a Bard alumni/ae trustee in December 1965; he served in that capacity until June 1970, when he was named a trustee associate. In 1978 he was reelected to the board as an alumni/ae trustee, and in 1983 was again named a trustee associate. At his death he was a trustee associate and a Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors member. He was a member of the Board of Overseers of Simon’s Rock (now Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College) from 1981 to 1991. “He was an enthusiast of the arts, a committed citizen, and a connoisseur who believed in the power of learning,” said Bard president Leon Botstein, lauding Seidman as “one of Bard College’s most loyal alumni.” In addition to his alma mater, his passions embraced tennis, Gilbert & Sullivan, the New York Times, and social justice.

His survivors include a brother, Lloyd; three sons and their wives: Michael (Judy), Robert (Maureen), and Peter (Julie); eight

CLASS NOTES | 55

grandchildren; and his companion, Sally Barnett. Seidman was predeceased by his wife, Irene, to whom he was married for more

dental science from the University of Tübingen in Germany. He served in the New York Army National Guard 1958–65, and

than 60 years. Donations in his memory will establish the Irene and Benedict Seidman Master Class at The Bard College Conservatory of Music.

worked as a dentist in private practice in Hausen am Bach, Germany. An aspiring writer, he had nearly completed a book on Mennonite history. He is survived by his son, Walter; two brothers, Alexander and Edward; three sisters, Lena Lydia, Frieda, and Trudi; and many nieces and nephews.

’42 Milton A. Jahoda died on June 5, 2007, in Sidney, Ohio. He was executive director of the Cincinnati Association for the Blind for 27 years. He was a 32nd-degree Mason, and a member of the Syrian Shrine, Sidney Gateway High Twelve, Shelby County Shrine Club, and St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, Sidney. He is survived by his wife, Josephine; their children, John and Christine; a sister, Christine; and four grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

’48 Alfrick Hubbell Man III died on July 23, 2007, at his home. Born on July 7, 1923, in Los Angeles, he graduated from Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1942 before attending Bard. He was the sales manager of Paper Trade Journal in New York City. He was an avid boater, fisherman, and sailor, participating in long-distance sailing races on Long Island Sound, and enjoyed skiing. He is survived by his sister, Lucy; his former wife, Christine; four children; and numerous grandchildren, cousins, nieces, and nephews.

’54 Edward Livingston Coster died at his home in Tannersville, New York, on July 30, 2007. After graduating from Bard, he served in the United States Army 1954–56. He went on to a long career in public relations, retiring as a vice president at the firm of Manning, Selvage and Lee in New York City. A lifelong member of the Onteora Club in Tannersville, he split his time between Onteora and Stuart, Florida. He was predeceased by his wife of 38 years, Felice S. Coster ’54; the couple met at Bard during their freshman year, and married six years later. He is survived by two sons, John and William; a sister, Josephine; two brothers, Gerard and Charles; four grandchildren; two nephews; and many cousins.

’69 Patricia A. Emmet died of breast cancer at her home in Newport, Rhode Island, on May 27, 2007. Born in Buffalo, she attended Bard and then earned her undergraduate degree from the New School for Social Research. She did graduate work at Bank Street College of Education in New York City, and received her master’s degree in education from Georgia State University. She enjoyed a long career in education as a classroom teacher, trainer of Head Start teachers, consultant, and director of programs for children at a department of child and family services. She is survived by her husband, William Emmet, and two children.

Waldemar “Walter” Streib, D.D.S., died on August 5, 2007, in Kingston, New York. Born in Ukraine, Walter earned his doctor of

56

’73 Tom Mayer died of a rare form of cancer on June 22, 2007. After majoring in physics at Bard, he went on to earn a master’s degree in atmospheric sciences from the University of Illinois, and then worked for 26 years as a scientist and software engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

In 1992 he won a seat on the Louisville City Council in Louisville, Colorado, which he retained until he became Boulder County Commissioner in 2003—a post he held until his death. During his years in public service he served on numerous regional, statewide, and national committees relating to health and human services, child welfare, sustainable growth, and energy. Mayer was beloved in his community, where he won a landslide reelection in November 2006. His memorial service was attended by several hundred people, including local, state, and national officials, many of whom spoke of his influence and the inspiration they drew from him. On July 19, 2007, a tribute to him by Colorado Congressman Mark Udall was read into the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. An avid cyclist and wine enthusiast, Mayer worked tirelessly to make his community a thriving and equitable place for all its citizens. He is survived by his wife, Kara Edin; his mother, Dorothy Mayer; two children, Daniel and Kris; two stepchildren, Siera and Elle; a brother, Bob; a sister, Nina, and a brother-in-law, Bo; and a niece, Jennifer, and great-niece, Skyla.

