Bardian 2007 Summer

Bardian Bard College Summer 2007

Remembering the Revolution A Continuum of Voices Bardians in Finance Commencement

this and opposite page Commencement 2007 cover 1956: Hungarians, gathered near their parliament building, read insurgent leaflets.

Introducing . . . the New Board of Governors President Walter Swett ’96 led his first meeting as president of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors on May 27, 2007, concluding Bard’s 147th Commencement and Alumni/ae Weekend Celebration. Swett, who has served on the board for eight years, most recently as vice president, was elected to his new position in March.

At Bard, Swett majored in historical studies and wrote his Senior Project on the use of social programs by Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Swett began his involvement in Democratic politics when political studies professor Shelly McConnell organized a group of students to volunteer at the 1995 Hyde Park, New York, summit between President Bill Clinton and Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Swett then obtained an internship with Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-New York).

Swett now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Rebecca Hall. He works for Representative Charles B. Rangel (D-New York) as executive director of the Rangel Campaign. The ongoing campaign was instrumental in the Democrats’ 2006 electoral successes in the U.S. House of Representatives and now works to expand the Democratic majorities. Swett’s responsibilities include strategic consulting, allocating funds to targeted races, managing Rangel’s political schedule, and coordinating all fund-raising events, direct mail, and online campaigning. Swett also serves on the Steering Committee of Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century (New York chapter) and is a participant in the Coro Leadership New York 2006–2007 program.

During his time on the Board of Governors and a stint as associate director of alumni/ae affairs (1996–98), Swett played a significant role in strengthening relationships between alumni/ae and the College. “I’m passionate about Bard because Bardians are fascinating people who do interesting things,” he says. “Bard delivers a tremendous education and I believe it’s in the interest of every alumnus/a to work to strengthen that.” He asks people to contact him at waltswett@gmail.com with their thoughts about how the Alumni/ae Association can strengthen connections between Bardians and their College.

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 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 Chairperson Ann Ho ’62 Charles Hollander ’65 Dr. John C. Honey ’39 Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71 Richard Koch ’40 Erin Law ’93, Fundraising 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, Bard Associated Research Development (B.A.R.D.) Chairperson Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Allison Radzin ’88 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56

Joan Schaffer ’75 Benedict S. Seidman ’40 Donna Shepper ’73 Barry Silkowitz ’71 George Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochairperson Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69 Andrea Stein ’92 Paul Thompson ’93 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, Diversity Committee Chairperson Sung Jee Yoo ’01

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SUMMER 2007 FEATURES 4 REMEMBERING THE REVOLUTION Bard Commemorates Its Hungarian Refugee Students of 1956 10 THE DOMINY EFFECT Dean of the College Builds Faculty and Curriculum 14 RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY Bard-Rockefeller Semester in Science Begins

28 BARDIANS IN FINANCE 30 MAKE IT NEW Students Revitalize Old Space 32 COMMENCEMENT 2007

DEPARTMENTS 42 BOOKS BY BARDIANS

16 A CONTINUUM OF VOICES The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College

46 ON AND OFF CAMPUS

20 WEST TO EAST California Students Migrate to Bard

80 FACULTY NOTES

24 WHY THE HUMAN BRAIN LIKES MUSIC A Talk by Wilmot James

54 CLASS NOTES

REMEMBERING THE REVOLUTION Bard Commemorates Its Hungarian Refugee Students of 1956

There are moments, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney has written, when hope and history rhyme. One such moment flickered fiercely into life and rippled quickly through the world on October 23, 1956, at 9:30 p.m. A crowd of more than 200,000 demonstrators in Budapest had just toppled a bronze statue of Stalin and decorated its boots, which were all that remained of it, with The events of that autumn more than half a Hungarian flags. At roughly the same time, the AVH— the Hungarian State Security Police—opened fire on century ago have inspired countless people, another crowd, this one gathered outside the Radio in Europe and around the world, who have Budapest building, killing many of the protesters. By the next morning, Soviet tanks had rolled into the city struggled against repressive political regimes, and armed citizens were raising barricades to oppose and provided a sort of distant kindling for the them. The Hungarian Revolution had begun.

“The statue’s body was dragged and beheaded in mass movements of the late 1980s and early the street,” remembers Zsolt Szilágyi, who took several 1990s that led to the ultimate collapse of the photographs of the prostrate monument the morning after. “It is difficult to characterize the mood, because Soviet Union. it was shifting from moment to moment, from elation to anger to despair. It was a fluid battle situation—no one knew what was going to happen next.”

What did happen next—a brief, euphoric victory for the freedom fighters; a second, crushingly successful onslaught by the Red Army; and the dispersal of thousands of Hungarian refugees to the West—has cast a long shadow on subsequent international politics. The events of that autumn more than half a century ago have inspired countless people, in Europe and around the world, who have struggled against repressive political regimes, and provided a sort of distant kindling for the mass movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s that led to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

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During their first winter of exile, 325 Hungarian refugee students, including Szilágyi, found a haven in Annandale-on-Hudson when Bard College took the extraordinary step of extending to them, gratis, instruction in the English language and orientation to life in the United States. The program, which ran from December 22, 1956 to February 25, 1957, was no small gesture; the students had fled almost certain imprisonment or death, and, in most cases, had arrived here indigent and with little or no ability to converse in English. At Bard, they were given not simply “the paradise of a heated room and three meals a day, with ketchup,” as one former refugee affectionately recalls it, and not simply a crash course in English vocabulary, pronunciation, and everyday conversation. Rather, they received a warm, personal welcome from President James Case and the entire College community, a show of confidence in their abilities to intellectually and materially advance themselves, and a commitment to help place them in American colleges and universities when the program ended. As Gyula Nyikos, their chief English instructor, put it, “Jim Case didn’t open the doors; he flung them open.”

Fifty winters later, in February 2007, more than 30 members of this “magnificent group” (as Case called them) were invited back to the College, along with their families, as the honored guests of a three-day conference, “The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and After: Impact and Contributions.”

Organized by the College’s Institute for International Liberal Education (IILE) and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs, the conference presented a host of distinguished speakers from Hungary and America, and panel discussions on the realities, repercussions, and historical

László Z. Bitó ’60

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significance of the revolution, as well as the contributions of Hungarian émigrés to America. There were films; a torchlight procession in the snow, which echoed a similar procession on the final night of the program in 1956; a piano recital by Malcolm Bilson ’57, who was a student teacher to the refugees; and a rousing performance of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Op. 84—the unofficial anthem of the uprising—by the American Symphony Orchestra, with Bard President Leon Botstein at the podium. But the animating force of the conference was the presence of the returning students themselves. Their moral authority, as people who braved all to liberate their nation and then risked all to start over in a strange land, provided the spiritual touchstone for the symposia and other events.

“They are so dignified, so passionate, and it was so moving to be in their presence as they relived, to an extent, their feelings in 1956,” said IILE director Susan Gillespie. “I felt I learned something really important about that moment of revolutionary change, optimism, unity—something wholly creative, free, energized, and joyful. These were clearly some of the natural leaders of their generation, the flower of Hungarian youth of the era. It was great to be able to help them come back together—I started feeling this the moment that we began to be in touch with them directly.”

Silver-haired and bundled against the cold, yet for the most part robust and vibrant, they came from as close by as Westchester County and as far away as California and Texas. They came to bear witness to their revolutionary youth; to reflect on the larger meanings of their historical moment; and to share stories of their brief, but memorable tenure at the small college that embraced them in their hour of need. They were proud, eloquent, and emotional.

“One cannot understand history without emotions,” said László Z. Bitó, chairman of the conference’s organizing committee and a refugee student who graduated from Bard in 1960. “As long as historians keep a cool head, they will never understand what happened in 1956. It was three days of adrenaline high and fever dreams.”

A measure of that emotion was evident in Szilágyi’s on-the-spot photographs of exultant demonstrators and battles in the streets of Budapest, which were on display in the Olin Hall atrium throughout the conference. Szilágyi, who arrived in the United States with only his photos and “a piece of Stalin’s boot,” found himself at Bard College in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve. His personal odyssey— from war, flight, and dislocation to high academic achievement and professional success—is typical to the Hungarian “Class of ’57.”

2007: Preparing for the Torchlight Procession

In Hungary, Szilágyi and some friends had held up a district police station with rifles and taken the machine guns. Later, after the Soviets had brutally subdued the uprising, house-to-house searches were conducted, and Szilágyi tried to leave the country. Captured, he escaped, and made it to Austria two days later. He contacted the U.S. Embassy, and was flown to Salzburg, thence to Munich, and finally to Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. Within weeks, he was in Annandale.

“The one thing I can tell you is that I had no fear,” says Szilágyi, of his participation in the revolution and his subsequent life on the run. “No pain, no hunger, no thirst at any given time, just a raw drive to survive.”

By the time Szilágyi left Bard in early February, he had the rudiments of a new language and the confidence to speak it. He also had slightly more possessions than when he had arrived, but nothing to carry them in. As he recalls it,

“President Case gave me his own suitcase, from a stand in his office, and then he took me to the train.” After Bard helped place him at the University of Oklahoma, Szilágyi went on to help design and build the first X-ray telescope and to pioneer the technology of digital imaging. Later, he earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts College of Optometry, and, after a 30-year career that saw him chosen as official optometrist for the 1980 Olympics, he retired this past February, a week before the reunion at Bard.

Almost to a person, Bard’s Hungarian students of 1956 have made remarkable contributions to science, statecraft, scholarship, medicine, and the arts. Béla Lipták, who had been one of the architects of the 16 Points, a document that defined the revolution’s goals, has since published 26 technical books and is currently working on another revolutionary project, the development of solar-hydrogen technology.

Charles Legéndy obtained a doctorate in physics from

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Cornell University; he was one of the first scientists to do significant work with helicon plasma sources, which now have applications in nuclear fusion, space propulsion, and the manufacture of computer chips. Karl Verebey became the chief toxicologist for the City of New York; Ferenc Novák was for many years the manager of office automation systems at the Port Authority of New York and New

Many consider those eight weeks in 1956–57 to have been the College’s “finest hour”; it was certainly a bold, unequivocal response to a desperate situation and has taken on an even greater luster with the passage of years.

Jersey; Bitó, Professor Emeritus of Ocular Physiology at Columbia University and the recipient of an honorary degree from Bard in May, was instrumental in the development of Xalatan, a drug used to combat the effects of glaucoma—and the list goes on.

These former refugees have greatly enriched the society that took them in and more than repaid the trust that Bard placed in them. Yet a constant and recurring theme of the conference was each generation’s “giving back” to the next one. As noted by Dr. Thomas Kerenyi, one of the speakers invited to address the returnees, it is imperative to forge “a chain of goodwill” to “extend a helping hand generously” to those who follow. Kerenyi, an associate clinical professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, is himself a sterling example of such generosity; he established a research fellowship for young Hungarian obstetricians at Mount Sinai Hospital, and he serves on the American committee of the Rosztoczy Foundation, which offers scholarships to Hungarian students to pursue their education in the United States.

Nor does one need to be affiliated with a large foundation in order to pass the torch. Eszter Jankovics, a refugee student who described herself as simply a “good gal,” takes no fee for teaching English to Hispanic students at the Livingston, New Jersey, library. A survivor of breast cancer, she is also helping to provide drugs for its treatment to people in Hungary who need them, but have a hard time obtaining them.

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Many consider those eight weeks in 1956–57 to have been the College’s “finest hour”; it was certainly a bold, unequivocal response to a desperate situation and has taken on an even greater luster with the passage of years. But as Jonathan Becker, Bard’s dean of international studies, noted at the conference, “it is worth understanding that it was part of an institutional commitment to welcoming refugee students and faculty that continues today.” That welcome had been extended to refugee intellectuals from Europe who had fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, and it remains in place for students from Asia, Eastern Europe, and war-torn areas of Africa as we enter the third millennium. Bard also continues to maintain a relationship with Hungarian students through its study-abroad program at Central European University in Budapest.

On the final day of the conference, the aging revolutionaries, smiling and singing, gathered for a group portrait on the steps of Olin Hall (see facing page). Then they strolled along Stone Row, one of the few areas of the campus that looks pretty much the same as it did in 1956, to Ludlow, the oldest building of them all. There, a plaque commemorating their brief but unforgettable term at the College was ceremoniously unveiled, on the wall outside the president’s office. But the real surprise was hanging above the plaque: the actual scroll, hand-painted with Hungarian folk motifs, that the students had presented to their hosts on February 25, 1957, as the program drew to a close.

Drawn up by their beloved instructor Gyula Nyikos (who was too ill to attend, but was represented by his irrepressible daughter, Kathy), the scroll conferred the title of “Honorary Hungarian Rector Magnificus” on both President Case and William Frauenfelder, the program’s director, and also saluted athletic director William Asip and professor Robert Koblitz. “Last but not least,” the document drily continued, “we confer the title of ‘Honorary Hungarian College Professor’ on all Bard teachers and instructors who thought that they could teach us the English language.”

Half a century later, those teachers and instructors have had the last laugh. The Hungarian refugee students of 1956–57 have long since attained proficiency in English, and have made their adopted country a better place. At a time when U.S. policies toward immigration and foreign exchange students are, at best, ambivalent, it is instructive to recall the success of a program that is still paying dividends.

—Mikhail Horowitz

A Moving Reunion Three-hundred-and-twenty-three Hungarian refugee students participated in Bard College’s Orientation Program of 1956–57. Of that number, organizers of last February’s reunion and conference found that about a third had since died, and another third could not be located. Even so, the College was able to contact about a hundred of the program’s beneficiaries, and 27 of them were able to attend the reunion, several with their spouses and children. As reported in the New York Times, they spent the three days of the conference “bear-hugging onetime classmates, visiting dormitories where they had roomed, reminiscing about that strange interlude with a tart Mitteleuropean humor,” and reviewing “some lessons that the United States needs to remind itself of in a post-9/11 world.”

The 27 returnees were Tamás Bartha, László Bitó ’60, Veronika Ferenczy, László Hámos, Frank J. Holly, Sándor

Holly, Esther Jankovics, László Jurak, Józef Kercso˝, Zoltán Kerekes, Tamás Kertesz, Kornélia Keszler (Tscholl), Joseph Kovács, Louis Lázár III, Charles Legéndy, Béla Lipták, Martha Lipták, Ferenc Novák, Péter Novák, Andor PaposiJobb, Péter Spyers-Durán, Endre Száz, Zsolt Szilágyi, Imre Tamás, Tamás Tamás, Karl Verebey, and Vilnos Vincze.

Also in attendance were three Hungarian Bard alums— Nóra Kovács ’97, Zoltán Fehér ’02, and György Tóth ’02—and Kata “Kathy” Nyikos, the daughter of Gyula Nyikos, who was the principal English instructor for the 1956–57 winter program. Several times during the reunion, Kathy Nyikos said, someone would read her name tag, realize that she was Gyula’s daughter, and “hug me and say, ‘Your father gave us bread into our hands’—meaning that, by giving them language, he gave them back their personhood.”

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THE DOMINY EFFECT: DEAN OF THE COLLEGE BUILDS FACULTY AND CURRICULUM Michèle D. Dominy, the top woman on Bard College’s academic ladder, combines anthropological training and “creative strategizing” to meet the needs of the College’s multiple populations. Her job, as vice president and dean of the college, requires her to be a listener as well as a communicator, interacting with faculty, students, administrators, trustees, and parents.

Dominy arrived at Bard just over 26 years ago, as visiting assistant professor of anthropology, in the spring of 1981. She went on to become a tenured professor; in the process, she developed a penetrating knowledge of Bard. Since being named the College’s chief academic officer in 2001, she has brought her scholarly and research skills to the job. “Knowledge of anthropology gives a dean a great edge as an observer,” she says. “In the same way as an anthropologist, the dean has to immerse herself fully in the community; in this case, the college community.”

But the administrative position trumps the academic role, in Dominy’s mind: “Becoming a dean was a way to become a problem solver in ways that being a professor and an anthropologist did not allow.” However, both roles inform her decanal position—“caring for the College as an embodiment of its students and faculty.” She sees her job in a collaborative light. “You have to bridge constituencies to build consensus,” she notes. “You have to work to build alliances.”

As an architect of alliances, the dean of the college’s most important job may be that of liaison between the president and the faculty. As Dominy put it in a May 2005 faculty seminar, “The dean mediates between the good of the students, the needs of faculty, and the public good of the institution.”

As an architect of alliances, the dean of the college’s most important job may be that of liaison between the president and the faculty.

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“From a faculty perspective, Dean Dominy has helped move us forward in terms of high standards, new initiatives, and a strengthened dean’s staff,” says Professor of Mathematics Ethan Bloch, who has worked closely with Dominy in his role as chair of the Faculty Executive Committee. “She has worked with us to clarify faculty policy and she has maintained a balance, not always easy, between empowering the faculty, which often engages in slow and deliberative decision making, and attending to the more urgent nature of administrative work. She has provided the faculty a great deal of support; and when she has to say ‘no’ to the faculty, as any dean will at times, she does so in a respectful and concerned way.”

Dominy also serves a key function, through faculty evaluation and by working with President Leon Botstein, in the recruitment of faculty. “This process, from my perspective, represents the future of the College,” she says during an interview in her Ludlow-Willink office. “The search committee’s role is to recommend the best person for their program; mine is to recommend the best person for the College.”

Clearly, this part of Dominy’s work requires tact as well as collaboration. She is proud of the quality of faculty recruited during her tenure as dean. Of 44 tenuretrack faculty hired, 93 percent were the College’s first or second choice for the position. More women (27) than men (17) were hired for tenure-track positions during the 2001–06 period. Asian, African American, Hispanic, and other ethnicities constitute 18 percent of the faculty, a statistic comparable to peer institutions.

“It’s about assessing that magical thing we call ‘fit,’” Dominy says. “To build a faculty is to build a curriculum.”

In overseeing curriculum, Dominy has spearheaded the Center for Faculty and Curricular Development (overseen by Deirdre d’Albertis, associate professor of English). The center emphasizes pedagogy and assists all members of the faculty, from newly graduated teachers to experienced tenured professors. It does so by offering workshops, featuring topics that range from how to publish one’s first manuscript to ideas for generating discussion in small seminar groups. Dominy credits Joan Retallack, director of the Workshop in Language and Thinking (L&T) and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, as well as d’Albertis and John Pruitt, longtime directors of Bard’s First-Year Seminar, with refining teaching techniques that smooth students’ transitions from L&T to FirstYear Seminar. Dominy also is proud of “positive changes” to the Office of Career Development, under April Kinser’s direction, and the Bard Academic Resources Center (BARC), overseen by Dean of Studies Celia Bland. Both offices have expanded their services, and BARC has focused on enhancing the use of technology in the classroom.

Dominy joins Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, the College’s executive vice president, in monitoring the academic affairs budget. “Especially at a time when external funding is scarce, we have been fairly successful in tapping into resources,” Dominy says.

She notes in particular the College’s receipt of two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants—for faculty development and to stimulate student life in the residence halls—and several other grants, including one from the Teagle Foundation to assess the first-year experience, Moderation, and Senior Project; and one from the National Study of Liberal Arts Education, sponsored by Wabash College’s Center of

“To build a faculty is to build a curriculum.”

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Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, that tracks students through six years. Bard is one of “a very select few” colleges chosen for the latter grant, Dominy says, adding, “The primary challenges for liberal arts colleges are financial survival and the recruitment of talent and diversity in a very competitive marketplace.”

Where does a person capable of meeting such challenges come from? Dominy was born in Nottingham, England; her parents were English, and her father, a mechanical engineer, grew up in Darjeeling, India, where his father managed a tea plantation. The family came to the United States when Dominy was 10, and settled in Schenectady, where her father had landed a job with the American Locomotive Company. “They didn’t plan to stay,” Dominy recalls. “It was supposed to be a twoyear adventure.”

Her dual loves while growing up were science and literature. At Bryn Mawr she majored in anthropology when she decided that it enabled her “to form a deeper connection” between science and the humanities. “Even my interest in literature is an anthropological interest,” she says. “Anthropology made sense of my own cultural dislocation and of my parents as immigrants.” As a result, she was drawn to fieldwork in New Zealand and Australia, to document the expatriate experience in those countries. School for her provided a sense of belonging and possibility, which presaged her proclivity toward small, liberal arts colleges, as both a student and an academic.

“The way I work as an administrator comes not only from the academy but, perhaps surprisingly, from long-term fieldwork on high-country sheep stations in New Zealand,” she says. “Caring about cultural preservation and innovation shapes my agenda as a dean, just as it does my research.”

“The College is extraordinarily proud of Dean Dominy’s achievements as a dean,” says Botstein. “The College is also extremely proud of her achievements as scholar and anthropologist. It was a stroke of good fortune that she came to teach here, became a leader in the faculty, then joined the administration.”

Dominy recently completed a six-year term on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist, and a term on the board of the American Conference of Academic Deans. She also is active in a network of Northeast deans (comprising the chief academic officers from highly selective liberal arts colleges from Maine to Pennsylvania), which meets once yearly, this year at Bard; and the Annapolis Group, consisting of presidents and deans of 97 independent liberal arts institutions, which meets annually in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss higher education issues of common concern. Dominy is equally committed to preserving the College’s affiliations with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and as well as the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. In fact, Bard was profiled as putting principles into practice in College Learning for the New Global Century: A Report from the National Leadership Council for LEAP (2007).

Dominy views the College’s future as an experiment to forge the same kind of synthesis that she has achieved between her teaching, research, and deanship: “We pride ourselves on creating intellectually curious and independent-minded students.”

The emphasis on strengthening intellectual outreach through expanded science education, as well as international initiatives, is also part of Bard’s future, and a part of the dean’s job she relishes. “My goal is to help fulfill the College’s aspirations for the future,” Dominy says.

—Cynthia Werthamer

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(Left to right) Alanna Costelloe-Kuehn, Noah McKenna, and Viktoryia Pavlenkovich

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY Bard-Rockefeller Semester in Science Begins An opportunity to do laboratory research at a premier biomedical facility in New York City drew three juniors to the first Bard-Rockefeller Semester in Science (BRSS).

Bard College’s ongoing partnership with the internationally respected Rockefeller University has been augmented to offer BRSS, a one-semester program designed for advanced science students, particularly those in the fields of neuroscience, biochemistry, molecular biology, developmental biology, biophysics, and genetics. In addition to working in the laboratory with Rockefeller University faculty, BRSS students take specially designed courses there and in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program.

Attending BRSS last semester were Alanna Costelloe-Kuehn of East Greenbush, New York; Noah McKenna of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts; and Viktoryia Pavlenkovich of Mogilev, Belarus. All of them are concentrating in biology. They lived in Bard Hall, a Manhattan residence and classroom facility that is home base to BGIA.

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Costelloe-Kuehn worked in the neurobiology and behavior laboratory of Rockefeller Professor Donald W. Pfaff. She assisted with research studying neurons thought to be in charge of the “general arousal” to stimuli that is necessary before any motor or emotional reaction can be activated. She took part in a project that sought to identify the “master cells” in the lower brain stem. “These neurons are thought to be responsible for general arousal and are uniquely connected to both the midbrain and the spinal cord,” she explained. By injecting dyes into both of these regions, researchers can identify the master cells by their double labeling. Working with mice and rats, CostelloeKuehn performed the surgeries necessary for the dye injection and two weeks later dissected brains and spinal cords, looking for double-labeled cells in the brain.

McKenna’s research took place in the sensory neuroscience laboratory of James Hudspeth, who is F. M. Kirby Professor at Rockefeller and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. McKenna participated in a project studying the details of the hair cells in the human inner ear. When these cells die—from loud sound or with age— hearing is lost. McKenna’s part of the research sought to learn what causes stem cells to form new hair cells. “Does the signal come from the hair cell or the stem cell?” said McKenna. “If we can figure out the exact signal, then one day we might be able to reactivate the hair cells in human ears and restore hearing.”

Pavlenkovich worked in the neurogenics and behavior laboratory of Leslie Vosshall, who is Chemers Family Associate Professor at Rockefeller. Using fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) as a model, researchers are seeking to determine how different olfactory systems interact, in order to recognize and detect a large number of structurally distinct odor molecules. Researchers had generated a transgenic line of flies that could not detect odors, with the goal of observing the survival rate of transgenic flies and “wild” flies sharing a scarce food source. The researchers were considering “rescuing” one olfactory neuron at a time and in that way observing the survival rate.

At BGIA, the three students took Issues in Global Public Health. Left to her own devices, Pavlenkovich might have chosen a course closer to her biology concentration, but she discovered that Issues in Global Public Health broadened her horizons in an exciting way. For CostelloeKuehn and McKenna, the course was crucial. “If I weren’t in New York City this semester, I would probably commute here once a week for this class,” said Costelloe-Kuehn. “It’s a unique opportunity to learn from women who are working

internationally in public health fields.” McKenna, who found the required reading especially thought provoking, said the course complemented a career goal: “I love research for a number reasons, but I can see myself doing research only if it has the potential to save lives or abate suffering.”

