Bardian SPRING 2006

Bardian
Bard College Spring 2006
Writing Africa
Food Webs as Predictive Tools
Clerking for Chief Justice Ginsburg:
Anna-Rose Mathieson ’99
Confucian Enlightenment

Professor Maria Simpson discussing the human skeleton with a parent after a Family Weekend lecture
Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association
Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69, President
Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President
Walter Swett ’96, Vice President
Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary
Olivier teBoekhorst ’93, Treasurer
David B. Ames ’93
Robert Amsterdam ’53
Claire Angelozzi ’74
Judi Arner ’68
David Avallone ’87
Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63
Cathy Thiele Baker ’68, Nominations and Awards
Committee Cochairperson
Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69
Eva Thal Belefant ’49
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, Development Committee
Cochairperson
Peter Criswell ’89, Career Connections Committee
Cochairperson
Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards
Committee Cochairperson
Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52
Joan Elliott ’67
Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53
Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60
Connie Bard Fowle ’80, Career Connections Committee
Cochairperson
Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68
R. Michael Glass ’75
Eric Warren Goldman ’98, Alumni/ae House

Construction of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation
Committee Cochairperson
Rebecca Granato ’99, Young Alumni/ae Committee
Cochairperson
Charles Hollander ’65
Dr. John C. Honey ’39
Rev. Canon Clinton R. Jones ’38
Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71, Oral History Committee
Chairperson
Chad Kleitsch ’91, Career Connections Committee
Cochairperson
Richard Koch ’40
Erin Law ’93, Development Committee Cochairperson
Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65
Dr. William V. Lewit ’52
Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards
Committee Cochairperson
Steven Miller ’70, Development Committee Cochairperson
Abigail Morgan ’96
Molly Northrup Bloom ’94
Jennifer Novik ’98, Young Alumni/ae Committee
Cochairperson
Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee
Cochairperson
Susan Playfair ’62, Bard Associated Research
Donation (BARD) Committee Chairperson
Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79
Allison Radzin ’88, Events Committee Cochairperson
Penelope Rowlands ’73
Reva Minkin Sanders ’56
Roger Scotland ’93
Benedict S. Seidman ’40
Donna Shepper ’73
George Smith ’82
Andrea J. Stein ’92
Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69
Jill Vasileff MFA ’93, MFA Liaison
Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, MFA Liaison
Samir B. Vural ’98
Barbara Wigren ’68
Ron Wilson ’75, Men and Women of Color Network
Liaison

Dear Alumni/ae and Friends,
This letter is about connecting.
Perhaps it was a brilliant red leaf fluttering at your feet and a sudden whiff of
crisp fall air; or the first few instantly recognizable measures of “Walk on By” drifting
out of the radio; or the sound of a waterfall that made you close your eyes to capture
the vision of that waterfall . . . and there you were, for a few brief moments in your
busy, rushing-on-by life, back at Bard.
For the past two years I have had the opportunity to attend the Life After Bard
dinners on campus, where alumni/ae return to talk with current students about their
career paths, choices they made along the way, and, essentially, how they got from here
to there. Consistently, a theme has emerged from these conversations: that of linkages
and the importance of maintaining Bard connections, be it for personal or professional
reasons. It is clear that the Bard community is important to these alumni/ae and they
cherish the friends they still hold close after many years.
The years go by and we do lose touch. It is quite possible that your only connections
with Bard at this time are issues of the Bardian, or an annual contribution (thank
you!) to the Bard alumni/ae fund. However, I am delighted to tell you that you do not
have to lose the academic and supportive community of Bard. There are many ways
you can maintain and strengthen your associations.
There is an active website at www.bard.edu that offers you the opportunity to
connect with classmates and other Bardians. Click on “Alumni/ae” and go to Online
Community. Once there, you can register and log on to find an alumni/ae directory,
websites of fellow Bardians, and a message board. Want to send a unique message? Click
on “Send a Postcard” and get an array of Bard landscapes and buildings to accompany
your message. Want to send news for publication in the Bardian? Click on “Class Notes.”
Looking for your first job or considering a career change? Click on “Services” and access
the college’s Career Development Office.This office also supports the collegecentral.com/
bard site, on which you can post job or internship offerings or sign up to be a mentor to
a current student. As a mentor you can choose a wide range of personally fulfilling
opportunities, ranging from being a listening ear to assisting with a job placement.
The alumni/ae website offers you details of upcoming events. There is also information
on ways to give to Bard—including the alumni/ae fund, gifts of appreciated
securities, and planned giving—to support current and future students, and thus future
members of the Bard alumni/ae community.
Take a moment. Sit back. Is there a particularly poignant memory you have cherished?
Is there a little stirring of desire to take the “then” and make it the “now”? Then
reconnect and come back to Bard! Learn about all the new and exciting programs and
initiatives that have made Bard a major force in liberal arts education in the 21st century.
Be a part of it.
Ingrid Spatt ’69, Ed.D., President, Board of Governors, Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Bardian
8 24 18
SPRING 2006
Features
4 Roger Scotland ’93 Inspires City Kids
6 Supreme Clerkship:
Anna-Rose Mathieson ’99
8 Writing Africa:
In Search of “A Balance of Stories”
14 MAT Program Graduates Make Marks
in the Inner City
16 Looking Homeward:
An Internship of Consequence
18 The Golden Rule’s Contemporary Relevance
20 Food Webs of the Past, Present, and Future
24 Dissonant Issues about World Music
26 Science, Technology, and Society:
Furthering Cross-pollination
among Academic Fields
28 To Bear Witness:
Medical Relief in Kashmir
32 Holiday Party
Departments
34 Books by Bardians
38 On and Off Campus
52 Class Notes
68 Faculty Notes

A MOTIVATIONAL
SLAM DUNK
Roger Scotland ’93 Inspires City Kids
When people talk about Roger Scotland ’93, they speak of
his willingness—indeed, his determination—to go out of his
way to help others.
“In basketball camp, he was one of the counselors, and to
my amazement, he was friendly,” recalls David McClure, who
was an overwhelmed fourth-grader when he met Scotland a
decade ago. Now 19 and a sophomore at Duke University,
McClure still sees Scotland as a mentor. He remembers being
15 years old and taking part in a 3-on-3 game with men in
their 20s. Scotland was playing too. “I was real intimidated,
and Roger just pulled me aside and told me, ‘Don’t be afraid;
you’re better than they are.’ He made me realize I could instill
confidence in myself.”
Fittingly, Scotland works with youth. He is deputy director
for citywide education and youth services in New York
City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office; before that, he ran
one of the city’s summer youth employment programs.
Thanks in part to Scotland, young employees now can receive
their pay through a debit-card system. He also has worked for
the Madison Square Boys & Girls Club and directed fund
development and special projects for Harlem Congregations
for Community Improvement (HCCI).
He was himself mentored by many. “I grew up in East
New York, Brooklyn, and never had consistent access to afterschool
programs,” says Scotland, reached at his office in lower
Manhattan. “When I was looking to go to college, I didn’t get
sound counseling in school. It was through a basketball coach

that I heard about Bard. . . . My models have been people who
didn’t have to be involved with young adults, but were—the
late Reverend Dr. Preston R. Washington, Charles McDuffie,
Kurt James, Lawrence Smith, and Archdeacon and Mrs.
Bernard O. D. Young. ”
One coach, Neil Woodard, involved him in Operation
Athlete, a program run by the not-for-profit Henry Street
Settlement, which tried to form college careers for teenagers
interested in improving themselves. When Scotland heard
about Bard, he recalls “griping” that he couldn’t afford
carfare for the visit. Operation Athlete’s director, James
Robinson, gave him and his mother $100 for the trip.
“When I got back, he died,” Scotland recalls. “I knew I had
to go to Bard,” which he did through the Higher Education
Opportunity Program (HEOP).
As an undergraduate, Scotland helped out with the
Special Olympics, while playing varsity basketball (he was
captain from 1991 to 1993). “I’ve always acted through the
examples others have set,” he says. “My grandfather, a deacon
in the church, was a maintenance worker in a Coney
Island housing development; no matter what his situation,
he always helped others.”
Woodard remembers Scotland, who was 16 at the time
the two met, as both organized and smart: “He was my assistant
coach in Operation Athlete after he graduated from Bard,
and he taught the kids how to think. He made the game
as cerebral as it is physical.” Woodard adds, “He was motivational
and inspirational for those kids. He would tear you
down, then pull you back up, which is necessary because
there is a lot of cockiness on the basketball court.”
Scotland grew up with his mother and two siblings; his
parents divorced when he was young. His mother, a manager
at Citibank, worked an additional part-time job to support her
three children while attending community college. Scotland
himself is divorced with no children, and has what he calls two
“vices”: his two Alaskan Malamute dogs and the antique cars
that he restores. He strongly believes that, nowadays, adults
increasingly ignore or allow themselves to be intimidated by
young people. “If you see children doing something they
shouldn’t, go out and talk with them,” he says. “Many adults
don’t take the time to engage our kids; many people are scared
of children, who try to take advantage. As Leon Botstein wrote
in Jefferson’s Children, teenagers have a great deal of perspective,
intellect, and curiosity.”
At HCCI, Scotland’s first job after Bard, “I was extended
a tremendous opportunity to be involved in the holistic rehabilitation
of Harlem,” he recalls. “But I realized no one would
listen to me with only a B.A.” So he enrolled in a Ph.D. program
in history at Columbia. Still at HCCI, he met a consultant,
Herb Lowe, who later recruited him for the Madison
Square Boys & Girls Club, where Scotland ultimately became
director of marketing and community relations and where he
learned valuable lessons about life, business, and stewardship.
He began working for New York City in June 2002.
“I saw him in action in the not-for-profit world and in
government,” says Ernie Hart, former chief of staff to the
deputy mayor for policy and now assistant vice president for
employee and labor relations at Columbia University. “At the
Department of Youth and Community Development, he
helped to start up and maintain day-to-day relationships in a
program that involved banks, contractors, parents, and youth.
He made certain the debit card program was successful. The
purpose was to make it easier for the city’s bookkeeping, but
it also gave kids experience in financial management.”
Scotland is involved with promoting a uniform and
responsive policy toward youth and families. His focus is on
“disconnected youth”—ages 16 to 24, who are neither in school
nor work—and young adults negotiating the criminal justice
system. “We are trying to better coordinate services so those
who fall through the cracks early in life find . . . access to workforce
development programs, life-skills training, and supportive
interventions,” he says.
In the midst of this busy life, Scotland found himself diagnosed
in 2001 with Guillaume-Barre Syndrome, an immobilizing
disorder that later often afflicts sufferers with chronic
fatigue. (He conducted negotiations on a tentative property
closing from his bed in an intensive care unit.) He says the
experience, like so many others in his life, affected him deeply:
“It gives you a better appreciation for the things you take for
granted. I’d been an athlete all my life and I couldn’t even do a
toe raise. Now I always look at programs with an eye toward
people with special needs.”
Another example of his concern for youth is his continuing
connection with the Bard campus through his participation
on the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s
Alumni/ae Association. “Since my childhood and my time at
Bard, I have always had in me the examples others have set,”
Scotland says. “Today’s youth could learn much from intergenerational
contact and greater focus—both by them and by
the adults who are supposed to prepare them for successful
adulthood.”
—Cynthia Werthamer
5

SUPREME CLERKSHIP
Anna-Rose Mathieson ’99 Serves the Highest Court
They are the highest clerks in the land. Young, bright, diligent,
and highly motivated law school graduates, they are
handpicked by the nine Justices of the United States Supreme
Court for one-year terms characterized by “long hours wading
through eye-glazing paperwork,” as Charles Lane put it in the
Washington Post. Working well behind the scenes, and outside
the hot glare of media scrutiny, they help the Justices pore
through certiorari applications (applications requesting the
Supreme Court to review lower-court decisions) and assist in
researching and writing judicial opinions.
In July 2005, a Bard graduate was welcomed into the elite
corps of Supreme Court clerks. Anna-Rose Mathieson ’99, a
native Oregonian who earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy
in Annandale and then went on to graduate first in her
class at the University of Michigan Law School, was selected
by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to serve as one of four clerks
on her staff. For Mathieson, it was—as it no doubt must be for
any clerk selected—a case without any experiential precedent.
“Nothing can really prepare you for the substance of a
Supreme Court clerkship—all you can do is jump in and
hang on as the almost vertical learning curve goes up and
up,” she says. “But it helped that I’d been in several other situations
that were also intense from the outset. For the eight
months before my clerkship, for instance, I worked at the
6

[Washington, D.C.] law firm of Williams & Connolly. I
started in November, and was immediately put on a big
criminal case that was going to trial in February. It was an
amazing learning experience: for all of February, our trial
team camped out in a Manhattan hotel and threw every
waking hour into defending our client.”
While clerking for the nation’s highest court may present
an unparalleled learning opportunity, Mathieson cannot
divulge the details: she and her fellow clerks are bound by the
strictest of confidentiality agreements. The Supreme Court,
as an institution, places a premium on discretion; while
details about the size of Mathieson’s workload, say,
or the amount of hours she logs might appear to be trivial,
even such humdrum minutiae about the Court’s inner workings
are not generally made public. Nothing prohibits her,
though, from discussing how her many and varied interests
dovetail with her legal career.
“Right after my clerkship interview with Justice
Ginsburg, I went to India for a couple of months,” she relates.
“Not to see the tourist sights—I’d already spent several
months doing that, being awed by India’s beauty and history,
and trying not to be overwhelmed by the sensory overload of
sights, smells, and sounds. Instead, this trip was to learn
about India’s legal system. I wasn’t planning to have the
experience contribute to my professional development in any
specific way; nor did I have any contacts there, or even a plan
about how I was going to proceed. I just hopped on a flight,
showed up at one of the law schools in Bombay, and started
talking to professors and students.”
The adventure proved to be as enlightening as it was
enjoyable. “I sat in on several law school classes and even
taught a contracts class; watched wig-bedecked lawyers argue
in several types of courts; talked to law clerks, prosecutors,
defense attorneys, and law firm partners; and read the Indian
penal code while sitting on a roof overlooking the chaos of
Bombay,” she says.
Her Indian sojourn helped Mathieson gain an appreciation
for the evolution of criminal law. “Both Indian and
American criminal law grew out of the same British common
law roots, and both changed and adapted in response to different
histories, cultures, and governmental structures,” she
says. “It was just fun to learn about something interesting and
get to design my own curriculum. [It’s] the sort of thing I
would never have done had I not gone to Bard.”
The above account makes abundantly manifest those
personal qualities—confidence, resourcefulness, amiability,
and a keen intelligence wedded to a boundless curiosity—
that have stood Mathieson in such good stead and make
such a lasting impression on those who encounter her.
“Do I remember her? We all do—she is unforgettable,”
says William Griffith, professor and director of the
Philosophy Program at the College. “She was absolutely an
exceptional student—one of the very best we have ever had in
the department. We all thought she might do spectacular
things. Now, it looks as though she has.”
Garry Hagberg, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of
Aesthetics and Philosophy, was Mathieson’s adviser on her
Senior Project. “What emerged from a flurry of highly
focused work was an award-winning, truly exceptional piece
of writing on philosophical issues in legal theory,” he says.
“We in the Philosophy Program are very pleased by, and very
proud of, her remarkable achievements.”
In case your image of a law clerk is that of a vaguely
Dickensian character, haggard and twitchy from squinching
over intimidating piles of papers and rarely seeing daylight,
let it be noted that Mathieson does have a life outside of law.
She has, at one time or another, been an avid runner, fencer,
rower, and white-water rafter; she has a passion for art history
and theater; and she is an insatiable traveler, having visited,
to date, more than 30 countries and all 50 states.
Mathieson has swum with piranhas in the Amazon, trekked
the Inca trail, waded through two kilometers of mud to cross
the Laotian-Chinese border on foot, and put the finishing
touches on her law school admissions essay in an Internet
café in Bangkok.
In July, Mathieson will complete her service with Justice
Ginsburg and move on. She will be in an enviable position;
according to Legal Times, former Supreme Court clerks are
highly prized and aggressively recruited by law firms. For her
part, Mathieson has no immediate plans.
“I’m not quite sure what I’ll be doing 10 years from now,
or even one year from now,” she says. “I’d love to end up
teaching criminal law, but I want to practice first and experience
the gritty realities of litigation.”
—Mikhail Horowitz
7

Clockwise, from left to right: Helon Habila, Emmanuel Dongala, Kofi Anyidoho, Caryl Phillips, and Chinua Achebe
8

