BOOKS BY BARDIANS

Technology and the Common Good

by Allen W. Batteau ’68. Berghahn Books

Building on the work of Nobel Prize–winning political scientist Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons), Batteau examines how different shared goods are shaped by technology in a democratic society, and demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology.

The City We Make Together

by Mallory Catlett ’92 and Aaron Landsman. University of Iowa Press

Theater director Catlett and theater artist Landsman look at how we make art with communities, how we perform power, who gets to play which roles, and how we might use creativity, collaboration, and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of democracy anew. The tools of theater, it turns out, can help us better understand and participate in critical civic processes.

Reaching for the Heights

by Frederic C. Hof, diplomat in Residence. USIP Press

Ambassador Hof, who spearheaded secret negotiations from 2009 to 2011 to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal, takes readers behind the scenes in Washington, Damascus, and Jerusalem, where President Assad and Prime Minister Netanyahu inched toward a deal to return Israeli-occupied areas of the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria severing military ties with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

The Art of Resonance

by Anne Bogart ’74. Methuen Drama

Award-winning director Bogart weaves personal stories and reflections from her own adventures—and misadventures— in the theater to illuminate potent philosophical ideas that go well beyond the stage. The book, which will appeal to anyone interested in what it means to be engaged in the artistic process, explores the intersections of performance theory, art history, neuroscience, music, architecture, and the visual arts.

Wings in Time

by Callie Garnett ’06. The Song Cave

The four sections of Garnett’s first full-length collection mirror the coming of age of the poet herself. Her experiences and evocations have been transcribed, recorded, rewound, shared, and edited over emails, and float nearly free of context, full of the desire to touch the immaterial and the dematerialized. The New York Times called it one of the “great pandemic books.”

Stay True

by Hua Hsu, professor of literature. Doubleday

A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu has given us a gripping memoir about friendship, the search for self, grief, the solace that can be found through art, and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. The New York Times included Stay True on its list of the “10 Best Books of 2022.”

Last Call

by Stephen Kessler ’68. Black Widow Press

In this collection, Kessler explores broad topical terrain ranging from aging to Beethoven to COVID-19, recording—with grief and wit, documentary realism and imagination, poignancy, irony, and reflection—a journey through the gains and losses of a lifetime. His emotional honesty, conversational lyricism, and wry melancholy are down-to-earth, heart-opening, consciousness-wrenching, retroromantic, and totally contemporary.

Urban Biodiversity

by Erik Kiviat ’76, executive director, Hudsonia; and Kristi MacDonald. Lexington Books

This case study will help decisionmakers foster the biodiversity that can thrive in cities and give planners tools to reduce the biological degradation that occurs with urbanization. Based on two decades of data and assessment, the book documents the habitats, biota, and patterns of occurrence of the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, butterflies, bees, dragonflies, seed plants, mosses, and lichens of the Meadowlands.

Flooded

by Peter Taylor Klein, associate professor of sociology and environmental and urban studies. Rutgers University Press

In 2019, after three decades of controversy, Brazil’s Belo Monte hydroelectric facility was completed. Billions of dollars for social welfare programs accompanied construction, but the damming of the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, also brought extensive social, political, and environmental upheaval to the region. Flooded is a rich ethnographic account of democracy and development in the making.

Driving Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

by Kristina Kohl, Bard MBA in Sustainability faculty. Auerbach Publications

This book provides a framework for building an inclusive organization as well as a model to engage and support senior and middle management beginning the process of capacity building and systemic change. Kohl guides leaders in creating strategies to redesign organizational processes and systems using tools and technologies for data-driven decision-making.

Distant Early Warning

by Alex Kitnick, assistant professor of art history and visual culture. University of Chicago Press

Marshall McLuhan is considered by many the founder of media studies, but he was also an important theorist of art. Kitnick argues that McLuhan was influenced by art, and that his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do directly influenced the art and artists of his time.

For the Common Good

by Alex John London ’94. Oxford University Press

Not even advancing the common good justifies abrogating the rights of a study’s participants. London’s approach to research would enable key social institutions to effectively, efficiently, and equitably safeguard the basic interests of individuals, and ensure that research is organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors’ moral claims to be treated as free and equal.

Ink

by Tanya Marcuse SR ’81, artist in residence. Fall Line Press

This unusual body of work came about serendipitously after Marcuse’s young son insisted on trying nocturnal squid fishing one summer in Maine. The images, in which the bodies of squid spread acrobatically across newspaper headlines, fashion advertisements, and marriage announcements, echo the sense of moral warning and impending apocalypse in the broadside backdrops.

Movements After Revolution

by Miles V. Rodríguez, assistant professor of historical studies. Oxford University Press

The Mexican Revolution of 1910–20 ended 30 years of dictatorship, but political unrest remained. In the aftermath there arose myriad organizations of industrial workers and agricultural laborers who fought for a vast array of demands and diverse forms of justice. So what happened to the revolutionary Mexico portrayed in Rivera’s and Siqueiros’s murals?

Why did Mexico instead become a capitalist country ruled by a single party?

Sex Dolls at Sea

by Bo Ruberg ’07. The MIT Press

Ruberg debunks the conventional wisdom of the origins of the commercial sex doll as dames de voyage made to accompany European sailors, and traces it instead to late-nineteenth-century femmes en caoutchouc—“women” made of inflatable vulcanized rubber. They further investigate the web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism that come along with this and other sex tech.

Learning the Birds

by Susan Fox Rogers, writer in residence. Three Hills

The song of a thrush reawakened Rogers, sparking a desire to know the birds that accompanied her as she rock climbed and paddled, to know the world around her with greater depth. Energized by her curiosity, she followed the birds— from the Hudson Valley to Arizona to Alaska—as they drew her deeper into her authentic self, and ultimately into love.

Spirit Things

by Lara Messersmith-Glavin ’98 University of Alaska Press

This essay collection examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. MessersmithGlavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island.

Lawful Sins

by Elyse Ona Singer ’10. Stanford University Press

Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, the book reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women’s citizenship in liberal societies.

A Buddhist Sensibility

by Dominique Townsend, associate professor of Religion. Columbia University Press

Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling monastery, a key site for Buddhist education founded in 1676, to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. The book sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes.

ununterbrochen mit niemandem reden

by Thomas Wild, associate professor of German studies Verlag: S. Fischer

This book on the ethics and political poetics of distinguished Austrian writer and Holocaust survivor Ilse Aichinger offers a constellation of close readings, new archival materials, and theoretical dialogue with thinkers such as Ann Lauterbach (David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature), Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant, and Ariella Azoulay reflecting on a contemporary poetics of hospitality.

How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

by Jane Wong ’07. Alice James Books

Wong’s second poetry collection explores the ways we articulate and reckon with fear of intergenerational trauma and the silent, hidden histories of families. What does it mean to grow up in a take-out restaurant, surrounded by food, just a generation after the Great Leap Forward famine? Full of elegy and resilient joy, these poems speak—across generations—of survival.

Death by Landscape

by Elvia Wilk ’10. Soft Skull

In a series of interlinked essays, Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

Homicide

by Theo Wenner ’09. Rizzoli

The first photographer to be granted such unlimited access to the New York Police Department’s most prestigious homicide division in Brooklyn, Wenner spent two years capturing the cops up close and behind-the-scenes. In the tradition of photographers like Weegee, he documents their investigative work and its ugly counterpart—murder—within America’s most iconic city.

The Rupture Tense

by Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts. Graywolf Press

The New Yorker called Xie “a magician of perspective and scale,” and in her second collection, she cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.