Otherwise, he said, he sees himself going into medicine or civil engineering, “establishing sustainable public health systems.”

McKenna and Costelloe-Kuehn enjoyed their new “campus” of New York City. “My favorite things have been the cheap eats, great neighborhoods, and great jazz,” said McKenna. Costelloe-Kuehn attended lectures, concerts, and films at Rockefeller. Walking daily across Manhattan between Rockefeller and Bard Hall, she took different routes and discovered new territory. Pavlenkovich, saying she wasn’t a “city girl,” admitted to missing Annandale.

Having come to BRSS to participate in professional research, the Bardians made the significant discovery of how demanding it can be. McKenna and Pavlenkovich each

“You can study biology in college and learn a lot of theory, but until you actually experience biology research, you don’t know quite what it is.”

spent 35 hours a week in their laboratories, in addition to classes and assignments. “Research takes a huge amount of time,” said McKenna, “but in order to get anything done that I can be proud of, I have to put in the hours.”

“The lifestyle here at Rockefeller gives me a clue as to what it would be like to be a graduate student,” said Pavlenkovich, whose long-term goal is to earn a Ph.D. in molecular biology. “You can study biology in college and learn a lot of theory, but until you actually experience biology research, you don’t know quite what it is.”

Costelloe-Kuehn also valued the chance to work with professional research scientists. “As a student, I appreciate the teaching strengths of the Bard faculty,” she said, “but seeing the world I would enter if I went into research as a career is also an important experience.”

With its laboratory research and graduate school–level responsibilities, BRSS demonstrates once again Bard’s confidence in its undergraduates’ success within demanding educational situations.

—Debby Mayer

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A CONTINUUM OF VOICES The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College Upon first arriving at Bard, Anthony Hecht ’44 was introduced to the world of poetry—a world that would later value him as one of its own. As an undergraduate, he read the works of Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and others. The result, says Hecht’s widow, Helen: “He determined then to devote his life to writing poetry.”

Hecht’s family has chosen to commemorate the poet by endowing The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College. President Leon Botstein has said of the biennial series, “It is a great honor that Anthony Hecht chose Bard as his home, both as a student and a faculty member [1952–55 and 1962–66], and we are delighted to recognize his extraordinary achievements through this important new lecture series.” Yale University Press will publish the lectures.

The series takes as its model Harvard’s Norton Lectures. The latter’s roster has included archaeologists, diplomats, writers, historians, musicians, architects, visual artists, philosophers, mathematicians, and theologians. The Bard lectures will reflect Hecht’s own panoramic interests. “The series will have a broad aim,” says Helen Hecht. “Tony was enormously scholarly, in addition to his poetic gift. His own work reflected his delight in, and knowledge of, all the arts. I wanted to do something that would have given Tony pleasure and would advance scholarship.”

The selection of literary scholar Christopher Ricks as the initiating lecturer was apt. In a 1979 New York Times review, Ricks wrote, “In its clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness, Anthony Hecht’s poetry goes from strength to strength. ‘The Venetian Vespers’ is at once an intense corroboration and an ample extension of his subtle, supple talents.” Hecht, in turn, showed his admiration by dedicating Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry to Ricks.

Ricks, whom Botstein introduced at the start of the series as someone who “has written so much and so well and has won awards for the excellence of his teaching,” is British born and Above: Christopher Ricks Oxford educated. He is William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor Opposite page: Anthony Hecht (1923–2004)

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of the Humanities at Boston University; founder and codirector of the Editorial Institute at Boston University; and professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. He is esteemed for his examination of the works of Milton, Sterne, Keats, Eliot, Tennyson, Housman, Beckett, and the Brownings, and has (controversially) championed Bob Dylan’s songwriting.

Ricks was in residence at Bard from March 5 through 16, held office hours, visited several classes, and delivered three on-campus Hecht-series lectures (a fourth took place at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y). Titled “True Friendship,” the lectures focused, variously, on interrelationships in the works of Geoffrey Hill, Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Hecht, and others. After opening the first lecture by saying, “It is an honor to join you in honoring Anthony Hecht,” Ricks brought his kinetic intelligence and encyclopedic

“It took Tony a long time to be able to deal with the war,” says his widow. “He began to write about it in the 1960s. It was a case of [in Wordsworth’s phrase] ‘emotion recollected in tranquility.’” Although the war left him with turbulent memories, Hecht’s poems employ a language noble in its poise. But the sense of vulnerability remained, even in his elegantly lyrical love poems. “Mortality is strong in his work,” Helen Hecht says. Her sentence, with the word mortality excised and replaced with morality, would be equally befitting.

In his lifetime, Hecht wrote seven books of poetry, several books of criticism, and myriad essays, forewords, prefaces, and translations. A partial list of awards he garnered includes the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Bollingen Prize for Poetry, Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale Award for lifetime achievement in poetry, Wallace Stevens Award,

The war’s dehumanizing cruelties scorched Hecht’s soul.

He rejected the idea of military glory, saying of his infantryman experiences, “The contemplation of horror is not edifying.”

grasp of literature to bear on the task of guiding listeners through selected texts, paying particular attention to allusions (through which, he says, writers “call into play” one another’s work) and the notion that “opposition” is often a measure of friendship. In discussing opposition, he spoke of Hill, who both denigrates and expresses gratitude toward Eliot. Such instances—in which writers navigate the influence of other writers—impel creativity and reinforce poetic community, or (as Ricks put it in a Bardian interview) exemplify “how one poem begets another.” In addition to hearing audiotapes of noted poets reading from their own texts, attendees received printouts of relevant works, a courtesy that facilitated cross-referencing.

Hecht’s undergraduate years were, to use Helen Hecht’s word, “idyllic”—albeit truncated. Although he received his B.A. in 1944, Hecht left the campus in 1943, having been drafted into World War II, where he experienced battles that were as internally tormenting as they were externally bloody. He was, for example, present at the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The war’s dehumanizing cruelties scorched Hecht’s soul. He rejected the idea of military glory, saying of his infantryman experiences, “The contemplation of horror is not edifying.”

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Robert Frost Medal, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, National Medal of Arts, and many fellowships and honorary doctorates (including one from Bard). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and served as what is now termed Poet Laureate.

He was also a teacher. “He read with incisive intelligence and appreciation, and brought a sense of discovery and excitement to his teaching,” says Helen Hecht. “His generosity of spirit is reflected in the enormous interest he took in his students and in the young poets who came to him for guidance. He always felt indebted to older poets who had helped him—Auden, Ransom, Tate—and chose to repay those kindnesses by helping younger people, unstintingly. In Tony, there was never envy. He was happy to come across excellence.”

In continuing their namesake’s generosity, the Anthony Hecht Lectures will do more than honor the memory of the man whose ashes are buried in the Bard cemetery; they will encourage other inspired voices.

—René Houtrides

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WEST TO EAST California Students Migrate to Bard Michael Brown ’09 graduated from Santa Monica High School, a sprawling public school with an enrollment almost twice that of Bard College. Six fellow students from his high school currently attend Bard. George Hamel ’08 went to Marin Academy, a small college preparatory high school just north of San Francisco. Five others from his former high school have joined him at Bard.

Brown, Hamel, and many of their West Coast compatriots eschewed the vast University of California (UC) system with its 209,000 students and 10 campuses located north to south from UC Davis to UC Santa Cruz, instead choosing the East Coast and Bard. What motivates these students, from high schools large and small, urban and suburban, from nearly every region of California, to travel some 3,000 miles from their sunny home state to the four seasons of New York?

Some reported being drawn to Bard by the opportunity to study with Nigerianborn writer Chinua Achebe, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature and 2000 nominee for a Nobel Prize in literature. Others cited the variety of available programs under which to study music, as well as the College’s proximity to the cultural riches of New York City.

“I looked around the UC colleges, at my parents’ request, but I really wanted a different environment,” says Brown, who is concentrating in film studies and serves as editor-in-chief of the Bard Observer. At Bard, he got exactly what he was seeking: a small, intimate setting with what he describes as “classes centered on Socratic, discussion-based lectures,” and the challenge of large, mind-opening ideas. “There is an entirely different discourse going on here,” he says. “People don’t take things for granted; they embrace ideas that are not necessarily included in the mainstream American media.”

(Facing page, left to right) (Top row) Michael Brown, George Hamel, Noah Weissman (Middle row) Sarah Frier, Ted Larson, Olga Opojevici (Bottom row) Dan McKenzie, Julius Fisher, Corrie Siegel

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Coming from a much smaller high school environment, Hamel feels that Bard has become increasingly more popular among Marin Academy seniors, “partly because the Academy is a lot like Bard and partly because I’ve told so many people about my experience here.” He applied to UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, but chose Bard for its broad spectrum of subjects and one-on-one interaction with professors—qualities that led him to the Environmental Studies Program. “You can really flourish in a small school that is also well-rounded,” says Hamel.

The trend of this west-east migration is clear in the numbers. Twenty years ago, Californians comprised 4.5 percent of the Bard student body; in 2001, the number of Californians had increased to 7.8 percent of Bardians; this year, more than 10 percent—167 of 1,643—of students on campus are Californians. A similar pattern appears in other Atlantic coast colleges. Brown University, with an

“With the new science center, Bard is seen as more comprehensive in what it offers.”

undergraduate enrollment of 5,903, reports that, of the 1,468 students in the class of 2010, 12 percent come from California. The same is true among other highly selective small colleges in the Northeast and North Central regions: students from California account for 11.5 percent of the current student body at Hampshire College, 10.6 percent at Vassar, 13.4 percent at Sarah Lawrence, and 10.4 percent at Oberlin.

Bonnie Marcus ’71, Bard’s senior associate director of admission, has several theories about the “West Coast to East Coast” phenomenon. “The UC system, which used to be the single biggest draw for California high school students, is very, very crowded,” says Marcus. “What’s more, from what I’m hearing in recruiting interviews, those who do enroll at UC schools are having a tough time graduating in four years. Due to overcrowding, it’s hard for UC students to get into the classes they need in order to graduate.” All of this means that more and more California high school students who have the wherewithal to do so are looking at private colleges—and they’re looking east. As for the College: “Bard’s reputation is growing in leaps and bounds,” says Marcus.

Noah Weissman ’09, who attended Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood, has his own theory about the

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California-Bard attraction. “I believe I’m getting a better education than my friends, most of whom are going to large schools, and that includes my brother who’s at an Ivy League school,” says Weissman. He adds that it’s not just the arts that attract students to the Annandale campus, but the arts and sciences. “With the new science center, Bard is seen as more comprehensive in what it offers, says Weissman, who plays stopper for Bard’s soccer team and is moderating in two programs, History and Film and Electronic Arts.

“At Bard, I didn’t have to limit myself to just one field of study,” he says.

Bard’s outreach activities have contributed substantially to the accelerating influx of Californians, according to Greg Armbruster, Bard’s associate director of admission.

“A lot of it is the fruit of the Admission Office team’s recruiting work there over the past 15 or 20 years. Each fall we do two days each in the San Francisco Bay Area and in greater Los Angeles, meeting with high school students and guidance counselors in schools large and small, and we go back in early January and conduct interviews. As a result, more and more California high school seniors learn about Bard, apply, and enroll,” says Armbruster.

Sara Frier ’09, who attended Santa Monica High School with Michael Brown, was raised with the idea that she would go to a UC school. “My mother went to UCLA, but in choosing a college, my biggest desire was not to be just another ID number,” says Frier. Still, she was as torn between big public and small private as she was between West Coast and East Coast. “I even paid two deposits, one to Bard and one to UC Santa Barbara.” The tipping point came when she attended a presentation at her school by Janet Stetson ’81, associate director of admission at Bard. “I was very taken with Bard’s story,” says Frier.

Word of mouth—through teachers, college counselors, and the ever-active student grapevine—cannot be underestimated as a highly effective means of recruiting students.

“Bard students from California stay in contact with their friends at home, and word gets back,” says Armbruster.

“I definitely put Bard on the map at my school,” says Ted Larson ’07, a graduate of Long Beach Polytechnic High School, and the first from his school to attend Bard. He chose Bard (over Oberlin, Wesleyan, and Sarah Lawrence) for its strong music program in which nonmusic students can participate. A history student, Larson’s Senior Project explores the relationship between scientific innovation and intellectual oppression in the 17th century. And, he plays the cello. “I’ve taken private lessons and played in the [Bard College] orchestra every semester,” says Larson.

After talking extensively to friends who were at Bard, Olga Opojevici ’09, a psychology student from Newport Beach, decided that Bard was “the perfect fit.” Opojevici holds U.S.–Romanian dual citizenship, yet, in homage to her adopted state, describes herself as RomanianCalifornian. “UC schools are all really good, and I love California, but I had a different picture of college in America, something more New England and ivy-covered, with cultural events and an intellectual atmosphere—like Bucharest, where I was born,” says Opojevici.

Huntington Beach native Dan McKenzie ’08 met a Bardian during a summer creative writing program at St. Andrews University, Scotland. “Because the writers in the program were as interesting as the program itself, I thought I would look into the schools they were going to,” says McKenzie. His application and acceptance to Bard soon followed. “Compared to my friends going to large

often recommended Bard to his students. “Bard is an excellent school at which to study science,” he says. The winner of a number of teaching awards, Bakunin looks to his role models at Bard. “I would like to have the dedication, determination, and caring characteristics of my physics teachers—Burt Brody, Peter Skiff, and Matthew Deady.” Today, those same professors are teaching physics to some of Bakunin’s own former students.

“Every arrow kept pointing to Bard,” says Corrie Siegel ’07, who grew up in Los Angeles. “I was seriously looking at the arts program at UCLA [where her father is on the faculty] and wasn’t even considering a school so far away from home.” But fate and a dash of serendipity pushed Siegel east. Participating in WriteGirl, a creative writing program aimed at high school girls, Siegel was paired with an older, established writer/mentor, Bardian Erin Aycock ’99. “I learned so much from Erin, including

John Bakunin ’91 teaches physics at Culver City High School, and during his eight years there, he has often recommended Bard to his students.

universities who say, ‘I have a relationship with my textbook,’ I know my professors and have a real relationship with them.”

“Californians tend to be adventurous students,” says Armbruster, a Bay Area native himself. “They attend high schools that are quite culturally diverse. They want an interesting and unusual experience, and they want to go away to college. These factors come together, and suddenly we have all these students from California who want to go to Bard.”

Julius Fisher ’07, who went to an Irvine public school with some 2,000 students, admits to having been both naïve and ready for anything when he came to Bard. “I didn’t know what New York was going to be like, but I did expect change, and something different,” says Fisher. The first change came when he switched from the Division of Languages and Literature to Science, Mathematics, and Computing. “It’s a big jump from literature to science,” he says. Soon, he was fine-tuning his choices. “It was between biology and chemistry, and I finally went with biology,” says Fisher.

There are few better at spreading the word than Bard alumni/ae. John Bakunin ’91 teaches physics at Culver City High School, and during his eight years there, he has

how great Bard is.” Still, it wasn’t until Siegel, who was visiting family in the Annandale area, spontaneously decided to see her favorite mentor’s alma mater that the decision was made. “I had no intention of checking Bard out for myself, but once I got there, I fell in love with it and decided that I had to apply.” Once at the College, Siegel knew she was home, even becoming a Bard tour guide.

“What I saw when I first came here—and what I continue to experience today—is a community of learners, thinkers, and individuals who decided to come together to share and learn together,” says Siegel. At work on her Senior Project in the Photography Program at the time of this interview, Siegel hadn’t yet decided what she wanted to do after graduation. “L.A. is still home to me, but I feel like a large part of my life has taken place here on the East Coast and at Bard. It’s tough to think about leaving any of that behind,” she says.

If Siegel, or any of her California classmates, chooses to return home, it is certain that there is a high school student somewhere back in California who is destined to learn a great deal about Bard from a Bardian.

—Kelly Spencer and Jan Weber

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WHY THE HUMAN BRAIN LIKES MUSIC A Talk by Wilmot James “In the 19th century, Charles Darwin correctly suggested in The Descent of Man that singing precedes talking. From an evolutionary point of view, intonation and rhythm are more ‘primitive’ than words.”

This quote, drawn from a lecture by Dr. Wilmot James of the Africa Genome Education Institute (AGEI), leads to a number of questions concerning the evolution of human life: If singing predates words, why was the capacity for music kept by natural selection in the gene pool? How does man’s first experiences with music and rhythm relate to the modern human brain? James, an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in addition to his role as executive director of AGEI, explored these issues when he visited the College last fall.

James, the author/editor of 13 books, mostly recently one on South Africa’s Nobel laureates, is also chairman of the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra. He is the former executive director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and has held visiting positions at Yale University, Indiana University, and the California Institute of Technology, among others.

A summary of his Bard lecture follows.

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Cuculus solitarius, from which the word “cuckold” partly derives, is known in the bird kingdom for being a brood parasite, laying her eggs in nests prepared by other birds. My interest is in her onomatopoeic melody: Piet-myvrou. This phrase, by which the bird has become known, means “Pete-my-wife” in Afrikaans, a language spoken largely in South Africa and Namibia.

Piet-my-vrou is a striking melody of three notes equal in length: an A, followed by an A-flat or G-sharp, followed by a G-flat or F-sharp. I use “melody” rather than “song,” as melody errs on the side of something that happens.

Song, on the other hand, is deliberate, composed, variable, and suggestive of abstract, metaphorical, and anticipatory thought, suggesting human, and not bird, qualities.

We do not know what birds intend. Survival in the bird world is a very tough and demanding business. Over half of birds die within their first month of life, so only those with the smartest strategies for securing food survive. Considering this struggle for survival, we must ask what advantage melodies give to birds. Why do they sing?

According to David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing, it is “for the same reason we sing: because we can. It’s the way we have been designed to tap into the pure shapes of sound.

We celebrate this ability in our greatest tasks, defining ourselves, defending our places, calling out to the ones we love.”

I begin the story of humanity’s music with an African bird because modern Homo sapiens evolved in the environmental ecology of Africa. It is there that our brain, including the higher cognitive functions, of which music is one, first developed. Harvard entomologist Edward Wilson has talked about how our habitat sensibilities were shaped in Africa, and how research on our habitat preferences—a vista that includes water, scattered trees, a few large animals in the distance—recalls our ancestral savanna home. I think the same thing applies to natural melodies, and that the melodies of African life forms must be imprinted in the human genome.

In his book The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen convincingly documents how other varieties of hominids likely sang before they had language. Modern human beings—at most 200,000 or so years old—also likely sang before we had language. As a consequence of a genetic

bottleneck, it appears that our brain’s higher cognitive functions developed only as recently as 80,000 years ago.

The earliest evidence of human art, suggestive of abstract, metaphorical, and ordered causal thinking, are the ocherand-seashell beads of the Blombos Cave (South Africa), and they are dated at 72,000 years old.

At that time we were likely a series of lost tribes who had survived another bitter ice age, with no more than about 200 individuals in a single band. But our higher cognitive functions allowed us to make things and to hand

As the size of the human community grew, music became exponentially more important.

It became our way of sharing emotion and fostering social cohesion.

down the information about how to make things to subsequent generations. Today there are 6 billion of us, and we have come to dominate and drown out much of the natural world of music.

As the size of the human community grew, music became exponentially more important. It became our way of sharing emotion and fostering social cohesion. Music as homage to a divine being has been among its greatest social functions, from the Baptist songs of the southern United States to the call to prayer from the minarets of Islamic mosques. We also sing national anthems to embrace communities in an abstract thing called a nation or state.

Language appears to lack the emotional content to foster bonds of community beyond the individuals we personally know, which is why we sing rather than narrate national anthems.

Unlike language, music transcends culture. Says Mithen, “At the deep structures in music there are elements that are common to the human psyche, although they may not appear in the surface structures.” Language and music draw on the same physiological layers of the brain, although one is not an extension of the other, and share three modes

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of expression: they are vocal, in speech and sound; gestural, in sign language and dance; and they can be written down and therefore committed to external memory.

Each of these modes has a biological foundation in the brain. As Mithen observes, we are hardwired to like music and, therefore, to make it. But music also contributes to group survival. In his book, How Homo Became Sapiens, Peter Gärdenfors observes that the chimpanzee, our closest living relative, lives in groups of 30 to 50 individuals.

Chimps tend to spend 20 percent of the time that they are awake grooming one another, a habit that establishes and maintains social ties and cohesion in the group. Survival depends on keeping the group together and on having individual chimps cooperate when necessary.

When we have time, we also groom. There is a big grooming industry that will be with us forever, as will the billion-dollar cosmetics, beauty, clothing, fitness, and leisure

But gossip and language have their limits. While it works in the local company or college or church, language cannot embrace vast populations or appeal to the human psyche. Song can, thereby promoting social cohesion and nationhood or providing moments of spiritually powerful bonding. Again, that is why we sing, and not narrate, national anthems.

From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to sing or dance to a beat—to keep time—is a uniquely human attribute. Cicada insects can make sounds in time but it is a matter of pure instinct, tied to biological rhythm and temperature. They have no detached control over the beat and, hence, cannot vary the rhythm. Chimpanzees have been trained to participate in circus orchestras, but with miserable results. According to Gärdenfors, “The apes love beating the drums and producing sounds with the instruments, but they never learn to keep time. They cannot share the

In human groups there is both formal communication between members of the family (or clan or band or tribe) and gossip, which serves as an informal check and sanction against members of the group who misbehave. Gossip is a monitoring system to catch out the devious, the free riders, those who do not pull their weight.

industries. All of them tap into the same emotional repertoire involved in the old primate tradition. However, unlike the chimpanzee, humans spend 99 percent of their time in groups of about 150 to 200, and have done so for the better part of the 200,000 years we have been on this planet.

Keeping a group of this size together, especially the more individualistic and devious Homo sapiens, cannot be achieved by grooming. Says Gärdenfors, “One would need 40 percent of the time for grooming. This would leave too little time for other life-sustaining activities, such as sleeping and gathering food.”

Grooming, therefore, is not a successful strategy of promoting social cohesion among humans. Gossip is. In human groups there is both formal communication between members of the family (or clan or band or tribe) and gossip, which serves as an informal check and sanction against members of the group who misbehave. Gossip is a monitoring system to catch out the devious, the free riders, those who do not pull their weight.

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beat.” He concludes that the reason apes cannot keep time is the same reason they cannot aim: to keep time, the organism must accurately anticipate the time to the next beat.

Mithen writes that “music” emerged from the remnants of humming—what he calls “Hmmmmm”—after language evolved. He says: “Compositional, referential language took over the role of information exchange so completely that ‘Hmmmmm’ became a communication system almost entirely concerned with the expression of emotion and the forging of group identities, tasks at which language is relatively ineffective.” In the neuroscience of music, we could say that the genetic repertoire for language, evolving from the common ancestor “Hmmmmm,” expressed itself in one physiological network of neurons in the brain, and the genetic repertoire for song expressed itself in another.

The question for evolutionary biologists is why the genes for language and music were kept by natural selection in the gene pool. When it comes to language, the answer is obvious: it is by virtue of language that we can transmit

information about strategies to survive, including how to evade predators, find sources of food, and make tools. The reason why musical capacity has been kept in the gene pool is not so obvious.

Theoretical neurophysiologist William Calvin, of the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, suggests that the molecular biology of “Hmmmmm” is the machinery that produces and, therefore, recognizes patterns. Finding the logic of an argument, creating an appropriate analogy or pleasing harmony, or being able to guess what’s likely to happen next requires that our brains see a pattern where there appears to be none—what we call higher cognitive function.

The modern human’s cerebral cortex, where the higher functions are located, consists of millions of neurons that, for comparison’s sake, would spread out over four pages. The chimpanzee’s would cover one page, the bird’s a postage stamp. The quantum of neural networks is immensely important, as are the abstract ideas and conceptual, problem-solving versatility that they allow. Unlike chimpanzees, we can juggle things, assess many ideas, think in metaphor, and enter the imaginative realm, and we do so via language. Says Calvin, “Language is the most defining feature of human intelligence. Without syntax— the orderly arrangement of verbal ideas—we would be little more clever than a chimpanzee.”

Higher cognitive functions made abstract planning possible. And the ability to plan gave us an advantage in finding sources of food. Hunting the animals of the African savanna also required advanced planning of what are, in essence, ballistic bodily motions. Calvin explains: “As improbable as the idea initially seems, the brain’s planning of ballistic motions may have promoted language, music, and intelligence. Such movements are extremely rapid actions that, once initiated, cannot be modified. Striking a nail with a hammer is an example.”

Ballistic muscle motions require a surprising amount of complex neural planning, says Calvin, because of the range of muscles involved in hunting a fast-moving animal.

The same biological functions allowed for the development of the physiological repertoire of mouth movements that made human language and music possible. So structured language and structured music might be accidental byproducts of hunting developments.