WRITING AFRICA
In Search of “A Balance of Stories”
In Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe, the Charles P. Stevenson Jr.
Professor of Literature and Languages at Bard, reflects on the 20th
century as the beginning of “‘re-storying’ peoples who had been
knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession,” and
expresses his hope that the 21st century will see a “balance of stories.”
Achebe played a seminal role in creating a tradition for “writing
Africa,” and Kofi Anyidoho, Emmanuel Dongala, Helon Habila,
and Caryl Phillips are building on that tradition. The five distinguished
writers and educators came together at the College last
October to discuss the history of fellowship and conflict between
African and African diaspora writers and to address the impact
of such issues as pan-Africanism, colonialism, and postcolonialism
on their work. Jesse Shipley, director of the Africana Studies
Program, moderated the event, which inaugurated the Chinua
Achebe Fellowship in Global African Studies at Bard College and
was cosponsored by Barnard College’s Literature of the Middle
Passage course.
Chinua Achebe has taught at Bard since 1990. Originally from
Nigeria, the poet, novelist, cultural critic, and essayist is perhaps best
known for his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, considered by many
the premier work of African literature. In September 2005, he was
named one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign
Policy magazine. Helon Habila, also from Nigeria, is the first
Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard. His debut novel, Waiting for an
Angel, was published in 2003 and received a Commonwealth
Writers Prize. Kofi Anyidoho is a poet, critic, and professor of literature
at the University of Ghana, his alma mater. His most recent collection
of poetry is PraiseSong for the Land. Emmanuel Dongala,
a novelist originally from the Congo Republic, teaches Francophone
African literature at the College and is the Richard B. Fisher Chair
in Natural Sciences and professor of chemistry at Simon’s Rock
College of Bard. Caryl Phillips, a native of St. Kitts who was
brought up in Leeds, England, is the author of three books of nonfiction
and eight novels, including Dancing in the Dark (2005)
and Crossing the River, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker
Prize for Fiction. He is a professor of English at Yale University and
last fall was a visiting professor at Barnard College.
Excerpts of the panelists’ remarks follow.
CARYL PHILLIPS In the 1930s, in Paris, two remarkable men
sat down for a series of conversations. One was Léopold
Sédar Senghor, a student from Senegal, and the other Aimé
Césaire, from Martinique. The young men saw themselves as
artists, but they also felt that they had a responsibility to
shape the political direction of their respective countries once
they had completed their studies. Senghor would eventually
return to Senegal and become its president, and Césaire
returned to Martinique and became mayor of its capital city.
Beyond their obvious like and trust for each other, what
bound these men together was their conviction that colonialism
was most vigorous and corrosive when it sought, as it
inevitably did, to destroy something they understood to be
black culture. Neither man could conceive a future for himself
in which his efforts achieved validation only when reflected
through European eyes. Their philosophy—for after all they
were French—came to be known as “Negritude.” It was a
9

mode of thinking that suggested that a common black culture
existed, a culture whose strengths were such that if one could
only recognize and promote them, it would no longer be necessary
to continually negotiate Europe’s assumption of black
inferiority, artistic or otherwise.
In September 1956, both men once again found themselves
in Paris for the Conference of Negro African Writers
and Artists. It soon became clear that those in attendance were
continuing the same conversation that Senghor and Césaire
had begun two decades earlier. In the intervening years, the
conversation had become a movement, and most of those at
the conference took it for granted that all black people possessed
a common heritage that existed in opposition to Europe.
James Baldwin, who wrote about the conference, felt
that there were three clearly expressed aims: to define or
assign responsibility for the state of black culture, to assess
the state of black culture at the present time, and to open a
new dialogue with Europe. But Baldwin detected something
else: a discomfort between what he termed the American
Negro and other men of color. Potentially, an African man
and a Caribbean man have much in common, largely because
they were forged in the same crucible of colonial exploitation.
But the African American has an altogether different
history. He has not been shaped by colonialism, but by
American expansionism. In fact, he’s been a central participant
in it. Remember, the buffalo soldiers had rifles.
Along with Baldwin, Richard Wright was in the audience.
Although these two writers hardly agreed on anything else, they
were agreed on the central divide between American Negroes
and these colonials. Both Baldwin and Wright felt that, despite
their checkered relationship with the United States, they had
been born into, as Baldwin put it, “a world with a great number
of possibilities.” Baldwin felt strongly that it was part of
his struggle as a writer to encourage Negro Americans to see
themselves as Americans, and until they could do that, they
had no place at all thinking of themselves as Africans.
Today, 50 years after the conference, we still have major
migration from Africa and the Caribbean to Paris and London
and the United States, now clearly the first choice of most
migrants. There’s an economic pull that draws people to the
United States, but there is also the hope of being able to function
in a society that does not view people of African origin
through a reductive colonial lens. In this sense, Negritude has
been replaced by “migratude.”
But let me conclude by returning to the problem that
daunted the conference in 1956 and continues to cloud the
conversation today. How does one have a conversation between
African writers and writers of the African diaspora and productively
include African Americans? And if we do speak, what
should we talk about beyond banalities of pigmentation? The
question, perhaps, will not be so much about finding a common
black culture; it will be a question that brings us back to colonialism:
the quest for power. How does power operate on the
social, political, and artistic expression of a people? A consensus
on the word “power” might be a good place to begin. Baldwin,
always intuitive, already knew this: he entitled his essay on the
conference “Princes and Power.”
EMMANUEL DONGALA I would like to talk briefly about
the problem of identity confronted by Francophone African
writers. It seems that this problem of identity, the so-called
authentic African identity, has been more of an issue in that
part of Africa writing in French. The reason may be that
Francophone African literature began not in Africa, but in
Paris. In Anglophone countries it started on the continent.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart, for example, were written in Africa, in
Nigeria. Read Things Fall Apart, and there’s no doubt in your
mind that the writer knows intimately the culture he’s talking
about—it is his culture.
Francophone African literature started from the banks
of the Seine. It tried to include all of the diaspora, le monde
negre, from Africa to America to the Caribbean. When you
have such an inclusive movement, you refer more to imagined
entities than to real ones; you deal more with generalities
and, inevitably, ideologies. And when you try to deal
with a specific culture, it’s a culture remembered, re-created.
In his book L’Enfant Noire, Camara Laye deals with the
Malinke culture in Guinea. It’s a culture remembered from
Paris, a celebration of a mythical and paradisiacal Africa.
I don’t know whether this quote is true, but Chinua was
10

quoted as saying that he found that book “too sweet” for
his tastes.
Negritude, this sort of celebration of Africa, was in part
a reaction to the belief that colonialism had destroyed and
offended African culture and identity. The remedy was
thought to be simple. It was through anticolonial struggle. It
was as if African identity lay somewhere in the path, and to
fetch it, to redeem it, all one had to do was remove the cultural
and political obstacles preventing you from reaching it. Well,
it turned out that was not true. After independence, not only
was the so-called authentic African identity nowhere to be
found, but the problem was more complex: writers were confronted
with a moving identity.
In any case, has there ever been such a thing as an authentic
African identity in a continent with so many ethnicities, each
with their own individual culture? You read Things Fall Apart
and learn that in Ebo traditional society, twins are evil and have
to be abandoned to the forest to die. Read my own Little Boys
Come from the Stars and you will learn that twins are to be celebrated
and that their mother is given a special status. How can
a writer in postcolonial Africa talk about a supposedly authentic
African identity when it can be, at the same time, Christian
and Muslim, animist and Marxist? And what is his or her
identity when he or she is a son or daughter of immigration?
Are you still an African writer when you have not lived on the
continent at all and do not speak any African languages?
What is happening now is that the Francophone writer
does not pretend to speak for the people anymore. He has
learned modesty. Like most writers, he or she is now more
concerned about his own vision of the world than anything.
Many of them do not want to be called écrivain engagé, the
committed writer, anymore. They do not even want to be
called an African writer. Just writer. So the problem of identity
faced by the first generation of Negritude writers has not
been resolved by the younger generation; it is just reappearing
under a new guise.
young Africans who do not see their future in Africa. My students
are busy spending the time they should be spending on
reading their books, preparing for their exams, or thinking of
a future for themselves where they are, in planning an exit. At
my university, most in the last class of medical doctors were
not at the graduation ceremony to receive diplomas; they had
already left, most on their way to America.
What would it take for us to reinvent a future for our
young people at home? It is important to keep reminding
ourselves of stories like those Neto has left us, stories about
how once upon a time we had our world in our hands and
stories about how we lost that world. And above all, stories
about how we can get back our own world.
Some tell us that our salvation lies in the refutation of
our history of pain, our history of shame, our history of endless
fragmentation. But we must wander through history into
myth and memory seeking lost landmarks in a geography of
scars and fermented remembrances. It must not be that the
rest of the world came upon us, picked us up, used us to clean
up their mess, then dropped us off into trash, hoping that we
remain forever lost among the shadows of our own doubt.
Ours is a quest for a future aligned with the energy of recovered
vision. With so much left undone, to keep calling our
situation a dilemma is just an excuse for inaction. We must
recall that we are the people who once wrote it down with
civilization’s life still blowing through our minds.
For 500 years and more we have journeyed from Africa
through the Virgin Islands into Santo Domingo, from Havana
in Cuba to Savannah in Georgia, from Ghana to Guyana, from
the shantytowns of Johannesburg to the favelas in Rio de
Janeiro. And all we find are a dispossessed and battered people
still kneeling in a sea of blood, lying in the path of hurricanes.
But no matter how far away we try to hide away from ourselves,
we will have to come back home and find out where and
how and why we lost the light in our eyes, how and why we
KOFI ANYIDOHO “My hands lay stones upon the foundations
of the world. I deserve my piece of bread.”These are the words
of the late Agostinho Neto, poet, freedom fighter, president of
Angola. In a world in which Africa has taken on the image of
poverty, of the professional beggar, we have to come back to
the understanding that it has not always been like that. In
fact, once upon a time, the world came to Africa to learn.
Today we in Africa ourselves are finding it very difficult
to believe that’s true. We are faced with a generation of
11

have become eternal orphans. We must remind ourselves that
just to survive, barely to survive, and merely to survive can
never be enough.
HELON HABILA It has occurred to me that most of the novels
by the new generation of African writers seem to be concerned
with coming-of-age themes. This emerging generation
of writers has been described as witnesses to the challenges
of living in a society in transition, as both the victims and
chroniclers of a prolonged season of pain.
In Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles we come face to
face with the civil wars in Uganda. In Chris Abani’s GraceLand
we see the chaos that was Nigeria under the long stretch of
military dictatorships. Diane Awerbuck’s Gardening at Night
tells of a young lady’s coming-of-age confusions and desires
for South Africa. From the same country we have the late
Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, with its treatment
of black-on-black xenophobia and the ravages of AIDS on
the people of Johannesburg. Despite the diversity of subjects
treated, these young writers are all trying to make sense of the
world around them. In choosing the bildungsroman form, it
is as if they are crying out, “We are just beginning. We know
you look to us for answers and interpretations, but we are as
helpless as you are.”
I cannot help but compare this generation to the first
generation of African writers whose reign began with the
publication of such landmarks as Things Fall Apart, A Grain of
Wheat, and The African Child in the 1950s and 1960s. This was
a time when Africa was reeling under the shackles of colonialism,
when books like Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, and even the adventures of Tarzan were the
standards by which Africans were judged. The pan-African
politicians and poets tried to correct this astigmatic perception
of the African, but without much success. After them, the
Negritude poets tried the same thing. Critic Simon Gikandi
suggests that these writers were so focused on countering
Western imaginings, that they forgot the essential point at
stake: the invention of an African culture independent of
Europe. So it was the first generation of writers, and Chinua
Achebe in particular, who were able, at that moment of transition,
to supply African and even non-African people with an
African culture they could read about, discuss in class, and
write papers on.
The kind of society that the new African writers, the
third generation writers, must make sense of is a society that
still struggles between democracy and dictatorship, a society
where most of the graduates are unemployed because of the
collusion between the unfair global economic system and corrupt
politicians, a society where most of the women are still
exploited and voiceless. And I see in the works of these young
writers a feeling of exhaustion, a lack of conviction about the
ability of the societies represented to triumph over the obstacles
in their path.
I think my generation seems to lack conviction not
because it has forgotten its history, but because it’s not sure of
the efficacy of literature to repeat the kind of feat that Professor
Achebe achieved. Notice that I’m taking it for granted that one
of the most important duties of a writer is to act as his community’s
conscience. But we are talking about a society where all
accepted avenues for protest and dissent have crumbled. In
Africa, we now have more newspapers than we had before,
more writers, but because of the desensitization of the societies
no one pays attention to the written word. It seems that to
protest, to express dissent, one must resort to extraliterary
channels. And so recently, to make himself quite clear to the
Nigerian government, Professor Achebe had to turn down an
award. And two weeks ago, the 71-year-old Nobel laureate
Wole Soyinka had to take to the streets to demonstrate against
the government’s economic policies.This desensitization to literature
is not is unique to Africa. Writers now are in competition
with the fact-churning industries—the search engines, live
television broadcasts, DVDs. And when people do talk about
books it is not about whether they are good or bad, but about
what prizes they have won or how photogenic the author is.
I hate to conclude on this pessimistic note, so I will borrow
a few hopeful words from a recent essay by Salman
Rushdie: “Not even the author of a book can know exactly
what effect his book will have, but good books do have effects,
and some of these effects are powerful, and all of them, thank
goodness, are impossible to predict in advance.”
12

CHINUA ACHEBE Not long ago, I watched a program in which
a group of upper-middle-class white women were discussing
the flood in Louisiana. In particular, they were discussing the
fact that a disproportionate number of black people were those
who appeared in the pictures, who were having the worst of it.
And one of the women asked why it was that, whether in
Louisiana, or in Haiti, or in Africa itself, poverty seems somehow
to attach to blackness.
Somebody said it was not a question of race, but a question
of class, which is the best position we have invented to save
us from the awkwardness of this question. But it’s a question
that has occurred to many of us. It’s occurred, for instance, to
the African American historian Chancellor Williams. I once
was in his audience, and he was asking the same question. As a
child growing up, he said, he wondered why black people were
always at the end of the queue. He knew he wasn’t more dumb
than other people; in fact, he beat everyone in his class. So why
was it that at the end of the day he was at the end of the queue?
Now this question has a very simple answer. The answer
is that these black people, whether you see them in Louisiana
or in Haiti or in Africa itself, have the same story: the story
of the slave trade. What happened, happened first in Africa.
The consequences then spread throughout the world. We
writers have to do the homework to find out the history of
what happened to us.
In my third novel, Arrow of God, I wrote in a character
from real life. My parents were Christian evangelists and
they knew the early missionaries who brought the gospel to
my part of the world. And they spoke about a Mr. Blackett,
who was so learned, they said, that he was more learned than
white people. Blackett came from the West Indies with an
Anglican mission. He was the director of education and he
became a legend, a man everybody was talking about. This
went on under the British, who owned the colony of Nigeria
and who, for reasons of their own, decided that they didn’t
need the word of God anymore and sent Blackett home. So
I put this man in my novel as a legend. He didn’t do very
much, but he lived in my mind and was part of it, so I put
him in. Now, 10 years later, I get a letter from a headmaster
in the Caribbean. He says, “I just read your novel, Arrow of
God. Thank you very much for the tribute you paid my late
father.” The letter went on to explain that this was Blackett’s
son, who, as it happened, was born in Nigeria. My mother,
who was 80, remembered this little boy.
The Caribbean missionaries clearly understood that there
was something binding them to the Ebo people in Nigeria.
The experience of black people in the United States is different
from the experience of black people in the Caribbean. It is
different from the experience of black people in Africa. But
that doesn’t cancel the fact that this is basically the same story.
The first and only time I met James Baldwin was in
Gainsville, Florida. The African Literature Association had
invited him and me to hold a conversation. I was very
excited. Six years before I had come to this country for the
first time on a fellowship given by UNESCO. I’d discovered
Baldwin, and he was one of the reasons for choosing to come
here. I came in ’62, I believe, and I was told that Baldwin was
in France and wasn’t likely to be back. So I didn’t see him.
Then this opportunity came at the conference. I was so
excited that when I met him I wanted to say, “Mr. Baldwin,
I presume.” Well, I didn’t, but later I talked to him about it,
and Baldwin laughed so much, you could see his eyes jumping.
When he had the opportunity to speak, he turned to me
and said, “This is a brother I have not seen in 400 years.” The
audience exploded. They were so loud they nearly missed the
next thing he said, which was, “It was never intended that he
and I should ever meet.”
Baldwin had his difficulties with Africa, and he said so
quite openly. But he was wrestling with it, because having difficulties
with Africa doesn’t mean saying “I didn’t come from
there” or “I came from there and I didn’t like it.” It is important
for us to understand that when we see black people at
the end of the queue in Haiti, in Louisiana, in Nigeria, it’s
because they have the same story. And it is the business of the
writer to deal with this story and all its ramifications. It’s
extremely complex, but we must never surrender to despair. I
don’t think that will do at all. We’ve got this task, this job, to
write Africa. And it’s extremely important to understand and
appreciate that it’s going to take a long, long time.
13

NOT BY ROTE
Carole Ann Moench and Kate Belin, Members of the MAT Program’s First
Graduating Class, Make Marks in the Inner City
Words are scattered across a seventh-grade classroom board:
“sound”; “ groaned”; “fawn.” At tables around the room, students
sort through envelopes stuffed with words that their
teacher has asked them to arrange into a poem. Outside, an
autumn sun shines on high-rises covered with graffiti, interrupted
by rows of new, single-family row houses, many with
cars parked on tiny concrete aprons in front.
Barely 10 years ago, the East Tremont section of the
South Bronx still looked as it did in the famous photograph
of President Jimmy Carter touring the rubble-strewn neighborhood.
Today, the row houses are gaining ground, but the
area remains one of the nation’s poorest. Many students at
Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School and High School come
from East Tremont or other parts of the South Bronx. “The
parents come in and say, ‘I teach my kids to fight because
that’s what they have to do to survive,’” says Carole Ann
Moench, the teacher giving the poetry lesson.
Moench, who teaches humanities at Fannie Lou Hamer
Middle School, and Kate Belin, who teaches math at Fannie
Lou Hamer High School around the corner, both graduated
last year from Bard’s new Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT)
program. The MAT degree blends advanced work in a graduate
student’s chosen discipline—for Moench, literature; for
Belin, math—with teacher training, including practice teaching
in public school classrooms, and certification over the
course of a full year.
“We believe good teaching should grow out of the practice
of the academic discipline being taught,” says MAT program
director Ric Campbell. “One error in public schools is
that we tend to infantilize learners, to see sixth graders and
ninth graders as capable of far less than they are. Typically in
schools, we march kids through a fixed curriculum dictated
from above, rather than letting a teacher’s deep interest in his
or her field determine the course of study.”
In an inner city school, it might seem quixotic to try to
turn humanities students with reading problems into poets,
or 11th graders struggling with division into mathematicians,
but both MAT teachers feel their Bard training has
been a plus. “It’s hard to learn if you’re just told to memorize
facts,” says Belin. “These kids haven’t been able to explore on
the way; it’s not that they’re not capable of it.”
In that spirit, Belin asked a recent class of 11th graders to
prove that the same rules apply to polynomials as numerals.
While the students traded insults, magic markers, and iPods,
14