’74 Ian Sturtevant Hobbs, 55, died in Newton, Massachusetts, on October 4, 2007, following a lengthy illness. He received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology, a subject he later pursued at Vanderbilt University. While at Bard, he was a student leader, serving as president of the student government during his sophomore and junior years, and also counseling his peers about the draft. During his senior year, Hobbs played a significant role in the history of the College, one whose repercussions could not have been foreseen at the time. As a member of the Presidential Search Committee that was seeking a successor to Reamer Kline, Bard’s retiring president of 15 years, Hobbs, acting on a suggestion from his parents, arranged to meet with the young, dynamic president of Franconia College in New Hampshire, one Leon Botstein, and inquire as to his interest in the job. “The most important outcome of those [Franconia] years was my call to Bard, and for that . . . Ian bears the responsibility,” says Botstein. “My gratitude after these more than 30 years is inextinguishable.”

At Bard, Hobbs was much loved by his classmates. “He had an indomitable spirit and an infectious smile,” recalls Gene Elk ’74,

who delivered a eulogy at Hobbs’s memorial service. “It was always obvious that he cared deeply about his family, friends, and

of music. In the early 1990s she moved to Wyoming, where she became what she called a “place composer,” creating works for

even strangers that he had just met.” Elk also recalled Hobbs’s “wonderful, wry sense of humor” and his refusal to let his sickness sap his great love of life.

Post-Bard, Hobbs lived in Nashville and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where for a time he managed the Harvard Bookstore. He received an M.B.A. from Boston University, with a concentration in nonprofit management.

His survivors include a daughter, Tessera Hobbs, and two sons, Jackson and Forester; his parents, Christina and Sturtevant Hobbs; and a brother, Geoffrey. He was the former husband of Sarah DeBlois ’75 of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Spence Waugh Hobbs of Barrington, Rhode Island, both of whom survive.

piano and orchestral instruments inspired by specific places that moved her. During this time she recorded Teton Seasons (1997), Sunrise (2000), Jewels of Light (2004), and The Muse (2006). Her Grand Teton Suite, for full orchestra and piano, was performed by the Jackson Hole Symphony, with Levinson on piano. Her chamber piece “The Winds,” commissioned by the Wyoming Music Teachers Association, premiered at one of the group’s conventions.

She was the founder and executive director of the Peace Chorus (www.peacechorus.org), a not-for-profit organization formed to create peace in our time through connection and song. In 2006 she moved to northern California. At the time of her death she was working on a series of books and accompanying music inspired by the Point Reyes National Seashore. She is survived by her mother, Caryl; her father, Bernard; her stepmother, Annie; a sister, Julie; and three brothers, James, John, and Nick.

’75 Timothy Anderson died on February 5, 2007, as a result of a car accident near his home in Palm Desert, California. A memorial liturgy in celebration of his life was held at All Saints Parish in Beverly Hills on April 21.

Hilaria Ann Winkfield died on August 25, 2007, in Rockford, Illinois, after a long illness. After her time at Bard, she attended Emerson College in Boston. She then moved to Rockford, where she joined the Macedonia Baptist Church and served as the superintendent of the Sunday school. Over the years, she also worked as a consultant with the 3R’s Learning Material Center and as a management analyst with the Rockford Housing Authority. She is survived by her mother, Addie Grant; a brother, Oliver Winkfield; two sisters, Dorothy Grant and Althea Greene; and a host of other relatives and friends.

’78 Charles M. “Tex” Goldberg died on July 28, 2007, at his home in Mexico, New York. During his life Goldberg pursued many interests. He and his childhood friend, Michael Simmons ’78, started a number of bands together, including one called Slewfoot, which was named “one of the three best punk bands in New York City” one year by Creem magazine. He lived in Maine for 26 years before moving to Oswego, New York, and then to the town of Mexico. A business owner, Charles earned a law degree at Franklin Pierce Law Center and worked as an attorney and substitute history teacher. He also continued to work as a professional guitarist. He is survived by his mother, Joan; his wife, Constance; a daughter, Abigail; two sons, Thane and Alexander; a brother, Adam; a sister, Sonya; and a grandchild, Rowan.