To account for the breadth of our higher intellectual functions (syntax, planning, logic, games with rules, music), we also need to look at improvements in abstract planning facilities. Humans certainly have a passion for stringing

things together: words into sentences, notes into melodies, steps into dances, narratives into games with rules of procedure. Might stringing things together be a core facility of the brain? In A Brain for All Seasons, Calvin concludes: “The higher intellectual functions may all share some neural machinery. Maybe when you improve structured language, you get better at structured music “for free,” without having to have separate natural selection involving fourpart harmony.

Musicality is a complex, hierarchically organized affair, and we have developed a nomenclature to describe and analyze its various aspects. We talk of tuning, melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, voice, lyrics, octaves, transposition, scales, keys, modes, chords, meters, arrangement, and mix. We understand that the genre and style of music we happen to like is a matter of personality and taste, linked to subculture and generation, and also to an emotional repertoire that responds to repetition, return, resolution, downbeats and offbeats, cadence, key change, and tempo change. The emotional repertoire includes changes in heart rate and vascular tone, elevated endorphin and hormonal levels, goose bumps, shivers, and tears.

To music’s invitation we tap our feet, dance, hum, sing, whistle, and give instrumental and vocal performances.

Our facial expressions, body language, and dance expression respond readily and involuntary to it.

Songwriters and composers use devices such as appoggiatura, key changes, and cadences to affect our emotional and autonomic states. The music-induced changes take shape via numerous connections between the auditory cortex and other regions of the cortex. When we move to music, the motor and somatosensory cortices influence our emotional and autonomic states. When we watch musical videos, movies, and musical theater, information processed by the visual cortex (e.g., facial expression, dance movements, scene design, and lighting) also influences how music makes us feel.

Happiness is not a single, or a simple, state of mind. Its main components are physical pleasure, absence of negative emotion, and meaning. Pleasure is a result of dopamine in the reward system. It can be brought on by a simple sensory or sexual thrill, or by a more complex route—the sight of someone you love, perhaps. It lasts, however, only as long as the neurotransmitters continue to flow. The human brain loves music because the biochemical neurotransmitters continue to flow in response to the patterns created by music and song.

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BARDIANS IN FINANCE

Andres Finkielsztain

Three Bardians (an economist, a mathematician, and a literature major) are using their talents in three distinct areas of finance.

Andres Finkielsztain ’99 has a softly accented voice that is hard to place, perhaps because he speaks three languages fluently—Spanish, Portuguese, and English—and uses them daily in his work. Finkielsztain is vice president and global investment specialist at JPMorgan’s Latin American Group, where he manages financial portfolios for clients who each invest upward of $20 million.

A native of Argentina, Finkielsztain came to Bard already interested in finance. He concentrated in economics, interned for one summer at Soros Fund Management LLC, and continued with the firm after graduation. Beginning a financial career at a small high-profile organization is unusual. “Most people start with a major bank, then move on to a small firm or hedge fund,” Finkielsztain says.

In 2000, Soros Fund Management was reorganized, and Finkielsztain moved on. “I went to JPMorgan as an analyst,” he says, “and then I began trading in emergingmarket debt [specifically, government bonds issued by lessdeveloped countries].” About a year ago he shifted into portfolio management for JPMorgan, where a team of analysts provides him with information support. He spends

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about one week out of every six visiting clients. “I speak to clients all the time, but some would prefer not to discuss their money over the phone. The traveling works well for me; I get to see my family in Argentina.”

Brandon Weber ’97 is an associate at Ziff Brothers Investments LLC (ZBI), a private investment company. He analyzes industries and their structures, developing ways to predict their evolution and the fortunes of the companies in them.

After receiving a degree in mathematics at Bard, Weber earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, researching industrial organization and the structure of markets. He had already begun the transition from mathematics to economics during a Bard internship.

“Between my junior and senior years,” he says, “I spent the summer at the Santa Fe Institute, studying complex adaptive systems—systems in which a few individuals who behave according to simple rules combine to exhibit complex behavior.” An ecosystem, the stock market, and an ant colony are examples of complex adaptive systems.

“At Santa Fe,” says Weber, “there was a graduate program in computational economics, sponsored by Coopers & Lybrand [now PricewaterhouseCoopers]. There was a group

Brandon Weber

working to forecast sales and other market behavior in non–price competitive markets—those markets driven more by fads or fashion, such as book sales. That got me interested, so I spent three summers in graduate school working at Coopers.”

The structure of an industry comprises the level of competition and the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers, among other things. Some businesses are particularly constrained by these factors. Weber’s interest in this area led to his work at ZBI. “I focus on global commodities and industries where the industry structure drives the behavior of a company,” he says. “I’m part of a team advising a portfolio manager. I’m constantly trying to find creative approaches to analyzing these industries. Often the best innovations are simple, but you have to find the right way to look at the problem.”

When Peter McCabe ’70 graduated from Bard with a bachelor of arts in literature, he had no desire to sit behind a desk and manage money. “I worked in a boatyard for a couple of years,” he says, “and I took courses at Columbia, thinking I’d go to medical school. Then I worked for the New York Times selling advertising. One of my brothers kept insisting that I apply to Harvard’s M.B.A. program.

“I was at Harvard Business School for two years and loved it. One thing that sparked my interest was a course in agribusiness. After getting an M.B.A., I worked for a company selling wheat, corn, and soybeans to the Soviet Union,” McCabe recalls. (This was the mid 1970s, when the Soviet Union emerged as a major importer of U.S. grain.)

“After a year or so, I wanted to return to New York. I went to E. F. Hutton and spent 12 years as a commodities futures broker.” During those years, Hutton went through several acquisitions and mergers, eventually becoming part of what is now Smith Barney/Citigroup.

“In 1990 I became licensed to handle stocks and bonds and everything else,” says McCabe. “Now I use my combined experience to manage individuals’ portfolios. I use the commodities futures market to hedge the bets that I make in stocks. In the last couple of years, because of the price boom—particularly in oil—there’s been quite an advantage to having commodities experience.”

McCabe is now first vice president of private wealth management for Smith Barney. “My job is a good substitution

for all the things I wanted to do,” says McCabe. “Newspaper work attracted me because of journalists’ ability to keep learning in many diverse fields. That’s what I get to do. I’ve learned about biotechnology, the politics of Chile, the steel industries of China and Brazil, wherever my interests lead.” McCabe also takes pleasure from his job at a human level. “There is no better feeling than having clients tell me that I have alleviated their worry about paying for their kids’ college education,” he says.

McCabe remains connected to his Annandale alma mater. He was president of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association from 1989 to 1997 and has been active in the College’s mentoring program.

“I’ve been involved with Bard because I believe that, more than ever, a good liberal arts education is not only necessary, but the best way to get where you’re going,” he says.

—Lucy Hayden

Peter McCabe

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MAKE IT NEW Students Revitalize Old Space

These days, no one shoots hoops in the Old Gym. But you might catch someone shooting a video—or engaging in verbal acrobatics on stage, or working out with a hammered dulcimer, or exercising their imagination in a collaborative art project. To many on campus, the restoration of the long-neglected venue has come to symbolize the good things that can happen when Bard students and staff work together to achieve a common goal.

In its most recent incarnation, the Old Gym had been a creaky host to parties, dances, concerts, and other student events. But the gatherings it was hosting became too large to be safely accommodated, and when the building was shut down by the state fire marshal, it fell into desuetude.

Now, some four years later, thanks to a group of undergraduates committed to reclaiming it as a student space and the support of Paul Marienthal, director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program (TLS), and other Bard administrators, the Old Gym has bounced back. It has been rewired, refurbished, and revivified, and is governed now by a set of rules—including a seating capacity of 120 and a ban on alcohol and smoking—that guarantees its responsible use.

Several people had expressed the need for a student-run, multiuse arts space on campus, but the ball got rolling when Kell Condon ’06, Julie Rossman ’06, and Brel Froebe ’07, three founders of a group called the Theater Guild of Bard College, approached James Brudvig, Bard’s vice president for administration, for permission to use the Old Gym. Brudvig was amenable, and asked Marienthal and the TLS Program to act in an advisory capacity.

Acting on Marienthal’s advice, the student trio formed a steering committee drawn from undergraduates in the Dance, Theater, Studio Arts, and Film and Electronic Arts Programs.

They presented a formal proposal to the College, appending an extensive list of rules and policies, along with an application form that outlined acceptable uses for the building. The College rewarded the students’ initiative by giving John Gall, director of Buildings and Grounds (B&G), the green light to convert the Old Gym into a theater and exhibition space.

“B&G installed a state-of-the-art smoke detection system that satisfied the fire marshal,” says Marienthal. “They got the electrical contractor to wire an entire lighting system. Had shutters

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built for the windows. Removed all the old sound-baffling curtains and painted the entire space black, a huge job.

Installed pipes for a lighting grid. Basically, they turned this into a highly usable theater space.”

The students pitched in, too. Mara Barenbaum ’07 researched and ordered all the sound equipment; Maggie Carson ’07 strung thousands of feet of lighting cable. Jon Dame ’06, Alexandra Eaton ’07, and scads more chipped in their time, talent, and energy. By last fall, the Old Gym was the coolest new venue for student shows and performances on campus. Among the many highlights were a hammered dulcimer concert by Max Zbiral-Teller ’06; productions of Pippin, Oleanna, and Woyzeck; and MINE, a darkly atmospheric art installation.

“It took the form of chutes, pulleys, disgruntled miners, projections, sound installations, peepholes, caves, dioramas, and much more,” says Leah Whitman-Salkin ’06, who helped organize MINE. “The installation utilized nearly half of the Old Gym, completely transforming it into a kitsch danger-zone mine.” The immensity of the room posed a problem, but that was precisely the reason the organizers wanted to work there—they “wanted an empty slate that would provide as many opportunities as possible,” Whitman-Salkin says.

More than simply offering students an endlessly adaptable black box theater space, the Old Gym has provided them with means for learning lighting, sound installation, and other forms of stagecraft. For the production of Woyzeck, says Marienthal, “The space was divided with floor-to-ceiling paper sails [that made] extremely dramatic sweeping curves. . . . Lighting was done by lights on moving poles. A sound booth was constructed for the live musicians. It was gorgeous, first-rate visual theater.”

Best of all, the resuscitation of the Old Gym has served as a model for the allocation of other spaces for the creative play of students. By the time this article sees print, the Student Mechanic Operated Garage (SMOG) will have been up and running for several months. An ingenious makeover of a small concrete building near the soccer field, this concert venue for larger crowds was made possible by the same spirit of collaboration between students and administrative staff, and generous allocations of student funds, including a $10,000 donation from the Class of 2006.

“It was the creativity and work of a number of students that salvaged some useful life out of a tired building,” says Brudvig, of the concerted effort to reclaim the Old Gym. “They deserve all the credit. We just gave them permission.”

—Mikhail Horowitz

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ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVENTH

COMMENCEMENT Bard’s 147th Commencement saw 342 undergraduates and 137 graduate students receive their degrees. In his Commencement address, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reviewed Bard’s similarities with the city—a shared commitment to education, the arts, public service, and free expression. Bloomberg further urged the graduates—whom he hoped would be known as the “Green Generation” that turned back global warming—to seek, in a first job, something that would “teach, humble, and exhilarate.”

Honorary degrees were awarded to Bloomberg and to László Z. Bitó ’60, who arrived at Bard as a refugee from the Hungarian revolution (see page 4) and went on to careers as a researcher in ophthalmology and a novelist. Also receiving honorary degrees were Gerhard Casper, constitutional-law scholar and president emeritus of Stanford University; Barbara J. Fields, professor of history at Columbia University and author of seminal works on race; William E. Milliken, founder of Communities In Schools, the nation’s leading communitybased organization devoted to helping young people develop, stay in school, and prepare for the future; and Azar Nafisi, lecturer and visiting fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

EXCERPTS FROM NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG’S ADDRESS Let me begin by congratulating today’s graduating students. . . . I don’t think I could have ever stepped in front of a Moderation board as a sophomore or stepped in front of a Senior Project board, like you’ve done this year. I went through a list of those Senior Projects, by the way—and they’re incredibly impressive: a study of labor movements in Latin America, a report on the economics of outsourcing, literary theses, musical compositions, photo essays, and one that caught my eye: “The Elucidation of a Reversible Color-Generating Redox Reaction Involving Silver Oxide and Germanium Dioxide in a Thermachromic Sodium Borosilicate Glass.” . . . [T]he values and priorities that have been important to you at Bard are just as important to us in the Big Apple. . . . First, take our shared commitment to education. . . . [Bard is] not only bringing free college humanities courses to Americans living in poverty. . . you’ve also helped found . . . the first liberal arts college in the former Soviet Union.

In New York City, we’ve also made education our top priority—and we’re transforming a public school system that was once mired in patronage and bureaucracy into a system that gives our children the skills they need to compete and succeed. In fact, at the forefront of this historic revolution is Bard High School Early College on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which sends an amazing 95 percent of its students to college. And I’m pleased to say that in 2008, Bard is on track to open a second public school in our city. . . .

[In addition] consider our shared love of public service. Whether it’s the work Bard students have done to rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, or the Bard Prison Initiative, which is giving hundreds of inmates a renewed sense of purpose in life, you’ve demonstrated a true commitment to “giving back.” Don’t lose that passion.

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It’s perhaps the most important thing you can do with your lives—and is what led me to take on the biggest challenge—and the biggest risk—of my life: running for mayor.

Today, as someone who’s in the position to see up close the real impact of public service by millions of New Yorkers, I can tell you: every minute of service helps in more ways than you can count. . . .

Every generation of Americans has been defined by its response to the major challenges of its time. For your grandparents and the rest of the Greatest Generation, it was the threat of fascism. Your parents, who were part of the Baby Boomer Generation, fought to expand civil rights. But what about you? How are you going to be remembered? . . . I hope one day you will be known as the “Green Generation.” That’s because right now we are facing the greatest environmental challenge in the history of mankind— and unless we act soon we could wake up one morning and find ourselves living on a very different planet. . . .

No matter what the skeptics say, no matter what the odds are, you’ve got to do what you believe is right in the long run. And that’s not a bad message to end with today. I have no doubt that the amazing experiences you’ve had at Bard are going to help you achieve great things.

Barbara J. Fields, Doctor of Humane Letters

Gerhard Casper, Doctor of Laws

William E. Milliken, Doctor of Humane Letters

László Z. Bitó ’60, Doctor of Science

Azar Nafisi, Doctor of Letters

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CHARGE TO THE BARD COLLEGE GRADUATING CLASS OF 2007

by Leon Botstein Many of you know that Bard College was started as an Episcopalian institution, and the graduation was really a quasi-religious service in which the pastor, whose role I now illegitimately assume, had the last word with a sermon, the charge to the class. So, to the Class of 2007: The traditions so visible in today’s ceremony—the march, the elaborate attire, (notably, the all-too-resplendent gowns on this platform), the granting of degrees with their Latin citations—are residues of an institutional history that we celebrate with nostalgia once a year.

That institutional history extends back to the Middle Ages. Universities survived only to be reinvented in the 19th and 20th centuries, all in the context of radically divergent social and political circumstances ranging from famine to world war. Nonetheless, commencements are somewhat akin to Christmas—on its eve, and on the day itself, we suddenly feel generous and filled with good cheer, only to return the next day to our ordinary competitive and mistrustful routines. Do we actually live in a culture where the aims and power of education are truly part of our lives before and after such annual commencements?

Academic rituals are fragments, rare signs of continuity with past generations. They are preserved, in part, to lessen our sense of vulnerability, our recognition of how fragile what each of us does is, and our own fondest hopes are. Our fear of vulnerability is a reflexive response to the inexorable passage of time that brings the new, the unanticipated, the familiar—aging and death, as well as the ravages of political and economic crises and political conflict. To

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combat and resist this fear, we hold fast to tradition in colleges and universities, from the system of courses, examinations, senior theses—here we call them Senior Projects—to the organization of faculty by rank and fields of expertise, to libraries and databases, and ultimately to our annual rituals. By so doing, the academy seeks to assert a sharp dichotomy. That dichotomy places matters of lasting value, primarily the critical pursuit of knowledge and a dynamic, expanding legacy in literature, the arts, and social sciences—achievements that can be described as having withstood repeated scrutiny and, therefore, the proverbial test of time—against a perceived enemy. That enemy is fashion, passing fads, ephemeral enthusiasms, mere style.

A college and university education, when it prepares young people properly, actually equips them with instruments of resistance against the trivial and ephemeral, so that succeeding generations might preserve and conserve the best of the human imagination against destruction and oblivion. That act of conservation and memory resists our desperate need to survive by forgetting. You members of the Class of 2007 are taking leave of an institution whose central purpose is to arm your conscience with the ethical obligation to remember, against willful absentmindedness, the pursuit of the life of the mind.

Looking out at this energetic and utterly charming and delightful class, one is inspired to ask, What is it that we seek, through the years of learning in college, to fight for through our traditions of remembrance? What are the continuities we wish to protect? What are the dangers we seek to counter?

At the core of our conceit, that the journey taken by today’s graduates is of indispensable value, is the belief in the connection between education and democracy. An educated citizenry is better prepared to preserve freedom, to protect dissent, individuality, and free expression in the arts against the threat of tyranny and censorship by the state and the pressure on each of us to adapt, to compromise too far, and to conform to habits and norms propped up by public opinion, commercial popular culture, and (at times) mass hysteria.

The conventions and clichés to which we are asked to adapt, even though they are accepted by an overwhelming majority, are often based on prejudice and ignorance. Consider, for example, a recent spectacle, nearly 150 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species and decades after the discoveries of modern molecular and cell biology,

where candidates for the American presidency declared, with either pride or cynicism, their rejection of the findings of evolutionary science.

Indeed, the daunting history of modern times readily makes a mockery of the central conceit that there is a link between education and democracy, between learning and freedom. Through the end of the 19th century and the century that has recently passed, the tyranny of government and the assent by majorities to cruelty, slaughter, and prejudice against dissent and individual freedom of expression have enjoyed rare success. The architects, the leaders, and the passive followers of oppression increasingly have had the experience of a college and university education. Under fascism and communism, the authority, tradition, and continuity implied by today’s ceremony were manipulated against the very ideals that, for us, define the justifying rhetoric of this College and all nonsectarian colleges and universities.

As if to add insult to injury, the Class of 2007 is graduating at a moment when a burgeoning movement is visible, within the university, against the centrality of nonutilitarian disciplines—abstract mathematics, literature, history, the arts, and the liberal arts—in favor of preprofessional practical courses of undergraduate study.

With these enrollment trends comes a threat to the funding of scholarship and research in the pure and nonapplied sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Furthermore, the federal government, with the enthusiastic endorsement of legislators from both political parties, seeks to

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enforce a culture of conformity on our colleges and universities by advocating the imposition of standardized tests and measures, all seemingly justified by the rhetoric of socalled accountability and assessment.

The enthusiasts of conformity and uniformity are not all publicity-seeking bureaucrats and politicians. We ourselves are less than totally courageous in protecting dissent on our campuses. We concede all too readily to restrictions to free expression that are based on facile accusations cast in the form of moral outrage, the accusation of prejudice and insult directed against those who think differently.

Self-censorship, motivated by the fear of social ostracism and personal embarrassment, follows. We live in a culture in which dissent and contrariness are deemed offenses, assaults on our dignity that challenge our constructed identities and values. With puritan zeal, we defend orthodoxies whose legitimacy we accept with little scrutiny and whose rejection is met with isolation and humiliation.

All this would be of little interest were not so much at stake. The link between education and democracy, learning and freedom, may not be vindicated by history; but it is justified by hope—renewable hope in individuals within each generation—by the very possibility of human progress and invention, which are dependent on individual achievement.

Consider today’s graduates, born in the late 1980s.

They grew up without memories of the Cold War. They were young children during that brief euphoric moment of optimism about the spread of peace and freedom throughout the world after the fall of communism. Yet, as the 1990s progressed, for all the advances in science, notably in biomedical science and technologies of convenience—from the Internet, to cell phones, to iPods—as these graduates

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came of age, they witnessed a rise in religious and cultural intolerance, tyranny, greed, corruption, cynicism, terror, and war. This generation has witnessed more incidents of killings in schools and colleges than any previous generation. Despite the enormous economic prosperity and growth that has surrounded their lives, little progress has been made to alleviate radical inequality, human suffering, and the degradation of the environment.

Yet this class has shown its resistance. It has distinguished itself in public service, in schools and prisons, in New Orleans after Katrina, in research and scholarship, in the arts and letters. It, in the best of Bard’s traditions, has been fearless in its willingness to dissent and gracious in its acceptance of disagreement. Optimism and energy were undeterred as these students pursued interests and passions, both popular and obscure. The possibilities you, today’s degree candidates, have shown redeem our faith in the potential link between education and democracy.

As you rise to receive your diplomas, remember the intense faith in study and learning as the means to preserve freedom and individuality that is expressed by your fellow alumni from the prisons of New York, recipients of Bard degrees in the liberal arts. Those condemned to incarceration cherish the opportunity to engage in the traditions of critical inquiry, to dedicate themselves to the life of the mind, to the freedom of the spirit in the absence of physical liberty.

But the dangers of forgetting and adapting lie before you. The seductions of practicality and routine are genuine; for the search for comfort, ease, and privacy is no sin.

Therefore, remember this day, this evocation of your years of studying—or, as the case may be, feeling guilty about not studying quite hard enough—for learning’s sake, perhaps without regard to utility. In judging the concessions and compromises you will have to make in your daily lives, do not forget the symbols of today’s ceremony and the ideals of the College’s course of study.

To decline engagement with the world because compromise and concession are inevitable is to reject the responsibilities of citizenship. By remembering the resistant and stable traditions of education, each of you can forge a link between learning and freedom by acting independently but effectively in the world. Embrace the cause of free expression without fear. Defend the singularity of the artistic imagination and protect dissent against conformity and tyranny, in the service of individuals and our institutions of culture, our colleges, our universities, museums and libraries, and, therefore, in the service of the first among them, Bard, your alma mater. Congratulations to you all.

FIRST LOOK AT NEW SCIENCE CENTER More than 100 people—a mix of curious alumni/ae, parents, graduates, and students, and trustees back for a second look—took advantage of the opportunity to tour The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation on Saturday morning during Commencement and Reunion Weekend.

Mark Halsey, associate dean of the college and associate professor of mathematics, guided the public tour. “People were stunned at the building,” he reported. “They would just stop and stare, inside and out,” noting how the extensive, curved glass walls create an inviting space, displaying the building’s interior to passersby and bringing the outdoors to those inside. “It was heartwarming,” Halsey added, “to get such an enthusiastic response from a large group, after so much hard work”—from planning through design to building the new center.

Halsey and Robert Malone, construction project manager, gathered the group in the building’s lobby and provided an overview of the space and its functions, then led people through the building or let them wander through laboratories, classrooms, and public spaces in the first-ever public viewing of the new center.

The building is on schedule for full use in the fall semester, said Halsey, who expected an official Certificate of Occupancy in June. “We’ll take ownership in July,” he predicted, “hold a few [Workshop in] Language and Thinking sessions in August, and be ready for classes in the fall.”

Mark Your Calendars: Sunday, September 23 A Daylong Celebration of the Sciences at Bard College Workshops and other activities will take place in the laboratories and classrooms of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. A panel discussion, “Educating Future Scientists,” will feature leading experts. For more information, call 845-758-7504 or e-mail wayne@bard.edu.

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THE PRESIDENT’S DINNER Medicine, the arts, and moral commitment were all honored in the annual Bard awards given at the President’s Dinner on May 25.

Ruth Schwartz Schwab ’52, who was cited for “placing Bard, since the fall of 1948, at the center of her life and the life of her family,” received the Bard Medal, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest award. “Since her graduation,” the citation continued, “she has conducted her life with an unusual combination of sentiment, intellectual curiosity, loyalty, and ethics. . . . Bard has been the beneficiary of these virtues,” and the Bard Medal was awarded to Ruth Schwab “for mirroring to us the best of ourselves.”

Gabrielle H. Reem, M.D., and her husband, Herbert J. Kayden, M.D., shared the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science. Dr. Reem, now professor emerita and research professor at the New York University School of Medicine, conducted research on cyclosporine and purine metabolism. Dr. Kayden, who is clinical professor at the NYU School of Medicine, researched lipoproteins.

Chris Claremont ’72, who wrote the X-Men stories and created numerous other comic book heroes with minds and souls, received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Elizabeth Royte ’81, whose two books on the environment were praised for their “highly effective integration” of objective reporting and the person of the reporter, was recipient of the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service.

Cynthia Ozick, whose fiction and essays were described as conveying “the drama and comedy of the human soul and mind,” received the Mary McCarthy Award, which is given in recognition of engagement in the public sphere by an intellectual, artist, or writer.