Belin went from table to table, answering questions and
pulling out blocks to help visualize principles of length and
height, multiplication and subtraction. When it came time for
each table to explain what they had discovered, each group
demonstrated their proofs, punctuating explanations with
expletives. Belin answered some students’ protests calmly
with, “We’re also working on our presentation skills.”
Surface static rarely throws Belin. “The students care a
lot about what they’re doing,” she says. “They take it very
seriously, even when I think that they’re not. I didn’t like
some of the schools in really privileged upstate New York
where I student-taught. That’s what brought me to the South
Bronx. Fannie Lou Hamer makes sense to me.” Now 23, she
grew up in Youngstown, New York, and dreamed for years of
being a public school teacher like her aunt. Belin does not
gloss over the challenges of teaching a troubled population,
but draws a distinction between her learning curve and theirs.
“Making students do things is just hard,” she says. “I can’t tell
if I don’t like it or I’m just not good at it yet. I’ll be making
people do things for the rest of my teaching career.”
For Moench, 29, who taught for several years in a New
York City preschool, handling a classroom isn’t new, but getting
the students to focus can be a battle. “I should be able to
have a thick skin, but when the kids don’t respond to the lesson
plan it upsets me,” she says. A Houston native, Moench
found her way to Bard through a college fair. She graduated
in 2000, returned for the MAT program, and ended up with
a Petrie Fellowship, a cash award to a graduate who commits
to teaching five years in New York City schools. “When I
came to Fannie Lou Hamer, I wasn’t thinking I was going to
save the world,” she says. “These kids are delicate; it’s a tough
classroom environment. I knew it was going to be a daily
fight to get them to like what I was teaching.”
Carole Ann Moench (center)
Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School principal Lorraine
Chanon believes that the schools’ size—the high school has
450 students; the middle school 175— and staff-run structure
make a Bard partnership particularly fruitful. “Bard is
clearly an institution that believes in the empowerment of
students,” she says. “Carole Ann is socializing kids to what it
means to be a student, as well as teaching thinking skills they
can carry through life. Kate’s classes are prepping students to
life beyond high school, to college, to the world of work.”
Campbell believes that the MAT Program, with its
emphasis on teaching the discipline of a field, offers particularly
good training for schools like Fannie Lou Hamer. “Carole
Ann and Kate are poised to move on in their graduate work,
but they’ve chosen to go into public schools with a deep commitment
to their disciplines and how they look at the world,”
he says. “Students often don’t have a grasp of how or why what
they’ve been taught works. They just have enough practice to
answer test questions correctly. It’s the teach-to-the-test phenomenon.
What’s important is for them to achieve an authentic
understanding.”
While the MAT philosophy shapes both teachers’
approaches, they have set realistic goals for their students, and
themselves. Belin finds her optimism growing. “I find myself
looking forward to next year,” she says. “I think every new
teacher quits four times a week their first year. I would not
want to give up on anything until I knew how to do it well.”
For her part, Moench is learning the limits—and possibilities—of
what she can help her students achieve. “There are a
lot of things that I have no control over,” she says, “but I do
have control over my classroom and what goes on there. I can’t
follow every kid home at night. I have little say in legislation
that passes or doesn’t. But I have a classroom of 20 kids for an
hour and a half each day and I can try to make that as positive
a learning experience as I can, both for them and for me.”
—Hanna Rubin
Kate Belin
15

LOOKING HOMEWARD
An Internship of Consequence
In 2004, Reporters Without Borders ranked the Philippines
second only to Iraq as the most dangerous place for a journalist
to work. They reported that more than 50 Filipino
journalists have been assassinated since 1986, the year that
nation ousted Ferdinand Marcos and returned to democratic
government. Jomar Giner ’07 knows these facts well. The
political persecution of journalists, human rights advocates,
and political opposition leaders in the Philippines was the
focus of her internship at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in
fall of 2005.
When she opted to intern at Human Rights Watch, as
a student in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs
(BGIA) Program in New York City, Giner had little idea
how vital her work would be. She was initially attracted to
HRW because of the group’s film festival, as she’d worked
for two summers at Amnesty International’s similar festival.
16
“I thought that would make an interesting comparison,” she
says. “Then I saw that HRW was looking for an intern in its
Asia division and that the associate overseeing the internship
was Bard alumna Jo-Anne Prud’homme ’04, who also went to
BGIA and interned at Human Rights Watch.” Prud’homme
ultimately became Giner’s on-site mentor.
“When I was preparing for the interview, I learned
that HRW’s Asia division was not actively covering the
Philippines,” Giner says. “I was born in the Philippines, lived
there for 11 years, and am a native speaker of Tagalog, so I
was naturally interested in issues there. I also knew that there
were a lot of human rights violations, and I was surprised that
they weren’t mentioned on the HRW website. I found out
that HRW didn’t have the resources to cover the Philippines
at that time, and they wanted an intern who could document
the situation there.”
ABOVE Filipino detainees are hosed down after police storm their cells inside the
prison camp in Manila’s Police Camp Bagong Diwa. RIGHT Jomar Giner ’07

Giner’s language skills, academic goals, and growing personal
interest in the research made the internship a perfect fit.
It also met her desire to do work that would matter. “Because
she’d worked in a similar position, Jo-Anne understood that
I wanted my work to make a difference,” Giner says, “and she
continually assured me that the research would be used.”
As soon as she arrived at HRW, Giner began gathering
reports and data on specific instances of politically motivated
murders, abductions, and torture. The process involved
online research, reading Philippine media, and talking with
human rights advocates working there. “One good thing is
that many of these instances are documented in the media,
because Philippine civil society is very strong, even though the
press is facing a lot of repression,” Giner says. “I decided to
research beginning in 2001 when the current president, Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo, started her term. At first I recorded violations
across the board, against women, children, indigenous
people, and political activists, but soon I decided to concentrate
on political assassinations, which I felt were the most
pressing.”
One of Giner’s first realizations was that, although the
United States’ “War on Terror” provides support intended to
crack down on Islamic terrorists based in the Philippines, the
resulting practice is overall repression of not just the Islamic
separatist movement, known to use terrorist tactics, but of all
Philippine Muslim populations, communists and former communist
associates, and members of any leftist political groups.
Giner’s research began to hit closer to home. “There were
points when I became very emotionally involved,” she says.
“I really loved my life there, and I still have friends there
and family members. Also, my parents have ties to these victimized
groups. My mother used to be a journalist in the
Philippines, and her former editor now serves in the Congress
for a minority party-list group.” Party-list groups are the political
voice of marginalized sectors and are guaranteed 20 percent
of Lower House (House of Representative) seats, a percentage
that suffers under corrupt election processes. They are
often accused of having ties to the communist insurgents.
Giner says that while that may have been true in the past,
these political minorities are trying to address their concerns
through legal means using the political process.
“Many of the victims are people my age doing what I’m
doing,” says Giner. “They’re activists doing legal things to voice
their concerns, but they’re being targeted. I could easily have
been among them if I hadn’t come to the United States. At the
end of my research, I had documented over 140 incidents of
serious violations since 2001. Many are murders and abductions
that took place in broad daylight, committed by masked
gunmen on motorcycles. The assailants are often military personnel
in civilian clothing, and people know that openly.”
By October 2005, Giner had completed a major research
report that, she has been told, will be used as the basis for a
fact-finding mission to Mindanao, perhaps in summer of
2006. Following that initial report, Giner began to look into
abuses of political detainees. She also continued research on
the approximately 140 political assassination she’d recorded,
assured that future efforts by HRW would put her work
directly to use.
As a BGIA student, Giner combined her internship
with academic work at BGIA, spending approximately 25
hours a week at Human Rights Watch and participating in
seminars and study at BGIA in New York City. Giner’s
internship work led to her successful application for a $2,500
grant through Bard’s Freeman Undergraduate Asian Studies
Initiative, supported by the Freeman Foundation. Giner will
use the grant to travel to the Philippines in summer of 2006
to research the “people power” movement and the role it has
played in Philippine national elections since 1986.
“The people power movement began in 1986, and the
current president, Arroyo, got her seat with the movement’s
support, which took out the previous president,” Giner says.
“Arroyo is now under criticism for election fraud and related
corruption charges, so the process hasn’t worked out the way
many thought it would. Some would say it’s even worse
now.” She is planning to look at how different segments of
the population have participated in the movement.
Giner is looking forward to her return, albeit brief, to
the Philippines, to renew contacts with friends and family,
meet face-to-face those whose work informed her research,
and investigate firsthand the flawed, complex political system
she’s been studying at Bard.
—Lucy Hayden
17

The Golden Rule’s Contemporary Relevance
Scholar Introduces First-Year Students to Confucius
If a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty, and applies it as sincerely to the love of the virtuous;
if, in serving his parents, he can exert his utmost strength; if, in his intercourse with his friends,
his words are sincere—although men say that he has not learned, I will certainly say that he has.
—Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), The Confucian Analects, Book 1:7
18

The ethical tradition known as Confucianism began 2,500
years ago with the teachings of a man called K’ung-fu-tzu, a
native of what is now China’s eastern Shandong Province.
K’ung-fu-tzu (also called Kongfuzi and Kongzi) spent much
of the early 500s and late 400s BCE as a traveling scholar and
adviser to political leaders throughout China. The philosophical
system he developed and preached became a pillar
of traditional Chinese culture and eventually spread across
the world.
In the west K’ung-fu-tzu is known as Confucius, a popularization
of his Chinese name adopted by Jesuit missionaries
in the 16th century, and his teachings are collectively
known as Confucianism. Adherents of Confucianism believe
that the individual is the key element of all human relations—families,
societies, and states. If the individual concentrates
on cultivating personal virtues such as honesty,
love, and devotion to family, the resulting harmony benefits
everyone. The keynote of Confucianism is best expressed by
the Confucian “Golden Rule”: “Do not do to others what
you do not want done to yourself.”
Chinese philosophy scholar Stephen C. Angle opened
this year’s series of First-Year Seminar public lectures at the
Sosnoff Theater of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the
Performing Arts with a talk titled “Confucian Enlightenment.”
At Wesleyan University, where he is an associate professor of
philosophy, Angle chairs the East Asian Studies Program and
directs the Mansfield Freedom Center for East Asian Studies.
He holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan.
As he explained to his audience at the Fisher Center,
Angle’s view is that “Confucianism is a live, ongoing source of
creative reflection. One of the fundamental ways one learns to
look at others compassionately—to look with just and loving
attention, if you like—is to think about oneself. The key is
to realize other people are like you in most respects, even
though the details are different. I think it’s very natural that
Confucius’s initial followers hit upon the notion of ‘sympathetic
understanding’ as one way of articulating the good in
ourselves, this process of just and loving attention. When you
love another person, you identify with them.”
With his current project, a book titled Sagehood: The
Contemporary Ethical Significance of Neo-Confucianism, Angle’s
goal is to articulate a contemporary philosophy that is informed
and influenced by Confucian ethics. In a follow-up conversation
after his lecture at the Fisher Center, he said he believes
that “rich rewards await us if we look at Confucianism as a
live philosophical tradition rather than only as an object of
historical study.”
The title of Angle’s book requires some explanation for
Confucian neophytes. “Sagehood” refers to adherents’ ultimate
goal: moral perfection. Neo-Confucianism came about
during the 11th century when a group of Confucian scholars,
reacting to the spiritual challenges posed by the rise of
Daoism and Buddhism, came together to create an updated
version of Confucianism that was popular until the end of
the imperial era.
In response to a student’s question about the differences
between neo- and classical Confucians, Angle explained, “Texts
from the classical era [pre–221 BCE] remained touchstones for
the neo-Confucians. But they interpreted the canon creatively,
so it spoke to the concerns of their age. This open-minded
approach to traditional Confucianism has been continued by
Chinese philosophers in the 20th century, and I seek to carry
on this legacy.
“Topics of philosophical ethics can seem remote from
our everyday lives,” he continued. “They seem to have relevance
only for major decisions about right and wrong, without
attending either to what might motivate us to act well, or
what it means to be a good person. Many philosophers have
looked back to the Greek and Christian traditions for inspiration
in their critique of mainstream approaches to ethics,
given the paucity of these discussions elsewhere. But, in fact,
there are rich resources in the Confucian tradition as well.”
In his book Angle hopes to demonstrate that the tenets
of Confucianism—virtue, family, and sincerity—have a great
deal to offer to the contemporary philosophical conversation
about how we should live our lives. The result could be a 21st
century in which we pay more attention to good behavior
and less to vanity; choose to spend more time with our families
and less at work; and value altruism over celebrity and
power. On the surface, the Golden Rule might seem trite
and simplistic. Applied to everyday situations, however, its
broader applications become clearer. Give to those who are
less fortunate. Respect and value all members of your family.
Listen and respond to others with the same care and thought
you’d expect from them. The result could be happier families
and neighborhoods, political campaigns that focus on
important civic matters rather than scandals, and a global
conversation about cultural differences rather than fear, terrorism,
and warmongering.
—Kelly Spencer
19

FOOD WEBS OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
From Static Community Description to Predictive Tool
by Daniel Reuman

From Darwin’s observations about simple food chains to today’s
more complex predation matrices, the study of food webs is evolving
to the point where scientists may soon be able to predict and manipulate
the effects of ecological disturbances such as global warming
and species extinction. Daniel Reuman, a research associate in the
Population Laboratory at The Rockefeller University, visited the
College in October to talk about the history and potential of food web
research as part of the Frontiers in Science Lecture Series.
The concept of food webs goes back to Charles Darwin and
his voyage on the Beagle. One of the first places he stopped
was St. Paul’s Rocks, off the coast of Brazil. In narrative
form, Darwin noted the species he found there and what
“Corresponding to average external conditions” means that
you’re not going to find polar bears in Brazil. “Subject to
reciprocal influences” says that each of these species interacts
with each other, which is illustrated by the arrows in the
directed graph. The fourth part says that you can’t take any
old collection of species, toss them into a tank, and call it an
ecological community—unless they persist.
The directed graph is one type of mathematical encapsulation
of a food web. Another is the predation matrix, which
was introduced in the late 1800s. In a predation matrix, you
first list all of the species in your system. Let’s say you have
salmon, anchovies, zooplankton (floating or weakly swimming
animals), and phytoplankton (microscopic plants). You then
make a four-by-four table, put the name of each species on
“Ecological research will become increasingly driven by the desire
to predict outcomes and manipulate systems. The reason is that humans
are taking over more and more of the Earth, and they’re placing greater
demands on ecosystems. It will have to happen so that we can
learn how to protect our resources.”
each species ate. His account is descriptive, but it can be
reformatted and mathematically analyzed using a directed
graph. In this graph, nodes represent each species and arrows
indicate the flow from prey to predator. For example, one
arrow might indicate that the spider eats the fly. This is an
object you can analyze. If you had several of these objects
from different ecosystems, you could compare them using
math and statistics.
Darwin recognized that his system was reasonably isolated,
but he didn’t note the importance of that fact. That
took another 30 years or so. In 1887, German ecologist Karl
Mobius first defined the concept of an ecological community
as “a group of living beings of which the numbers and types
of species and individuals correspond to the average external
conditions, which are subject to reciprocal influences and
which maintain themselves permanently in a specified area
by reproduction.” Let’s break that down. The “number and
types of species” is the same as the nodes in a food web.
each column and row, and put a “1” wherever one organism
eats another. So a 1 might indicate that salmon eat anchovies
and another 1 indicates that salmon eat salmon.
In a quantitative predation matrix, you also list the
amount that gets eaten. For instance, in my fictitious system,
you note that salmon eat .01 kilograms per day of salmon and
5 kilograms of anchovies; anchovies eat a lot of zooplankton
and very little of their own kind, and zooplankton eat lots of
phytoplankton. As a rule of thumb, when an organism eats, it
converts one-tenth of the mass that it eats into its own body
mass or its own reproduction. So, if zooplankton eat 660 kilograms
per day of phytoplankton, roughly 10 percent of that is
eaten by anchovies, and so on.
To this point, the food webs described have been static
snapshots. Darwin didn’t stick around St. Paul’s Rocks to find
out whether one bird species is more abundant at a certain
time of year. And that brings us to the dynamics of food webs,
how species populations fluctuate over time in an interrelated
21

Daniel Reuman
way. This kind of analysis requires additional data. We’ve
talked about whether a species is present or not in a food web,
but not about its abundance. And unless you have that data,
you can’t talk about how abundance changes over time.
In the 1920s, Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra wrote equations
for the dynamics of food webs. The best way to illustrate
The hare population crashes. And then the lynx population
starts to crash, because the hare are becoming less abundant.
Once the lynx population crashes, the predation pressure on
the hare clears up and the hare thrive. This cycle repeats every
nine to 10 years. The Lotka-Volterra equations model this;
they predict how it works.
There are some problems with the equations, primarily
because things are rarely as simple as this example. But Darwin
said mathematics endows one with something like a sixth
sense, and now that we have a mathematical formalism for
talking about food webs, maybe we can make use of that sixth
sense. We want to look for structural features that are common
to all or many food webs.
It turns out that the proportions of top species (no predators),
intermediate species (predators and prey), and basal
species (no prey) in a food web are, on average, independent
of the number of species. If you look at a food web with many
species, it has some proportion of top predators. And if you
look at a food web with a few species, it has about the same
proportion. This is important. Consider that the world’s
oceans are being fished at an alarming rate. Typically, the
species of fish captured for human consumption are top predators
such as salmon and tuna. If we reduce the number of
organisms—and potentially even the number of species—at
“Darwin said mathematics endows one with something like a sixth sense.
Now that we have a mathmatical formalism for talking about food webs,
we need to make use of that sixth sense.”
these equations is with the famous example of the Canadian
lynx and the snowshoe hare. In this simple real food web, the
hare eat the plants and the lynx eat the hare. The Hudson Bay
Company, which sold the furs of these animals, kept track of
how many of each were trapped over a 100-year period. If you
make a graph with the years on the X-axis and the abundance
of hare and lynx on the Y-axis, you learn a number of interesting
things. About 1862, the populations of both lynx and hare
are low. Then the hare population goes high really fast. Soon
the lynx population starts to rise. Then, once the lynx population
gets pretty high, the hare population starts to drop. It’s
because the burgeoning lynx population is eating them all.
the top of the ocean food web, it might lead to consequences
where the whole web is modified to bring the proportion
back into play. One way might be through the extinctions
of smaller organisms.
It also turns out that the number of trophic links (links
away from the base food producer) is proportional to the
number of species. A big food web has a certain number
of predator-predator relationships. A smaller web has a
smaller number, and the relationship is linear. You can predict,
based on the number of species, approximately how
many predator-prey interactions there are going to be in a
community.
22