’85 Sally Deette Cotherman Robbiani, GSES ’94, died in Kingston, New York, on August 23, 2007, following a brief illness. After her undergraduate and graduate work at Bard, she went on to receive an M.A. in information science in 2006 from SUNY Albany. The owner of the Clermont Book Store in Catskill, New York, she was passionate about the environment, knowledge, and books. She is survived by her father, Rex B. Cotherman; her husband, Robert Robbiani; two sisters, Leslie Romanyshyn and Gerri Lynn Cotherman; two brothers, Rex B. Cotherman III and John Cotherman; a son, Ray Phillips; a daughter, Debra Phillips Hazelton; and a grandson, Brandon Phillips.

Staff Catherine E. Pickert, 92, died on August 28, 2007, in Poughkeepsie, New York. A Red Hook resident for most of her life, she earned a degree in nursing from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She worked as a registered nurse at Bard College for the majority of her career, as well as at Ward Manor, Hudson River Training School for Girls, and Mount Sinai. Her survivors include a daughter, two sons, two brothers, five grandchildren, and a great-grandson.

’83 Composer, musician, singer, and teacher Jan Levinson died of lung cancer on August 14, 2007, in Inverness, California. She studied music at Bard, where she worked with Joan Tower and the Da Capo Chamber Players. After graduating, she taught piano, voice, and composition to students of all ages, helping to instill her love

CLASS NOTES | 57

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS The Hayden E. Walling ’39 Memorial Scholarship

by Doug and Leslie Hatch

In 1936, Bartlett “Bart” Chappell was a senior at Bard College. This was no small thing. His family had lost all their money in the Depression, and the funds for his education were gone.

Although the young man had worked hard to pay his own way and had been frugal—to the point of living on a single five-cent can of beans each day—he now found himself without the wherewithal to continue his education.

Bartlett Chappell ’37 Resigned to not graduating, Chappell headed toward the dean’s office to explain that he would have to withdraw from the College, as he couldn’t afford to continue at Bard. On his way to the office, he came across a classmate and friend, Hayden E. Walling ’39, to whom Chappell explained his financial straits. After asking how much Chappell needed to finish out the academic year, Walling did an extraordinary thing. He gave Chappell the necessary $500!

Chappell, gentleman that he was, indicated that he considered the amount to be a loan, one that he would repay. But Walling would not hear of it, insisting that the money was a gift.

Chappell completed his senior year and graduated. He then earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from Columbia and, thereafter, went on to a distinguished career as a teacher and school administrator. Without Walling’s exceptional generosity, Chappell’s life might have followed a very different path. And Chappell never forgot Walling’s kindness. In the 1970s he tried, unsuccessfully, to locate his benefactor.

Shortly before Chappell passed away, at the age of 91, he called his lawyer (a former student of his) and asked her to look into how he could set up a scholarship to honor Hayden Walling. Unfortunately, Chappell died before the scholarship could be established. The lawyer, however, conveyed Chappell’s wishes to his heirs. Those wishes were duly honored; the Hayden E. Walling Memorial Scholarship is awarded to a senior, or rising senior, who maintains at least a 3.0 grade point average and is in danger of not completing his or her course of study due to financial hardship.

Bard is deeply grateful to Chappell’s nieces and nephews for having stepped forward on behalf of the Bard seniors who find themselves in financial circumstances similar to those experienced, decades earlier, by “Uncle Bart.”

To learn how you can establish a scholarship in honor of a loved one or in your own name, please call Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, at 845-758-7405, or e-mail her at pemstein@bard.edu. All inquiries are confidential.

58

JULY 4 – AUGUST 17

BARDSUMMERSCAPE

ROMEO AND JULIET, ON MOTIFS OF SHAKESPEARE

KAROL SZYMANOWSKI: TWO OPERAS

WORLD PREMIERE

HARNASIE

Music by Sergey Prokofiev Scenario by Sergey Prokofiev and Sergey Radlov Choreography by Mark Morris Performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, Music Director

KING ROGER (THE SHEPHERD) American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, Music Director Directed and designed by Lech Majewski

sosnoff theater sosnoff theater July 4, 5, 8, 9 at 8 pm July 5 at 2 pm July 6 at 3 pm

SPIEGELTENT Cabaret, Family Fare, SpiegelClub July 5 – August 17

July 25, 31, and August 2 at 8 pm July 27 and August 3 at 3 pm

OF THEE I SING Music by George Gershwin Book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind Lyrics by Ira Gershwin

theater two

FILM FESTIVAL: CINÉMA TRANSCONTINENTALE: AMERICA, RUSSIA, AND FRANCE IN THE 1930s

August 1, 6, 7 at 8 pm August 2, 9, 10 at 3 pm August 3 at 7 pm August 6 at 2 pm August 8 at 5 pm

