ON AND OFF CAMPUS: FACULTY RECOGNITION

FACULTY RECOGNITION

Franco Baldasso

Adriane Colburn

James Romm

Franco Baldasso, assistant professor of Italian and director of the Italian Studies Program, Artist in Residence Adriane Colburn, and James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and Director of the Classical Studies Program James Romm were awarded 2021 Franklin Research Grants from the American Philosophical Society. Baldasso’s grant will allow him to finalize Against Redemption: Literature, Democracy and Memory in Post-Fascist Italy, the first book to distinguish, analyze, and theorize early postwar literary practices as a main vehicle for intellectual dissent. Colburn’s grant supports The Divining Forest, a suite of artworks that will explore the poetics of scientific fieldwork being conducted in the dense and biodiverse environment of the Rincón de la Vieja, a volcano in Costa Rica where high levels of CO 2 have been emitted through fissures in the volcanic crust for thousands of years. Romm’s new book, The Sacred Band, focuses on the Theban hegemony (379–362 BCE), in which Thebes played a leading role in central Greek affairs and defeated the army of Sparta by deploying a corps made up of 300 male lovers, the Sacred Band of Thebes. Romm’s grant will fund research on a set of notebooks, recently uncovered, detailing the skeletal remains found in the Sacred Band’s mass grave.

Christopher Gibbs

Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music, was named a spring 2022 Berlin Prize Fellow by the American Academy in Berlin. The Berlin Prize is awarded annually to American or U.S.-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.

Valeria Luiselli, photo by James Higgins

Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature Valeria Luiselli was named winner of the Dublin Literary Award, which promotes excellence in world literature and is one of the world’s richest prizes for a novel published in English (€100,000/$122,000), for Lost Children Archive. The award is sponsored by Dublin City Council and administered by Dublin City Libraries. Nominations are made by libraries around the world.

Daaimah Mubashshir, photo by Maya Sharpe

Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright in residence, was one of six winners of a 2021 Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting. Theatrical agent Helen Merrill established the fund as part of the New York Community Trust to help playwrights pursue their talents with less financial pressure. Since 1999, the fund has made 98 awards totaling $2.14 million. Mubashshir’s work has been commissioned by the Guthrie Theater and 3 Hole Press. Previous awards include a 2021 PlayCo Residency for Black Women Theatre Makers, 2020–22 WP Theater Lab Fellowship, 2019–22 Core Writer Fellowship (Playwrights Center), 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), MacDowell Fellowship, and Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Richard H. Davis

Laura Kunreuther

Olga Touloumi, photo by AnnAnn Puttithanasorn ’23

Two members of the Bard College faculty have won National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships Award (up to $60,000) to support their scholarly humanities book projects: Richard H. Davis, professor of religion and Asian studies, for Religious Cultures of Early India, Up to 700 CE, and Laura Kunreuther, associate professor of anthropology, to support research and writing of Interpreting the Field, Translating Global Voices: On the Labor of Interpreters in U.N. Field Missions. And Olga Touloumi, assistant professor of architectural history, accepted an NEH Summer Stipend Award to support research and writing for her book project, tentatively titled The Global Interior: The United Nations and the Ordering of the World.

Kristin Lane was elected Fellow of the Society of Social and Personality Psychology, which recognizes those who have made “extraordinary, distinctive, and longstanding contributions to the science of personality and social psychology.”

For her dedication to increasing the success and visibility of women in mathematics, Associate Professor of Mathematics Lauren L. Rose was named a 2022 fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects award for Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight, a project envisioned and led by Erika Switzer, Bard College Conservatory of Music piano faculty, and Martha Guth of Ithaca College— cofounders of the art song nonprofit Sparks & Wiry Cries—along with Lucy Fitz Gibbon MM ’15, Graduate Vocal Arts Program faculty.

Sky Hopinka

Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was awarded one of four inaugural fellowships from Forge Project, a new Hudson Valley– based nonprofit that supports Indigenous communities and leaders working in the arts, food sovereignty, language revitalization, and more. Forge Project is based in Columbia County at the only house in the United States designed by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. The fellowship, which comes with a $25,000 award and housing on the 37.5-acre property, aims to provide time and space for Indigenous leaders to devote themselves to their practice.

Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu, director of the Written Arts Program, was named Catherine T. MacArthur Professor in the Humanities. Mengestu, a recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Award, is the author of three novels: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014).

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, photo by Kaet Heupel

The American Ethnological Society awarded Associate Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou- Robbins the 2021 Sharon Stephens Book Prize for Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine.

Japheth Wood, photo by AnnAnn Puttithanasorn ’23

Japheth Wood, director of quantitative literacy and continuing associate professor of mathematics, and coauthor Ben Blum-Smith, won a 2021 Paul R. Halmos–Lester R. Ford Award for expository mathematical writing in Mathematical Association of America publications for “Chords of an Ellipse, Lucas Polynomials, and Cubic Equations,” which appeared in American Mathematical Monthly. Wood was also awarded an Epsilon Award for Young Scholars Programs from the American Mathematical Society to help support the Bard Math Circle’s Creative and Analytical Math Program (CAMP).

David Ungvary, photo by Chris Kendall ’82

David Ungvary, assistant professor of classics, has been selected to receive Harvard University’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for the 2021–22 academic year. This highly competitive fellowship supports major research and publications in classical studies and will allow him to complete the manuscript for his first monograph, The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Antique Gaul (Oxford University Press).

Richard Lopez

The Association for Psychological Science has named Assistant Professor of Psychology Richard Lopez an APS Rising Star, a designation that recognizes outstanding psychological scientists whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions. Lopez is director of Bard’s Regulation of Everyday Affect, Craving, and Health (REACH) Lab.