Scientists want to understand how interacting populations
in a food web change over time in order to understand
the effects of such ecological disturbances as species invasion
or global warming. If you add a new species to the system,
what’s going to happen? If you’ve got a lake where a fish dies
off for some reason, what are the cascading effects? There are
about 50,000 non-native species in the United States, and
the cost of managing these invasive species is estimated at
$137 billion per year. How do we predict what will invade
successfully? How do we control invaders more easily?
To date, much of the work done with food web dynamics
has been theoretical. However, several recent improvements
are going to help bring dynamics closer to reality, in my
opinion. The abundance web is one. There is also a food web
that includes average population density and average body
mass of each species. If you know the distribution of body
masses for each species, then you have a chance of modeling
that a particular species will switch prey as it gets bigger.
The addition of stoichiometric data might also make
food web dynamics more plausible. Every organism has a
characteristic ratio of carbon to nitrogen to phosphorus. It
turns out that vertebrates have more phosphorus than invertebrates.
I’m a vertebrate, so it may be that I seek out items
with more phosphorus, in order to build my skeleton.
I also think qualitative prediction will become possible
in more complex cases than the lynx and hare, and that we
will soon be able to say, “the population of this species will
go down” or “this ecosystem will become more fragile if we
do x, y, and z to it.” As humans take over more and more of
the Earth, they’re placing greater demands on ecosystems,
and I think research will become increasingly driven by the
desire to predict outcomes and manipulate systems. We need
to protect our resources.
Daniel Reuman holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in mathematics
from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Harvard
University. His research interests include applications of mathematics
to ecology, epidemiology, and social policy analysis. He has
taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard.
23

NOT “EASY LISTENING”
Mercedes Dujunco
Raises Dissonant Issues
About World Music
“These are the days of miracle and wonder,” sang Paul Simon
on Graceland, a 1986 album that introduced Western listeners
to Ladysmith Black Mambazo, an ensemble of Zulu singers.
Not least of those miracles and wonders is the fact that, for
better or worse, the increased accessibility of sophisticated
recording technology and the ineluctable pull of the global
market have resulted in “world music,” the widespread dissemination
of formerly localized or restricted musical fare.
Even a quick skim of the listings for concert halls and clubs
in any cosmopolitan city will reveal performances of Tuvan
throat singing, Balinese gamelan, Cuban son, and Japanese
Kodo drumming, as well as curious hybrids of every imaginable
stripe—Celtic klezmer, Native American jazz, Russian
reggae, and even, perhaps, Hawaiian oompah.
So one could assume that students taking Mercedes
Dujunco’s Introduction to World Music already have a fairly
good grasp of the subject, yes?
“They think they do,” says Dujunco, an ethnomusicologist
and an associate professor of music at Bard. “A lot of
things are passed off as ‘world music’; it’s essentially a marketing
term. Much of what falls under its rubric is very
diluted, or exoticized, or put on stage out of context, so that
it can cross over to the mainstream and be made more palatable
for Western audiences.
“We cannot stop this commodification and appropriation
of non-Western music,” she continues. “My job is to
inform students of where the music came from, in what context
it was played—so that, for instance, when they get their
24

hands on sampling equipment, they’ll know what is ethical
or not ethical to take and manipulate.”
On a clear, crisp, September afternoon outside of Blum
Hall, as the sweetly entwined voices of chamber singers further
mingle with the raspier voices of late summer cicadas,
Dujunco discusses myriad issues addressed by her introductory
course, and by ethnomusicology in general.
“Ethnomusicology is basically the study of music and
its relationship to different aspects of culture,” she says,
adding that the field can accommodate all forms of musical
expression—everything from the warrior songs of the Maori
to the sonatas of Mozart. “If I were to study Mozart from an
ethnomusicological perspective, I would look at him in the
social imagination, the perception of him and his music by a
cross section of society. This would include an examination
of which of his works are played, how often, in what way,
and as part of what kind of events—a Mostly Mozart series,
concerts in the park, or piped-in music in planes.” Such a
study would proceed from the assumption that “Mozart’s
music is not handed down wholesale through the ages, but
selected and reinterpreted in order to resonate with presentday
sensibilities.”
In her world music class, however, Dujunco places the
emphasis on non-Western musical styles, “because they get
short-shrifted.”
Born in the Philippines and trained as a classical pianist,
Dujunco had her first revelation of cultural short-shrifting as
an undergraduate. She took a class at the University of the
Philippines with the pioneering ethnomusicologist José
Maceda, and it opened her eyes, she says. “I thought, here we
are, an Asian country, but we’re Americanized; I know nothing
of my own traditions. It made me question the whole history
of how I got to be playing Western music. . . . I began to
realize that music doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it has a social and
political context.”
Her postgraduate studies at the Shanghai Conservatory
of Music served to deepen her appreciation of non-Western
musical traditions, particularly those of China, Vietnam, and
the Chinese diaspora communities of Thailand. Eventually,
she immersed herself in a form of Chinese string ensemble
music called xian shi yue and became proficient on the zheng,
a plucked board zither whose modern incarnation has 21 to 25
silk strings. Bard students have had the chance to hear and
play the zheng in Dujunco’s Chinese music ensemble workshop,
along with other venerable instruments such as the di (a
bamboo transverse flute), erhu (a two-stringed fiddle), and the
pipa (a short-necked, pear-shaped plucked lute.
Although most of these folk instruments can be traced
back to antiquity—the zheng, for instance, dates to the Qin
Dynasty, circa 221 B.C.E.—how they have been played, and even
whether they may be played, has often been influenced by extramusical
considerations and circumstances. As Dujunco noted
in her Ph.D. dissertation, the Chinese government banned the
playing of xian shi yue from 1949 through most of the 1970s,
deeming it to be “feudal” or “counter-revolutionary.” It’s precisely
this sort of context that students acquire in Dujunco’s
classes, along with an increased awareness of the thorny questions
involving music and identity politics, music and cultural
difference, and music and its commercial exploitation.
A particularly ticklish area is the secular use, by outsiders,
of sacred music. Examples of such misrepresentation
are depressingly plentiful. “I remember a student of mine
who wanted to sample Qur’anic chant and incorporate it in
her remix CD,” says Dujunco, with a wry smile. “There’s also
the case of Sister Drum, an album by the Chinese composer
He Xuntian, the tracks of which include a sampling of
Tibetan chant. This is a particularly egregious act of cultural
appropriation, given the larger context of the lopsided nature
of Chinese-Tibetan ethnic relations.”
The only effective way to countervail such tendencies
is to educate listeners—and not merely in the classroom.
“Performances should always be accompanied by symposia,”
she says. “Recordings should contain detailed liner notes,
such as those provided by the Smithsonian reissues. Even
with museums, there’s this tendency to pick the most exotic
elements of a culture and package them, so you don’t get to
see the broad spectrum of what goes on.” One thing that
would help, she says, would be for cultural venues to present
a variety of little-known performers in addition to the same
two or three “superstars” who have been designated, whether
they like it or not, to represent a whole culture.
Ultimately, what Dujunco seeks to impart to her students
is that there’s a whole world of musical expression out there that
is distinct from our own, and if we approach it respectfully, with
open ears and an open mind, it will enrich us.
“Music is a gateway to understanding other cultures,” she
says. “I want students to be able to talk about a musical culture
other than their own intelligently, on its own terms—to take
into consideration how people in that culture think about their
own music, rather than imposing our own values on it, and to
be able to share that with the people they know. I want them
to develop a very cosmopolitan tolerance for music that they
may not even like, but can appreciate for its own merits.”
—Mikhail Horowitz
25

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY
Furthering Cross-pollination among Academic Fields
What are the possible social consequences of genetic
research? How do emerging technologies shape the way elections
are run? How have technological advances changed the
definition of human rights? These and other questions reflect
our increasing concern about the interrelation of scientific
and technological systems with social and political life.
Addressing the conversation from an academic perspective is
Bard’s new Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program.
STS provides a foundation in the fields needed to study
this interdisciplinary subject in conjunction with a primary
divisional program. The program allows for study in a number
of areas that span the academic divisions—such as nonfiction
science writing, film and electronic arts, or developmental economics
and technology—and promotes scholarship that confronts
the key issues raised by contemporary science and
technology.
Students in STS follow, in conjunction with their primary
program requirements, a challenging curriculum that includes
one two-course sequence in a basic science (biology, chemistry,
computer science, or physics) and two additional courses in the
Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing; two STS
core courses, along with two more STS cross-listed courses;
and one methodology course, usually in policy analysis or statistics.
Starting this spring, STS offers paired science and technology
courses that are linked by a common theme and
anchored by an introductory science class: for example, an
introductory course in epidemiology paired with a course in the
history or anthropology of disease.
The idea behind the paired courses, according to Gregory
Moynahan, assistant professor of history and codirector of the
STS Program, is “to create an immediate logic of why science
is in society and society is in science. Our vision is not to
reduce a subject to a very specific subfield, but rather to show
all the ways in which a topic like epidemiology or biology
opens out into these other issues. For example, a Biology
Program course in epidemiology might pair with a course in
26

the history and anthropology of disease. Science students start
thinking about public health, for example, and history students
start thinking about how we have come to understand
the biology of disease.”
Another goal of STS is to create a bridge between those
who have not studied or taught science at Bard and those who
have. An unexpected outcome of the success of the College’s
Science Initiative is that this gap has become clearer. “I don’t
want to say ‘Balkanized,’ necessarily, but it’s been hard for students
in the other divisions to find a point of entry,” says
Jacqueline Goss, assistant professor of film and electronic arts.
“In some ways the science division has been the last frontier.
We’d like the STS Program to be a bridge that helps students
from the sciences come to our divisions, and vice versa.”
Both Moynahan and Goss feel that Bard’s relatively small
population makes STS more viable than it might be at a larger
school. “At a small place like Bard we can work to create connections
between the sciences and the social sciences in a way
that our society as a whole hasn’t,” says Moynahan. “That
becomes a productive aspect of the program; a small community
can become a model that can’t be developed at a larger
place.” Adds Goss, “At engineering schools, and at places like
M.I.T. and R.P.I., the STS programs are like little cells inside
much larger organisms. At Bard, STS can take on a much bigger
role and have a larger function.”
In the 2006–07 academic year, Noga Arikha, a visiting
assistant professor in First-Year Seminar, will teach an STS
course titled History of Medicine and Psychiatry in the
West. “Liberal arts colleges are places where the humanities
need to be practiced rather than just preached,” says Arikha.
“Because we’re living in a world where science rules a lot of
our lives, it’s the responsibility of a liberal arts college to
actually try to under- stand where we are in regard to science.
We need to take stock of where we are; we need to find
the tools and concepts to understand how to ask the right
questions regarding the relationship between humanity,
ethics, and the sciences. A lot of people talk about interdisciplinary
curricula, but few practice it. A liberal arts college
like Bard, where there’s also a lot of free spirit, is the kind of
place where good things like STS happen.”
Moynahan echoes Arikha’s description of Bard’s curriculum—his
term is “classic”—when he differentiates the STS
Program from those at other schools. “What’s different about
our program, and our curriculum, is that it’s more rigorous in
terms of requirements,” he says. “This is in keeping with the
classic curriculum that Bard emphasizes: students need to
Left to right: Noga Arikha, Gregory Moynahan, and Jacqueline Goss
learn a field, and a methodology, well. Precisely because Bard
is so tightly knit, it’s a new way of creating a dynamism on
campus around thinking about science.”
STS students came to the program from various disciplines
and backgrounds, as is the case with their peers in other
programs. Some had considered double majors; others became
interested in a new subject and conveniently learned of STS
at the same time. “STS attracted me because it allows me to
formally extend my study of the social and political consequences
of scientific knowledge and practice that the traditional
Biology Program doesn’t officially promote,” says Parris
Humphrey ’06, who is concentrating in STS and biology.
Humphrey’s post-Bard plans include pursuing a degree in
medicine as well as a master’s degree in public health. Tenzin
Lama ’07, who is studying history along with STS, came to
the program from another direction. “During a year away from
Bard, I took a class at the New School in New York City entitled
Science and Empire,” she explains. “The class was very
enlightening, an interesting synthesis of science, history, and
politics. Looking through the Fall ’05 course list when I came
back to Bard, I saw that similar classes were on offer. STS is a
very useful addition to Bard’s academic programs. Now students
can take classes that combine technical and theoretical
knowledge in a meaningful way.”
Possible future STS offerings include a chemistry
course linked with a history course on the second industrial
revolution in Germany; a course on the social science issues
involved in simulation and modeling in computer science;
and a course that studies how mechanism in the 18th century
can be studied to help us understand our own problems
with technology. Moynahan seems to be confident that STS
has a long future ahead of it; he cites several on-campus projects
as evidence that applied science is alive and well at Bard.
“Students are putting biodiesel into buses, for example, and
they’re making their own radio transmitters,” she says. “Bard
students are singular in that, when they’re interested in the
material, they’re willing to do the extra work—even outside
of their regular course work. At other colleges where I’ve
taught, students were just focused on whatever got them
good grades. What’s exciting about Bard is the community
aspect and the freedom that students have to become energized
about projects like these. I feel that the STS Program
has enormous potential here.”
—Kelly Spencer
27

TO BEAR WITNESS
MEDICAL RELIEF IN KASHMIR
by Charles Berkowitz ’02
Who knows but that hereafter some traveler like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where
now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit
down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep for a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?
—from Ruins, by Constantin François de Chassebeouf de Volney
28

Walking through the village of Chinari is one of the saddest
things I have ever witnessed. The faces who look upon us are
of those of a people desolate of any splendor, eyes hollowed and
darkened like the shadows cast from some ancient ruin. They
surround us, these dark eyes, as our mule train halts, unable to
traverse the monumental collapse of cars, buildings, and people.
Reputed to have been a delicate jewel of the Jhelum Valley,
infused by emerald orchards of chinar, almond, walnut, and saffron,
Chinari is now a sepulcher for several hundred inhabitants
who perished in the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that
rocked Northern Pakistan on the morning of October 8, 2005.
Located approximately 35 miles southeast of Muzaffarabad,
Chinari is an incruent necrotic wound, representative of so
many other nameless Kashmiri villages and towns demolished
by pancaked concrete roofs and rebar. The damage and
destruction are unimaginable and the smell of death lingers
in every breath. Perhaps you have heard of Chinari or seen
photos in news reports. It has risen to world recognition not
from the sheer devastation it has endured, but from the fact
that 200 of the several hundred casualties amassed in this
tiny village are children, many whom remained trapped
under the debris of fallen school buildings. As our medical
team walks across the large slabs of fallen concrete, I notice
an elbow and a small hand jutting from the wreckage, speckled
white with dust. It is a gaunt angular visage, indicative of
the passing of several generations of Kashmiris and
Pakistanis in just 30 seconds. This is the last place I’d ever
expect myself to be: in the middle of what has been called
“the most dangerous place on earth.”
Our work here is not with the dead. Scattered reports tell
of hundreds of thousands of people severely injured by the
quake and many more in need of immediate medical care. Our
group is an unlikely one in this region of the world—a volunteer
outfit of 10 New York City paramedics and a medical
doctor. Combined we have more than 150 years of emergency
medical experience between us, earned on the streets and hospitals
of Seattle, California, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the
Bronx. As paramedics we are the products of the nation’s
fledgling third service—EMS (Emergency Medical Services),
mobile nurses trained to encounter any emergency life or God
or whatever you want to call it can throw at us. Our specialty
is triage; recognition and immediate treatment of the sick and
dying. Yet, for the most part, the job remains unseen, save by
the few souls involved, and it repeats itself often into some distant
obscurity. Over time it becomes difficult to remember the
people you treat, and only once in a while do you recall with
clarity the blurry faces you pass by like those from some faded
sepia photograph.
Over the past few weeks, prior to our departure, we had
read situation reports of the earthquake, watching it slowly
fade from the front page news of the New York Times and
subsequently from the American consciousness. Casualties
mounted—first 1,500, then 3,000, 20,000, and then exponentially
upwards. World Health Organization e-mails began
circulating within our circle of friends, citing an immediate
need for doctors and paramedical personnel to Pakistan. Aid
trickled into Islamabad from several countries, but even two
weeks after the initial quake, few organizations were on the
ground and even fewer resources were available to ferry
essential supplies to villages scattered throughout the mountains.
Kashmir was an active war zone marred by isolated
conflicts along the Line of Control for the past half century,
despite the India/Pakistan cease-fire several years before. In
our usual fashion we persisted. The decision to go took me
about four seconds to make.
As we sit outside, listening to a Pakistani colonel give
us a situation report, my eyes follow the occasional invalids
being carried in makeshift stretchers down the dusty road.
The rotors of an American MH-53E Sea Dragon solemnly
Encountering the injured on the path to Noor Dijhia (above) and
Survivors in Chikoti, Kashmir (left)
29