July 6 – August 14

UNCLE VÁNYA

By Anton Chekhov Translated by Paul Schmidt Directed by Erica Schmidt With Peter Dinklage as Uncle Ványa

theater two July 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19 at 8 pm July 12, 16, 19 at 2 pm July 13, 20 at 3 pm

BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL: PROKOFIEV AND HIS WORLD Leon Botstein, Christopher H. Gibbs, and Robert Martin, Artistic Directors Simon Morrison, Scholar in Residence 2008 August 8–10, 15–17, and October 25–26

845-758-7900 fishercenter.bard.edu

FA C U LT Y N OT E S

Peggy Ahwesh, associate professor of film and electronic arts, has had recent solo screenings at the Yale University School of Art, Syracuse University, Columbia University School of the Arts, and Mount Holyoke College. She presented a program of her videos at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago to kick off the DVD collection of her work Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh, distributed by Video Data Bank. She was represented in the gallery exhibition On The Collective for Living Cinema at Orchard with screenings at Orchard and Anthology Film Archives, both in New York City. In October, Ahwesh screened three new short video works in Views from the Avant-Garde, a sidebar program of the New York Film Festival. Ahwesh and Barbara Ess, associate professor of photography, received a 2007 grant in music/sound from the New York State Council on the Arts, to develop a new project.

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, published a translation of Pierre Reverdy’s Haunted House with Black Square Editions (founded by John Yau ’72). A selection of Ashbery’s work was translated into Italian and published as Fiumi di ali by L’Oubliquo. (For more on Ashbery’s recent activities, see page 14.)

Emily Barton, assistant professor of writing, received 2006–07 fellowships in fiction writing from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies, gave two talks in December: on majorities, minorities, and separatist movements in India, at the Asia Center of Harvard University, and on territorial changes and territorial restructurings in the Himalayas, at a workshop held at a research unit of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Baruah is one of the organizers of the Asian Borderlands Research Network (www.asianborderlands.net), based at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. He directed the Network’s first conference, held in January at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati, India, where he holds a concurrent professorial appointment.

Laura Battle, professor of studio arts, presented work in a twoperson show at the Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York City in September.

60

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, published “Freud and Wittgenstein: Language and Human Nature” in the October 2007 issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association. He contributed two articles to edited volumes: “Einstein and Music” to Einstein in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press), and “Kunst und Staat am Beispiel der Musik” (Art and the State: The Case of Music), to Kunst und Staat: Beiträge zu einem problematischen Verhältnis (Art and the State: Contributions on a Problematic Relationship) (Huter & Roth). For The Musical Quarterly, he wrote three essays: “Music in History: The Perils of Method in Reception History,” “An Unforgettable Life in Music—Mstislav Rostropovich (1927–2007),” and “Reinventing Life and Career: The Perils of Immigration.” He also contributed an opinion piece, “How Accessible Should a College President Be?” to Currents, a publication of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. He was interviewed about the history of listening, the subject of a current book project, for the fall 2007 issue of Guilt & Pleasure. To honor poet John Ashbery (Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature) on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) in a concert of works especially chosen for the poet. For the arrival of the John Cage Trust at Bard, the president performed in a production of Cage’s Lecture on the Weather. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature), the president participated in a program honoring the writer at the National Arts Club. For Bard’s First-Year Seminar symposium series, Botstein presented “New Worlds and Traditions,” a lecture-concert during which he led the ASO in a performance of Dvoˇrák’s Symphony No. 9. In addition, the president received the Mill Street Loft’s 2008 Friend of the Arts Award and fulfilled regular conducting duties with the ASO and the Jerusalem Symphony, the radio orchestra of Israel.

Franklin Bruno, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, published “Is That All There Is?” and “The Uses of Disenchantment” in Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (Duke University Press). He presented “‘Writing Through’ Philosophy in Contemporary Poetry” at “Poets Reading Philosophy, Philosophers Reading Poetry,” held at the University of Warwick

in Coventry, England, in October, and “Why Words Aren’t Works” at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, held in Los Angeles in November.

Imagined at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild (June 9 – October 8).

A solo exhibition opened in January at Michael Steinberg Fine Art in New York City.

Luca Buvoli, faculty in sculpture, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, showed a multimedia project—suspended sculptures, video animations, mosaics, and paintings—in the first room of the Arsenale, as part of the 52nd International Venice Biennale, Italy.