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Chris Claremont ’72, Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters

Elizabeth Royte ’81, John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service

President Leon Botstein

Cynthia Ozick, Mary McCarthy Award

Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden, John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science

Ruth Schwartz Schwab ’52, Bard Medal

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BOOKSBYBARDIANS

Hooking Up or Holding Out: The Smart Girl’s Guide to Driving Men Crazy and/or Finding True Love

by Jamie Callan ’75 SOURCEBOOKS CASABLANCA

In this guidebook to “the new sexual revolution,” Jamie Callan provides a road map for women who want to get as much as possible from a relationship with the opposite sex. She urges women to “revolt against the system” by holding out for romance or even boycotting sex entirely (à la Lysistrada). Callan is married and lives in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Malory’s Contemporary Audience: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England

by Thomas H. Crofts ’90 D. S. BREWER

This scholarly work maintains that Sir Thomas Malory’s famous Morte Darthur (Death of Arthur) cannot be critically viewed apart from the social and political crises of its time—the mid- to late 15th century. Malory’s writing of the Arthurian epic began during the Hundred Years War and ended with the rise of Richard III; Thomas Crofts uses textual criticism and other means to investigate the work’s place in this period of social climbing and civil war.

Crofts is assistant professor of English at East Tennessee State University.

The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia

by Benjamin Dangl ’03 AK PRESS

While writing news articles from Bolivia during the upheaval of that country’s gasoline wars in 2003, Benjamin Dangl was astonished at how little attention the North American mainstream press paid to the issue. His book, documenting the clash of corporate and popular power in Bolivia, is an attempt to counter this lack of information and to connect Boliva’s struggles to others in the region. Dangl has worked as an independent journalist throughout Latin America.

Observations in an Occupied Wilderness

by Terry Falke MFA ’95 CHRONICLE BOOKS

Terry Falke’s richly textured photographs of the American Southwest place nature in juxtaposition with human (and humorous) elements. Power lines, roads, satellite dishes intrude upon landscapes; even photographs with no overt sign of civilization—such as the starkly beautiful “Bird Refuge in a Dying Sea”—carry human undertones. The book’s introduction is

by Carol McCusker, curator at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, the essay by scholar William L. Fox. A native Southwesterner, Falke lives outside Dallas.

Somewhere There’s Music

by Larry Fink DAMIANI

Larry Fink’s black-and-white photographs of musicians—in their homes, doing chores, but mostly playing music—span nearly half a century and speak to viewers about “music as the labor of a life,” in the words of George E. Panichas, professor of philosophy at Lafayette College, who wrote the accompanying essay. From members of school marching bands to world-famous jazz players, Fink lovingly records details that speak volumes: a bulging vein in a forehead during a saxophone blast; sweat on a gospel singer’s thrown-back throat. Fink is a professor of photography.

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Dusk Outside the Braille Press

by Paul Hostovsky ’81 RIVERSTONE, A PRESS FOR POETRY

Language as a physical entity, through sign language and Braille, is one of the themes of this slim book of poems by Paul Hostovsky, which won the 2006 Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Award. Even silence becomes a kind of language (“When there’s nothing to say there is still/this to say”), and communication a form of loving. Hostovsky’s other recent book, Bird in the Hand, won the 2006 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition. Hostovsky works in Boston as a staff interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf.

The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York

by Mat Johnson BLOOMSBURY

This historical account of a “Negro plot” in New York City in 1741 is portrayed with all the breathlessness and vivid detail of a whodunit novel. Mat Johnson tells the little-known tale of 16-year-old Mary Burton, a white indentured servant who divulges a monstrous (and untrue) scheme by black men to burn the city. Johnson brings the episode’s characters, locations, and events to life with irony and drama. He is assistant professor of literature.

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City

by Michael A. Lerner HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Dubbed “the noble experiment” by President Herbert Hoover, the decade-long experience of Prohibition, the constitutional amendment banning alcohol in the United States in the 1920s, was anything but. Michael Lerner examines the effects of Prohibition on New York City, which Lerner calls “the foremost battleground in the war against demon rum.” He focuses on the legislation’s hidden bigotry against minorities, and on Prohibition as a forerunner of today’s divisive social debates. Lerner is associate dean of studies at Bard High School Early College in New York City.

A Tree Lives

by Richard Lewis ’58 TOUCHSTONE CENTER PUBLICATIONS

This book for children, its text a poem by Richard Lewis and its illustrations by Noah Baen, explores the mysteries that exist within a tree. The original illustrations and text were the wellspring for the Tree of Knowing Project, workshops in which children explored the life of trees in art and writing that also are included in this volume. Lewis is founder and director of the Touchstone Center for Children, a nonprofit educational organization in New York City.

The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement

by Mark Lytle OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

The life of Rachel Carson—the world-renowned environmentalist, author, and researcher— emerges vividly in this compact volume by Mark Lytle, professor of history. In examining Carson’s influence, Lytle recounts her life and her relationship with the scientific community, both of which were difficult. He shows how much her struggle to warn of chemical pesticide abuse in Silent Spring cost Carson in personal and health terms, and how much her passion is needed in attending to today’s environment.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS | 43

Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead

by Bruce A. McClelland ’83 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Just as the vampire is a symbol of evil, the vampire slayer is seen, in Western culture, as a romantic superhero, in characters from Van Helsing in Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television. Bruce McClelland examines the history of these heroes, who often possess special powers and who are seen as acting on behalf of the entire community. He claims that the need to create killers of “the undead” comes from a complex set of social, religious, and political circumstances. McClelland is a writer, translator, and vampirologist in Gordonsville, Virginia.

Take a Nap! Change Your Life: The Scientific Plan to Make You Smarter, Healthier, More Productive

by Sara C. Mednick ’94 with Mark Ehrman WORKMAN PUBLISHING

While working on her doctorate at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, Sara Mednick helped discover that subjects who took a 60- to 90-minute daytime nap showed as much benefit as those who’d had six to eight hours of nocturnal sleep. So began her mission to move naps out of the realm of the shameful and slothful and into the light of day as a “lifesaving” technique for enhancing energy. Mednick, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, points out that napping “is woven into our DNA” and has been institutionalized in several industries.

Idylls of Semeniskiai

by Jonas Mekas, translated by Adolfas Mekas HALLELUJAH EDITIONS

These pastoral poems by Jonas Mekas, who was in the forefront of 1960s avant-garde filmmaking, were written in his native Lithuanian, but have received little attention outside the poet’s home country. This translation is by his brother Adolfas, professor emeritus of film, who notes that the translation is “as close to the original Lithuanian as it can ever be.” The translation—called “crystalline” by John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature—was complicated by the fact that Jonas Mekas often made up words for onomatopoetic effect. The poems recall the seasons, landscapes, and memories of a Lithuanian childhood.

Interregna

by John Pilson HATJE CANTZ

The forward to John Pilson’s book of black-and-white photographs consists of two sentences: “Between 1994 and 2000 I worked weekend and night shifts for an investment bank in Manhattan’s Financial District. These photographs were taken during that time.” Pilson used the time well, recording meticulously what other office workers might overlook: a grapefruit atop a computer monitor; a man’s tie neglected on a windowsill; forlorn Christmas decorations on a door. Pilson is visiting assistant professor of photography.

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The Study of World Politics, Volume 1: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges The Study of World Politics, Volume 2: Globalization and Governance

by James N. Rosenau ’48 ROUTLEDGE

This two-volume set collects 40 essays by James Rosenau, University Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The first volume focuses on theoretical challenges and their methodological implications, and vice versa; analyzes foreign policy; and examines the role of the political scientist. The second volume is connected to the first in its examination of globalization since World War II and the complexities and tensions underlying the global phenomenon.

The Nature of Photographs: A Primer

by Stephen Shore PHAIDON

What is the difference between street photography and fine art photography, and what separates picture-taking from artistic endeavor? Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, draws on his years of teaching experience to bring together a panoply of photographs, famous and found, and explain what makes them tick. The book is a tool for students, teachers, and those who want to look at, or take, photographs in a new way.

Witness Number One

by Stephen Shore JGS

This book is based on a premise: Stephen Shore took a day (October 29, 2005) on which the New York Times gave a story a six-column, front-page headline ("Cheney Aide Charged With Lying in Leak Case"). Shore then photographed a "visual time capsule" of that day and his life as he moved through it, from a CNN headline on the death of civil rights icon Rosa Parks to cars on the road seen through his windshield. The book also includes work from Shannon Ebner '93, Jamie O'Shea '03, and Laura Gail Tyler '98. Shore is Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts.

Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It Is Different, and How to Fight It

by Kenneth S. Stern ’75 AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE

Kenneth Stern begins his book by positing that anti-Semitism exists in two forms: religious and “race-based,” the latter manifestation reaching its fullest expression in Nazi Germany. These forms have emerged in new ways, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Stern examines these problems and offers possible solutions, such as diplomacy and creating a comprehensive curriculum for combating hate. Stern, an attorney, is the American Jewish Committee’s expert on anti-Semitism.

Happiness Sold Separately

by Lolly Winston ’81 WARNER BOOKS

This bittersweet novel, Lolly Winston’s second, involves corporate lawyer Elinor, her husband, Ted, and Gina, the personal trainer whom Ted is seeing on the side. The book begins with Elinor’s discovery of the affair, which occurs after Elinor and Ted give up on their infertility treatments. The plot moves, with compassion and insight, toward an attempt at reconciliation marked by personal growth and dark humor. Winston lives in Los Gatos, California.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS | 45

ONANDOFFCAMPUS

Conservatory Student Awarded Prestigious Soros Fellowship In February, Yulia Van Doren, a vocal arts student at The Bard College Conservatory of Music, learned that she had won a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

She was one of 32 recipients chosen from more than 800 applicants. The Soros program’s mission is to assist immigrants and their children in preparing for opportunities for high achievement in their various fields in the United States. Since its inception in 1997, it has given more than $23 million to fund the graduate education of 262 fellows. “We founded the Fellowship program to encourage young people with demonstrated leadership qualities, much like the Rhodes scholarships,” Paul Soros says. “Our criteria are designed to identify people who will contribute something to this country, in whatever area of endeavor they choose.” Each Soros Fellow receives, for two years, one-half of the tuition cost of their graduate study, as well as a maintenance grant of $20,000 per year.

Born in Russia, Van Doren, a soprano who is gaining attention especially for her work in Baroque music, came to the United States as a child, was homeschooled through high school, graduated from the New England Conservatory of music, and has just completed the first year of her M.M. degree program at the Bard Conservatory. Reacting to the news that she had won the prestigious fellowship, Van Doren said, “I was thrilled to learn that I am the only performing artist chosen as a Soros Fellow this year. I am very honored and grateful.”

Liberating Minds: BPI Graduates a New Class The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) held its third Commencement on February 3 at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Napanoch, New York. In an emotional ceremony, 16 men received associate in arts degrees from Bard College.

BPI director Max Kenner ’01 started the program with the goal of restoring college-in-prison opportunities. Under his

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Speaking in the Golden State President Leon Botstein traveled to California to attend an April gathering of the parents of current and recently accepted students from the West Coast.

Alumni/ae also attended the event. Botstein spoke about the College and answered questions. To ensure that northern and southern California were included, meetings were hosted in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the past two decades, the number of Bard undergraduates from California has steadily increased. For more on this, see page 20.

stewardship and that of Daniel Karpowitz, director of policy and academics, the program has expanded steadily since its 2001 start and now reaches more than 100 inmates at four facilities.

Bard President Leon Botstein gave the charge to the graduates, thanking them for all they have taught those involved with the program and for embracing the ideals of the College’s liberal arts curriculum. “You make us feel . . . the traditions of learning and inquiry . . . for their own sake, are really worthwhile in the transformation of an individual’s life.”

Also attending the ceremony was Jeffrion L. Aubry, New York State assemblyman, who received Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. Aubry, chairman of the state’s Standing Committee on Corrections, has advocated for incarcerated people and for increased public awareness of the perils of drug addiction. Barbara J. Fields, professor of history at Columbia University, delivered the Commencement address. Numerous Bard representatives (including administrators, trustees, and professors) were present, along with many of the graduates’ family and friends.

Four graduates spoke eloquently. One, Sylvan Bennett, referred to his BPI education as a “gift” and added, “through education our minds have been liberated.”

For more information, go to www.bard.edu/bpi/.

Globe-trotters: Bard’s New Watson Fellows

New Name, New Institute for Simon’s Rock

As winners of the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Gabriel Harrell ’07 and Kathryn Newman ’07 will embark on global odysseys.

“The awards are long-term investments in people, not research,” says Rosemary Macedo, executive director of the Watson Fellowship program. “We look for people likely to lead or innovate in the future and give them extraordinary independence in pursuing their interests.” Annually, only 50 Watson Fellowships are awarded nationwide. Each fellow receives a $25,000 grant for a year of independent travel and exploration outside the United States.

Harrell’s project, “Folk Puppetry: Performance and Craft in Agrarian and Religious Calendars,” will explore puppetry and the-

To better reflect the school’s mission and its affiliation with Bard, the Simon’s Rock Board of Trustees has approved an official name change to Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College. The change is expected to clarify to prospective students that the degrees granted at Simon’s Rock are Bard College degrees.

The new name is also significant in light of the fact that Simon’s Rock has raised $1 million in start-up funding and will move forward on plans for the Institute on Early College Pedagogy, a national program to support and guide educators interested in the early college movement. The Fund for the

ater troupes specializing in performances centering on agricultural and religious rites. “I will follow one strain of shadow puppetry, known in Turkish as Karagöz, from Greece through Turkey to Egypt, observing the ways in which this traditional form has been transferred across national, linguistic, religious, and cultural borders,” says Harrell. “I will then follow a style of string-and-rod puppetry from India to Myanmar [Burma]. I hope to better understand theater movements anchored within popular or once popular calendars, where theater may be viewed as a technology—as a farming instrument—structuring the passage of time.”

Newman will volunteer and cocurate at children’s museums in Melbourne, Dubai, Delhi, and Buenos Aires to research her project, “A Child’s World: The Cultural Exhibit in the Children’s Museum.” Says Newman, “The children’s museum is a place where culture develops. Culture, in this sense, is produced through children, and in children’s museums, one sees the development of a new citizen, as guided by adult values and ideas.”

Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) awarded $393,405 to Simon’s Rock in 2006 to help establish the Institute, which will be located on the school’s Great Barrington Massachusetts campus. Start-up funding came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other institutional contributions.

Central to the Institute will be the weeklong teaching seminars that Simon’s Rock began two years ago with funding from the Gates Foundation. In addition, the Institute will provide consulting services; develop a national consortium of early colleges, including an online community; and host a national conference on adolescents, accelerated learning, and excellence in education.

“Simon’s Rock is poised to lead national conversations on education reform,” says Institute director Christine Z. Somervill.

“The Institute is a demonstration project that will serve as a resource to educators and school districts interested in rethinking how best to engage the adolescent intellect.”

Bard Names Educator Lagemann to Fellowship Post Esteemed education historian Ellen Condliffe Lagemann has been appointed a Bard Center Distinguished Fellow. She will collaborate with members of the Bard community, including Bard High School Early College and Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, to develop programs for a new Bard Center for Education and Democracy, based at the Simon’s Rock campus in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

“I am thrilled to have this opportunity to work with [Bard President] Leon Botstein, [Simon’s Rock Vice President and Provost] Mary Marcy, and their distinguished colleagues . . . on urgent national problems,” said Lagemann, Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education at Harvard and former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“The Center will support research, teaching, and outreach, having to do with the meaning of democracy in public education policy and practice. Our work will focus initially on questions of leadership and the schooling of young people 14–24 years of age.”

Lagemann, who began her career as a high school social studies teacher, was a friend of Simon’s Rock founder Elizabeth Blodgett Hall. Their association, dating back to the 1960s, fostered Lagemann’s interest in educational innovation. She has written about racial inequality in public education and the politics of knowledge. The author or editor of nine books, most recently An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research, Lagemann has taught at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, Columbia University, and Teachers College. She received her B.A. at Smith College, M.A. at Teachers College, and Ph.D. at Columbia University.

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BGC Celebrates Brass This summer’s exhibition at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC) examines an often overlooked aspect of the Aesthetic Movement in America. A Brass Menagerie: Metalwork of the Aesthetic Movement contains approximately 75 pieces of brass and mixed-metal objects.

Organized and curated by Anna Tobin D’Ambrosio, curator of decorative arts at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art in Utica, New York, the exhibition is on view at the BGC from July 12 through October 14.

The Aesthetic Movement, formed Agnes Gund (left) and Alanna Heiss

A Celebration of Curatorial Excellence At a celebratory dinner, Alanna Heiss, founder and executive director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, received the 10th annual Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College.

The May 2 star-studded event, held at in New York City’s Gotham Hall, appropriately honored Heiss as a bold and groundbreaking exhibition maker who has left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape of New York City for more than thirty years.

Throughout that time, Heiss’s curatorial vision has focused on providing alternative exhibition opportunities for contemporary site-specific art, venues that traditional museums did not offer.

Agnes Gund, president emerita of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and recipient of a 1997 National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton, presented the award. Gund, who spearheaded the renovation of MoMA, is also an arts educator. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, spoke at the award ceremony, as did Brian O’Doherty, artist, writer, and media arts professional.

O’Doherty’s work (under the alias John Ireland) is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and other institutions.

Heiss was selected for the award by a panel of leading critics, curators, art experts, and Bard alumni/ae. Proceeds from the award gala support student scholarships and the student exhibition program at the Center for Curatorial Studies.

CCS Bard Shows Feelings The Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College (CCS Bard) is presenting Feelings, the first North American survey of British artist Martin Creed, whose work encompasses sculpture, video, installation, and music. Of his wide-ranging approach to creating art, Creed has said, “I try to try many things. I don’t believe enough in one thing to do just one thing.”

Creed is particularly renowned for his aggressive use of seemingly banal materials, such as sheets of paper filled in with highlighter or ballpoint pen; enormous collections of a variety of

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during the late 19th century in Europe and the United States, was a reaction to the socalled philistine tastes of the middle class.

Its advocates, including the expatriate American painter James McNeill Whistler and the Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde, espoused art for art’s sake and denied any social or moral value in art. The movement’s U.S. introduction took place at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. It remained popular through the 1880s, particularly in the decorative arts.

Most of the pioneering “art brass” manufacturers, such as the Charles Parker Company and the Bradley and Hubbard Manufacturing Company (both of which were based in Connecticut), are represented in the exhibition by numerous objects that show the range and diversity of their products: hanging shelves, tables, chandeliers, and clocks.

The exhibition is the first in-depth examination of this multifaceted aspect of the Aesthetic Movement in the United States. For more information, visit www.bgc.bard.edu. The BGC is located at 18 West 86th Street in Manhattan.

balls; or neon signs, in unlikely places, spelling out words and phrases such as “FEELINGS” and “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT.” These works appear to aim for minimalism, but evoke a broad range of potential meanings and emotional responses, from fear to empathy. Feelings, which runs at the CCS Galleries and the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art through September 16, is curated by Trevor Smith.

Following the Creed exhibition, CCS Galleries will mount a survey of work by New York artist Keith Edmier. Curated by Tom Eccles, CCS executive director, it runs from October 20, 2007, through February 3, 2008.

SEEN & HEARD FEBRUARY The semiannual Life after Bard program took place on February 6 at Kline Commons. Alumni/ae in attendance included Priya George ’97, a producer at WNYC; Paul Thompson ’91, school principal, jazz musician, and composer; David Homan ’01, an executive with the America-Israel Cultural Foundation; and John Coyne ’00, project manager at Hudson Planning Group.

Robert Capa: American Soldier Landing on Omaha Beach, D-day, June 1944, Gelatin silver print. ©Cornell Capa, Collection International Center of Photography

International Center of Photography In collaboration with Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and based in the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) Manhattan facilities, the ICP—Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies awards an M.F.A. degree in photography. ICP also maintains a museum at 1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, New York City. Gallery hours are: Tuesday to Thursday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Following is a list of upcoming exhibitions: May 11 – September 9, 2007 Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969–79 [Shore is Bard’s Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts.]

Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon Chim: The Photographs of David Seymour / Selections from George Eastman House September 21, 2007 – January 6, 2008 This is War! Robert Capa at Work Gerda Taro Magazines of the Spanish Civil War Dark is the Room Where We Sleep (Francesc Torres)

The Bard Center presented “The Mad Empress Remembers,” a recital by cellist Diane Chaplin and pianist Sharon Bjorndal, at Olin Hall on February 11.

Peter Orner, winner of the 2007 Bard Fiction Prize, read from recent work on February 12 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

On February 16 at the Fisher Center, Leon Botstein, president of the College, conducted the Bard Conservatory Chamber Orchestra in a program featuring works by Bohuslav Martinu, ˚ Dvoˇrák, and Brahms.

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program presented a talk by Joel Rosenthal, president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, on February 22 at Bard Hall in New York City. The event was part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.

Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion, gave a talk, “Prophetic Practice in Ancient Israel,” on February 23 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center. It was the first lecture in a Lenten luncheon series sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Theology (IAT).

The Da Capo Chamber Players performed works by Bard faculty, alumni/ae, and students in a Bard Center concert on February 25 at Olin Hall.

Novelist Joanna Scott, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, visited Bard on February 26 as part of the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series.

Prize-winning Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah gave a talk, “The Question of Human Rights in Africa,” on February 27 at the F. W. Olin Language Center.

“Religious Responses to Evil,” a weekly IAT lecture series by Rabbi Lawrence Troster, kicked off on February 28.

MARCH László Bitó ’60, inventor of a successful glaucoma drug and novelist, gave a talk, “Saving Sight and Gaining Insight: A Drug Is Born,” on March 1 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

Shuangshuang Liu ’09 performs with the American Symphony Orchestra. A native of Shanghai, China, Liu attends The Bard College Conservatory of Music, where she studies viola with Ira Weller, Michael Tree, and Steven Tenenbom. ©Steve J. Sherman

The American Symphony Orchestra, with music director Leon Botstein, performed works by Sir William Walton and Anton Bruckner in concerts March 2 and 3.

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John Cage Trust to Reside at Bard The John Cage Trust, created to oversee the use of the published and unpublished work of one of the 20th century’s most important composers, writers, and artists, has become a permanent resident organization at Bard College. Dr. Laura Kuhn, the executive director, will administer all of the holdings of the John Cage Trust and will be the campus’s first John Cage Professor of Performance Arts.

Trained as a pianist, John Cage (1912–92) was responsible for many radical innovations in musical composition. He formed numerous influential partnerships during his career, most notably with dancer Merce Cunningham and visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Cage was known for his interest in chance processes; the ultimate statement of this aesthetic, and probably his best-known work, is his composition 4’33”, a piece in which the performer maintains total silence while the random sounds of the world enter. Cage received many awards in his lifetime, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949. When he died, he was musical adviser for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; all of his holdings passed to Cunningham, his longtime friend and collaborator.

Says Kuhn, “We couldn’t be happier with this association. Bard’s rigorous, creative academic programs, integrative performance practices, and profound interest in and commitment to contemporary culture make it the perfect setting for the trust.”

Bard Junior Medals at National Cycling Race Katriel (Kat) Statman was philosophical about his chances going into the national collegiate bicycle races in Angel Fire, New Mexico, last October. In only his second year of racing, with no experience riding at elevations of 8,000-plus feet, and competing in a field that included both Division I and II schools, the philosophy major from Meadville, Pennsylvania, hoped, at best, to break the top 10. Instead, he finished third, and in a faster time than half of the pro- and semipro racers who competed on the same course. “We had two 9.5-mile laps that started at 8,000 feet and climbed to 11,000, for a total of 6,000 feet of vertical ascent in two hours,” Statman said. “I kept chugging along with the eventual winner, who was from Colorado, but his lungs were superior to mine in dealing with the lack of oxygen. Still, for an East Coast boy, it was quite a feat.”

A charter member of Bard’s Cycling Club, Statman earned the invitation to the MTB Nationals by finishing in the top 10 in all but one of his seven Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference (ECCC) races. Getting to New Mexico was a bit trickier, but he raised $300 from a bake sale, a rummage sale, and contributions from the Bard community to cover some expenses. Thanks in part to Statman’s success, Bard’s Department of Athletics and Recreation has made cycling an official club sport, replete with a budget that will allow more members to compete in future ECCC races. In addition, with the help of alumni Daniel Tieger ’75, the club has forged new sponsorships from local businesses and made plans for a variety of events on campus to promote cycling.

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Collegial Scrum The Commencement weekend alumni-student men’s rugby game, played the day before graduation, inspires ruggers to travel from near and far to battle it out amicably on the field. Brian Wolf ’05, who concentrated in music at Bard, journeys from New Zealand to attend Commencement, play in the rugby game, meet the undergraduates, and visit with his former professors.

The game tradition, begun in 2000, provides yet another venue through which Bardians, past and present, can meet. This year’s cocaptain and club president Bill Ardito ’07 says, “It’s great to talk after the game and learn where the alumni live and work.”