echo in the distance, the helicopter having cast its cargo of
China Aid tents and us onto a concrete pad. “We have little
or no supplies with us apart from what the Afghans have
brought,” the colonel continues. “This area has begun to clear
out and as it is almost two weeks after this quake has hit,
most people who are severely injured are dead. The Afghans
are leaving tomorrow and it is likely you will have to take over
for them. We still are receiving many patients a day and many
more are descending from the mountains.”
The colonel brings us to meet the Afghan team, which
has been here in Sewan since the beginning. Their field hospital,
which emits an ashen glow from a free-hanging fluorescent
light, is one of complete dissonance. It is constructed
around the rubble of a fallen hospital with an operating theater
of several benches, various packets of gauze, rusting
instruments, and a improvised curtain made from a patient
gown stained brown—streaks of iodine from violent procedures.
The pharmacy is absolutely chaotic, with medications
from all over the world strewn about along collapsing beds
and concrete slabs. Yet the Afghans operate with precision
and brutal capability.
A patient enters, her upper leg a festering aggregation of
smashed muscle and flesh, the anterior shaft of the femur
plainly exposed. Several of the men hold the down the girl as a
physician clears the bilateral cavities around the bone of debris
with his two index fingers.Tears stream from the patient’s face,
her body winces in spasms from the pain, but she makes no
sound. The wound is packed with gauze and bandaged in less
than five minutes. Dispatched several days after the quake, the
team has been operating out of war-torn Kabul for more than
35 years. Over dinner, Ahmad, a medic wearing a jacket bearing
a “Kabul Ambulance Corps” patch, briefs me on the first
days of the recovery. “We saw hundreds and hundreds of people,”
he relates. “They sat along the road, lined up as far as we
could see. Many people died. Many people lost limbs. I have
not witnessed such suffering in many years.” I look down at the
ground of the hospital and cannot imagine the sheer trauma
endured here during the first few days after the quake. The
thoughts of it are simply overwhelming.
We are in the depths of Azad Kashmir, four miles from
the Line of Control. Travel through this area reveals our
worst fears—absolute destruction of every building with
nearly half of the population dead.
Walking farther up the Jhelum Valley, I cannot help but
remember a passage from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—
“as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and
30
out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting
into mud . . . writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent
despair.” The road is plagued by continuous landslides of
boulders the size of buses and the miasma of decomposition
looms around every corner in thick veils of stagnancy.
Five of us have moved on from our initial clinic to the village
of Kathai, a Pakistani army forward artillery base. Our
treatment area is flanked by two 130mm artillery guns pointed
across the Line of Control into India. The Pakistani army has
been nothing short of remarkable in its efforts to recover what
has been left of this region. They are beside usat every
moment, integral to our efforts by helping with Urdu translation,
supplies, water, and food. Our relationships with them
have taken on a fascinating candor, tinged with childhood
innocence and inquisitiveness. We know them by name—
Salat, Arfan, Boota, Major Zubair, Arshad, Farooq—and they
tell us of their families and their lives here in Kashmir. We
watch them pray five times a day during this time of
Ramadan, bowing in the direction of Mecca and obeying the
daily fast until the sun sets quietly behind the mountains.
The wounded begin to gather again. Silent throngs of
destitute villagers gather along the periphery of our hospital to
bear witness to the sick and injured. They stand fixated,
watching like the chorus of some ancient Greek tragedy.
Together our team begins to see 200 patients a day, from 6
a.m. until sunset. Forty percent of our patients are children.
Two areas are set up, one for medial ailments and the other for
trauma. The vast amount of injuries seen here are traumatic—
fractures, gangrene, deep lacerations, ulcerations, abscesses,
soft tissue, and penetrating trauma—wounds left uncared for
nearly two and a half weeks. To make matters worse, nearly all
the wounds are rife with severe infection. The result is that
without proper medical attention, many people will end up
dying from complications brought on by minor injuries.
A woman is brought to me on a bed, carried by five men
over six miles of nearly impassable terrain. Her legs have
been crushed by falling concrete and now the wounds on her
lower legs have become thick with necrosis. She looks to be
in her mid 20s and we exchange a smile. She blushes, hiding
her face in a saffron scarf. I take a quick history from her
through an interpreter, make sure her vital signs (pulse, respiration,
blood pressure) are stable, and insert an IV into her
vein. After exploring the wounds, I consult with our medical
doctor and we decide her treatment. The legs are thoroughly
cleansed with an antiseptic solution of iodine, sterile water,
and hydrogen peroxide. I administer pain medication into
New York City medics with an Afghan medical team, Sawanj, Kashmir.
Charles Berkowitz is seated in the foreground (second from right), with
photographer Phil Suarez to his left.

the IV and begin the injection of local anesthetic around the
wound borders.
When the woman looks adequately sedated I begin the
process of debridement, surgical removal of debris and devitalized
tissue. The pale white mucilage of infection seeps
with the slightest pressure as the scalpel scrapes away at the
white layers of fibrinous exudate and dead material. Layers
of granulated tissue slowly appear and the wound takes on a
healthy pink tone, raw and bleeding. The area is then soaked
in Bacitracin antibiotic, covered with sterile petroleum gauze,
wrapped with a dressing, and the patient is prescribed Cipro
antibiotic. I can tell the procedure has been extremely painful
to the young woman and I try to help her move back to the
bed. But then a remarkable thing happens. Aided by another
man, she stands up and proceeds to walk back to her village.
Days later, as I am suturing up the foot of a little girl, she
taps me on my shoulder. Through an interpreter she tells me,
“You have given my legs back to me.” I undress the wound.
Still raw, it is free from infection.
As we fly over the village of Chinari for the last time, the
blades of the Huey whipping the air violently above, I see the
white canvas of a large International Red Cross Hospital in the
distance. Huge tent cities have since sprung up, some made out
of billboards advertising Nestlé and shampoo into the cosmos.
My mind drifts to the events of the past 10 days and to the
people we have met. I remember small things: wiping tears off
a face, holding a child’s hand, playing walnut soccer with the
soldiers. Neither Kashmir nor Islam are unknowns anymore—
they are imbued with beauty, heartfelt relationships, faces,
and names. What remains of this experience is a deeply profound
realization that, as human beings, we are remarkably
alike despite our differing cultures and geography. Perhaps it
is the reason we came to this land in the first place, and perhaps
it is the reason for my plans to return in the spring to see
my friends once again. Back to Pakistan, the country of the
pure—back to my beloved Kashmir.
Editor’s Note: For more information about Charles Berkowitz and
his volunteer group of paramedics, visit www.nycmedic.org.

HOLIDAY PARTY 2005
32

Neither an ice storm nor a threatened transit strike
deterred revelers from the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae
Association’s annual Holiday Party, which took place on
December 16 at the National Arts Club on Grammercy
Park in Manhattan. Six decades of Bardians—from the
Class of 1940’s Richard Koch and Benedict Seidman on
through Third Millennium graduates—were present and
accounted for in the club’s Grand Gallery, along with
President Leon Botstein, Justus Rosenberg, Burton Brody,
Peter Sourian, and other faculty and staff members. The
jubilance continued at an excellent “after party” at Link,
organized by the Young Alumni/ae Committee.
3333

B O O K S B Y B A R D I A N S
God’s Whisper
by Dennis Barone ’77
SPUYTEN DUYVIL
The narrator of this small book is Heather, a journalist writing about an almost-famous Italian
runner named Renzi and about what long-distance running means to him: it is “how he praises
God.”The novel includes a bizarre scene involving out-of-shape tag-sale shoppers in a melee with
runners during a race. Dennis Barone teaches English at St. Joseph College in West Hartford,
Connecticut.
Fig
by Caroline Bergvall
SALT PUBLISHING
Many of the pieces in this eclectic volume were written by invitation or in response to an occasion:
“16 Flowers” is a group of one-liners to accompany a CD-ROM about flower motifs in
Proust and Genet; “More Pets,” written for an arts journal, consists of repetitive but changing
lines as “a game of domino . . . developed using visual elements, small connecting signs.” The sections
are visually challenging and mentally invigorating. Caroline Bergvall cochairs the writing
faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
The Young Widow
by Cassandra Chan ’78
ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR
Jack Gibbons, a Scotland Yard detective sergeant, tracks down cases with the help of his best
friend, the rich and charismatic Phillip Bethancourt. Jack’s latest case, on which Phillip tags
along, involves the poisoning death of Geoffrey Berowne, a biscuit magnate, at his Surrey
estate. Berowne’s young wife is the prime suspect; Phillip is afraid Jack’s judgment could be
clouded by the widow’s charms. This book, Cassandra Chan’s first novel, is a contemporary
homage to classic English mystery writers. Chan lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
Mary Magdalene: A Biography
by Bruce Chilton ’71
DOUBLEDAY
Mary Magdalene, Bruce Chilton argues, should be on the list of the creators of Christianity.
Though references to women in the New Testament and other ancient Christian writings are
fleeting, Chilton examines biblical and historical texts to shape his biography of the woman he
says had “mastery of Jesus’ wisdom.” Chilton is Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy
and Religion and chaplain of the College.
The Theory of Oz: Rediscovering the Aims of Education
by Howard Good ’73
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD EDUCATION
Howard Good starts his book by asking, “What defines someone as educated?” and proceeds to
answer himself with the metaphor of the four companions who skip down the Yellow Brick Road
in the famous Wizard of Oz movie and book. An educated person, contends this former school
board president, needs what the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion, and Dorothy want: a brain, a heart,
courage, and home. Mandatory testing, and even the structure of the classroom itself, does little
to create a well-rounded student, argues Good, who suggests smaller schools and more individualized
attention, among other solutions. Good is professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz.
34

The Bhopal Reader: Remembering Twenty Years of the World’s Worst
Industrial Disaster
edited by Bridget Hanna ’03, Ward Morehouse, and Satinath Sarangi
THE APEX PRESS
Shortly after midnight on December 3, 1984, a storage tank at a neglected Union Carbide pesticide
factory in Bhopal, India, began leaking a toxic substance that instantly killed an estimated
2,000 to 10,000 people. Up to 500,000 others were exposed to the cloud of poison gas. This
collection, described as “a textbook for prevention and activism,” brings together first-person
accounts of the catastrophe, reports of its aftermath, and examinations of how the disaster continues
to shape the world.
Adam Ferguson: His Social and Political Thought
by David Kettler
TRANSACTION PUBLISHERS
First published in 1965, this comprehensive study of Adam Ferguson, the Scottish Enlightenment
historian and philosopher, has been reissued with a new introduction and afterword. A contemporary
of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson is best known for An Essay on the History of
Civil Society, which David Kettler, research professor of social studies, revisits, through his comments,
in the context of present-day debates over the concept of civil society.
Small Wars
by An-My Lê
APERTURE
In this elegant volume, An-My Lê presents delicate yet bold black-and-white photographs of
Vietnam and the Iraqi conflict—but not for real. She captures the worlds of reenactors, those
often obsessed individuals who play out past conflicts (in this case, Vietnam, her native country,
replayed in Virginia). She goes on to document training for the Iraqi war, which takes place
in a California desert. The book includes an essay by Richard B. Woodward, former editor at
large for DoubleTake magazine, and an interview of Lê by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als.
Lê is an assistant professor of photography.
America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon
by Mark Hamilton Lytle
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bracketed between the birth of rock and roll and the resignation of a president, the period now
known loosely as “the sixties” was one of profound changes and turmoil. Professor of history
Mark Lytle begins his examination of the era with the mid 1950s: the fight against communism
and the seeds of teen culture. He chooses a chronological, rather than a topical, approach
to the cultural and political sights, sounds, and clashes of the period.
Performing Israel’s Faith: Narrative and Law in Rabbinic Theology
by Jacob Neusner
BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS
The laws of conduct set forth in the Torah are an integral part of the religion of Judaism. In his
latest book, Jacob Neusner shows, in practical terms, how Jewish theology expresses itself in law,
and how law embodies theology in everyday conduct. He examines the doctrine of sin and
atonement, and the doctrine of treatment of other nations, through theological definition of
“right belief ” and details of the applicable law. Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and
Theology and a Bard Center Fellow.
35

The Program
by Hal Niedzviecki MFA ’97
RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
The mores of a troubled Jewish American family are at the center of Hal Niedzviecki’s third
novel, which begins when Maury Stern takes his young son Danny on a camping trip that ends
in near disaster. Memories erupt: of Zionist summer camp, Maury’s brother Cal, and Cal’s disturbing
relationship with Danny. As a young man, Danny escapes from reality by locking himself
into a computer lab to write “The Program,” a computer code designed to meld irreconcilable past
and present. Niedzviecki lives in Toronto.
Alexander the Great: Selections from Arrian, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Quintus Curtius
edited by James Romm
HACKETT PUBLISHING COMPANY
In recent years, Alexander has been portrayed as both an enlightened humanitarian and a
bloodthirsty tyrant. Which is closer to the truth? What really motivated the man whose actions
irrevocably changed a large part of the world? James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of
Classics, uses selections from four ancient writers—Arrian, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Quintus
Curtius—to provide a narrative of the highlights in Alexander’s life as well as those events in
which his character is most at issue. Romm’s introduction and chapter notes provide historical
context.
Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash
by Elizabeth Royte ’81
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
A recent study estimates that every American generates 1.3 tons of garbage a year, and Elizabeth
Royte decided to find out where it goes. She started by measuring her own trash output—7
pounds, 9 ounces in one day—and following the trash down the street in her Brooklyn neighborhood.
The entertaining and educational volume goes on to discover the paths taken by “thrown
out,” recycled, and composted garbage and suggests ways that the process will have to change.
Flesh
by Hollis Seamon (Rowan) ’83
MEMENTO MORI MYSTERIES
Graduate student Suzanne Brown, a.k.a. Suzanne LaFleshe, is the heroine of this tongue-incheek
murder mystery about cannibalism, evil spirits, and academia (she imagines “All But
Dissertation” written on her tombstone). As her name implies, LaFleshe is preoccupied with
bodily pleasures. Several of her ex- and present lovers are among those who help her investigate
the death of Sam Tindell, also her lover, who plummets to his death from the humanities building
at the university where they both work. Seamon lives in Albany, New York.
A Painter’s Path through the Catskill Mountains
by Robert Selkowitz MFA ’84
CATSKILL PRESS
In his foreword to this book of Robert Selkowitz’s pastel landscapes, John Kleinhans, a photographer
and chairman of the Woodstock Artists Association, says, “Selkowitz’s choice of pastel
as the medium of these works is crucial to their vitality and vibrancy.” Selkowitz and art historian
Wayne Lempka also add forewords to the book, which includes maps of the Catskill areas
where the landscapes were painted. A member of Bard’s first MFA graduating class, Selkowitz
lives in Ashokan, New York.
36

Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature
by Karen Sullivan
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
In the European Middle Ages, Karen Sullivan points out, a heretic was an entirely imaginary
concept: everyone knew heretics existed, but no member of the Christian majority admitted to
being outside the fold. In any case, it was not easy to distinguish between those who believed
ecclesiastical dictates and those who believed what they chose (“heresy” derives from the Greek
for “choice”). Sullivan, associate professor of literature, examines the paradox of why literatures
of the period celebrated the very characters who were denigrated by society at large.
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Plays: Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
by Lance Tait ’78
ENFIELD PUBLISHING
Though Edgar Allan Poe wrote only one play, which remained unfinished, theater was in his
blood: his mother was a popular actress. His stories, with their dramatic tension and exquisite
eye for detail, have been famously adapted to stage and screen. Lance Tait wrote these one-act
plays, performed in Paris in 2002–03, based on well-known and lesser-known Poe classics. The
volume concludes with an afterword by the author.
Upcity Service(s)
by Dominic Taylor
BROADWAY PLAY PUBLISHING
Dominic Taylor’s latest play involves intersections—of both the human and street variety—in
Harlem, where Jacqueeda is trying to find money to attend the funeral of her mother’s
boyfriend. She enlists the aid of her friend Poppy, who reads in the paper that Deacon
Derricott, a local preacher whose Lincoln Continental sits onstage, has won millions in the lottery.
The play’s action is supplemented by a Greek chorus of eight television sets. Taylor is visiting
assistant professor of theater.
Say “Saah”: A Bathtub Yoga Book
by Kim Canazzi and Frolic Taylor ’70
CONARI PRESS
What could be more relaxing than combining the practice of yoga, that ancient physical and
spiritual form of exercise, with a soak in a warm bath? Practicing simple yoga poses in the tub,
along with breathing and visualization techniques, brings relaxation from stress and releases
aches, the authors contend. Frolic Taylor is a yoga teacher, writer, and horse-farm owner in
Cazenovia, New York.
SEND US YOUR CDs!
Beginning with the Fall 2006 Bardian, Books by Bardians will be expanded to
include CDs. Alumni/ae and faculty are invited to send their recent recordings to
CDs by Bardians, c/o Cynthia Werthamer, Publications Office, Bard College, PO
Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504.
37

O N A N D O F F C A M P U S
Seminars Share Early College Techniques
Time-tested methods for educating younger scholars were
shared last summer as Simon’s Rock College of Bard inaugurated
its Early College High School Teaching Seminar.
Twenty-nine participants traveled from across the country to
the Simon’s Rock campus in Great Barrington, Massachusetts,
for an intensive four-day workshop in a new series of programs
funded by a $156,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.
The core of the seminar was observation of Writing and
Thinking workshops (an approach to learning created by the
Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College), followed
by group discussions. Among the Simon’s Rock faculty leading
the seminar was Joan DelPlato, who directs the Simon’s
Rock Writing and Thinking Workshop for incoming students
and teaches art history and women’s studies. Participants
ranged from teachers of literacy to science educators, and from
principals of inner city high schools to university administrators.
They came from institutions as diverse as an early college
high school on a tribal reservation in Washington State, a
charter school in Salt Lake City, a college in Maryland, and
traditional high schools in Philadelphia and Chicago.
The program took advantage of having 145 first-year
Simon’s Rock students on campus, along with a student
group from Bard High School Early College (BHSEC)
attending a workshop to prepare them to serve as mentors
and tutors at their school.
BHSEC faculty offered a panel on their experience in
launching an early college high school in New York City,
which demonstrated that the Simon’s Rock model could succeed
in an urban setting. “This was the turning point in
helping participants see the relevance of the Writing and
Thinking work in their home schools,” says DelPlato, noting
that several had set up new schools or were in the process of
doing so.
In addition to Simon’s Rock and BHSEC, program
partners are Jobs for the Future in Boston and the University
Park Campus School associated with Clark University in
Worcester, Massachusetts.
Some of the teachers from across the country who took part in the Early College High School Training Seminar at Simon’s Rock College of Bard last summer
38