Julia Emig and Derek Furr, faculty, Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program, cochaired a panel discussion on professional development at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), held in New York City in November.

Furr and Emig also presented on the same topic at NCTE’s Conference on English Leadership in November.

Mary Caponegro ’78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing, read from her work at St. Joseph’s College last October. Tin House published a story by Caponegro in its “Fantastic Women” issue. Her story “An Etruscan Catechism” is included in Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana, forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

Nicole Caso, assistant professor of Spanish, published an article, “Pragmatismo y el discurso ingenioso en el Sermón de la epifanía del padre Antonio Vieira,” about a sermon given by the 17thcentury Portuguese Jesuit missionary, in Revista Iberoamericana.

In September she presented a paper, “La geografía cultural de Panamá: de la decapitación de Balboa à la conciencia nacional en laberintos de orgullo de Rosa María Britton,” at the Latin American Studies Association conference in Montreal, Canada.

Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion and chaplain of the college, is editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Bible, Second Edition (Cambridge University Press). The volume presents analysis of the canonical writings of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and also of apocryphal works by Jewish and Christian writers.

Laurie Dahlberg, associate professor of art history and photography, delivered a paper, “At Home with the Camera: Private Presentations of Modern Masculinity,” in December at a symposium in honor of the 125th anniversary of Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology. She is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography (Routledge).

Daniella Dooling, visiting associate professor of studio arts, had work included in Bellezza Pericolosa at Palazzo delle Arti Napoli in Naples, Italy (July 5 – October 23), and in PATHS: Real and

Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, is publishing translations (with Deliana Simeonova) of two novels by Angel Wagenstein, a noted Bulgarian author. Both are from Other Press: Farewell, Shanghai came out last fall, and Isaac’s Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld Through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps, and Five Motherlands is scheduled for this spring.

Bernard Greenwald, professor of studio arts, exhibited work in Regional Neo-Expressionist and Pattern Paintings at the Albert Shahinian Fine Art gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York, last summer.

Marka Gustavsson, visiting assistant professor of music and violist for the Colorado Quartet, notes that the 2007–08 season is the group’s 25th anniversary. The Quartet celebrated “that joyous and excruciating journey,” says Gustavsson, with the release of the complete Beethoven Quartets, a New York concert sponsored by Symphony Space on May 9, 2008, and a busy concert season dedicated to presenting works from the 1982 Naumburg and Banff competitions, both of which awarded the Colorado Quartet first prize.

Ed Halter, visiting assistant professor of film and electronic arts, contributed a chapter, “James Fotopoulos,” to Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work beyond Hollywood (SUNY Press). He curated a six-part series at the San Francisco Cinematheque; entitled “Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde,” the series grew out of research Halter did in preparation for his Seminar in Science Fiction Film, which he taught at Bard last fall. The screenings include work by Roddy Bogawa, faculty in film and video, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

FACULTY NOTES | 61

Lynn Hawley, assistant professor of theater, worked as an actor/creator on Hunted at the Public Theater in New York City

New York. Myra Young Armstead, professor of history, and Gregory Moynahan, assistant professor of history, gave papers at

last summer and fall. A new play of hers received a reading at Voice and Vision’s “Envision Retreat” on the Bard campus last summer, and Hawley acted in a staged reading of Seven at the retreat.

the symposium and helped to organize it. Leonard coedited, with Tracie Rozhon, Bobs’ Folly: Inventing America’s First Practical Steamboat, the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name, presented at Clermont State Historic Site. The catalogue will be published this year.

At Sea, the most recent film by Peter Hutton, professor of film, was presented at the Toronto International Film Festival. In October, At Sea was screened at the international film festivals in New York, Vienna, and London. Hutton also presented a program of his films at the Tate Modern in London and Harvard Film Archive (October); Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and University of Chicago (November); and the University of Colorado, University of New Mexico, California Institute of the Arts, and REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles (December).

Patricia Karetzky, Oskar Munsterberg Lecturer in Art History, curated the exhibition and wrote the catalogue for Beijing Boogie Woogie Art in Beijing 2007, presented at Gallery 456 at the Chinese-American Arts Council in New York City. Her essay “The Evolution of the Image of Xian in the Han” was part of Daoist Art History at Xi’an Academy of Art in Shaanxi, China, in May 2007.

She published part two of “Scenes of the Parinirvana, Death of the Buddha” in Oriental Art (2006) and “The Gao Brothers of Beijing” in Yishu, September 2007.