Ardito, a physics major in Bard’s Science, Technology, and Society Program, is planning to pursue an engineering career in the New York area and will call on local rugby alumni to help him navigate his new surroundings.

Andrew Corrigan ’00, the club’s alumni coordinator, studied classics at Bard and is now a chef at a French restaurant in Manhattan’s chic meatpacking district. He says, of the friendly competition, “The current guys learn from the more experienced players. And, the networking potential is very strong.”

All the players are proud of being, as Ardito puts it, “a thinking-man’s rugby team.” Literature major David Tramonte ’04, now a Los Angeles–based television producer for FOX Sports, concurs, saying, “We’re a bunch of guys who majored in poetry and creative writing, but we hold our own on the field.”

Rugby is a popular club sport on campus. For more information, contact Bard’s Department of Athletics and Recreation at 845-758-6822, extension 6811.

Anthropologist and Sudan Expert John Ryle Joins Bard

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami visited the College on March 4 for a screening, discussion, and interview with film

John Ryle, filmmaker, writer, and chair of the Rift Valley Institute (RVI), an action-oriented research and educational organization focused on Kenya and Sudan, joins Bard as the Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology. He will teach at the Annandale campus each spring (through 2011) and split the remaining months between London and East Africa, continuing his work on, among other projects, the Sudan Open Archive, a digital database of historical and contemporary documents about Sudan, including the recent atrocities in Darfur.

“I’m excited to be part of a growing African and Africanist

historian Scott MacDonald. Several of his films, including Through the Olive Trees and Five: Dedicated to Ozu, were shown at the Avery Arts Center in conjunction with the event.

presence on campus,” says Ryle, who has already established a U.S. office for RVI at Bard, where several students are assisting with the archive and in organizing events. “I hope that the Rift Valley Institute will act as a bridge between Bard and East Africa, linking the Hudson Valley to the Great Rift Valley, where human life began.”

A member of the U.S. State Department–sponsored International Eminent Persons Group reporting on abduction and slavery in Sudan (2002), Ryle is anthropology and Africa editor for The Times Literary Supplement in London; author of Warriors of the White Nile, an ethnography of the Agar Dinka of southern Sudan; and codirector of The Price of Survival, a documentary about the effects of civil war on the Nuer of the Upper Nile region. He has written about the Sudan, child soldiers, and land mines in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Granta.

The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, in cooperation with The Bard Center, presented “Fight Night at the Opera,” a program featuring Bizet’s Carmen on March 9.

Wanjiku Ng’ang’a, a visiting Fulbright scholar at Bard, delivered a luncheon lecture, “Girls, Puberty, and Education in Kenya: An African Case,” on March 10 at the Campus Center.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presented associate director Melvin Chen in recital at Olin Hall on March 11. The Conservatory also sponsored a recital by Laurie Smukler, violin, and Jeremy Denk, piano, on March 17, and a chamber concert on March 25.

Cable News Confidential author Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group FAIR and former on-air personality at MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, gave a lecture, “An Insider’s Critique of Mainstream Media,” on March 19.

Novelist Brian Evenson, author of six books of fiction, including The Open Curtain, a 2006 Edgar Award finalist, read from new work at Weis Cinema on March 19.

Kenneth Anderson, professor of law at American University, gave a lecture, “Counterterrorism in the Next Administration,” on March 20.

Class of 2007 Exemplifies Conscientious Giving Careful consideration was put into this year’s graduating class gift to Bard. “Many students expressed concerns about school endowments, about whether or not they were invested in socially responsible funds,” says Ethan Porter ’07, head of the senior class committee.

“We are creating an endowment that does not invest in oil or conservative media interests. Future alumni/ae can also donate and know their money will be invested in good causes.” This socially conscious fund, which currently stands at $15,000, comprises the first half of the Class of 2007’s two-part gift.

The second part consists of a fund to create a College political union that will bring several eminent speakers to campus each semester. The speakers will present arguments about controversial topics and will then engage students in debate. “The union will improve day-to-day student life on campus,” says Porter. “It will hone student debate and public speaking skills and offer students opportunities for discourse with notable figures on contentious issues.”

Porter and the committee began to work on forming the political union in September 2006. They are making a long-term commitment and will continue fund-raising for the gift even after graduation, if necessary. Although strong organization is required to implement the ambitious gift, the members of the Class of 2007 are convinced that it is worth the extra effort in order to significantly benefit their alma mater for years to come.

Olin Hall was the setting of a March 21 recital by acclaimed pianist Claude Frank.

Frank Morgan, Webster Atwell Class of 1921 Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, gave a presentation on soap bubbles and mathematics at the Campus Center on March 21, as part of the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series.

“HIV and International Security,” a lecture in the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, featured a conversation between Mark R. Dybul, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, and Joelle Tanguy, former U.S. executive director of Doctors without Borders. The March 22 event took place at Bard Hall in New York City.

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, and Stephen Ratcliffe, of Mills College, opened the spring John Ashbery Poetry Series. The event, sponsored by The Bard Center, was held at the Bertelsmann Campus Center on March 22. Other poets featured in the series included Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Sawako Nakayasu, and Tracie Morris.

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, hosted “Music Alive,” a March 28 program featuring students and faculty of Bard College and the Conservatory of Music.

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JULY 5 – AUGUST 19

BARDSUMMERSCAPE

Alexander von Zemlinsky: Two One-Act Operas A FLORENTINE TRAGEDY THE DWARF American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director Directed by Olivier Tambosi McDermott & McGough, set and costume designers Robert Wierzel, lighting designer

SAINT JOAN

By George Bernard Shaw Directed by Gregory Thompson Ellen Cairns, set and costume designer Judith Greenwood, lighting designer

theater two July 12–14 and 19–21 at 8 pm July 15 and 22 at 3 pm

FILM FESTIVAL: BRITISH POSTWAR CLASSICS

sosnoff theater

July 8, 12, 15, 19, 22, 26, 29; August 2, 5, 9

July 27, August 2 and 4 at 8 pm July 29, August 5 at 3 pm

SPIEGELTENT

THE SORCERER

Cabaret, Family Fare, SpiegelClub July 5 – August 19

Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan Libretto by W. S. Gilbert Conducted by James Bagwell Directed by Erica Schmidt David Korins, set designer Mattie Ullrich, costume designer David Weiner, lighting designer Sean Curran, choreographer

theater two August 3, 8, 9 at 8 pm August 5 at 7 pm August 10 at 5 pm August 4, 11, 12 at 3 pm

DOUG VARONE AND DANCERS sosnoff theater July 5, 6, 7 at 8 pm July 8 at 3 pm

BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL: ELGAR AND HIS WORLD Leon Botstein, Christopher H. Gibbs, and Robert Martin, Artistic Directors Byron Adams, Scholar in Residence 2007 August 10–12, 17–19, and October 26–27, 2007

845-758-7900 fishercenter.bard.edu

Guggenheims to Five Bardians

APRIL

Five members of the Bard community were among the 189 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 2,800 applicants for 2007 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Amie Siegel ’96, a filmmaker living in Brooklyn Two faculty members from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts: Karyn Olivier, a sculptor (received a fellowship for installation art); and Stephen Westfall, a painter Verlyn Klinkenborg, visiting professor of literature, for work on The Radical Essence of William Cobbett (1763–1835, politician, agriculturist, journalist)

The Bard chaplaincy hosted a weekend symposium, “Toward Open Christianity,” on April 13–15.

Bradford Morrow, professor of literature, in support of research for and the writing of his novel-in-progress, The Prague Sonatas. Morrow was also honored with the 2007 PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing Conjunctions, the literary journal he founded in 1981 and which Bard College has published since 1990.

The Guggenheim Fellowship program considers applications in 78 different fields, from the natural sciences to the creative arts.

Bard is one of 77 institutions this year that are represented by one or more Fellows.

Levy Conference Addressed Global Imbalances The Levy Economic Institute’s 16th annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, “Global Imbalances: Prospects for the U.S. and World Economies,” took place on April 19 and 20 at Bard’s Blithewood mansion, overlooking the Hudson River. The idyllic setting and weather belied the urgency of the topics, which included the growing U.S. trade deficit, the slump in the U.S. housing market, and fluctuations in world currency markets and the consequent misalignments in exchange rates.

Frederic S. Mishkin, of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, delivered the keynote address. He concluded: “I recognize that uncertainties surrounding the economic outlook have increased recently, and I remain concerned that the persistence of inflation at the recent elevated rate could have adverse consequences for economic performance. However, I continue to believe that the current stance of monetary policy is likely to foster sustainable economic expansion and a gradual ebbing in core inflation.”

Among the many other presenters were Wolfgang Munchau, associate editor, Financial Times; Peter Hooper, managing director and chief economist, Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.; Robert Z. Aliber, professor emeritus of international economics and finance, University of Chicago; and Lakshman Achuthan, managing director, Economic Cycle Research Institute.

Also at the Levy Institute, a three-day conference organized

by Economists for Peace and Security took place from May 30 to June 1. Titled “War and Poverty, Peace and Prosperity,” the event gathered policy experts from around the world.

On April 15, the Bard Center presented violist Marka Gustavsson and pianist Carmel Lowenthal in a performance of pieces by George Tsontakis, distinguished composer in residence at the College; J. S. Bach; Darius Milhaud; and Brahms.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) presented a conversation between Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout and Ian Buruma, Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, on April 17 at the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center.

The April 19 James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series lecture, “Anti-Americanism and World Politics,” featured presentations by James W. Ceaser, author of Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought, and Paola Cesarini, contributing author to the forthcoming AntiAmericanism.

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College hosted the 16th annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, “Global Imbalances: Prospects for the U.S. and World Economies,” on April 19–20.

David Shields, PEN/Revson Award winner and author of eight books, including Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season and Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, read from new work on April 23.

On April 25, the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra’s allBeethoven program, “Maestro 2 Maestro,” featured guest conductor and Bard professor emeritus Luis Garcia-Renart.

Soprano Dawn Upshaw headlined a benefit concert for The Bard College Conservatory of Music on April 27.

Mia Farrow, actress and activist, talked about the situation in Darfur on April 27, as part of a student-organized series of events aimed at stopping the genocide in Sudan.

On April 29, the Colorado Quartet performed works by Harold Farberman, director of the Conductors Institute at Bard; Robert Schumann; and Johannes Brahms.

MAY The American Symphony Orchestra performed Debussy’s La Mer and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor in weekend concerts at the Fisher Center on May 4 and 5. Bard president Leon Botstein directed.

Caleb Carr, visiting professor of history at Bard and author of The Lessons of Terror and The Alienist, was a featured speaker at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program forum, “Unknown Unknowns: Anticipating and Countering Insurgency in Iraq,” on May 10 in New York City, along with former Marine Corps captain Nathaniel Fick and Jon Lellenberg, Special Operations Bureau, U.S. Department of Defense.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 53

CLASSNOTES

SUMMER 2007 ALUMNI/AE EVENTS SPEAKING IN CLOWNS | SATURDAY, JULY 28 Gather in the Spiegeltent at Bard for dinner before Speaking in Clowns, a beautiful, genre-defying theatrical experience conceived specifically for the Spiegeltent and inspired by singer-songwriter Elliott Smith’s posthumously released album, From a Basement on the Hill.

TIME Dinner 7:00; performance 8:30 p.m.

PLACE Spiegeltent, an exquisite rotunda constructed of carved wood, canvas, and glass—the social

center of Bard SummerScape, next to the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts FEE $60, includes dinner, performance, and contribution to the Bard College Fund.

INFORMATION Tricia Fleming, alumni@bard.edu or 845-758-7089

SUMMER SOFTBALL TOURNAMENT Bard’s second Alumni/ae Softball Tournament. Everyone welcome, players and fans alike!

Bring a picnic and beverages.

TIME AND DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED PLACE McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn INFORMATION Joshua Bell ’98, bardalumnisports@yahoo.com

Save the Date!

HOLIDAY PARTY | DECEMBER 7

ALUMNI/AE SURVEY 2007 Thank you to more than 600 alumni/ae who responded to the alumni/ae survey. Your input will be invaluable in helping the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association plan future programs and activities.

ALUMNI/AE CITIES PARTIES | APRIL 2007

54

Nostalgia

by William “Bill” Dills ’37 (and shared by Mrs. Virginia Dills, December 2006)

Can you recall, old friend, Sitting there under the Lyre Tree As only seniors could.

1937, it was our last late spring At old St. Stevens/Bard.

We were the last of the Saints.

We sat there between classes In those black academic gowns Staring the length of that tree lined campus, Past Stone Row to the library.

We talked of four great years, Of Tewksbury, Obreskov, Sottery, Phalen, Frauenfelder, Davidson, Good old Trotsky, Edwards And Professor Harry’s class Chanting loudly in classic Greek.

And……………..

And the young ones whose names I have forgotten.

Those fine teachers And only a hundred of us, Two, three, five, eight students per class And a Columbia degree, no less.

I tell thee, old friend, we had it made, Our bread was buttered on both sides.

With his Brooklyn accent.

Then there was Briggsy, handyman in chief, Who taught working students How to paint the college inside and out And what a day’s work really meant.

Do you remember the fraternity band?

A bagpipe, two drums, cymbals and a fife, Leading us up from the Kap House Through the woods waving our flashlights To start the rally for tomorrow’s soccer game.

Every evening the whole school Ate dinner together in the commons.

Sometimes after dinner we sang.

Remember Jericho?

We took turns singing verses And then the whole room Would shout the chorus: “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, And the walls came a tumbling down!”

We spoke of our ancient traditions Which even then began to fade: The Boar’s Head Dinner before Christmas, The freshman burying the algebra, The spring tug of war Across the Sawkill creek.

Then there were proms: Young men in white ties or black, Girls proud in evening gowns, Lovely princesses every one, Lithesome and graceful, All swaying to the big band sound Played by real musicians, real music, Soft lights, friendly talk And a little applejack in the car.

We knew how to live.

Even required chapel Had its points.

Good sermons by the faculty, Music from a fine organ And the throats of a hundred young men.

Remember the recessional: “Domine, Salvam fac patriam nostram Et exaude nos in die qua, invocaremus te.”

How we used to swing that chant As we marched from the chapel.

That’s the way to go: Now that we are old Let us sing the recessional As we go marching out.

CLASS NOTES | 55

’44 Paintings and drawings from the collection of Arnold Davis and his wife, Seena, were included in Method and Metaphor: Selected Works from the Seena and Arnold Davis Old Masters Collection, the inaugural exhibition of the OSilas Gallery at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York. This exhibition included works by van der Weyden, Carracci, Rubens, Joos van Cleve, Gerard David, and others.

’48 60th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Classes of 1939 and 1944

James N. Rosenau is University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He published four books over the course of 2005 and 2006. In addition to The Study of World Politics, Vol. 1: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges and Vol. 2: Globalization and Governance (see Books by Bardians, this issue), he was coauthor, with David Earnest, Yale Ferguson, and Ole R. Holsti, of On the Cutting Edge of Globalization: An Inquiry into American Elites; and coeditor, with Ersel Aydinli, of Globalization, Security, and the Nation State: Paradigms in Transition.

’38 70th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’39 Dominick A. Papandrea, M.D., left his work as a physician at the age of 80 and is now happily retired at 89.

’40 Class correspondent Dick Koch, 516-599-3489 Neil Gray writes this reminiscence: In the fall of 1936 an 18-yearold freshman from central Pennsylvania stood gazing at his living quarters at Bard College. The surprise of arriving there was not confined to the storybook beauty of the school, but also stemmed from the pleasure of being a first inhabitant of a newly built dormitory below and beyond Stone Row. This was extended to the wonder of the room next to his, from which came the rolling, rippled rhythm of musical scales from a piano, a piano of all things.

He felt rich coming to this place with a trunk, and someone had brought a piano! The door was open, revealing a baby grand, lid raised, and a pianist with hands racing up and down the keys.

Moments later, he met the fellow first-year student who introduced himself as John Steinway, and then his roommate, “Bunny” Eisenlohr. The pianist’s name solved the mystery, but then, this was Bard, and there would be others.

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

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60th Reunion, Class of 1947

55th Reunion, Class of 1952 ’50

’53

Janet Zimmerman Segal continues to be chief operating officer of Four Winds Hospital, a 175-bed psychiatric hospital in Katonah, New York, serving children, adolescents, and adults.

55th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008

’51

Naomi Bellinson Feldman, nada1500@comcast.net

Harvey Edwards is still making films. Good ones, he hopes!

Joel Fields is a psychiatrist working with adults with severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, at the Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, New York.

Louise Tachau Schulman received the Louisville (Kentucky) Mayor’s 2006 International Award for Lifetime Achievement for her leadership and volunteer work with Louisville’s international groups.

’52 Class correspondent Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net Joyce Lasky Reed joined the Board of Overseers of Smolny College (a joint enterprise of Bard and Saint Petersburg State University, and Russia’s first liberal arts college). As president and cofounder of the Fabergé Arts Foundation, she has directed cultural programs and exchanges between the United States and Russia since 1990. Previously, she worked in the field of foreign policy, specializing in U.S.–Russia relations, on Capitol Hill and in the Department of State.

Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Class correspondent

Martin Johnson retired after more than 35 years as a magazine publisher and consultant to the decorative-products field. He takes digital photographs, paints, video edits, writes, and exhibits his work at Florida museums, such as the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Cornell Museum of Fine Arts at Rollins College in Winter Park, and Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs. In 2006, 20 of his paintings were featured in a solo exhibition at the Governors Club in West Palm Beach. As a special correspondent for the Sun-Sentinel, a Chicago Tribune newspaper, he also writes about artists, inventors, and other topics.

In 2006 Bas Kooiman and his wife Helen celebrated their 80th birthdays in good health with family and friends. Bas and Helen live in the vicinity of the college town of Claremont, California,

CLASS NOTES | 57

50th Reunion, Class of 1957 where they enjoy student concerts, chamber music, and theater.

They often see his six children and eight grandchildren, all of whom live nearby. They also love to travel on riverboats in Europe. Bastiaan’s first wife, Mayo Elwinger, died in 2002 after a valiant battle with cancer.

Maurice Richter has retired after 50 years of teaching, 39 of those years at SUNY Albany. He now lives in Kendal on Hudson, a retirement community 25 miles north of New York City in Sleepy Hollow.

Martha D. Wagner’s Marine grandson, Joseph M. Wagner, has returned from Iraq.

Sherman Yellen was represented off Broadway in 2006 with his drama December Fools at the Abingdon Theatre in New York City.

His musical Josephine Tonight! for which he wrote the book and lyrics, had a successful premiere in Chicago in March 2006. His progressive political writing appears frequently on the Huffington Post website. For more information, visit www.shermanyellen.com.

taught from 1969 to 1999. He is also an artist member of the Rockport Art Association, specializing in sculpture. He wonders how classmates have done over the last 50-plus years, and would enjoy hearing from them at macnpeg@verizon.net.

’57 Sallie E. Gratch (Eichengreen) has begun a second nonprofit organization, Women Founders Collective, to support women founders of nongovernmental organizations. For more information, visit www.womenfounders.org. Sallie’s first nonprofit is doing well; for more information, visit www.projectkesher.org.

Eleanor Kalfin-Royte retired as a teacher educator in early childhood education and development, but continues to consult with parents and teachers as a child development specialist. She is very proud of her daughter, author Elizabeth Royte ’81, who received the Dewey Award at the President’s Dinner during Commencement/Reunion Weekend this year, and her son, Josh Royte ’85, a conservation planner at the Nature Conservancy in Brunswick, Maine.

’54 McAlister Coleman is a deacon of the First Parish Unitarian Church in Beverly, Massachusetts, where he has been a member since 1972, and professor emeritus at Endicott College, where he

58

’58 50th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’59 Bette LeVine retired from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2006 and now works as the coordinator of the Coordinating Council of Cooperatives of Greater New York.

’61 Ann Bruce Kitcher is now semiretired after 34 years in an antique and interior/architectural design business. She enjoys spending time with her two granddaughters (ages 4 and 2), her garden, and her two German shepherds.

’62 Naomi Alazraki-Taylor (Parver) received the 2007–2008 Distinguished Scientist Award in Radiologic Pathology from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). She will spend six months in Washington, D.C., at the AFIP, lecturing and representing the organization at several international meetings.

Early in 2007 Jack Blum (Columbia Law ’65) joined the whitecollar crime practice group at the law firm of Baker Hostetler.

He keeps offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City and focuses on financial crime, international tax evasion, and moneylaundering issues. Founded in 1916, Baker Hostetler is among the

nation’s 100 largest law firms, with 10 offices and more than 600 attorneys coast to coast.

John W. Waxman produced a recording of Franz Waxman’s oratorio Joshua that was released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2006.

Maximilian Schell is the narrator on the recording, Rod Gilfry (baritone) sings Moses and Joshua, Ann Hallenberg (mezzosoprano) is Rahab, and Peter Buchi and Patrick Poole (tenors) are the spies. James Sedares conducts the Prague Philharmonia and Prague Philharmonic Chorus.

’63 Class correspondent Penny Axelrod, axelrodp@earthlink.net

’64 Ronni Crystal Brenner is proud and delighted to report that part of her walked the halls of Aspinwall in the form of her son, Neil Brenner, who was visiting associate professor of sociology at Bard.

He taught a course, Cities of Justice? Critical Geographies of the Late Modern Urbanization in the USA, that is part of the Bard Prison Initiative/FIPSE Project. He taught at Woodbourne (New York) Correctional Facility and on the Bard campus.

45th Reunion, Classes of 1962 and 1963

CLASS NOTES | 59

Bonnie Markham, Ph.D., Psy.D., has been involved over the years with the American Psychological Association (APA). In 2005 she

’66

was named Psychologist of the Year by Division 42, Psychologists in Independent Practice. She represents the division on the APA Council of Representatives.

A Seal Upon the Heart, a biblical novel by Mary Helene Rosenbaum (Pottker), was published by Blue Grape Press in 2006. The story of the prophet Jeremiah and the fall of the First Temple is seen through the eyes of a bondwoman in his household.

Stuart Posner, M.D., enjoyed a photo shoot in Morocco in 2006 (see page 84) and is anticipating traveling to the base camp of Mt. Everest. Classmates can keep in touch with him at sposner@cox.net.

’68 40th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’65 Michael Lawrence’s book Jim and I: Jim Morrison and Other Friends was published by iUniverse Press in 2003. It is a memoir and portrait of an artist as a young man.

40th Reunion, Class of 1967

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Class correspondent Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com

Judi Arner has accepted a new position at the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA). In her role as vice president of chapter services and revenue generation, she is responsible for the foundation’s total contributed revenue and for managing and supporting a network of 45 chapters nationwide. CCFA is the premier organization dedicated to finding cures for Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis, through research, and to improving the quality of life for patients and their families, through education and support. Although Judi’s job keeps her hopping, she manages to find time for travel (a trip to Brazil and the Amazon River Basin was a recent highlight), marathons, and fun with family and friends.

Martha Schwartz Bragin has moved to California. She was appointed to the faculty of social work at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, California State University at San Bernardino.

She continues her international work of demobilizing child soldiers, and is looking into reintegration issues for soldiers here in the United States.

Sharon Barcan Elswit’s book The Jewish Story Finder: A Guide to 363 Tales Listing Subjects and Sources (McFarland, 2005) received honorable mention from the Association of Jewish Libraries in the Judaica Bibliography category.

Dwight Paine, together with his wife, Allison Withers, has started an educational consulting company, Pawith Educators LLC, in Poughkeepsie, New York. For more information, visit www.pawitheducators.org.

’69 Regan O’Connell Burnham and her husband, the Rev. Dr. Frederic B. Burnham, retired to the western mountains of North Carolina in 2004, but continue to visit the Catskills in summer. In the summer of 2006, Regan began studying the flute with Sarah Elia ’06, an extraordinary teacher, and writes, “what a joy!” In North Carolina, Regan continues weekly flute lessons with a former Juilliard teacher, and performs with two choirs. In the near future, she will begin tutoring in an elementary school, and her cocker spaniel will enter training to become a therapy dog at the local hospice.

Lilja Toban Finzel is 99 percent retired. She lives on a timber farm and volunteers at a museum and with an arts group in her rural community of Vernonia, Oregon.

Mark Gross became a full-time judge on the Mount Vernon City Court on February 15, 2006.

Gene Kahn appeared in Positively Naked, an HBO documentary in which approximately 80 HIV-positive men were photographed completely nude by Spencer Tunick, who is famous for staging many similar events worldwide. The original photo shoot was used as the cover for POZ Magazine’s 10th anniversary issue.

Otherwise dressed, Gene does custom woodworking in New York City, rides a bike from Brooklyn into Manhattan almost every day,

Bardians gathered in New York City to celebrate Diana Hirsch Friedman’s birthday. Celebrants included Betsey Ely ’65, Peter Kenner ’66, Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68, Barbara Crane Wigren ’68, Kris Jefferson ’68, Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65, William Sherman ’68, and Michael DeWitt ’65.

and is still collecting praise for his recent sailing memoir, Deep Water, A Sailor’s Passage, from Haworth Press. For more information, visit www.deepwaterbook.com.