SEEN & HEARD
SEPTEMBER
Bruce Chilton, executive director of the Institute of
Advanced Theology, and Bard’s Rabbi Lawrence Troster
discussed religion and the environment during a luncheon
lecture on September 14 at Bertelsmann Campus Center.
Pianist Jeremy Denk, faculty member of The Bard College
Conservatory of Music, performed Bach partitas at Olin
Hall on September 14.
The eminent American playwright Romulus Linney participated in a staged reading
of Aristophanes’ The Clouds in the Sosnoff Theater in September. Part of the
First-Year Seminar lecture series, the reading was directed by Peter J. Criswell ’89
and featured three Bard professors—Daniel Berthold, William Mullen, and Kristin
Scheible—and many students.
Drucilla Cornell of Rutgers University gave the inaugural
lecture in the “Constitutional Ideal” series on September 20
at the Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building. The talk,
titled “Dignity Jurisprudence in South Africa,” was sponsored
by the Bard Prison Initiative, Human Rights Project,
and Science, Technology, and Society Program.
German artist Thomas Struth, known for bringing largescale
color photography to the forefront of contemporary
art, spoke at Olin Hall on September 21, in an event sponsored
by the Photography Program.
On September 21, the Middle East Studies Program presented
a talk by Bradley Clough of American University in
Cairo on “Teaching Comparative Religion in the
Contemporary Middle East.”
The Center for Curatorial Studies presented a conversation
with Laura Hoptman, curator of the 2004 Carnegie
International Exhibition, at the Avery Center theater on
September 21.
Radio station WXBC and Student Activities presented a
concert by the Texas indie rock band Hundred Year Storm
at Bertelsmann Campus Center on September 22.
Bard celebrated the culture of the former Soviet republic
of Georgia on September 24 with a dance performance by
the Dancing Crane ensemble, a food and wine reception,
and a panel discussion, “Georgia at a Crossroads.”
John Barth, introduced by Bard professor Bradford Morrow as “the greatest postmodernist
we have,” spoke on the art of fiction and gave a reading from his recent work in
Olin Hall on October 4.The author of The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and
the National Book Award–winning Chimera joked that he was reading at “Barth
College,” and treated a large audience to hefty sections of a novella, I’ve Been Told,
and a work in progress about a “mediocre writer teaching at Stratford College in
Pennsylvania,” where an annual literary prize known as “The Bard’s Petard” results
only in misfortune for those who win it. “If language were poker, you wouldn’t want
to play this guy,” said Morrow, whose course on contemporary fiction brought Barth
to campus.
Documentary filmmaker Avi Mograbi was on campus for
a September 26 screening of Avenge But One of My Two
Eyes, his provocative examination of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict that was shown at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Jonathan Rosen, former arts editor of the Forward and
author of the forthcoming novel Joy Comes in the Morning,
gave a talk on “Writing, Without Shame, about Jews” on
September 27 at Bertelsmann Campus Center.
39

Miss Barich Retires after Six Decades at Bard
On Monday, June 25, 1945, the day that Susan Barich began
her tenure in Bard’s business office, Imperial General
Headquarters in Tokyo announced the fall of Okinawa to
the U.S. Marines. Harry Truman was in the White House,
and it cost three cents to mail a letter, nine cents to purchase
a loaf of bread, and less than a quarter for a gallon of gas.
On November 17, 2005, the College held a retirement
party for the woman fondly referred to as Miss Barich by
three generation of Bardians. For the record, it now costs 37
cents to mail a letter, more than two bucks for a loaf of bread,
and something approaching the GNP of Venezuela to fill up
the car.
Over that 60-year span, Miss Barich—who reportedly
never took a vacation—was a rock of constancy at Bard, serving
the College as assistant controller, controller, and business
manager. And it was an “extraordinary” term of service, as
Professor Peter Sourian recalled in a letter that was read at
her retirement party: “Her civility, her intelligence, her
implicit sympathy for us as individuals with individual needs,
have represented the particular sense of community that we
have always had at this place. I remember when she and Bill
Asip virtually ran Bard with nothing but the help of a couple
of secretaries. And then, she by herself. . . . She is a real factor
in [Bard’s] survival and in [its] subsequent renaissance.”
With her oversized sunglasses, chocolate-colored
Cadillac, and tradition of stepping up to the plate in high
heels at Bard’s annual Fourth of July softball game, Miss
Barich cut a colorful figure on campus. But it will be her
devotion to the College, and the standard of excellence that
she upheld for six decades on the job, for which she will be
remembered in years to come.
Persi Diaconis, a mathematician, magician, and former MacArthur Fellow,
gave the keynote address to the Northeast regional meeting of the American
Mathematical Society in October. The two-day event was hosted by Bard and
took place in Olin Hall.
Students of The Bard College Conservatory of Music rehearse prior to a performance
on November 16 at the Renee Weiler Concert Hall at Greenwich
House Music School in Manhattan. The concert took place five days after a
panel discussion at the school in which several key administrators and faculty
of the Conservatory participated, including director Robert Martin, associate
director Melvin Chen, and violinist and teacher Weigang Li, along with
Conservatory student Wui Ming Gan. The student musicians pictured are
(from left) Anja Boenicke, violin; Tian Zhou, violin; Emanuel Evans, cello;
and Liyuan Liu, viola.
Susan Barich speaking at her retirement party; Alice Stroup listens.
40

The Center for Curatorial Studies’ Conversation Series
continued on September 28 with curator Cuauhtémoc
Medina, who discussed “When Faith Moves Mountains,”
a project by artist Francis Alÿs.
Printmaker Yuri Shtapakov (left) with two Smolny College students and Lisa
Duva, Emily Kaufman, and Richard Gray, U.S. exchange students participating
in the Bard-Smolny study abroad program
Smolny Strengthens Art Curriculum
Smolny College, a collaboration between Bard College and Saint
Petersburg State University, is unique in Russia not only as a liberal
arts institution, but also as the only study-abroad program that
allows North American students to matriculate fully into general
academic courses taught in Russian and English. Now in its eighth
year, Smolny College enrolls more than 100 new students each year
and hosts a growing number of international exchange students.
Developments in Smolny’s art history and studio art courses
offer a snapshot of the ways in which Russian and North American
students learn side by side as the College establishes itself as an
international liberal arts institution. Ivan Czeczot, a distinguished
art historian, chairs the Art History and Architecture Program. He
taught a course last semester on the German painter Philipp Otto
Runge, using German-language texts as source material. Other art
history faculty include Yekatirina Andreevna, a Russian art critic
of international distinction, and Olesya Turkina, a curator of the
Russian Museum, who is teaching The History and Theory of
Video Art this spring.
A new studio art course in printmaking is taught by Peter
Bely and Yuri Shtapokov, St. Petersburg’s leading art printmakers.
Two U.S. fine-art majors are among those taking the course,
which is taught in Russian.
Late Soviet Unofficial Art is taught in English by Stanislav
Savitski, a renowned writer and critic. Seeking to construct a new
understanding of Soviet culture while its art forms are still recent
enough to be visible and tangible, Savitski draws a connection
between early Soviet attempts to create a cultural perception of new
ideology and developments in the arts of the late- and post-Soviet
culture. Course materials include a variety of genres, such as conceptual
and performance art pieces, film, memoirs, poetry, and critical
works. By teaching in English, Savitski makes difficult concepts
more accessible to international students still learning Russian,
while he creates an additional challenge for the Russian students.
Thanks to Nina Chesakov, an exchange student from Youngstown
State University, for her contribution to this article.
Wesleyan University classics professor Andrew Szegedy-
Maszak gave a talk titled “Clear Light and Shining Ruins:
19th-Century Travelers and Photographers in Athens” on
September 29 at Preston Theater.
OCTOBER
Architectural historian Matthew A. Postal led a walking
tour of Manhattan titled “More Than Tall: Ornament and
Line in Midtown.” The October 1 event was presented by
The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative
Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC).
On October 3, Hossein Kamaly of Columbia University
gave a talk, “From Island to Mainland: Varieties of
Rationality,” as part of the First-Year Seminar lecture series.
In conjunction with its exhibition Georg Jensen Jewelry,
the BGC offered a series of lectures (October 5, 7, and 11)
by leading experts in Scandinavian art and design at a variety
of New York City locations. Topics included “Viking
Silversmiths,” “Georg Jensen in America,” and “New
Classicism and Danish Design in the 1920s: The
Transition to Modernism.”
The first lecture in the Technology, Technocracy, and
Human Rights series, “Constructing Race, Defining
Citizens: Racializing and Deracializing Immigrants in
U.S. Federal Statistics, 1898–1913,” featured Levy
Institute Research Professor Joel Perlmann and was held
on October 6.
Siddartha, an activist for cultural renewal in his native
India, visited the College on October 12 to discuss
“Culture and Sustainable Development in India.”
Bard in China presented a lecture by art historian Midori
Yoshimoto on October 14 at the Olin Language Center.
The talk was titled “Into Performance: Japanese Women
Artists in New York, 1955–75.”
Folk music legend Richie Havens appeared at the Richard
B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on October 16
in support of the second annual Walk for Opportunity, an
event cosponsored by Bard to benefit the Hudson Valley
Cerebral Palsy Association.
41

Roots Rockers Raise Funds for
Hurricane Relief
The grizzled New Orleans roots rocker Dr. John and
the celebrated vocalist and lyricist Natalie Merchant
combined their considerable talents on December 3,
when they performed a benefit concert to raise funds
for the victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita at the
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
The audience, which packed the Sosnoff
Theater, was treated to full sets by each of the pop
luminaries (including a collaboration on two songs),
as well as performances by such special guests as
Fergus Bordewich, Michael Doucet, John Sebastian,
Artie Traum, Roswell Rudd, and the River Road
Ramblers, among other supporting players.
The concert, titled “Build a Levee,” was the
inspiration of the Hudson Valley Levee Board, an
organization of area residents committed to keeping
the Gulf Coast assistance effort on track. The board
consists of Michael Pillot, a fourth-generation resident
of New Orleans, and Paul Antonell, who were
the concert’s coproducers; Terence Boylan ’70; and
Kenneth Cooke, Georgia Dent, Kristine Hanson,
and Deborah Macaluso.
Dr. John and Natalie Merchant performing together at the Sosnoff Theater.
Bard’s team emerged victorious in the 2005
North Eastern Atlantic Conference Women’s
Tennis Championship, which took place over
two days in October at SUNY Purchase. Team
members are (from left) Sarah Elia ’06, Ayesha
Bari ’07, Kate Myers ’07, head coach Fred
Feldman, Genya Shimkin ’08, Chelsea Herman
’09, and Mary Magellan ’06, voted NEAC
Player of the Year. The conference also honored
Feldman (Coach of the Year) and named the
Bard women its Team of the Year.
42

Levy Institute Receives Grant from Smith
Richardson Foundation
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
public policy research organization, has received a $50,000
grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation in support of a project
titled Government Spending on the Elderly.
The project’s mission is first to explore the implications of an
aging society for the economy and public policy. Policy makers,
professional associations, and advocacy organizations will then be
provided with new, crucial information as they explore options for
the future financing of health and economic support programs for
the aging.
To this end, the Levy Institute is commissioning a series of
papers that examine various aspects of the economics of aging,
including prospects for aging and government spending, retirement
security overall and for women in particular, progressivity of
Social Security and Medicare, retirement behavior, the interaction
between private and public provisioning of retiree benefits, and
government expenditures and the well-being of the elderly.
The papers will be reviewed at a workshop for feedback from
others in the field and will then be presented at a conference and
issued as working papers by the Levy Institute. A summary of the
conference proceedings will be disseminated to members and
staff of Congressional committees, federal and state officials, the
academic community, and the media.
The First-Year Seminar presented the lecture “Science
and Religion in the Age of Galileo and Descartes” by Alice
Stroup, professor of history at Bard, at the Richard B.
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on October 17.
A panel discussion on the sacred landscapes of Tibet was
held on October 19 at the Olin Language Center. Hosted
by Bard in China, the panel featured Li-Hua Ying, associate
professor of Chinese at Bard, and Christopher Reed
Coggins, associate professor of geography and Asian studies
at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.
The Bard Orchestra and the Erica Lindsay/Sumi
Tonooka Quartet performed a program of classical music
and jazz at Olin Hall on October 19.
The Bard Center for Environmental Policy presented an
open forum, “The Origins of Amnesty International and
the Human Rights Movement in the United States: A
Dialogue with the Founders,” on October 20 at Bertelsmann
Campus Center.
Folk festival headliner Tracy Grammer, called “a brilliant
artist” by Joan Baez, performed at Down the Road Café on
October 20.
Also on October 20, Jessica Feldman, professor at the
University of Virginia, delivered a lecture on John Ruskin
and the rise of modernism.
The Human Rights Project, Bard chaplaincy, and Christian
Student Fellowship presented a talk by G. Simon Harak,
cofounder of Voices in the Wilderness, on October 20.
Harak’s organization has brought medicine and toys into
Iraq in defiance of U.S. sanctions.
A panel of journalists who covered the Yugoslav wars—
Roger Cohen of the New York Times; Emma Daly, then of
the Independent of London; Newsday’s Roy Gutman; David
Rieff, author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the
West; Stacy Sullivan, then of Newsweek, and Ed Vulliamy,
of the Guardian—gathered at Bard Hall in New York City
on October 21, the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Peace
Accords, to discuss the lessons of Bosnia.
Elizabeth Larison ’06 (left) and Alexandra Tatarsky, a Bard High School Early College
student, were named the winners of the Institute for International Liberal Education’s
essay contest, which was organized to promote understanding of the links between
HIV/AIDS infection and human rights needs. Both Larison, a senior concentrating in
human rights, and Tatarsky, who is in her third year at BHSEC, won trips to Russia
to attend that country’s first international conference on HIV/AIDS and human rights,
which was hosted by Smolny College and took place in October.
Evelyn Fox-Keller of MIT gave a talk titled “Innate
Confusions: Nature, Nurture, and All of That,” at Weis
Cinema on October 21.
Rock historian Barry Drake presented “60s Rock: When the
Music Mattered,” a show featuring hundreds of slides, videos,
and musical clips, on October 21 at the Campus Center.
43

Bard Cavaliers
When Sarah Perkins ’07 from Branford, Connecticut, and
Susannah Bradley ’07 from Dallas arrived at Bard, they were
surprised to find that the College, set in rural Annandale, did
not have an equestrian club. Perkins and Bradley, who lived in
the same first-year residence hall, rode together a few times a
week at a local barn off campus. Before long, they decided to
try getting others involved.
In the spring of 2004, Perkins and Bradley cofounded the
Bard Equestrian Club, which is a recognized student club with
some funding through the Convocation/Student Activities
Fund. Fifty students signed up for their mailing list, and 12
began taking lessons with the club. A small show team—
Perkins, Bradley, and Elizabeth Ford ’08—started competing
in the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA) against
15 other colleges in the region including Marist, Vassar,
Columbia, and New York University. In November 2004, Ford
won champion in her division at the Vassar show.
This year, Bard’s equestrian club—now called the Bard
Cavaliers—has 21 Bard students, with varying levels of experience,
taking riding lessons. The show team now has at least
Bard Cavaliers
seven equestrians competing in IHSA shows. Bard alumna
Andrea Nussinow ’84 coaches the intercollegiate team at her
new equestrian facility, Blue Star Farms.
“It’s the perfect blend of what we were looking for,” says
Bradley. “The gorgeous facility is just minutes from campus
and the training is excellent.”
Andrea Conner
New Director of Student Activities
Bard has more than 100 student clubs, half a dozen student
publications, an active student government, and a campus
center that hosts films, readings, exhibitions, concerts, and a
variety of additional student activities. Overseeing it all is
Iowa native Andrea Conner, the director of Bertelsmann
Campus Center and student activities.
Conner received a master’s degree in higher education/
student affairs administration from Iowa State University. It
was a career direction she chose as an undergraduate at Coe
College, when she realized she “loved ‘college’ and the idea of
the liberal arts education even more than music and theater.”
Conner has since worked as a residence counselor at
Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and as assistant
director of campus life at Illinois’s Knox College, where last
spring the commencement activities she helped plan included
an address by Senator Barack Obama.
At Bard, Conner quickly learned about the high level of
student activism from the community’s response to Hurricane
Katrina. She helped advise students on their relief efforts,
including an all-night concert by Bard bands at Bertelsmann.
Just weeks into the fall semester, she was helping 15 new clubs
get off the ground, advising them on how to generate interest,
write budgets, and secure funding. While Conner hopes to
support the academic mission of the College with the level
and types of programming offered, it’s also her mission, she
says, “to find ways to help the students relax and have fun.” So,
along with students, she is working to expand the Thursday
night coffee house concerts at Down the Road Café and planning
a few big campuswide events for spring, including Super
Bowl and Oscar parties and Spring Fling.
44