Franz Kempf, professor of German, presented a paper, “Kulturkritik from Rousseau to Schiller,” at the International Congress on the Enlightenment in Montpellier, France, last July.

His most recent reviews of books ranging in subject matter from Goethe’s Faust and epic poetry to Freud and Kafka have appeared in Monatshefte, German Studies Review, and Lessing Yearbook.

Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature, published poems and essays in Brooklyn Rail, Atlanta Review, and Fence, among other journals. Her published art essays included one on Joe Brainard’s Nancy artwork as part of The Nancy Book, forthcoming from Siglio Press; and one for the Whole Fragment exhibition catalogue at Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada in Reno (October 2007.) The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience comes out this spring as a Penguin paperback. Lauterbach is a visiting art critic (painting) at Yale Graduate School of the Arts this spring and participated in a panel on artists’ collaborations, held at Yale’s Beinecke Library in March.

Trap Rock Part II is a series of photographs on the Clinton Point quarry near Poughkeepsie by An-My Lê, assistant professor of photography. The series is on exhibition at Dia:Beacon until September 2008. Last fall Lê had a solo show at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and was featured on Art:21, “Art in the TwentyFirst Century,” the PBS series of profiles of artists and their work.

Nancy Leonard, professor of English, chaired a symposium in June on the 200th anniversary of the invention of the first practical steamboat, by Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston of Clermont,

62

Mark Lytle, professor of history, gave the Walter LaFeber–Joel Silbey Fund lecture in history at Cornell University last October.

Lytle’s subject was Rachel Carson and the controversy over Silent Spring.

Adolfas Mekas, professor emeritus of film, presented a retrospective screening of his films at the EU Film Festival, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, last September.

Chiori Miyagawa, playwright in residence, has been accepted as a resident playwright by New Dramatists in New York City. Last year she traveled to Budapest as part of the Artist Abroad program of the New York Theatre Workshop. Her play America Dreaming was published in an anthology, Global Foreigners. Another play, Broken Morning, was “highly recommended” in the BBC/British Council International Radio Playwriting Competition.

Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism, was an editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Religious and Philosophical Writings in Late Antiquity. He published numerous articles and essays, including “The Talmud Teaches How to Speak about Beliefs and Deeds,” in Talking Texts: How Speech and Writing Interact in School Learning (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) and “Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Mishnah: A New Approach to Ancient Jewish Texts,” a review essay, in The Review of Rabbinic Judaism: Ancient, Medieval and Modern.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college and president of the Levy Economics Institute, was interviewed in July by Gary Shapiro at the New York Sun and in August by Elia Powers at Inside Higher Education, regarding Bard’s new dual degree in economics and finance. Also in August, Papadimitriou was interviewed by Rex Nutting at MarketWatch, regarding the risks of the housing debacle to the larger credit and financial markets; by John Hilsenrath at the Wall Street Journal, regarding Hyman P. Minsky, and by Nicholas Rummell at Financial Week, about Basel II and the current U.S. framework. In July, Papadimitriou also appeared on the Turkish television program TNT as a discussant on the role of Greek banks in Turkey. In September he reviewed The Future of Europe, Reform or Decline,

by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi, for the journal Comparative Economic Studies.

Jennifer Reeves ’93, faculty in film, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, finished her double-projection film Light Work Mood Disorder at the MacDowell Colony last year. The film received a production grant from the Wexner Center for the Arts

at Ohio State University, and has been screened at the Wexner Center with live music, and at the International Film Festival

Benjamin Stevens, assistant professor of classics, has been awarded a FIRST (Faculty in Residence, Summer Term) grant

Rotterdam (the Netherlands), Diapason gallery (Manhattan), Rooftop Films (Brooklyn), and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Strasbourg, France).

from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was nominated for this competitive grant by the university’s Classics Department.

Stevens also had three new papers accepted for publication: “The Scent of Language and Social Synaesthesia at Rome” in Classical World; “Per gestum res est significanda mihi: Ovid and Language in Exile” in Classical Philology; and “Symbolic Language and Indexical Cries: A Semiotic Reading of Lucretius 5.1028–90” in American Journal of Philology.

Antarctica: Life on the Ice, an anthology edited by Susan Fox Rogers, visiting assistant professor of writing and First-Year Seminar, was published last fall by Travelers’ Tales.

James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, presented a paper on Hippocrates’ treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places in January at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association. He has contributed articles on nine different topics to the Oxford Companion to World Exploration and continues to work on an edition of Arrian’s history of Alexander the Great, for the Landmark Series of Ancient Historians.