After teaching computer graphics as an Adobe Certified Instructor for the last 15 years, Cathy Michelman moved to Baja, Mexico, with her husband, Keith Williamson, the brother of her classmate Kirk Williamson. Cathy and Keith now live between Rosarito and Ensenada. There she is going back to her roots: ceramics and painting.

’70 Gary M. Haber of Poughkeepsie, New York, is now proud grandfather to three—Esther, Eliyah, and Ella.

Act I of Mark Zuckerman’s new opera, The Outlaw and the King, was given its concert premiere by the Opera Workshop at Rutgers University in the fall 2006 term while Mark was a visiting professor of music there. Mark’s a cappella choral arrangements of Yiddish songs were released as The Year in Yiddish Song on Centaur Records; they are published by Carl Fischer, Transcontinental Music, and by E. C. Schirmer, which has issued them in its Mark Zuckerman Yiddish Choral Series. MSR Classics has released two CDs of Mark’s music: Because, with a cappella choral music in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and New Music for Strings, with music for string orchestra and string quartet.

’71 Eight years ago Bonnie R. Marcus married Ted O’Neill, dean of admissions at the University of Chicago, and moved to Chicago.

She now runs the Bard College Midwest admission office and commutes to Bard irregularly, but often.

Bruce McClelland MFA ’83 lives in Gordonsville, Virginia. In 2006 he finished translating a long Russian historical poem about Ivan the Terrible; it is now being made into a British-Russian film titled Ivan and Maria.

CLASS NOTES | 61

35th Reunion, Class of 1972 ’72 Phil Abrami is director of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia University in Montreal. To relax, he road-races BMWs. After performing for a while with singer Paula Lockard ’70, following graduation, Michael “Fishel” Bresler taught music in a private school, worked as a night watchman in a psychiatric hospital, and once received a coveted “Public Entertainment Without A License” citation from the Newport, Rhode Island, Police Department (artistin-residence-for-a-night, town lockup). He spent the ensuing years playing with bluegrass, country rock, and baroque ensembles (including a 30-piece mandolin orchestra); doing mime; storytelling; and teaching. For more information, visit www.matchbook.org. For the past 20 years, he has been doing therapeutic music with hospitalized and special-needs children and adults, and performing with his Hassidic and klezmer band. Sabbath-observant since 1986, he married the miraculous Elianna in 1996.

’73 35th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008: Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu James Banks exhibited work in 2006 at the Sacramento Street Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife Jeannie Motherwell ’74. They were married in December

62

2005 and welcomed their first grandson, Kael Stefan Banks, in October 2006.

In 2006 Ana Cervantes released her third CD, Rumor de Páramo (Murmurs from the Wasteland), the culmination of her project honoring landmark Mexican author Juan Rulfo. Ana asked 18 composers from four countries and three generations for a short work for solo piano—their singular creative response to Rulfo’s work. Twelve of the works are included on the CD, but all 18 of them were performed by Ana at the 34th Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico, in October 2006, with 14 of the 18 composers in attendance. Ana’s recordings are available through her website. For more information, visit www.cervantespiano.com.

Howard Good was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his poem “On Being Asked, ‘Have You Written Anything Yet About Your Mother’s Death?’” which appeared in the summer 2006 issue of Rose & Thorn. His second chapbook of poetry, Heartland, will be published in 2007 by FootHills Publishing. Howard is coordinator of the Journalism Program at SUNY New Paltz.

Kristin Waters is professor of philosophy at Worcester State College and visiting scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center. She coedited Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, which was published by the University of Vermont Press in April 2007.

’74 In January and February 2007, Jeannie Motherwell showed collages and prints in a solo exhibition in the Metropolitan Gallery at Boston University. Since 2003 she has exhibited at the Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she will have a solo show of new paintings in August 2007. Jeannie serves on the Public Art Commission advisory committee for the Cambridge Arts Council, and works full-time for the Arts Administration Graduate Program at Boston University. For more information, visit www.jeanniemotherwell.com.

’75 Joanne Greenbaum had solo exhibitions of her work at D’Amelio Terras gallery in New York City in November and December 2006; the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, in April 2007; and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago in May and June 2007. She participated in Poets and Painters, a group show at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, in April 2007 and will be included in The Triumph of Painting, a group show at the Saatchi Gallery in London in this fall.

Traditional puppeteer Fred Greenspan presented “Prof.

Frederick’s Flea Circus” at the Long Island Puppetry Guild, and a talk and demonstration, “The Art of Paper Theatre,” to the Valley Artist Association in Peekskill, New York, in the spring of 2006.

He performed at the Puppeteers of America East Coast TriRegional “Super Sonic Puppet Festival” in Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 2006, in addition to performances he gave in New York State at the Clermont State Historic Site, Long Island Mozart Festival, Long Island Fair, and Sands Point Medieval Festival; and in New Jersey at the Monmouth County Fair. The model theater that Fred and his wife, Sondra, built was displayed at the Rockland County Historical Society. Long Island Newsday published an extensive article about Fred and his puppetry. For more information, visit www.traditionalpuppetry.com.

worked to eliminate racism and empower women. In February 2007 Amy accepted the position of CEO/executive director of the Mental Health Association of Westchester.

Bruce Wolosoff ’s chamber opera Madimi, written with librettist Michael Hall, was given a staged reading at Symphony Space in New York in early 2007. The opera tells the story of Dr. John Dee, noted mathematician, magus, and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, who has contact with Madimi, a mischievous spirit in touch with God. Bruce is also a visiting artist at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, New York, where he started a children’s orchestra in which the students (most of whom have little or no formal musical training) compose, conduct, and perform their own and each other’s music.

’78 30th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu

Class correspondent Valerie Shaff, valshaff@valstar.net Emily Rubin founded a literary reading series, Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose in August 2005. To date, she has produced nine readings in laundromats around the country, including one as part of San Francisco’s Litquake Literary Festival in October 2006. In January 2007 the series was awarded a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Rubin has had her fiction published in Confrontations, Red Rock Review, HAPPY, and ArtsAlive, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Copake, New York, and works as a freelance stage manager for several television networks. For more information, visit www.dirtylaundryreadings.com.

’76 Erik Kiviat, executive director of Hudsonia Ltd., presented a paper in September 2006 on the impacts and management of the invasive common reed at the 33rd Natural Areas Conference in Flagstaff, Arizona. He also presented a paper on the ecology of Japanese knotweed at a conference hosted by Cornell University in October 2006.

Iris Levy enjoyed her 30-year class reunion so much, she returned for the class of 1977’s thirtieth reunion. She is alive and well and works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.

’77 In 2006 Amy Kohn and Jeanne Gallo celebrated their 20th anniversary, the 10th birthday of their daughter, the third birthday of their large dog, and Amy’s fifth year as CEO of the YWCA of White Plains and Central Westchester (New York), where she has

30th Reunion, Class of 1977 CLASS NOTES | 63

’82

’85

Thomas Begich continues to tour the United States as an itinerant musician and trainer in community development, specializing in helping communities work on juvenile crime issues. To date he has worked and played in 29 states and territories, from Alaska, where he lives in Anchorage, to the Virgin Islands. He has four CDs out, and two on the way. For more information, visit www.tombegich.com.

Daphne Ross, MSES ’00, and her partner, Carlos Peinado, premiered their documentary feature, Waterbuster, at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. The film was nominated for best documentary at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco and the Aboriginal Film and Video Festival in Manitoba, Canada. For more information, visit www.waterbuster.org.

Lucy Park got married in a castle in Scotland in 2006. She paints, makes wine, enjoys scuba diving, and has two dogs. She was excited about her 25th reunion, but couldn’t believe that it has really been 25 years.

After a misspent youth as a reinsurance litigator, Geoffrey Stein is now a recovering lawyer. He has been painting full time since 2000, working figuratively, but not in an “academic” manner. He is completing a master of fine arts degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Geoffrey lives and paints in New York City, where he and Patricia Poglinco (Mount Holyoke ’81) celebrated their 18th anniversary in March 2007.

’83 25th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Matt Soper, 845-758-7505 or soper@bard.edu

25th Reunion, Class of 1982 64

’87 Eva Lee is collaborating with a neuroscientist to create 3-D animations based on his data from studies on the basis of emotions in the brain. The data tracked electroencephalographic (EEG) readings on the right and left prefrontal lobes when participants simply made facial expressions reflecting anger, joy, fear, sadness, and disgust (as opposed to actually feeling those emotions). Eva began this project during a residency at the MacDowell Colony, and the work in progress was exhibited this past spring at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Eva plans to collaborate with a composer for these animations. Interested Bardians are welcome to contact her at eva@evaleestudio.com.

Jennifer Mandel has been working as a music supervisor for commercials, television, and film for over five years. As a singersongwriter, she has had some television and film placements. In August 2006 she married Timothy Wager, a literary agent.

20th Reunion, Class of 1987 ’88

Lisa DeTora, detoral@lafayette.edu

Jonathan Hearn is still a permanent resident of Scotland; he lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Gale, and two children, Iskra and Lovel, who are both “cheerful, strong willed, fatiguing, and delightful.” Jonathan is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also director of undergraduate teaching for the School of Social and Political Studies. His second book, Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, came out in 2006. Scotland is a wonderful place to visit, he writes; he takes the kids to castles on the weekend, instead of to a park. Any Bardians traveling his way are encouraged to look him up at machearn@btinterbnet.com.

Lisa DeTora left her job in industry to join the English faculty at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Moving from the Poconos to the Lehigh Valley meant a major scenery sacrifice but resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of black bears per trash day. In 2006 Lisa’s travels included dinosaur watching in Chicago, New York, Brussels, and Washington, D.C.; sight-seeing in Evian, Geneva, Lyon, Paris, Brussels, Bruges, Cologne, and Boston; “spring break” (aka “academic conference”) in Fort Lauderdale; and a day of shopping in Erkelenz.

David Montebello is the global business unit manager for BASF’s motorcycle and small/utility engine emissions catalysts division, making clean-air technologies. He is responsible for six plants, in Rome, Italy; Chennai, India; Rayong, Thailand; Shanghai, China; Indaiatuba, Brazil; and Huntsville, Alabama. He travels far too much, but thoroughly enjoys the frequent-flier perks. He is happily married to Lisa Abelman-Montebello, who is a production manager at Random House. They live in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn.

After 10 years of service with Sukyo Mahikari, a nondenominational spiritual organization, Gary Edmonds has become center director of its Miami, Florida, dojo. Anyone interested or curious can stop by, or visit www.sukyomahikari.org.

Josh Ralske is back in school, working toward a master’s degree in communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York.

20th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Melissa Mathis and her husband, Lawrence Frank, are delighted to announce the birth of their daughter, Ella Louise Mathis, on Thanksgiving Day 2006.

’89 Class correspondent

Jennifer Halpern and her husband, Dan, are proud to announce the birth of their daughter, Louisa, in July 2006. On a recent trip to Barbados they discovered that Louisa loves to swim. Jennifer continues to work as an interior designer and architect in New York, but most of her current focus is the design of this new dear little girl.

Elizabeth Ann “Beth Ann” Finisdore Rejonis is a dance/movement therapist but is staying home to raise her two boys, Zachary and Jarod. She volunteers at her sons’ Montessori school, teaching dance, doing psychoeducational movement groups, and leading crafts and baking projects. She is treasurer of

CLASS NOTES | 65

15th Reunion, Class of 1992 the Generation X Board of the Hearing Loss Association of America, editor of HearSay, a newsletter of the Pennsylvania state office of the Hearing Loss Association of America, and program chair of the board of the Pennsylvania American Dance Therapy Association. To stay in shape, she takes a jazz/hip-hop dance class and performs every now and then.

Eight years ago Diana Rickard earned a master in fine arts degree in writing and poetics from the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, writes maudlin yet acerbic and generally unpublished poetry, and lives in Brooklyn.

Adam Snyder and his partner, Cecelia Anne Cutler, are proud to announce the birth of their son, Jack Emmet, born on June 5, 2006. Jack is a fifth-generation New Yorker.

Rebecca Weinstein, Esq., M.S.W., is cofounder and president of Identity Cops, Inc. (www.idcops.com), an information technology company working in identity-theft protection. Rebecca has previously started, built, and run two corporations focusing on advocacy, social justice, and civil rights issues. She has worked as a legislative advocate and political consultant, and as a labor and employment litigator. She is the author of Mediation in the

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Workplace: A Guide for Training, Practice, and Administration (Quorum Books, 2000). In her spare time, Rebecca runs AmeriCo Productions (www.americoproductions.org), a politically oriented arts organization. She lives in Portland, Maine, and can be reached at rebecca@idcops.com.

’90 Class correspondent Francie Soosman, fsoosman@hvc.rr.com Sarah Poor Adelman lives in Brooklyn. She is working toward a master of literacy degree at Hunter College, CUNY, and teaches preschool at Brooklyn Friends School. She lives with Mike Adelman and their daughter, Lucy.

Thomas Crofts lives with his wife, Molly, and sons Rex and August.

He is an assistant professor at East Tennessee State University, teaching medieval literature and Latin (see Books by Bardians).

His poems have appeared in The Texas Observer and Upstart Crow. Most of all, he misses Olin-ball and Francie Soosman.

Gwynne Duncan lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Alec Stephen, and daughter, Mimi. She is a painter and has a small business, Floor Plans NY, drawing architectural floor plans for real estate websites.

For more information, visit www.gwynneduncan.com.

Marlene Hennessy is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches medieval

’92

literature.

Andrea Stein, stein@bard.edu

Amy Bachelder Jeynes is an editor for F+W Publications in Cincinnati. She works on fine art and comic art instruction books for the North Light and IMPACT imprints, and had the pleasure of editing a book by Anthony Apesos MFA ’89 (see page 72 for more details). She also had a few of her own photos published in Comic Artist’s Photo Reference: People and Poses (Impact Books, 2006). Amy and her husband, Scott Jeynes, have two children: Henry, 6, and Emma, 4.

Charlotte Mandell Kelly had two translations published this year: A Voice from Elsewhere by Maurice Blanchot (SUNY Press, February) and Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham University Press, May).

Jakob Clausen and Christina Hajagos-Clausen live in Washington Heights, New York, with their two boys, Andreas, 5, and Lars, 2. Jakob teaches English as a second language at a neighborhood public school. He enjoys taking his students to visit Bard and has participated in several school exchanges to Amsterdam.

Christina works for the United Food and Commercial Workers International as a collective bargaining representative. She finished her first Olympic-distance triathlon in April 2006 with the Leukemia Society’s team-in-training program. She went on to compete in several more triathlons in New York City; Montauk, New York; and St. Petersburg, Florida. Any Bardians in the neighborhood should feel free to e-mail them at clausenhajagos@mac.com.

Catherine Talese is a freelance photography editor, photographer, avid composter, and gray-water girl. She and her husband, photographer Brennan Cavanaugh ’88, live in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and can often be found in the beautiful Hudson Valley.

Kevin R. Foster and his wife, Donna R. Jarvis, welcomed their new daughter, Millie (who joins her big sister, Anna), on February 17, 2006. Kevin still enjoys his career as an economics professor at City College of New York. Visit Kevin and Donna at www.donna-kevin.com.

’91 Scott Licamele, who earned a master of international affairs degree from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in 1997, has rejoined Alfa Capital Markets as vice president in charge of equity sales and trading in North and South America. Scott covers Russian, Ukrainian, and Central Asian equities. Alfa Capital Markets is the U.S. subsidiary of the Alfa Bank of Russia, the largest privately held banking group in the former Soviet Union. Since returning to Alfa in 2006, Scott was involved in numerous Russian initial public offerings, including Chelyabinsk Zinc and OGK-5. In addition, he focuses on brokering private equity deals in the Ukraine. His offices are in New York; he lives in Weston, Connecticut, with his wife, Victoria, and sons Anton and Bruno.

Samuel Sharmat, M.D., writes, “Life is good.” He completed a fellowship in addiction psychiatry and now serves as attending psychiatrist in the Department of HIV/AIDS at North General Hospital in Manhattan. He also has a general psychiatry practice in Greenwich Village. Last year he composed the score for a festival-winning short film, In Love. He feels blessed to be surrounded by love from his daughter, his partner, and his family.

Jen Strongin and her husband own Victrola Coffee Roasters in Seattle, which includes their original cafe, Victrola Coffee & Art, and their new cafe and roastery, Victrola Coffee. They are happy that Seattle native Patrick Tesh ’06 joined the Victrola team after his graduation from Bard. Their coffee-roasting activities were featured in Food & Wine, Imbibe, House & Garden, and Sunset magazines, and, early in 2007, on the Food Network program Giada’s Weekend Getaway.

Class correspondent

Jane Heidgerd MFA ’94 lives in Rhinebeck and continues to write and to give readings from her work in the area. She also helps organize readings and other events for Poets’ Walk, a Scenic Hudson park on River Road in Red Hook.

Jessica Mass has lived in San Francisco for the past 15 years, enjoying the fog and forgetting what seasons feel like. For the last eight years she has taught high school English. She and her partner enjoy being run ragged by Ezra, their ukulele-playing, punk rock–dancing, 2-year-old son.

Yasmin Padamsee is working as a United Nations Development Programme public information manager in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. She and her husband, Eben Forbes, and their daughter, Ziya Zella, live in a huge house, so any Bardian in Vientiane is welcome to e-mail Yasmin at ypadamsee@yahoo.com, and she will extend an invitation for some Lao lao and khin khao.

Jacqueline S. Petro, RN, M.P.H., C.C.M., completed a master’s degree in public health at New York Medical College in 1999 and returned to work in health care. She is the director of Employee Health and Volunteer Services at Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, New York, and also the coordinator for a parish nurse program that places nurses in communities of faith to act as health educators, facilitators, and advocates. In her spare time she is a National Garden Club master flower-show judge, and enjoys attending programs offered to the community at Bard.

Dan Sonenberg is in his second year on the tenure track as assistant professor and resident composer at the University of Southern Maine School of Music. He plays drums in the folkpop-country band Truth About Daisies, and is a founding member of the New York–based composers collective South Oxford Six. For more information, visit www.danielsonenberg.com.

CLASS NOTES | 67

Journalist Matt Taibbi was the speaker at the Class of 2007 Senior Dinner. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, writing feature articles and the weekly political column "The Low Post" for Rolling Stone’s online magazine, Matt has addressed topics as diverse as the Jack Abramoff scandal, evolution vs. intelligent design in the Pennsylvania public schools, the Michael Jackson trial, and the 2004 United States election. He started his writing career in Russia, as a sports editor for the Moscow Times, and was a correspondent for the Mongolian National News Agency. He was also editor of the expat paper Living Here and coeditor of the satirical English-language newspaper The eXile. Now based in New York, Matt has written for The Nation, Playboy, New York Press, New York Sports Express, and The Boston Phoenix.

Miriam Zellnik is proud to announce the publication of her second mystery novel, A Death at the Rose Paperworks (Midnight Ink, 2006). This is the second in a series written with her brother Joe under the pen name M. J. Zellnik. The books are set in 1890s Portland, Oregon, and feature transplanted New Yorker Libby Seale and Portland newspaper reporter Peter Eberle as detecting partners. In addition to her writing, Miriam produced her finest work in February 2006, a son named Theo Miranda-Zellnik, with husband Adrian as collaborator.

’93 15th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Three photographic works by Malerie Marder were included in the exhibition Wrestle at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art. Following graduation, Malerie earned a master of fine arts degree from Yale University in 1998. She is represented by the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and Salon 94 in New York and by Maureen Paley in London. Reacquainted with and subsequently married (in 2005) to Mark Hyatt, she created her most recent solo exhibition, Nine (at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in 2006), to reflect her

Zoltan Bruckner ’94 was the first Hungarian student sent to the United States as a Kellner Foundation scholar.

The foundation, now celebrating its 15th anniversary, provides one-year scholarships (to Bard or Trinity College) for highly motivated Hungarian university students who intend to return to their home country in order to play a significant role in its social, political, or economic development. Bruckner, who lives in Budapest, has founded a venture capital fund that invests in Hungarian technology companies.

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Matt Taibbi ’92

journey through each month of pregnancy. Malerie, Mark, and their daughter, Esme, live in Los Angeles.

Ilana Navaro is a filmmaker living in Paris. After Bard, she lived in New York City and then moved back to her home in Istanbul, where she worked as a television journalist. She quit her job in 1999 and made her first short fiction film in 2001. It was shown on French television and screened at many festivals, including Cannes. She moved to France soon after that, and has been making documentaries, mainly for Arte, the French-German cultural channel. One of her projects was All the Televisions of the World, a series that explored countries and cultures, based on their popular TV shows—a subject not unrelated to her Bard Senior Project on television and modernity. She is working on her first featurelength film.

’94 Josie P. Gray is still living happily in the Hudson Valley, but no longer enduring the long commute to Manhattan. She is working to develop the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, a new research and policy organization. For more information, visit www.thebeaconinstitute.org.

Kristi Martel released her newest CD, Ravengirl, in October 2006. “Ravengirl” is Kristi’s superhero name for herself; it recognizes the crazy blessing of joy she felt every day, in the midst of profound grief, after her former life partner’s suicide in 2003. The CD received stellar reviews from several Rhode Island and New England papers, and Kristi was named Artist of the Week on Boston’s WERS 88.9 FM in November. NPR also spotlighted Kristi on its online “Open Mic” feature. Kristi is touring nationally, and Ravengirl is available online at CD Baby and Apple iTunes. For more information, visit www.kristimartel.com.

’95 Malia Du Mont is completing a year of service with the U.S. Army Reserve at the Combined Forces Command in Kabul, where she has been responsible for providing strategic analysis of the political-military situation in Afghanistan to the commanding general and other senior U.S. officials. She plans next to take a

position as the Afghanistan team chief in the U.S. intelligence element at NATO Headquarters. Malia’s husband, an officer in the Army National Guard, is in the middle of a yearlong tour in Afghanistan (although not in Kabul). Due to these deployments, they have spent a grand total of three weeks together since their marriage in April 2006. They look forward to reuniting in Brussels in the spring of 2008.

In 2006 Lisa Kereszi presented work in Public Dialogue, a solo exhibition at the John and June Alcott Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work was also included in Looking Back from Ground Zero: Images from the Brooklyn Museum Collection at the Brooklyn Museum. In the spring of 2007 Lisa’s solo show Cheap Thrills was on view at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City. Group shows scheduled for 2007 include Points of Departure at the Bob and Penny Fox Art Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; a show at the Vivarosi Gallery in Budapest, Hungary; and Selections from The Camera Club of New York’s Darkroom Residency Program, in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Morgan Miller lives in the mountains of Alaska with her fiancé, Daniel Warthin. She is happily employed as a regional wildland fire communication and education specialist for the National Park Service.

’96 Class correspondent

Lisa Kereszi ’95: Red and Gold Room, Haunted House, Kearny, New Jersey 2005

2006), a photo history of Mount Prospect, Illinois, based on images of buildings and spaces that are no longer standing or have been radically changed.

Gavin Kleepsies, gwkleespies@hotmail.com Brent Armendinger lives in San Francisco, where he teaches literature at New College and poetry to senior citizens at a public library. He also rings up groceries at Rainbow, the largest workerowned collective in the country.

Jordan Bridges and Caroline Eastman welcomed their son, Orson Lloyd William Bridges, on October 20, 2005. His sister, Lola, is delighted to have a little brother. In 2006 Jordan could be seen on television as Nick Potter in the Dick Wolf drama Conviction. He also made his Broadway debut, hanging upside down, in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

Caroline’s thesis from New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program was selected by the History Channel as one of the 100 best inventions of 2005.

Melanie Brockert (Schlosser) is pleased to announce the birth of her twins, Blu and Scarlet.

Tracy Bulkeley and Mark Groner ’97 are pleased to announce the birth of their first child, Veronica, in March 2006.

Gavin W. Kleespies and Gabriel Robinson live in Chicago. Gabriel is working on a Ph.D. in the history of religion at the University of Chicago. Gavin is a public historian with an organization that is working to move and preserve an 1896 one-room schoolhouse.

(For more about this project, visit www.yourcentralschool.org.) He has published his second book, Lost Mount Prospect (Arcadia,

Sam Kramer teaches elementary school art in Evanston, Wyoming. His students draw varied subjects, from old woodworking tools to local rock formations. They will be allowed to paint when they memorize pi to the 100th decimal and clean up their quadratic equation skills. His students are learning about the molecular structure of the polymorphs of carbon: graphite and charcoal. No, they are not allowed to draw those turkeys by tracing their hands. Well, okay, maybe sometimes. If you’re driving down I-80, his e-mail address is samkramer@yahoo.com.