American Streamlined Design on View at the BGC
A chrome-plated iron, a bullet-shaped soda siphon, and a boldly
angled lounge chair of leather and tubular steel are among the
180 objects on display in American Streamlined Design: The World of
Tomorrow, an exhibition at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies
in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC), which will
open on March 15 and run through June 25, 2006.
The streamlined idiom evolved in the 1930s and 1940s, in
defiance of art deco and functionalist modernism. “It was based on
an admiration for industry and speed,” says cocurator David A.
Hanks, who has gathered a selection of ceramics, metalworks, furniture,
and graphic designs by such notable practitioners of the
movement as Norman Bel Geddes (the Futurama exhibit at the
1939 World’s Fair), Henry Dreyfuss (20th Century Limited train),
Raymond Loewy (Lucky Strike packaging), and Walter Dorwin
Teague (Texaco gas station), among others.
Many of the objects in American Streamlined Design were culled
from the Eric Brill Collection and speak to the birth of American
consumerism, when time-saving products such as mixers, blenders,
and power drills spurred spending and promised a better world for
everyone. In addition to offering a fresh appraisal of these classic
industrial designs, the exhibition looks at the revival of streamlining
in design today. Lectures, tours, and other public programs will be
offered in conjunction with the exhibition. For additional information,
see www.bgc.bard.edu or call 212-501-3011. The BGC is
located at 18 West 86th Street in New York City.
On October 23, Bard president Leon Botstein and a distinguished
panel of speakers, including Alan Sussman,
Jack Blum ’62, Daniel Karpowitz, and CNN correspondent
Kitty Pilgrim, discussed the future of the Supreme
Court.The Campus Center program concluded the College’s
Family Weekend events.
Director Todd Solondz, known for indie favorites Welcome
to the Dollhouse and Happiness, and producer Michael Ryan
screened their 2004 film Palindromes on October 23. The
film was shot on and around the Bard campus.
Susan Merriam, assistant professor of art history at Bard,
was the featured speaker at the First-Year Seminar on
October 24, discussing “Producing Knowledge in the Early
Modern Curiosity Collection.”
Heinrich Dohna of The Rockefeller University lectured on
“Spatial Population Dynamics of Chagas Disease Vectors”
on October 24, as part of Bard’s Frontiers in Science Lecture
Series.
Novelist and translator Sergio Waisman, of George
Washington University, talked about Argentine literature
and Jorge Luis Borges’s theories of translation on October
24. On the same day, Fred Lazin of Ben Gurion
University of the Negev lectured on “Israel versus the
American Jewish Establishment.”
In a conversation at the Center for Curatorial Studies on
October 25, executive director Tom Eccles provided a
behind-the-scenes look at several of his installation and curatorial
projects, which have featured work by Nam June Paik,
Jeff Koons, Willem de Kooning, Keith Haring, and others.
On October 27, Bard’s Globalization and International
Affairs Program presented a talk by Thomas M. Nichols,
former chairman of the Department of Strategy and Policy
at the U.S. Naval College, and Scott Silverstone, assistant
professor of international relations at West Point, titled
“Does Preventive War Have a Future?” The event was held
at Bard Hall in New York City.
Skippy-Racer Scooter, c. 1933. Harold L. Van Doren and John Gordon Rideout.
The Eric Brill Collection.
“Rethinking Tourette Syndrome,” a screening of the
Emmy-nominated documentary Twitch and Shout and a
discussion of the syndrome with the film’s narrator and
coauthor, Lowell Handler, was held on October 27 as the
first event in the College’s “Rethinking Difference beyond
the Classroom” series.
45

La Voz staffers (from left) Elisa Ureña ’06, Mariel Fiori ’05, and Nevena
Gadjeva ’06
La Voz Makes Itself Heard
Now entering its third year, La Voz (The Voice) is a magazine
that aims to shake, stir, inform, and delight its audience of
Spanish—and would-be Spanish—readers. “The idea was
always to be a bridge between the English and Spanish communities,”
says Mariel Fiori ’05, managing editor. “It’s for the
Hispanic community, but it’s also for people studying Spanish
who want to practice.”
La Voz publishes articles about immigrants’ and students’
experiences, current events, and life in the Hudson Valley, as
well as short stories, opinions, and legal and health advice
from area experts. An educational supplement offers dialogue
phrases in both English and Spanish, to aid readers of both
languages.
La Voz’s popularity is such that, as of January, the
magazine went from quarterly to monthly publication and
expanded from 12 to 16 pages. It is distributed free on the
Bard campus and in supermarkets, post offices, and “any
place else people can see it in Dutchess and Ulster counties,”
Fiori says.
The magazine began as a Trustee Leader Scholar (TLS)
project of Fiori and Emily Schmall ’05, who approached her
classmate about starting the publication after Fiori had written
a Spanish-language column for The Citizen, a regional
magazine published by Elaine Fernandez ’01. The first issue’s
print run was 1,000 copies; now it is up to 4,000. The current
editor is TLS student Nevena Gadjeva ’06.
Though still supported by Bard, the goal now is to find
funding from other sources as well so that La Voz can continue
to reach out to the community. “You don’t get all these
perspectives in other publications,” says Fiori. “Perhaps it
should be called Las Voces.”
Digging Up More than Dirt
More than 100 pieces of ceramic, intact bottles, two toothbrushes, and even a tortoise
shell comb, all from the mid to late 1800s, have been carefully removed from
a deep shaft behind the construction site of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert
J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. The artifacts within the stonelined
shaft are prime archaeological finds from a 6,000-square-foot site that has
been cordoned off between the future science building and the Sands House student
residence.
Christopher Lindner, archaeologist in residence and visiting assistant professor
of anthropology, discovered through shovel tests the remains of two buried stone
walls, one a possible barn or shed foundation and the other “almost certainly” a privy
shaft, which Sands House inhabitants began filling with broken pottery and other
debris in the 1880s. “We knew from several shovel tests we were into something
rich,” Lindner said. As a result of the dig, the utility pad and transformer for the science
building have been moved from the locations sited in original plans.
“It’s very exciting to know about the history of the land on which this college
is constructed,” said Diana Brown, associate professor of anthropology. She toured
the site with Mario Bick, professor of anthropology, who added, “History is literally
embedded in the ground as well as the texts. To have such archaeological programs
right on campus is a rare opportunity for students to gain visceral insights into local
history.”
William Ruiz '03 takes measurements of a stone
shaft that is part of a 6,000-square-foot archeological
site between the Sands House and The
Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center
for Science and Computation.
46

A Bard Forum on Science and Society showcased a panel
discussion on genetics and race with faculty members
Michael Tibbetts, biology; Gregory Moynahan, history;
and Amy Ansell, sociology. Mark Halsey moderated the
October 27 event at the Campus Center.
The Levy Economics Institute hosted the conference
“Time Use and Economic Well-Being” on October 28 and
29 at Blithewood.
The Colorado Quartet performed works by Beethoven,
Rochberg, and Haydn at an afternoon concert at Olin Hall
on October 30.
Jesse D. Cain ’05 won a Princess Grace Award for excellence in film. The prestigious
scholarship will fund the production of his Senior Project—a film based on footage
of his journeys on the Trans-Siberian Railway. “I’m interested in doing work that
is concerned with narrative informed by real experience,” says Cain, whose script is
derived from his experiences aboard the epic train ride from St. Petersburg to
Beijing. Established in 1984, the Princess Grace Awards recognize and nurture a
new generation of young artists studying at institutions nationwide.
NOVEMBER
Investigative journalist Ana Arana discussed the rise of
transnational crime in Latin America on November 1 as
part of Bard’s Technology, Technocracy, and Human
Rights lecture series.
The Da Capo Chamber Players celebrated the works of
Bard faculty, alumni/ae, and student composers during a
Bard Center concert at Olin Hall on November 2.
The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra performed works
by Barber, Copland, Gershwin, and Woodstock composer
Alan Shulman during An American Thanksgiving, a concert
at Olin Hall on November 4.
Michael Almereyda presented his recent documentary on
world-renowned photographer William Eggleston on
November 4 at the Avery Center theater.
The Institute of Advanced Theology sponsored a luncheon
lecture and book signing with Bruce Chilton, executive
director of the Institute, and Jacob Neusner, Research
Professor of Religion and Theology, on November 7 at the
Campus Center. Their recent books include Chilton’s Mary
Magdalene: A Biography and Altruism in World Religions,
edited by Chilton and Neusner.
David Hinkley, a veteran member and officer of Amnesty International (AI), was
one of the panelists in an open forum at the College on October 20, on the origins of
the group and its growth in the United States. Hinkley, a founding member of several
West Coast AI chapters who now serves as executive director of Survivors
International, joined other AI pioneers in the dialogue, which was presented by the
Bard Center for Environmental Policy and moderated by BCEP director Joanne
Fox-Przeworski.
Christopher Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of
Music, addressed the First-Year Seminar on November 7
on the topic “Mozart’s Final Reconciliation: The Magic
Flute and the Enlightenment.”
On November 8, Bard in China presented a lecture by historian
Dan Shao of the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign, titled “Chinese by Definition: The Making
and Practice of Nationality Law, 1909–1980.”
47

Zachary Hamacker ’08, Dylan Cummins ’07, and Colin Safranek ’08
Men’s Volleyball Roster Includes Star Players
The men’s volleyball team has stepped up its game. Last
year, Dylan Cummins ’07, Colin Safranek ’08, and Zachary
Hamaker ’08—all nationally ranked players from northern
California—joined the roster. “These guys are phenomenal
athletes, extremely intelligent people, and great students,”
says head coach Owen Roberts, who is from Berkeley,
California, and works in Bard’s Admission Office.
Recruiting these players to Bard—two outside hitters
and one setter—wasn’t a hard sell. Safranek, who ranked first
nationally in kills per game last season, was accepted at Bard
on a full-tuition scholarship as a Distinguished Scientist
Scholar. Hamaker, whose father is a professor at Saint Mary’s
College, received a tuition exchange scholarship and came to
study math at Bard. Cummins, looking for an academically
challenging liberal arts college, transferred to Bard from
Sonoma State University as a sophomore. “This team’s chemistry
is one of the best I have ever experienced in 14 seasons,”
says Cummins, who cocaptains the team alongside Safranek
and Hamaker. “Although the level of competition on the East
Coast does not rival that of Sonoma State [a Division II
team], Bard’s superior attitude and coaching make it more
rewarding.”
Last season’s turnaround success—ranking second nationally
in team hitting percentages—won Bard an invitation to
join the North Eastern Collegiate Volleyball Association
(NECVA), a top Division III conference. “The competition
will be much stiffer and the season more rigorous,” says
Cummins, who played in high school on the same championship
team as Safranek in Santa Cruz. Roberts continues to
recruit other positions, especially defenders, as his team’s
intensity and competitive spirit heightens.
Edie Meidav Wins Bard Fiction Prize
Edie Meidav, whose second novel, Crawl Space, paints a chilling portrait of a French collaborator
with the Nazis, has been named the recipient of the annual Bard Fiction Prize. Meidav,
a native of Toronto who lives in San Francisco, won the 2001 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for
Fiction by an American Woman for The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon.
In Crawl Space, Meidav dares to inhabit the mind and soul of a 20th-century monster,
Emile Poulquet, “a morbid opportunist who artfully isolates his guilt with the lie that men
are mere cogs in the wheel of history” (Thomas Meaney, Los Angeles Times). The novel, published
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has been widely praised for its unflinching delineation
of its protagonist, the power and scope of its narrative, and the originality of its treatment of
the Holocaust.
The Bard Fiction Prize, which consists of a $30,000 cash award and a one-semester residency
at the College, is bestowed annually to a writer of promise who is 39 years or younger
and an American citizen at the time of application. The selection committee consists of three
professors in the Division of Languages and Literature, Mary Caponegro, Robert Kelly, and
Bradford Morrow. Previous recipients have been Nathan Englander (2001), Emily Barton
(2002), Monique Truong (2003), and Paul LaFarge (2004).
Edie Meidav
48

Family Weekend
Each fall Bard hosts parents of current students during Family
Weekend. While together on campus, families are invited to attend
classes, panel discussions, performances, sporting events and more.
This year’s program highlighted the Science, Technology, and
Society Program offering such classes as Matthew Deady’s First-
Year Seminar Galileo and Catherine O’Reilly’s Global Change.
The Life after Bard Dinner, held November 9 at the
Manor House Café, featured talks by Lukas Alpert ’99, a
reporter at the New York Post; graphic designer Anne
Finkelstein ’80; dancer Abby Bender Lauren ’95; John
Rolfe ’79, a journalist with Sports Illustrated for Kids; and
attorney Ken Stern ’79.
“The Rise of Chinese Power” was the topic of a November
10 lecture by Elizabeth C. Economy, director of Asia
studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Dan
Blumenthal, American Enterprise Institute fellow, at Bard
Hall in New York City. The talk was part of the Bard
Globalization and International Affairs Program’s James
Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.
On November 10, the Bard Center for Environmental
Policy presented a talk by Dick White, professor emeritus
at Smith College, about Las Gaviotas, a self-sustaining
community and reforestation center in Colombia.
Mark Halsey, associate dean of the college and mathematics professor, addresses
Family Weekend participants.
President Leon Botstein presents Stefano Ferrari with a soccer shirt at the dedication
of the Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex, named after Stefano’s father.
The Bard College Conservatory of Music concert and
lecture series offered four fall programs, beginning with
a November 13 concert by renowned pianist Simone
Dinnerstein, who performed Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
Other programs included a performance by the Conservatory
orchestra, guest-conducted by Fabio Mechetti; a concert by
pianist Melvin Chen and violinist Arnold Steinhardt; and a
recital of chamber music by Conservatory students and faculty.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, The
Fortress of Solitude, and The Disappointment Artist, read
from his works on November 14 as part of the Innovative
Contemporary Fiction Reading Series. Bradford Morrow,
professor of literature at Bard and founding editor of
Conjunctions, introduced the award-winning writer.
Dean of the College Michèle D. Dominy lectured on
“Captain Cook’s Endeavor: Science and Exploration in the
Pacific” on November 14. The talk, part of the First-Year
Seminar, took place at the Sosnoff Theater.
The November 15 lecture in Bard’s Technology,Technocracy,
and Human Rights series featured Michael Menser,
Brooklyn College, who discussed “Infrastructure Is a Political
Act: Obligation, Place, and the Borders of the Polis.”
Michèle D. Dominy engages parents in a question-and-answer session.
Bard in China presented a lecture by Joshua Muldavin,
Henry R. Luce Professor of Asian Studies and Human
Geography at Sarah Lawrence College, on the environmental
and social implications of China’s recent economic
success on November 17 at the Olin Humanities Building.
49

Robert Epstein
New Trustee Appointed
Robert Epstein ’63, a principal of The Abbey Group and a co-owner
and comanaging partner of the Boston Celtics, was elected to the
Board of Trustees of Bard College in October 2005.
Epstein, who earned his bachelor’s degree in political studies, is
a real estate developer in the Boston area. The Abbey Group, of
which he is chief executive officer, has developed many key properties
in that city, notably Lafayette Corporate Center and the awardwinning
Landmark Center near Fenway Park. A lifelong Celtics
fan—as a young boy, he attended a summer camp run by Celtics
Hall of Famer Bob Cousy—he became an executive of the fabled
basketball franchise in 2002. The New England Sports Lodge chose
him as its 2005 Sportsman of the Year.
Epstein also serves on the boards of numerous organizations,
including Team Harmony, the Anti-Defamation League, Rose Art
Museum, Wang Center, and Boston Celtics Shamrock Foundation.
ABOVE
A rendering of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden
Center for Science and Computation by Rafael Viñoly Architects
PC. The view is from the northeast, along the extension of Campus
Walk, which now ends at the plaza in front of the science building.
The rendering shows, on the east side, the mezzanine level
of faculty offices and the lobby with classrooms and an auditorium.
On the west side, one sees the north end of the laboratories.
RIGHT
Construction of the Reem and Kayden Center is well under way.
The two foundation walls that will support the main laboratories
and support areas have been completed. The building is scheduled
to be enclosed sometime this spring, with an expected completion
date of February 2007.
50

Five-time Emmy winner David Javerbaum, head writer
for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and one of the primary
authors of the bestselling America (The Book), talked to the
Bard community on November 18 at Olin Hall.
The exhibition Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home
Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931–1945
opened at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the
Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture on November 18
and ran through February 5.
Language and Thinking Workshop teachers for 2005 included alumni/ae (from
left) Delia Mellis ’86, Stephanie Hopkins ’94, Colleen Murphy Alexander ’00,
Andrew McCarron ’98, and Rebecca Granato ’99
BHSEC Outreach Bolstered
Last summer Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) offered
a five-week academy to selected students from three middle
schools in its Lower East Side neighborhood. These are “Title I”
schools, with an economically disadvantaged student body.
Despite previous BHSEC tutoring, most of the students’ reading
and math skills remained too low to allow them entry into
BHSEC, a public high school in which students can progress in
four years from ninth grade through the first two years of college.
When promised funding for the summer academy did not
materialize, BHSEC students and staff volunteered their time to
make the program happen. A pilot class of 28 students, rising
sixth and seventh graders, had their first Bard experience. They
wore lab coats and protective goggles in science labs. They read
and wrote about authors they had never met and revisited familiar
ideas from a different angle. Field trips were modest, ranging from
work in a neighborhood garden to a tour of Columbia University.
The Columbia tour, at an institution the academy students had not
heard of before, proved to be one of the most successful outings.
While there, the group met, quite by chance, two BHSEC graduates
who had gone on to Columbia.
The academy’s ending was bittersweet; without funding, a
Saturday program could not continue during the academic year.
That changed in September when District I of the New York City
Department of Education—of which the three middle schools are
a part—received a grant from the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and
Talented Students Education Program of the U.S. Department of
Education. Among other programming, the three-year grant will
allow the expansion of BHSEC’s summer academy. Ultimately,
the students will be better prepared for the rigors and opportunities
of the best public high schools in New York City. “If all goes
well,” says Ray Peterson, BHSEC principal, “we feel confident
that many of these students will be with us for the Bard High
School Early College experience.”
Robert Coover, former Bard professor and prize-winning
author of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Henry J.
Waugh, Prop.; The Public Burning; Pricksongs & Descants;
and many other works of fiction, read from his new short
story collection, A Child Again, on November 28 at the
Bertelsmann Campus Center.
The First-Year Seminar presented a November 28 lecture
by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze of DePaul University, titled
“Philosophy, Science, and Cultural Principles of Reason.”
DECEMBER
The James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series concluded
its fall schedule on December 1 with a lecture on
“Coming Challenges to the United Nations” by Barbara
Crossette, former UN bureau chief of the New York Times,
and Edward Luck, professor at Columbia University’s
School of International and Public Affairs. The talk took
place at Bard Hall in New York City and was sponsored by
Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program.
The First-Year Seminar Series presented “Gender Trouble in
the Age of Reason: Mansfield Park and the Enlightenment
Project,” a lecture by Eileen Gilloooly of Columbia
University, on December 5 at the Sosnoff Theater.
The Bard College Community Chorus, directed by James
Bagwell, performed Haydn’s Mass in the Time of War at the
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on
December 7. The performance was dedicated to the late
John Dalton ’74.
The Winter Dance, featuring Senior Project and faculty choreography,
was held at the Fisher Center on December 10.
FEBRUARY
The American Symphony Orchestra, with Leon Botstein,
music director, performed Don Quixote and Ein Helenleben
by Richard Strauss on February 3 and 4 at the Richard B.
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
51