Justus Rosenberg, professor emeritus of languages and literature, delivered a series of lectures on the topic “Understanding Culture” at the New School for Social Research during September and October. In November he conducted a seminar, Innovative Novellas and Short Stories, for the New School’s Humanities Department.

Keith Sanborn, faculty in film and video, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, had a video installation in Black September at MuHKA Media, Monty, and Zuiderpershuis, three arts institutions in Antwerp, Belgium. He gave a lecture presentation of his work on “Internet 2” at the Video Vortex Conference sponsored by Argos (Centre for Art & Media, Brussels, and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam). He spoke on Guy Debord’s posttheoretical synthetic praxis at “Film as Critical Practice,” a conference sponsored by the Office for Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. Sanborn’s recent publications include an essay, “Information Theory and Aesthetic Perception: Objects in Your Mirror Are Closer than They Appear,” in the catalogue for Figment, an exhibition on the work of Paul Sharits presented at Espace Multimédia Gantner in Belfort, France. “The Impossible” was published in Impossible Cinema (Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturenea, Spain, 2007).

Luc Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, gave a lecture last September in Berlin, at the Festival of New York at the House of World Cultures. His topic was New York City after 9/11.

Amy Sillman MFA ’95, faculty in painting, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, presented Suitors & Strangers, a solo exhibition, last fall at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in Texas. Another solo exhibition of Sillman’s work, curated by Anne Ellegood CCS ’98, is at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., from March through early July.

David Levi Strauss, visiting professor of studio arts, and faculty in writing, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, was appointed chair of the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Stuart Stritzler-Levine, professor of psychology, and dean of studies at Bard High School Early College, spent 10 days in Moscow and St. Petersburg last fall at the invitation of the Institute of Psychology at the Russian Institute for the Humanities and Smolny College. He gave two lectures in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg, about the work and critique of Stanley Milgram’s study on obedience to authority.

Julianne Swartz, visiting assistant professor of studio arts, showed work in Voice and Void at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, from September 2007 to February 2008. In November and December, a portfolio of her photographs was exhibited at and published by Mixed Greens Gallery in New York City. A sitespecific commission for the lobby of the Indianapolis Museum of Art remains on view until May. Swartz’s work was also part of We Interrupt this Program at the Mills College Art Museum (January– March 2008). She will be a resident artist faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture this summer.

Elaine R. Thomas, assistant professor of political studies, shared second place in the new Stanley Hoffmann Award for the best article on French politics, offered by the French Politics Group of the American Political Science Association. Thomas’s 2006 article, “Keeping Identity at a Distance: Explaining France’s New Legal Restrictions on the Islamic Headscarf,” was published in Ethnic and Racial Studies.

La Terreur à l’oeuvre: théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan,

by Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, was published last September by Presses universitaires de Vincennes. Trudel also published an article, “La Résistance intime: contact et immédiateté du sens chez Jean Paulhan,” in the journal L’Esprit Créateur (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and presented a paper, “Un Flou d’une acuité folle: l’illisible intime du poème alferien,” at the International Colloquium of French Poetry, held at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, January 30 – February 2.

Peter Sourian, professor of English, has two short stories and an excerpt from his third novel in the anthology Forgotten Bread: First-Generation Armenian American Writers, which came out from Heyday Books last fall.

FACULTY NOTES | 63

148TH COMMENCEMENT AND ALUMNI/AE WEEKEND CELEBRATION FRIDAY, MAY 23, THROUGH SUNDAY, MAY 25, 2008 FRIDAY, MAY 23

REUNIONS

President’s Dinner and Reception

Class of 2003, 5th Reunion

Salute reunion classes and honor the exceptional achievement of Bard alumni/ae and friends.

Reception: Blithewood front lawn

Class of 1998, 10th Reunion Concert Bard student soloists and composers in concert with the American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein, conductor Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

Reception: Blithewood front lawn

Class of 1993, 15th Reunion Reception: Blithewood front lawn

Class of 1988, 20th Reunion Reception: Blithewood front lawn

SATURDAY, MAY 24 Walking Tour of Bard Lands with Professor William Maple Senior Project Panel

Class of 1983, 25th Reunion Reception and dinner: Ward Manor

Class of 1978, 30th Reunion Reception and dinner: Ward Manor

Members of the Class of 2008 present their Senior Projects.