Karla Stinger is the director of development at the Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, New Jersey, where she oversees fundraising initiatives (www.hunterdonartmuseum.org). She also keeps busy as a painter and is still trying to learn German. She continues to be obsessed with music and art and has spent some time in Rio. Marta Topferova has been living in New York City for the last 10 years, working as a singer and songwriter. Her fourth CD, Flor Nocturna / Nocturnal Flower was released in September 2006. Her last CD, La Marea, was voted #4 in the Top 10 CDs of 2005 in Barnes & Noble Staff Picks. She has toured the United States and Europe, playing at venues such as the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, Chicago World Music Festival, Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, London Jazz Festival, Vienna Jazz Festival, and London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. She received ASCAP’s Young Composer’s Award in January 2006. For more information, visit www.martatopferova.com.

CLASS NOTES | 69

’97 Class correspondent Julia McKenzie Munemo, juliamunemo@comcast.net Deirdre Luvon (Larson) has two sweet little ones and lives in a bit of heaven on earth, east of the North Cascades in Washington State. She would love to be in touch.

Rachel Sherman was short-listed for the 2006 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. For more information, visit her website, www.thefirsthurt.com.

’98 10th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663, whitmore@bard.edu

Class correspondent

meet the extended family. In October 2006 Patricia began her second postdoc, and ended up following Mike Tibbetts’s advice about working with mammalian cell cultures. She is learning all about membrane proteins and lipid rafts. If anyone wants to get in touch, e-mail her at pm846@ufl.edu.

’99 Bree Benton was happy to see many Bardians at the wedding of Caitlin Lord ’03 and Kale Kaposhilin in September 2006. Bree works a sweet gig in Santa Rosa, California (her hometown), with Meg Hamill ’01. She would love to hear from any Bardian coming out west.

Amanda Youmans and Max Lefer ’02 were married on November 4, 2006, in New York City.

Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com

’00

Damore Viola Jensen and her husband, Sean Jensen, welcomed their son, Malachy Augustine, into the world on July 12, 2006.

Hillary Avis and her husband, Royce Reece, welcomed their first child, a girl they named Jane, in February 2006. They live in Redwood City, California.

Patricia Moussatche of Gainesville, Florida, has had an amazing time of late. After “an enormous belly,” Matthew Moussatche Settles was born on April 6, 2006. Patricia took two months off from her postdoc, and then went back to it full-time. She is glad that Matchi loves day care! She and her husband, Andrew, have already taken him sailing in the Virgin Islands, and to Brazil to

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’00 Anja Brogan and YaQin Betty Chou were among five Bardians showing work in 5x5 ACARIGUA–NEW YORK at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in New York City. Curated by former Bard professor Juana Valdes, 5x5 featured artists working in

5th Reunion, Class of 2002 Acarigua-Araure, Venezuela; New York City; and Berlin. 5x5 was also exhibited at Salon Andres Bello in Washington, D.C., and the Consulate General of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in New York City. Anja lives in Berlin and, among other activities, takes part in vintage scooter races. In a race in October 2006 on the Nürburgring (the famous Formula 1 racing track in Nürburg, Germany) she came in first in the women’s category on her 1969 Sprint Veloce. She plans to continue dominating the field in 2007.

The Damnwells, Theodore A. Hudson’s band with classmate Alex Dezen, is performing around the country. Their new album is titled Air Stereo. To check them out, visit www.thedamnwells.com.

Amy Toth is finishing her Ph.D at the University of Illinois in the Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Using physiology and genetics, her thesis investigates how insect societies (for example, wasps and bees) are organized. Bee-keeping is wonderful! She is also obsessed with the life and writings of Darwin.

’01 Michael Chameides is cocreator of the documentary Young, Jewish, and Left, which has screened at festivals and independent theaters across the country. A celebration of diversity, the movie weaves queer culture, Jewish-Arab history, Yiddishkeit, and spiritual traditions into a multilayered tapestry of leftist politics. For more information, visit http://youngjewishandleft.org.

Matthew Chiocca works as an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, and would love to hear from fellow Bardians.

Robert Gray and Austin Shull were among five Bardians presenting work in 5x5 ACARIGUA–NEW YORK at the Clemente

Soto Velez Cultural Center in New York. For more details, see Anja Brogan ’00, page 70.

Nick Kramer lives in Los Angeles and is enrolled as a master of fine arts candidate in the Roski School of Fine Art at the University of Southern California.

Alex Richards lives in New York City and writes novels for young adults. Back Talk, her first book, is being published this summer, and she has a second novel in progress. She is also an independent filmmaker and has completed several cult horror shorts.

’02 Emma Kreyche lives in Rosendale, New York. She is Latin America program director for Global Youth Connect, a small international human rights organization dedicated to leadership development of young activists.

In 2006 Seth Mabbott completed the postbaccalaureate program in graphic design and interactive media at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He is moving to Chicago to be with his fiancée, Nawojka Lesinski.

’03 5th Reunion: May 23–25, 2008 Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663, whitmore@bard.edu Cassandra Bull has been teaching first grade in Oakland for the past three years.

Ben Dangl says “hola” to all of his Bard friends. He works as a journalist in Bolivia (see Books by Bardians).

CLASS NOTES | 71

In 2006 Monica Elkinton graduated from Northeastern University School of Law, passed the Alaska Bar Exam and was admitted to the Alaska Bar Association. (She notes: “If other Bardians are looking for a law school, Northeastern is great—liberal and public interest– oriented, with no grades or Law Review, so no competition.”)

Monica is clerking for Judge Sen Tan at the Alaska Superior Court in Anchorage, and hopes to get a job in the Anchorage public defender’s office at the end of her clerkship, this September.

Jessica Hankey was among five Bardians showing work in 5x5 ACARIGUA–NEW YORK at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in New York City. For more details, see Anja Brogan ’00, page 70.

Lauren Johnson lives in New York and works in publishing. She is still writing fiction and poetry, and working on a collection. In 2006 Lauren had work published in Volume 14 of Berkshire Review. She is getting into the New York City poetry scene and says to keep your eyes and ears peeled for her poetry readings.

Caitlin Lord married Kale Kaposhilin on September 2, 2006. She works at her dream job, as audio-production director and midday DJ at WKZE 98.1 in Red Hook, New York—one of 22 independent radio stations remaining in the United States.

Lydia Willoughby graduated with a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Montana in 2006. She is working with a local land conservancy as part of AmeriCorps Project Conserve in western North Carolina.

’04 Allegra E. Ceci received a master’s degree in 2006 from the Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice Program at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology.

Yishay Garbasz presented The Fence, a solo exhibition at the Cicero Gallery for Political Photography in Berlin. The gallery represents his political work in Europe. The German federal minister of culture attended the exhibition opening. Yishay’s images explore the landscape of separation between Israel and Palestine.

For more information, visit www.yishay.com.

Kena Hazelwood is a high school teacher in Brooklyn with the New York City Teaching Fellows program. She is also pursuing a master of science degree in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) at City College of New York.

Elizabeth A. McGovern and Ian A. McBee ’02 are happy to announce their marriage, which took place on October 14, 2006, in Springfield, Vermont. The two met at Bard in the fall of 2000 and have stayed together ever since!

Teodor Viorel Stan earned a master of arts degree from the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University in May 2006. He is now a program associate with the Education Programs Division at the International Research and Exchanges Board.

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’05 John Hagan BHSEC ’02 is a New York City Teaching Fellow, teaching seventh and eighth grade special education at a middle school in Brooklyn.

Abigail M. Morgan began a year of service with AmeriCorps VISTA in November 2006. She works with Operation Frontline, an organization that offers nutritional advice and low-budget cooking classes to the low-income community in Seattle.

Kendra Rubinfeld settled in Washington, D.C., in 2006, after living in Italy for about a year. She works for a nonprofit called Yachad (www.yachad-dc.org). She is still working on the Borscht Belt Project, if you can believe it. Anyone know a producer? And she is making customized sculpey chess sets! Don’t ask!

Charles Schultz works on a literary reading series called Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose that was founded by fellow Bardian Emily Rubin ’78. All of the Dirty Laundry readings take place in Laundromats. For more information, visit www.dirtylaundryreadings.com.

Iani Tassev, who came to Bard from Sofia, Bulgaria, won the Green Card Lottery in 2006 and is now thinking about staying permanently in the United States.

Program in International Education (PIE)

’04 Aniko Kovecsi is the department coordinator for the Department of Mathematics and its Applications at Central European University in Budapest.

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

’89 Anthony Apesos has written Anatomy for Artists: A New Approach to Discovering, Learning and Remembering the Body, with illustrations by Karl Stevens. It will be published by North Light Books in late 2007. In a nifty coincidence, the book’s editor is another Bard alum: Amy Bachelder Jeynes ’90.

’96 Mara Adamitz Scrupe was appointed to the Alan F. Rothschild Endowed Chair in Fine Art and chair of the Department of Art at Columbus (Georgia) State University in the fall of 2006. Recent solo and group exhibitions of her public projects and interventions include the Fota Lichens Project, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery and Fota Arboretum (supported by funding from the Irish Arts Council), Cork, Ireland; I Bienal Internacional de Arte al Aire

Libre 2005, Caracas, Venezuela; E V + A 6th Biennial of Visual Art 2006, Limerick Ireland; Claremorris Open Exhibition 2006, Mayo,

(Brooklyn Arts Exchange) Arts Educator of the Year award. In December he performed with longtime collaborator Patricia

Ireland; and Archaeo-Entropy: An Intercession for a Deactivated Airbase, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah.

Hoffbauer in The Architecture of Seeing-Remix at the Club, the cabaret space of La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City.

’97

’02

Jasmina Danowski’s work was included in the Weatherspoon Art Museum’s biennial exhibition Art on Paper 2006 in Greensboro, North Carolina; a group show at Spanierman Modern Gallery in New York City in the fall of 2006; and a two-person show at Spanierman Modern in the spring of 2007.

Carrie Moyer presented new paintings in January in a solo exhibition at Canada, a New York City gallery cofounded by Wallace Whitney MFA ’01. This past spring, she participated in group shows at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Momenta Art in Brooklyn, and Bard, among other venues. She teaches at Yale, Rutgers, and Pratt.

Kevin Teare received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for painting in 2006. The late artist Joan Mitchell, an abstractexpressionist who worked in New York and Paris, established the award in 1994 for painters and sculptors. Kevin lives in Sag Harbor, New York, where he teaches painting, drawing, and art history at Suffolk County Community College. His work was featured at the Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery at the Art League of Long Island in its exhibition Line And Surface in January and February 2007. For more information, visit www.kevinteare.com.

’99 Keiko Narahashi had a solo show, How Long Have I Been Sleeping? at the Hudson Franklin Gallery in Chelsea in January.

’00 Nina Bovasso completed a yearlong stint as artist in residence at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. Early in 2007 she exhibited new work in Botanizing on the Asphalt, a solo exhibition at the BravinLee programs gallery in Chelsea, New York City.

Serkan Ozkaya’s work was featured in the exhibition Altered, Stitched and Gathered that opened in December 2006 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. Just after the opening, an article about Serkan’s work, “Black, White and Read All Over,” was published in the New York Times.

Mark Wonsidler had an installation in Some Serious Business, an exhibition at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, August 25 – September 16, 2006. The show involved 50 artists’ taking over the first floor of a former office building of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Slant, Mark’s installation, remained on view through the close of 2006.

’04 As a collaborative team, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn showed video in New York City at P.S.1 and in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Margo Leavin Gallery. In 2007 the two have scheduled a solo exhibition at Carlier-Gebauer gallery in Berlin and new work in group shows at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karslrühe, Germany, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles. Kahn’s writing appears in two forthcoming fiction anthologies, Userlands and Nothing Moments. Dodge and Kahn each had pieces published in Soft Targets and LTTR. Their son, Lenny, is two.

Abbey Williams presented a solo exhibition, Present Company Excluded, in the Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College in November 2006. Her show was part of an ongoing series of exhibitions and lectures by and about emerging artists.

Abbey was the featured “Studio Visit” in the Fall 2006 Studio, the magazine of the Studio Museum of Harlem.

’06 Stefany Anne Golberg is executive director of the arts collective Flux Factory in Long Island City, New York. A major kineticsculpture collaboration in 2006 resulted in FluxBox, a “giant, interactive music box” created by seven visual/sound artists (including Stefany) and rigged with accordions, musical teacups, old guitars, glockenspiels, bicycles, and other assorted objects, all playing a single tune. For more about Flux Factory’s projects and events, visit www.fluxfactory.org.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

’01

’04

Michelle Handelman’s “This Delicate Monster” was featured at the opening of the 3LD Art & Technology Center in New York City in September 2006. She received a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council studio residency for 2006–07.

Jessica Barry, a trustee of the Kingston Area Library, presented at a Green Buildings Workshop held by the Mid-Hudson Library System. Her work with Mid-Hudson Energy Smart Communities enabled her to offer libraries throughout the system advice on becoming more energy efficient and pursuing green-building alternatives for renovations.

George Emilio Sanchez chairs the Department of Performing and Creative Arts at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York. He was the 2006 recipient of the BAX

CLASS NOTES | 73

Catherine Bowes is the global warming program manager for the northeast office of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), in

Center for Curatorial Studies

Montpelier, Vermont. This is her second position within the NWF; previously, she worked on issues related to mercury pollution.

’96

’06 Ben Hoen presented his master’s thesis research at the 2006 annual conference of the New York State Economics Association.

Todd Paul accepted a position with the Matthew D. Rudikoff Agency, an environmental planning and consulting company based in Beacon, New York.

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture

’98 Ella Howard completed a Ph.D. in American studies at Boston University. Her dissertation was titled, “Skid Row: Homelessness on the Bowery in the Twentieth Century.”

’04 Caroline Hannah is a Ph.D. candidate at the Bard Graduate Center and a Jane & Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is based in the Department of NineteenthCentury, Modern, and Contemporary Art. As part of her dissertation, she has been documenting Crow House, the threatened home and studio of the artist-craftsman Henry Varnum Poor. A grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design funded this project, a large part of which has been architectural photography by Elizabeth Felicella, Bard ’89. A sampling of these remarkable photographs can be seen on www.henryvarnumpoor.com.

’06 Marybeth De Filippis continues to work at the New-York Historical Society, where she began as an intern in June 2003. She is an assistant curator of American art, and manager of the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture.

’07 Adrienne Leigh Sharpe received her M.A. in May. Her thesis, “Literary Inspirations, Ancient Touchstones, and Vanished Legends: Morris and Company’s contributions to, and arts and crafts influences upon, three American commissions, c. 1870–1896,” explores aspects of the work of Morris and Company in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century. This project allowed Adreinne to combine her interests in the decorative arts, interior design, and architectural preservation. She serves on the governing board of The William Morris Society in the United States, and in October 2006, she was appointed secretary for the New Haven Historic District Commission in her hometown of New Haven, Connecticut.

Adrienne is also a 2005 alumna of the summer school program of The Victorian Society in America in Newport, Rhode Island.

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Daniel Bozhkov Recent Works, curated by Regine Basha, adjunct curator, Arthouse, Jones Center of Contemporary Art in Austin, Texas, traveled to the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and University of North Texas, Denton. Regine wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue and launched a website, www.grackleworld.com, for posting traveling exhibitions by contemporary curators and institutions worldwide, as a way of sharing information. The November/December 2006 issue of Art Papers included one of her commentaries.

“The Log‘ ic of Stories,” an essay by Pip Day, was published in Afterall #14 (2006). Pip is enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Goldsmiths in the new Centre for Research Architecture, London.

Gilbert Vicario is assistant curator of Latin American art and coordinator, International Center for the Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was the U.S. commissioner of the 10th Cairo International Biennale, which attracts major international participation, along with the leading artists of the Arab and Muslim world.

’97 Brian Wallace, curator at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, lists among his recent projects LoCurto/Outcault [un-moving] pictures, ANFAS LISTWA NOU: Facing Our History/Haiti: Photographs by Daniel Morel, and two exhibitions developed with artist Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts: Judy Pfaff: New Prints and Drawings, consisting of 60 works; and 50 works from the Dorsky Museum’s permanent collection in the adjacent gallery. A catalogue documenting the Pfaff exhibition was published in March.

’99 An essay by Judy Kim, curator at the American Federation of Arts, was included in the catalogue accompanying Matthias Alfen, an exhibition at the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Robbin Zella ’96 is director.

’00 Jeffrey Walkowiak and Rachel Guggleberger ’97, codirectors of the Sara Meltzer Gallery, organized an informal gathering of CCS alumni/ae during the Miami Art Fair. Jeffrey and Rachel curated Introductions, featuring artists Felipe Barbosa and Edgar Oriaineta, at the gallery in January.

’01 Inés Katzenstein, curator at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, curated David Lamelas. Lo super-real (works 1969–1984) at the museum in the fall of 2006.

Allison Peters, director of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, was credited for giving a “fresh infusion” to the

center’s exhibition program, which was highlighted in a feature article on contemporary art and architecture in Chicago in the January 2007 Art in America.

’02 Sandra Firmin, curator of the UB Gallery at the University at Buffalo (New York), organized two exhibitions last winter: Bruce Adams, Half Life, 1980–2006 at the Anderson Gallery and Joe Brainard: People of the World, Relax!! at the UB Gallery Center for the Arts.

’03 Jimena Acosta Romero, curator, MUCA—Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes—in Mexico City, was one of three curators chosen for a residency at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino, Italy. The residency began March 1.

Ana Vejzovic Sharp, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, curated Side by Side, a group exhibition, and gave an opening night talk and tour of the exhibition in January.

Christel Tsilibari’s and Marketa Uhlirova’s project for the Fashion in Film Festival, which premiered in London in May 2006, traveled to New York in March 2007, hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image.

’04 Stacey Allan is settling into her new position as program associate at The Kitchen in New York City.

Tairone Bastien, promoted to director of the Moti Hasson Gallery in New York City, cocurated a group show there, Beyond the Pale.

Aubrey Reeves, video artist and programming director of Trinity Square Video in Toronto, presented a program at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, then traveled to Germany for the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, for the premiere of a video installation of her own work.

Ryan Rice, aboriginal curator in residence at Carleton University Art Gallery in Ontario, curated Red Eye, a First Nations short film and video.

’05 Yasmeen Siddiqui was promoted to curator at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, where she curated Fascia, work by Pia Lindman. The Storefront hosted Lost & Found, the exhibition curated by CCS first-year students, in March.

Erica Fisher is enjoying a temporary position at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Modern and Contemporary Department.

Before returning to his home in Norway, Geir Haraldseth, curatorial resident at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) participated in “Open Weekends,” which give the public access to the ISCP community of artists and curators in residence from around the world. Last October, Geir gave a presentation about art and entertainment at Art in General in New York City.

Natalie Woyzbun, still living on a sailboat, worked with Meg Shiffler last fall as events coordinator for the San Franciso Arts Commission Gallery annual benefit, while she looked for a permanent job in the Bay Area.

Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program

’05 Gilana Chelimsky lives in Brooklyn and teaches modern global history at Brooklyn High School of the Arts. Friends can contact her at gilanac@gmail.com.

Jeanine Tegano teaches dance to 9th- to 12th-graders at Spring Valley High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Dance Department has nearly 200 students, and last May they performed “Ripped From the Headlines,” their first original performance piece, based on media topics. Jeanine and her students wrote and choreographed the show.

’06 April Howard ’04, MAT ’06 is a journalist and editor for upsidedownworld.org. She spent the last year living in Vermont, where she taught Spanish and history, and in Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay, where she reported on social movements and politics.

In Memoriam

’38 The Reverend Donald Platt died on December 25, 2006, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A native of Everett, Washington, he graduated summa cum laude from Bard, attended the Berkeley Divinity School of Yale University, and was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. He was a chaplain in the U.S. Navy during World War II and served numerous congregations over the years in Rhode Island, California, Illinois, Florida, New York, and Massachusetts. His survivors include his wife, Martha; two sons; a brother; and two granddaughters.

’06 Sarah Bachelier is working as a part-time associate at DIA:Beacon with José Blondet ’03, administrator of education programs.

’42 John B. Tillson died on November 26, 2006, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, he served in Europe during World War II and was among the Allied troops at

CLASS NOTES | 75

the Elbe River when Germany surrendered. He went on to work in the insurance business and, for the final 20 years of his profes-

living and working as an editor in New York City. He then returned to Grand Marais, Minnesota, where he was active as an

sional life, with the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts. His survivors include his wife of 63 years, Frances Ragland Tillson; three sons, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

actor, director, and playwright, and lived in his beloved house overlooking Lake Superior. His survivors include a sister, a brother, and numerous nieces and nephews.

’44

’63

Frank X. McWilliams, 83, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, died on October 4, 2006. Born in Staten Island, New York, he attended Dartmouth College and graduated from Bard, where he majored in mathematics. Over the course of his professional career he worked for the Carbon Black Export Corporation, Columbian Carbon Company, and Continental Grain Company. In the 1960s he was president of McWilliams Transit Incorporated, which owned and operated seagoing coal barges. He enjoyed classical music and his frequent trips to the Tanglewood Music Festival.

His survivors include his sister Marie McWilliams.

Vera Gordon, who studied philosophy at Bard, died on August 28, 2006. Her survivors include her daughter Gina.

’47 Paul W. Derby, a lifetime resident of West Hartford, Connecticut, died on January 1, 2007. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. He went on to work for Western Electric, and then, for many years, for Aetna Life & Casualty, until his retirement in 1985. His survivors include a longtime friend, Edward Jones of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

’54 William Bond Baxter, 76, died on March 18, 2006, in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was the son of Gladys Bond Baxter and John Baxter and attended Bard and New York University. He was a member of the Stamford Art Association and a supporter of the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra, Greenwich Chamber Music Society, and Christ Episcopal Church of Greenwich. His survivors include three cousins.

’55 Joan Worth died on December 8, 2006, at her home in Beverly Hills, California. She was a painter who spent many years working as a theatrical writer and producer, carrying on the work of her late husband, Marvin Worth. The Worths were close friends of Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X and were involved in numerous films, documentaries, and stage productions based upon the lives of those men.

Her survivors include two daughters, a son, and four grandchildren.

’59 Susan Wilkins died on June 24, 2006. Her survivors include her son, Nicholas Rozen, and her friend and former husband Arthur Rozen ’53.

’68 Editor’s Note: The Bardian received this report from Howard Dratch ’68.

Patricia Beringer died on December 4, 2006, at the home in Mexico that she shared with her husband, Howard Dratch ’68.

She died gently and painlessly and Howard spread her ashes in the lagoon on which they had lived for eight years. She spent her last day working on a watercolor. Her death was caused by injuries she sustained during an anti-American attack in the lagoon in front of their home. She faced the rescue and resulting multiple surgeries and hospitalizations with courage.

Howard and Patricia met for the first time in the “square room” in the old Dining Commons. They were married in July 1969 in the garden at Blithewood. A “Schuyler House girl,” Patricia always looked back happily on life at Bard—life of the mind, the heart, and all the fun stuff. She graduated with honors from the art department, having studied with the painter Murray Reich as her tutor. She also had enjoyable memories of the nearly 25 years that she and Howard lived near Bard, attending lectures, movies, and readings.

Bard was always a part of their lives in those days. They worked together on many photography projects there, illustrating the Hudson Valley Regional Review for many of its first issues and covering the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series for Professor Abe Gelbart. After Howard’s heart attack they began to explore the shore of the Gulf of Mexico and Mayan history, and finally settled on the shore of Laguna Bacalar.

In addition to her husband, Patricia is survived by her parents, Hazel and William Beringer ’42, and her sister, Lynne White ’74, a ceramicist.

Peter Mekeel, a musician and photographer, died on December 23, 2006, at his home in Lake Hill, New York. An accomplished guitarist, he played in Greenwich Village clubs during his Bard years, and continued to play professionally. He was also a photographer who concentrated on landscapes, especially of the Adirondack Mountains. At the time of his death he was employed by the Taconic Developmental Disabilities Services Office, working in one of its group homes in Saugerties, New York. His survivors include his mother, a brother, a nephew, and seven cousins.

’62 David Frederickson died on January 28, 2006. A native of Minnesota, he earned a degree in literature at Bard, taught English on the island of Crete for a year, and then spent 30 years

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’69 Kit (Christopher Clark) Lewis died on August 18, 2006, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Over the years he wrote, directed,

acted in, and produced theater in Oregon, California, and Ontario, Canada, and taught theater and English to adults and children.

His survivors include his wife, Delvalle; two sons; a daughter; two sisters; and two brothers.

’70 Richard Lieberson died on September 11, 2006. He was a guitarist who played equally well in several genres, including early country, jazz, Dixieland, and western swing. He was also a scholar who published an influential book on playing country fiddle tunes on the guitar. He wrote articles and liner notes, and made his living playing music in and around New York City.

’83 Patrick Covert died at his home in Schenectady, New York, on October 8, 2006. A dedicated poet-musician, he was a longtime member of the Albany, New York, arts community, dating back to poetry readings at the old QE2. More recently, he appeared in Albany at the New Age Cabaret, Valentine’s, and the Albany Word Fest. His survivors include his half-sister, Stephanie.