Class of 1973, 35th Reunion

Campus Tours

Class of 1968, 40th Reunion

Richard B. Fisher Center for the Peforming Arts; Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation; campus-wide tour of new buildings

Dedication James H. Ottaway Film Center Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center

SUNDAY, MAY 25 Alumni/ae Memorial Service Champagne Buffet Brunch Join President Leon Botstein, Dean of the College Miche`le D. Dominy, and Board of Governors President Walter Swett ’96

Reception and dinner: Ward Manor

Reception and dinner: Ward Manor

Class of 1953, 55th Reunion Class of 1948–1949, 60th Reunion Class of 1943, 65th Reunion Class of 1938, 70th Reunion Reception and dinner: Ward Manor

Commencement-Reunion Barbecue, Dance, and Fireworks Blithewood main lawn

www.bard.edu/reunions www.bard.edu/commencement

Photography Cover, inside front cover, and page 1: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 2: Don Hamerman 3: (left to right) Don Hamerman; Karl Rabe; Mike Falco/Black Star 4–5: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 6–8: Don Hamerman 9–11: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 12: Don Hamerman 13: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 14: Karl Rabe 17: Mike Falco/Black Star 18: Joanne Savio 20: Dennis Brack/Black Star 21: (top) ©2007 MJ Maloney/Black Star; (bottom) Don Hamerman 22: John Troha 24–25: Donald Dietz, courtesy of the John Cage Trust at Bard College 26: Ian Jones/The Daily Telegraph 29: Don Hamerman 31: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 32-33: Karl Rabe 36: ©2007 Philip Channing 37: (top) Karl Rabe; (bottom) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 38: (top) Courtesy of the Bard Graduate Center; (bottom) Karl Rabe 39: (top) Karl Rabe; (middle) Doug Baz; (bottom) Jamie Livingston ’79 40: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 43: Courtesy of Roger Phillips ’53 44: Sasha Boak-Kelly 46: Courtesy of Kevin Ryan 51: Courtesy of Toni Fortini ’02 53: Courtesy of Sabrina Gschwandtner MFA ’08 58: Courtesy of Doug and Leslie Hatch 59: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 60–61: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Back cover: Don Hamerman

Board of Trustees of Bard College David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Second Vice Chair Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary Roland J. Augustine, Treasurer Fiona Angelini + Leon Botstein, President of the College David C. Clapp * Marcelle Clements ’69 The Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan Jr., Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61 Robert S. Epstein ’63 * Philip H. Gordon ’43 * Barbara S. Grossman ’73 Sally Hambrecht Ernest F. Henderson III Marieluise Hessel John C. Honey ’39, Life Trustee Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan George A. Kellner Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Murray Liebowitz Marc S. Lipschultz Peter H. Maguire ’88 James H. Ottaway Jr. Martin Peretz Stanley A. Reichel ’65 Stewart Resnick Susan Weber Soros Martin T. Sosnoff Patricia Ross Weis ’52 * alumni/ae trustee + ex officio

Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405 or pemstein @bard.edu; Jessica Kemm ’74 Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu; Sasha Boak-Kelly, Associate Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7407, boak@bard.edu; Tricia Fleming, Administrative Assistant, 845-758-7089, fleming@bard.edu

1-800-BARDCOL

www.bard.edu/alumni

Published by the Bard Publications Office Ginger Shore, Director; Mary Smith, Art Director; Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mikhail Horowitz, René Houtrides MFA ’97, Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Mary Maguire, Kevin Trabucco, Ken Treadway, Anne-Marie Weber, Designers ©2008 Bard College. All rights reserved.

A PREMIER WORK OF LITERATURE TURNS 50 REVISITING CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART: A 50TH-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE panel discussion Panelists: Chinua Achebe, Ifi Amadiume, Simon Gikandi, Christine Griffin, Jesse Weaver Shipley Moderator: Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

Friday, April 11 I 7:00 pm I Free sosnoff theater richard b. fisher center for the performing arts bard college With funding from the New York Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities)

Images of Africa: Conrad and Achebe Myra Armstead, Derek Furr, Abdou Gaye Thursday, March 27, at 7:00 pm SUNY Ulster Student Lounge (VAN 203), Stone Ridge Free Sponsored by Bard College, SUNY Ulster, and American Association of University Women-Kingston Chapter

Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000

www.bard.edu

Modernity and Traditions in Things Fall Apart Myra Armstead, Wendy Urban-Mead Saturday, March 29, at 1:30 pm Mid-Hudson Library System Auditorium, 105 Market Street, Poughkeepsie Free Sponsored by Bard College and the Poughkeepsie Library District

NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION U.S. POSTAGE PAID BARD COLLEGE