MFA ’07 Crispin Webb, 28, died on November 23, 2006, at his mother’s home in Charleston, West Virginia. A sculptor and interdisciplinary artist, he earned a B.A. from Mount Vernon Nazarene University. Upon leaving Bard, he enrolled in the graduate Art and Technology Program at Ohio State University and worked as an artist assistant for multimedia artists Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil. An inspiration to his fellow students and alumni/ae, Webb experimented with ways to incorporate his Christian beliefs into his artwork. His survivors include his mother, Janet “Kay” Webb, and his sister, Heidi.

Faculty Otto P. Pflanze, Charles P. Stevenson Professor Emeritus of Social Studies, died at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, on March 3, 2007. Born in Maryville, Tennessee, on April 2, 1918, he earned a B.A. degree from Maryville College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. He taught at Bard from 1987 to 1993.

Among his publications was Bismarck and the Development of Germany, a three-volume series published between 1963 and 1990, which received the Einhard Prize in Germany in 1999. Pflanze was also a recipient of the Humanities Award of the McKnight Foundation, Biennial Book Award of Phi Alpha Theta, and, in 1990, the award for Most Outstanding Book from the American Association of Publishers. He received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and International Research and Exchanges Board. He was a member of the board of editors of Journal of Modern History and Central European History. His survivors include his wife, Hertha Maria Pflanze (Haberlander); two sons; one daughter; two

grandsons; one sister; and many nieces and nephews. Funeral services were held in Bloomington and burial was in Maryville.

Marcia Tucker, the 1999 recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture (CCS), died at her home in Santa Barbara, California, on October 17, 2006, at the age of 66. She had been on the CCS faculty since 2000. A forceful presence in the U.S. art world for almost 40 years, Tucker began her career at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, curating exhibitions of work by Robert Morris, James Rosenquist, Lee Krasner, Al Held, Joan Mitchell, and Richard Tuttle, among others. In 1977 she left the Whitney and founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art. There she curated seminal group shows, often with provocative titles, like “Bad” Painting, Bad Girls, and Have You Attacked America Today? “In a sense,” wrote Roberta Smith in Tucker’s New York Times obituary, “she made the New Museum, which she ran for 22 years as director, in her own image: a somewhat chaotic, idealistic place where the nature of art was always in question, exhibitions were a form of consciousness-raising and mistakes were inevitable.” Tucker’s motto in founding the museum, wrote Smith, was “‘Act first, think later—that way you have something to think about.’” Part of Tucker’s C.V. was classic: she held degrees from Connecticut College (B.A.) and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (M.A.), and her publications included exhibition catalogue essays and articles in Artforum, Art in America, and the New York Times. At the same time, feminist politics imbued much of what she did; she belonged to the Redstockings in the 1970s, and was rumored to be one of the gorilla-masked Guerrilla Girls, feminist watchdogs of the 1980s art world. Later she sang alto in the Art Mob, an a capella group, and performed as a stand-up comedian. In a 1993 article in the New York Times, John Walsh, then director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, described Tucker: “There’s always been a social conscience in Marcia that’s impatient and results in a kind of alertness you can just read across her forehead like a Jenny Holzer sign.” Tucker’s survivors include her husband, their daughter, and her brother.

Staff Eileen Gubler, 73, a longtime employee of the Bard College Bookstore, died on June 1, 2007, after a long and courageous battle against ovarian cancer. A lifelong resident of Red Hook, New York, she had worked at the campus bookstore since 1989. She had previously worked at the New York State Psychiatric Center in Poughkeepsie. She is survived by her husband, David, of Waterford, New York; a son, Steven, and a daughter, Lisa Hotaling; and five grandchildren.

CLASS NOTES | 77

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS

by Robert Bassler ’57 I maintain very strong feelings surrounding the lifelong effect my experience at Bard had on me. The unique educational principles practiced there deeply affected my career as a college professor in the visual arts. I managed to function philosophically (i.e., in specifically Bardian fashion) at a large university of more than 30,000 students, and the results were often gratifying. My teaching career actually began at Bard, with the opportunity to act as a teaching assistant in sculpture and to have one private student off campus. This experience became an important part of my Senior Project, the creative aspect of which was a sculpture titled Seclusion or (more popularly) the Bard Nymph, designed and installed, as a fountain, in the Blithewood garden. It was intended, at that time, to be my personal gift of gratitude to the College. I am amazed to see that she lives on, today, in the memorial garden near the chapel.

My experience might seem peculiar to current Bardians, who would find it hard to believe that, during my years, many of the students participated in emergency fund-raising efforts to keep the College from having to close its doors! The multifaceted experiences outside and beyond the excellent academic program were equally important to my personal development. For example, Bard supported a student fire department that regularly trained to protect the campus and neighboring communities. That activity connected us with local township volunteer departments and other nearby citizens. Every May, we joined Red Hook’s traditional Memorial Day parade, with our two trucks, ambulance, personnel, and mascot “Smoky” (a sheep). After the ceremony, we joined the local folks in a community barbeque at the VFW hall in town. Yes, we did fight fires, on and off campus, often in collaboration with other departments. This community service was the closest thing we had to a fraternity/sorority, since the girls also participated as fire, police, and first aid practitioners.

Other extracurricular activities, some providing me with financial support, included serving as lifeguard and swimming instructor at the pool down by the Sawkill falls; hosting the classical music program on our campus radio station; being regular projectionist for the classic film series we rented from the Museum of Modern Art; working for Buildings and Grounds, including snowplowing, road grading, and forestry; delivering student laundry; and joining other students and faculty volunteers to help convert the old wooden coach house into a wonderful community theater. Finally, and most important, I experienced one winter field period living alone in a small cabin in the snowy woods near Woodstock, on property owned by my adviser, Harvey Fite. I worked for, or with, him on various construction projects, as well as pursuing my own creative and intellectual enterprises.

That experience at Opus 40 probably has had the most influential long-term effect upon my life as an artist.

All of this has had an enormous impact upon so many aspects of my chosen profession and lifestyle, which are based upon intellectual curiosity, energetic determination, ongoing creative spirit, and a love of all the arts. Bard was the critical turning point that provided the focus and direction for all that was to come.

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Robert and Lynn Bassler

Those four years were, undoubtedly, the most important of my life—full of amazing memories that have been with me and guided me for 50 years. I’m sure that many of you have similar sentiments.

Having attained the age at which the IRS requires that I begin accessing a percentage of the value of my Individual Retirement Account (IRA) each year, it seemed to me wise and prudent to contribute that amount, or more, to the institution that had so much to do with the life I have subsequently enjoyed as an artist and teacher. This is not entirely an altruistic act, since the required withdrawal, if properly directed, can avoid income taxes on that amount. In addition, our family trust has, for some time now, included designating a percentage of the value of our estate to Bard. That donation will constitute the Robert and Lynn Bassler Visual Arts Awards for student awards or special projects.

It is a joy for me to see Bard thriving and to be able to continue being a part of the life of this unique institution that successfully maintains its founding philosophy and standards while continuing to evolve in response to the educational challenges of the 21st century.

For information on how you too can make a gift from your IRA or establish a bequest, please contact Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs.

Phone: 845-758-7505 E-mail: pemstein@bard.edu All inquiries will be kept confidential.

CLASS NOTES | 79

F A C U LT Y N O T E S

Rhea Anastas, faculty, Center for Curatorial Studies in Art and Contemporary Culture (CCS), published the article “‘Not in eulogy, not in praise, but in fact’: Ruth Vollmer and Others, 1966–1970,” in the monograph Ruth Vollmer 1961–1978, Thinking the Line (Hatje Cantz). She conceived and moderated a roundtable, and coedited the resulting remarks in “The Artist Is a Currency,” Grey Room 24 (Summer 2006); and read from a book in progress, “Untitled” by Andrea Fraser: A Short Reception History, at the College Art Association Annual Conference in Boston in February 2006 and at SUNY Binghamton in March 2006.

Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, a book by Noga Arikha, visiting assistant professor in First-Year Seminar and faculty member at the Bard Graduate Center, was published

by Ecco/HarperCollins.

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, published A Worldly Country, a collection of new poems (Ecco/HarperCollins in the United States; Carcanet in the United Kingdom). He also published new work in Chicago Review, Crazyhorse, Crowd, Cue, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, New York Review of Books, Raritan, and Times Literary Supplement; a selection from his new translation of Pierre Reverdy’s Maison hantée (Haunted House) appeared in PN Review (U.K.). A portfolio of 15 of his never-before-seen postcard collages was published in the inaugural issue of The Sienese Shredder. Ashbery was profiled by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine (January 14) and was the subject of a feature interview in El Mundo (Madrid).

A fine art edition of his prose poem “Coma Berenices,” with prints

by Alex Katz, was published by Graphicstudio, the University of South Florida’s Institute for Research in Art. Ashbery participated in and gave readings as part of the Robert Creeley celebration at SUNY Buffalo, the William Empson Centennial Symposium at Harvard, the “Poetry Bus Tour” event at Dia:Chelsea, and the Frank O’Hara Festival at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

New translations of his work were published in Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

Dean of Studies Celia Bland attended the Higher Education Data Sharing forum, “Assessments of Student Learning Outcomes,” in Santa Fe this January. She read her poetry at the New York

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Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in February as part of a program called “Myth, Biography, and the Talking Cure: A Dialogue between Poet and Biographer.” She also read her poetry and taught a workshop at Utica College last October.

Ethan Bloch, professor of mathematics, will publish his third book (and second with Springer Verlag) in Springer’s prestigious Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics series.

Leon Botstein, president of the College and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, helped Bard celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution at the international conference and reunion the College organized in February (see page 4).

He spoke about the College’s decision to shelter 300 refugees during the winter of 1956, and he conducted the Bard Conservatory Orchestra in a program of works by Martinu, ˚ Dvoˇrák and Brahms.

For a gathering of the Whitney Museum American Fellows, Botstein described the extraordinary influence exerted by the short-lived Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 near Asheville, North Carolina, on the visual, performing, and literary arts. In Berlin he participated in “German-Jewish Dialogue,” a yearly conference organized by the Bertelsmann Foundation, and for the Jerusalem Post he wrote an essay called “Memories of Beginnings Past.” He wrote and narrated “Talking about Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena,” a CD released by Telarc, for the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s “Talking about Opera” series. At Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) in programs devoted to symphonic works by Mexican composers, the influence of French composer César Franck, music written by conductors, and the U.S. premiere of Der ferne Klang (A Distant Sound) by Viennese composer Franz Schreker. In conjunction with the last concert, Botstein took part in a panel discussion at the Austrian Cultural Forum in which he discussed the fate of Schreker’s music during and after the composer’s lifetime. For the “Classics Declassified” series at New York’s Miller Theatre, Botstein and the ASO presented Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, and Debussy’s La mer. He also recorded music of Bruno Walter with the NDR Symphony Orchestra (Hamburg) and fulfilled regular conducting responsibilities with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the radio orchestra of Israel.

In December, Arthur Burrows, associate professor of music, was bass soloist for two performances with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, in Bach Cantatas No. 33 and No. 140, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Mary C. Coleman, assistant professor of philosophy, published “Directions of Fit and the Humean Theory of Motivation” in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. In April, she commented on the paper “Agential Systems and Causal Deviance,” by Jesús Aguilar, at the American Philosophical Association meeting in San Francisco.

Jonathan Cristol ’00, visiting assistant professor of political studies and deputy director of Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program, presented the paper “Balancing and Bandwagoning in the Federation-Dominion War on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Recent publications by Professor of Religion Richard Davis include an article, cowritten with Leslie C. Orr, titled “People of the Festival,” which appeared in the Hélène Brunner memorial volume Mélanges tantriques a la mémoire d’ Hélène Brunner (French Institute of Pondicherry). Last spring, he lectured at New York University on modern popular Hindu devotional art, with a talk entitled “Temple in a Frame,” and at Yale University on South Indian festival processions.

Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography, is a winner of the Rome Prize and will spend 2008 at the American Academy in Rome. He recently opened a solo exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art and is publishing an essay on the color olive—in the form of a fake, very negative review of his own art— in an upcoming issue of Cabinet magazine.

Margaret De Wys, faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, published the paper “The Necklace of Mysteries” (Zentrum fur Interdisziplinare Frauen und Geschlechterforschung, Teilband 3) in September 2006. An audio installation she did with artist Wendy Ewald, “Towards a Promised Land,” was exhibited last fall in Margate, England. Also last fall, Daughter, a sound and sculpture piece created in collaboration with Kiki Smith, was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Mercedes Dujunco, associate professor of music, gave an invited talk last November at the research colloquium series of the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong. Her presentation, “Chaoyu gequ: An Unpopular Chinese Popular Music,” explored the failure of Chaoyu gequ (a state-promoted pop-song genre) to catch on, not because of its ideological content, but because of the ill-conceived setting of the Mandarin-style lyrics to music. She also presented a paper last September at a symposium on tourism in Asia, organized by the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore.

In April, Julia Emig, faculty member of the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program, presented “The Effects of Professional Development in Literacy on Secondary Urban Teachers: A CrossCase Analysis” at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Chicago. She presented the paper “‘I Don’t Have the Conch Anymore’: Findings from a Cross-Case Analysis of the Effects of Literacy Coaching in One Urban High School” at the International Reading Association Conference in Montreal this May. Together with MAT colleague Derek Furr, Emig also presented “Ivory Tower Meets Real World: Bringing Literacy Practices and Literary Inquiry Together in the Professional Development of Secondary English Teachers” at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention last November in Nashville, Tennessee.

A multimedia installation by Barbara Ess, associate professor of photography, was featured at Souterrain, a new project space in the Mitte district of Berlin, beginning on March 28. In February, she was in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy. Her photo work and a video piece were part of a three-person show, Music Is a Better Noise, at P.S. 1/MoMA, on view from October 2006 through January 2007.

Work by Larry Fink, professor of photography, was included in the following shows: The Art of George Grosz and Larry Fink, Heckscher Museum, Long Island, New York; Somewhere There’s Music, Galleria Forni in Milan, Museo Alinari in Florence, and Villa delle Rose in Bologna; and Logging, the Olympic Peninsula, Lorenzelli Arte Gallery in Milan. For information about his book Somewhere There’s Music, published in 2006, see Books by Bardians in this issue. He is currently curating a show on Lisette Model and her influence on photography for Aperture magazine.

FACULTY NOTES | 81

Jean M. French, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History, was praised in the Financial Times (September 16/17, 2006) for her work

contributed to the anthology Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, edited by Sherry Ellis and

in establishing the effectiveness of neutron activation analysis in provenance studies of medieval limestone sculptures. The article reviewed the exhibit Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture, on view from September 26, 2006, through February 19, 2007, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. French’s study led to the formation of the Limestone Sculpture Provenance Project, a French-American cooperative venture that aims to match isolated sculptures in museums and private collections with major monuments.

published by Tarcher/Penguin.

Jacqueline Goss, associate professor of film and electronic arts, premiered Stranger Comes to Town, a short animated documentary about the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT system, at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January.

Lynn Hawley, assistant professor of theater, performed in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles at the Berkshire Theatre Festival last summer. Early this year she played Rose Tamkin on an episode of NBC’s Law and Order: SVU television series.

Peter Hutton, professor of film, traveled to Windsor, Ontario, in February to present a retrospective of his work, including his most recent film, At Sea, at the Media City Film Festival. He also presented a retrospective of his films at Pennsylvania State University in November. In September, he was awarded a film production grant from New York State Council on the Arts.

Paul Ramírez Jonas, assistant professor of studio arts, had a solo show of his work at the Roger Björkholmen Galleri, Stockholm, in January. He is also serving as artistic codirector of the Kitchen’s Summer Institute.

An-My Lê, assistant professor of photography, was one of 10 recipients of the 2007 Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Awards. Her photographs of foundries in France were published in Draft magazine, while a traveling exhibition of photographs, Small Wars, was on view at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, beginning in February. She participated in a panel discussion on the representation of war at the Yale University School of Art and gave a lecture at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. Additionally, her film 29 Palms was shown at the IFC Center in New York as part of a program, “Idiot Joy Showland: An Evening of Film and Video by Artists.”

Barbara Luka, assistant professor of psychology, published with Cyma Van Petten the paper “Neural localization of semantic context effects in electromagnetic and hemodynamic studies” in Brain and Language. In May 2006, at the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention in New York, she presented a poster, “Behavioral and electrophysiological measures of associative relatedness.” Coinvestigators were Van Petten and Pedro Macizo-Soria.

Edie Meidav, visiting assistant professor of writing, authored the introduction to an anthology of student writing coming out of the graduate program at New College of California; published a short story and an interview in the Chattahoochee Review; and

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Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities and author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins, 2006), participated in a conversation (“Galicia, Mon Amour”) with Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and author of Kaddish. The January event, hosted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, focused on Mendelsohn’s and Wieseltier’s writings about the destruction of their Polish Galician families during the Holocaust. Mendelsohn also presented the Robert Silvers Lecture, “From Roman Games to Reality TV: Some Thoughts on Mass Entertainment and Imperial Politics,” at the New York Public Library in December.

Bradford Morrow, professor of literature, was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship for this year. His short story “Sylvia’s Idea” appeared in the Spring 2007 Ontario Review. A chapter examining his work as both novelist and editor, “Of Morrow and Tomorrow,” appeared in Paul West’s Sheer Fiction IV (McPherson) in April. His first children’s book, Didn’t Didn’t Do It, illustrated by veteran cartoonist Gahan Wilson, was published by Putnam in May. (For more on Morrow, see page 53.)

Melanie Nicholson, associate professor of Spanish, published the article “Without Their Children: Rethinking Motherhood among Transnational Migrant Women” in the Fall 2006 issue of Social Text.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the College and president of the Levy Economics Institute, was interviewed in November by Greg Robb at MarketWatch.com regarding the Federal Reserve year in review, in December by Özer Turan at Turkishtime magazine regarding Greek banks’ expanding their operations in Turkey, in January by Steven Johnson at Reuters regarding dollar reserve holdings of central banks in China and other Asian economies, and in February by Michael E. Kanell at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution regarding the impact of growing debt on the economy. He contributed an entry on Hyman P. Minsky to the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd edition, and authored the chapter “Economic Perspectives on Aging: An Overview” in his latest edited book, Government Spending on the Elderly.

More than fifty works by Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, were included in the exhibition Judy Pfaff: New Prints and Drawings at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz. The exhibition ran from February 10 through April 7, and was curated by CCS graduate Brian Wallace ’97. An adjoining gallery showed Judy Pfaff Selects, an installation designed by the artist and featuring works from the museum’s permanent collection.

Jennifer Phillips, faculty, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, presented “Adaptive Strategies of Hudson Valley Farmers to a Changing Climate” at the November conference “Changing

Climate and Its Consequences in the Hudson River Valley: Past, Present, and Future.” In October, she served on a review panel for

also featured the work of three former Bard students: Shannon Ebner ’93, Jamie O’Shea ’03, and Laura Gail Tyler ’98 (see Books

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Cooperative Institute for Climate Applications and Research housed at Columbia University. She also served on a National Academy of Sciences board to review the U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s draft report, “Characterizing, Communicating, and Incorporating Scientific Uncertainty in Decision Making.”

by Bardians, this issue). Shore’s work has also appeared in the following group shows: Where We Live, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; When Color Was New, Art Institute of Chicago; Not for Sale, P.S. 1, New York; Second View: Amerikanische Fotografie, Kunstmuseum, Magdeburg, Germany. Finally, a photograph by Shore is included in the latest installation of the photography galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Kelly Reichardt, visiting assistant professor of film and electronic arts, was awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Douglas Edwards Experimental/Independent Film or Video Award for Old Joy. Her film was also nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2007 Film Independent’s Spirit Awards.

Sigrid Sandström, assistant professor of studio arts, was represented in the exhibitions Land Force, at Sabina Lee Gallery, Los Angeles, and MÄRKT, at Galleri Gunnar Olsson in Stockholm.

Joseph Santore, visiting associate professor of studio arts, was commissioned to paint the portrait of Kathleen Bowman, retiring president of Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. When completed, the painting will be installed in the school’s Maier Museum.

Gautam Sethi, faculty, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, participated in an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico, this spring. The workshop investigated the role of economics in policy-making decisions related to biodiversity conservation, and Sethi’s presentation, “Incorporating Uncertainty in Fisheries Management,” addressed the importance of incorporating scientific and managerial uncertainty into policymaking.

Professor of History Gennady L. Shkliarevsky’s article “The Paradox of Observing, Autopoiesis, and the Future of Social Sciences” was accepted for publication by the British journal Systems Research and Behavioral Science.

A major exhibition of the work of Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program at Bard, opened this May at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City. In conjunction with the show, which focused on his work in the decade 1969–1979, he and Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography, held a public conversation at ICP. Shore also gave talks at the Photographers’ Gallery, London; the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University; and at Concordia University, Montreal. Additionally, Shore and Jeff Wall held a public conversation at the Baltimore Museum of Art, moderated by art critic Michael Fried of Johns Hopkins University. A new and expanded edition of The Nature of Photographs was published in February (see Books by Bardians, this issue). A discussion about the book, between Shore and Luc Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Aperture. The premier issue of Witness, devoted to Shore’s latest project, making limited-edition artist books employing print-on-demand technology,

Patricia Spencer, visiting associate professor of music, performed as a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall in November and January; at Tribeca Performing Arts Center in December; and at the Knitting Factory this June.

Karen Sullivan, associate professor of literature, was the 2006 recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies. The awards committee cited her book, Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature, as “a model of learned and scholarly writing.”

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, read her essay “This, I Believe” on NPR’s All Things Considered and Performance Today. Three of her works were performed at Carnegie Hall, including a December 28 concert with the New York String Orchestra, a March 8 concert celebrating the Grawemeyer Award winners, and an all-percussion program on May 1. A fourth work will be performed at Carnegie Hall on October 27, in a concert by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, with Roberto Abbado conducting. A new all-Tower orchestral recording debuted in the spring on Naxos, with Leonard Slatkin conducting the Nashville Symphony.

Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, wrote the introduction and notes to a new edition of Remy de Gourmont’s Chez les Lapons (Presses de l’UQAM). He organized a panel devoted to French poet Pierre Alféri at the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium at Texas A&M University and presented a paper, “Proférer l’intime. Dispositif de l’exception chez Pierre Alféri.” He taught a seminar at l’École doctorale (Paris) in June, and his first book, La terreur à l’œuvre: Théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan, was published this spring by the Presses universitaires de Vincennes (France).

Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature, wrote “In Praise of Hybridity: Mathias Schauwecker’s Chimera,” an exhibition essay for the Zhou B. Art Center, Chicago.

In February she lectured at Princeton University on the role of conversation in the Franco-American imagination. In March she delivered the keynote address, on literature and snobbery, at Brown University on the occasion of the French Department’s Graduate Student Conference. She presented a paper on Roland Barthes and “l’exception française” at the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium at Texas A&M University.

FACULTY NOTES | 83

Morocco (see page 60), Stuart Posner ’64

Photography Cover: Erich Lessing/Magnum Photos Inside front cover and page 1: Don Hamerman 2: (top) Don Hamerman; (bottom) Karl Rabe 3: Don Hamerman 4: David Hurn/Magnum Photos 6–9: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 10: Don Hamerman 14: Noah Sheldon 16: Courtesy of the Estate of Anthony Hecht 17: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 19: Courtesy of Bard College 20: (middle right) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (all others) Don Hamerman 24: Jason Reed/Ryan McVay/Getty Images 28–29: Don Hamerman 30–31: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 32–38: Don Hamerman 39: ©2007 Bilyana Dimitrova 40: Don Hamerman 41: (top left, top right, middle right, bottom right) Don Hamerman; (middle left, bottom left) David Wanderman 46: (top left) Courtesy of Yulia Van Doren; (bottom) Karl Rabe 47: ©2007 MJ Maloney/Black Star 48: (left) Karl Rabe; (right) Collection of Robert Tuggle and Paul Jeromack, courtesy of the BGC 49: (top) ©Cornell Capa, Collection International Center of Photography; (bottom) ©Steve J. Sherman 50: (top) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (bottom) Courtesy of Katriel Statman 52: ©Peter Aaron/Esto 56–57: Julia Jordan 58–59: Bessina Harrar 60: Karl Rabe 61: Courtesy of Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 62–64: Karl Rabe 65–66: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 68: (top) ©2007 Lisa Quinones/Black Star; (bottom) Courtesy of the Budapest Business Journal 69: Lisa Kereszi ’95 70–71: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 78: Courtesy of Robert Bassler 80: (left to right) Don Hamerman, Noah Sheldon, Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 81: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 84: Courtesy of Stuart Posner ’64 Back cover: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99

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Board of Trustees of Bard College David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, 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

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