C L A S S N O T E S
Editor’s Note: Alumni/ae wishing to submit a class note can do so by filling
out the envelope enclosed in the Bardian or going to www.bard.edu/alumni
and clicking on the link for Class Notes.
’36
70th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu
’39
Who, besides George Rosenberg, remembers that diner in Red
Hook and its remarkable proprietor? As often as possible, George
went to watch in awe as, with one hand, the man toasted and buttered
bread while with the other he broke eggs, stirred in diced
onion, peppers, and who knows what else to make George a western
sandwich. George read in the Escapes section of the 8/19/05 New
York Times that if he were to return to Red Hook today, he might
dine at J & J’s Gourmet Deli and have an ice cream dessert at Holy
Cow. Holy Cow, indeed! Tempus fugit—and quickly, too!
’41
65th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu
’46
60th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu
’50
Mary Gelb Park had a successful exhibition of brightly colored
abstract oils at the OTWAU gallery in Portland, Oregon. She sends
a cheery hello to all the “Old Wrinklies” from her era. Her daughter,
Lucy, also graduated from Bard, and was Elaine de Kooning’s studio
assistant. There are actually granddaughters waiting in the wings!
John Rice has sold his Queen Palm Nurseries in Sarasota, Florida,
after 45 good years. He says retirement is great. He now enjoys spending
more time around his young grandchildren.
’51
55th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu
’52
Class Correspondent:
Kit Ellenbogen ’52, max4794@netzero.net
William Walker has been living happily in California since 1960.
He reports that his success as a writer and teacher was the result of
his years at Bard. He attributes his awakenings to Ted Weiss, James
Merrill, Bill Humphrey, and other faculty members who encouraged
and inspired him. A Stegner Fellow (and sometime teacher) at
Stanford University, as well as a teacher at Colorado State University
and Foothill Community College, Bill retired in 1989. He spends his
time reading, writing, and gardening.
’56
50th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Miriam Roskin Berger, mb33@nyu.edu; Steve Portman,
steveportmandesign.co.ule.uk. Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-
758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu
’60
Amy Green, M.D., was included in the 2004–05 edition of the
Consumers’ Research Council of America’s Guide to America’s Top
Psychiatrists. Her husband, Dr. Jack M. Clemente, died in 2002. Her
daughter, Laura, is engaged, and plans to marry next year.
’61
At 75, Barbara Hanes Morse, a.k.a. “Hafner,” is still teaching yoga
at the Palomar Community College in San Marcos, California.
’63
Phyllis Chesler was one of 75 Jewish women featured in an online
exhibition titled Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution. Organized
by the Jewish Women’s Archive, the virtual exhibition featured art,
writing, radio and TV clips, and other work by the participants, each of
whom wrote a short essay about the importance of her contribution to
feminism. Chesler, an active participant in the National Organization
of Women, supported one of the country’s first women’s crisis centers
in Brooklyn and cofounded both the Association for Women in
Psychology (1969) and the National Women’s Health Network. She is
also a charter member of the Women’s Forum. The Jewish Women’s
Archive exhibition can be visited at www.jwa.org/ feminism.
Untitled, by Judith Trepp ’63
52

Morris Museum
Sunday, March 19
A tour of the exhibition Musical Machines and Living Dolls:
Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata from the
Murgoth D. Guinness Collection, hosted by Steve Miller ’70
and Charlie Clancy ’69. This important collection features 60
mechanical musical instruments and automata, dating from the
early 18th to the early 19th century. Reception to follow.
Time: 1:30 p.m. Place: Morris Museum, 6 Normandy
Heights Road, Morristown, New Jersey. Reservations required.
11th Annual Young Alumni/ae
Cities Party
Friday, April 7, and Sunday, April 9
Information: Rebecca Granato ’99 and Jennifer Novik ’98
Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochairs
E-mail: rebecca.granato@gmail.com or jnovik@gmail.com
Tour of Chelsea art galleries
led by Professor Tom Wolf
Saturday, May 6
Information: Taryn McGray ’05, e-mail: mcgray@bard.edu
Reservations required.
Commencement/Reunion
Weekend 2006
May 19–21
Reunion Classes: 1936, 1941, 1946, 1951, 1956, 1966,
1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001
For more information, call Jessica Kemm ’74
at 845-758-7406 or e-mail kemm@bard.edu.
Bard Fiction Reading
Tuesday, June 13
The new alumni/ae reading series, hosted by Jamie
Callan ’75, continues with Bardian authors reading from
recent works of fiction.Time: 6:00 p.m. Place: Bowery
Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, New York City. Fee: $5 cover at
the door, and one drink minimum. Reservations required.

Judith Trepp-Sklar has lived and worked in Thalwil-Zurich,
Switzerland, since 1970. For the past 15 years she has spent the
summer months at her studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Trepp, a painter and art critic, is represented by Art Forum Ute
Barth in Zurich. Her work was shown in 2005 at the Pentimenti
Gallery in Philadelphia. A one-person show is planned for Zurich
in November 2006.
’66
40th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Peter Kenner, peter@tivolipartner.com; Kathryn Stein,
kestein@erols.com. Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406
or kemm@bard.edu
’68
Gail Grisetti received the Provost Award for Leadership in
International Education from Old Dominion University.
Marjorie Mann married Don Baier ’66 in 2002 and works as a psychiatric
nurse at Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore. Don is retired; the
couple tries to spend a lot of time traveling, and visited Italy in fall
2005. They recently acquired paintings by Michael DeWitt ’65 and
Wendy Weldon ’71.
’70
Photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood’s sixth book, Sentinelles de
l’ombre, Editions Le Seuil, was published in France, where she has
lived for 33 years. Visit her website: www.JaneEvelynAtwood.com.
’71
35th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Carla Bolte, carla.bolte@us.penguingroup.com; Rhonda
Harrow Engel, harrowengel@yahoo.com; Debby Davidson Kaas,
dkass@rcn.com. Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or
kemm@bard.edu
Mark Barnett has expanded his company both in Vietnam and
Cambodia, and his family is growing as well.
’76
30th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Richard Caliban, caliban421@aol.com; Angelo DePalma,
adp@tellurian.net; Jerry Drucker, jerrydsurf@cox.net; James
Fishman, jamesr626@aol.com; Deborah Bornstein Gichan, debgichan
photography@mac.com; Michelle Petruzelli, mapny13@yahoo.com;
Janice Storozum, janicederosa@mac.com; Shelley Weinstock, sbw2
@aol.com. Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm
@bard.edu
’78
Doreen Clark and Lewis Copulsky ’79 are pleased to announce the
academic progress of their two sons Ben Copulsky and Dan Copulsky.
Ben is a first-year student at Bard, and Dan has begun his first year
at Simon’s Rock.
Emily Hay, flutist and vocalist, was featured on KXLU in Los
Angeles (and at www.kxlu.com), and music from her CD Like Minds,
released on pfMentum Records, was highlighted on BBC Radio.
She has also appeared in numerous concerts with such musicians as
cellist Michael Intriere, bassist Anthony Shadduck, percussionist
Brad Dutz, trombonist/vocalist Kurt Heyl, violinist Ronit
Kirchman, and keyboardist Wayne Peet. Additional performances
in 2005 included the Thingamajigs Festival, Electric Lodge, and
South California Sonic Festival of New Music. Visit her website for
updated events and record releases: www.emilyhay.com.
After a minireunion/alumni/ae get-together in the land of not one, but
two hurricanes (a.k.a. Stuart, Florida), Karen Varbalow again came to
realize just how important her years at Bard were, and still are. She
invites any “Bardie” to look her up, say hello, and stop by sunny Florida
as long as there are no hurricanes blowing through. Her daughter
graduated from high school this year and has chosen a college as diametrically
different from Bard as possible: one with more than 30,000
students and a Division I sports program, where she will be on the dive
team and study international business and Chinese. She hopes her
daughter’s college experience is as fulfilling as her own was.
’73
Together with their son, Salim Haruka, Stephen Goto Gerald and
Yoshiko Goto Gerald ’83 returned from Tokyo, where they taught
an acting workshop together at Nihon Daigaku ( Japan University).
Stephen was honored to receive a Presidential Medal for Distinguished
Service to Japan University’s College of Fine Art. They look forward
to teaching and traveling to Japan and Korea in the summer.
’74
Margaret Sleeper has joined the faculty of the University of
Wisconsin–Madison School of Social Work as a full-time clinical
assistant professor.
Emily Hay ’78
54

’79
Dr. Michael Gold is the founder of Jazz Impact. More information is
available at www.jazz-impact.com. His wife, Deborah Dachis Gold ’81,
is a creative director in digital marketing communications.
’81
25th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Janet Stetson, stetson@bard.edu. Staff contact: Matt Soper,
845-758-7505 or soper@bard.edu
Kathie diStefano still lives in Rotterdam with her Dutch husband. In
1984 she founded Avalanche Theater. It has toured and played for elementary
and high school audiences for the past seven years, winning
prizes in support of its “learning through laughter” projects. She plans
to take a break from performance and financial director duties to focus
full-time on education. Her high school job will include teaching
drama and directing theatrical projects at a Dalton-style public high
school in Rotterdam. In addition, she will teach drama workshops to
elementary school pupils. Both of these teaching activities will be conducted
in English. Although Kathie speaks fluent Dutch, bilingual
education is gaining popularity at many Dutch schools, which creates
the opportunity for her to work in her native language.
’83
Sharon Spector (Gellman) was married on June 19, 2004, to Harv
Spector. In 2005 she received the Nexus Award from the Association
of American Medical Publications for her work on the journal
Current Psychiatry.
Press coverage and photos for the May 1, 2005, world premiere of
Dirck Toll’s one-man stunt show Irregular Opposition appeared in
the Albany Times Union, Glens Falls Post-Star, and Saratoga Springs
Saratogian. The Times Union selected Irregular Opposition as a “Pick
of the Week.” In October, Dirck performed his show Relax—I Brought
Enough Ego for Everybody at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.
’85
Mimi Czajka Graminski is a sculptor and artist whose work was
exhibited at a number of shows in the Hudson Valley and Long
Island areas this past fall. Mimi had work in the Kingston Sculpture
Biennial, Mohawk-Hudson Regional at the Albany Institute of
History and Art, and group shows at the Arts Society of Kingston,
Islip Art Museum, Sanjula Exhibitions Space in Tivoli, and
Pocketbook Factory in Hudson. She lives in Red Hook with her husband,
Mark, and 6-year-old son, Thomas.
Liz Korabek is editor of The Physical Actor, a new journal inspired by
the “poetry of the body.” The Physical Actor covers the history and current
developments in physical theater performances and training.
Jim Toia’s exhibition Spore was shown in San Francisco in 2005.
The show consisted of mushroom spore drawings made during a
winter 2004–05 trip to northern California.
Allison Radzin ’88, with daughters Caleigh (left) and Wyatt
’86
20th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Michael Maresca, mjmaresca@earthlink.net; Chris LeGoff
Kauffman, cak64@comcast.net. Staff contact: Sasha Boak Kelly,
845-758-7406 or boak@bard.edu
’87
Michael Burgi moved to New Jersey with his wife, Christine, in the
fall of 2002, after the birth of their daughter, Caelin. A second
daughter, Sara, was born in June 2003. Two months later, Michael
was promoted to editor of Mediaweek, where he has worked for 13
years. “Life is great!”
Eva Lee’s New Drawings and Digital Animations ran from June 11
to September 11, 2005, at the Real Art Ways Gallery in Hartford,
Connecticut. This solo exhibition featured new large-scale drawings
and the continuation of The Liminal Series, an ongoing project of
short, abstract, digitally generated animation.
’89
Jane Andromache Brien and Rhinebeck local Stewart Emil Verrilli,
Pratt, ’87, were married in Milan in August. Their son, Burt (see
page 56), attended, along with friend Wendelin Scott ’96, who also
recently married, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jane, Stewart, and Burt
live in the Hudson Valley, where they host many kitchen parties.
’91
15th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: J. J. Austrian, johnjaustrian@hotmail.com; Carrie (Eudaly)
Benevento, cbene@optonline.net; Benjamin Goldberg, benjamin
goldberg.email@gmail.com; Chad Kleitsch, chadkleitsch@hotmail.
com; Mark Nichols, marknichols@mindstream.com; Matt Phillips,
mphillips@wingedkeel.com; Stacy Pilson, staceynyc@yahoo.com.
Staff contact: Sasha Boak Kelly, 845-758-7406 or boak@bard.edu
55

Christiane Cullens continues to teach high school on an island off
the coast of Downeast, Maine. She just bought a big old farmhouse
and has discovered a strange affinity for power tools. She is glad to
report that Ariel, her oldest cat, is still spry and kicking, and has
done fair justice to the stamina and cheek that are indigenous to the
rare breed of Tivoli cat that she is.
After 15 years of talk and no walk, Julian De Marchi finally moved
to Amsterdam. He’s still working as an engineer, but is now rounding
off his 10th year of fantasizing about becoming an artist, so who
knows what will happen in another five?
Jane Andromache Brien ’89 with son Burt
After graduation, Kamran Anwar worked in a bank in New York for
five years before moving back to Karachi, his hometown, in Pakistan.
Returning to Pakistan was a challenge at first, as he was 18 when he
left and 27 when he went back. When the harsh reality of what it
would mean to thrive in a developing country hit him, it was his
Bard zest and vision that carried him through. After some time in
Karachi, he moved to Dubai. While there, he visited Amman,
Beirut, Bahrain, and Qatar. Now he is in London—with the same
bank. Still single, his family continues to exert tremendous pressure
on him to “settle down.”
Ty Donaldson lives in Los Angeles and produces films through his
company, Buddha-Cowboy Productions. He coproduced/line produced
Soldier of God (www.soldierofgod.net), a historical epic set
during the Crusades, which was accepted for the 2005 Stratfordupon-Avon
International Film Festival. His short film RewinD,
directed by Jonah Salander, was accepted for the same festival, and
was chosen for the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival.
He is in postproduction with the film Love, Fear and Rabbits and in
development for a number of feature films, most notably The Hootch
(www.thehootchmovie.com) and another film with David Avallone
’87. He enjoys watching movies and scuba diving. His son, Ross, 14,
is starting high school, and boy does that make Ty feel old.
After completing a five-year doctoral program at Bastyr University,
Dr. Laura Eastman has earned her degree as a naturopathic doctor
(ND). NDs are trained as primary care physicians who use natural
medicine to aid the body in healing itself. Laura will serve as a resident
for two years at Emerald City Clinic in Seattle, where she has
lived since she graduated from Bard. She is overjoyed to be practicing
naturopathic medicine, and welcomes all communication from fellow
Bardians at laura.eastman@bastyr.edu.
’92
Class Correspondent:
Andrea Stein ’92, AJS630@aol.com
Throughout May and June 2005, Mallory Catlett directed the company
Banana Bag and Bodice in a production titled Panel. Animal,
presented at The Collapsable Hole in Brooklyn and Ontological-
Hysteric Theatre in Manhattan. For information about Banana Bag
and Bodice, contact www.bananabagand bodice.org. For information
about Mallory Catlett, visit http://homepage.mac.com/mallory
catlett/ home.html.
Morgan Cleveland is still living in Oakland (“the best city on
Earth”) with her husband and two children (a son and a daughter,
ages 7 and 4, respectively). She works as an independent consultant
in the field of education. Last summer, she and her family rediscovered
the joys of baseball (“Go A’s!”), skimboarding, and sea kayaking.
She would love to hear from any Bard friends. Her e-mail address is
nnebe4@yahoo.com.
This sculpture by Linda Ganjian ’92 is titled Ode to Disappearing
Smokestacks (2005; mixed media)
56

with Christina acting as the general contractor. She still writes haiku
and participated in several writing workshops in the spring of 2005.
Allison Parker serves as a contributing editor for Other Voices, an
all-fiction literary magazine, as well as its imprint, OV Books.
Allison is finishing a novel that began as her Y2K M.F.A. thesis and
is working on a collection of critical essays. She lives without regret
in the no-man’s-land between Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper West
Side of Manhattan with her husband, André Compeyre, and their
Franco-American toddler, Quentin. She writes, “I have to thank
Odile Chilton for all my years of French!” She welcomes contact
from fellow Bardians.
Daniel Sonenberg is assistant professor and resident composer at
the University of Southern Maine. He lives with his wife, Alexandra,
in Portland.
Flyway, by Grace Markman ’92
Linda Ganjian is enjoying life—and many ethnic culinary delights —
in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her partner, Jesse Lambert. She
is still making art; her sculpture was displayed at the Brooklyn
Museum last year as part of the Open House: Working in Brooklyn
show. She is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at Gallery
Boreas in Williamsburg, Virginia, in March. Visit www. lindagan
jian.net for details.
Christine Gobbo Petrella lives happily in Katonah, New York,
with her husband, Larry, and two beautiful boys: Christopher, 5,
and Nicholas, 3. She would be thrilled to hear from any of her old
Bard friends.
Sian Jacobwitz and Todd Defren ’91 are still happily together after
17-plus years, and have two great kids—Luke, 13, and Branwen, 10.
Sian is in nursing school and Todd is a principal at SHIFT
Communications, a public relations firm. They split their time
between homes in the San Francisco and Boston areas. Most of
their free time is spent coddling their 200-pound English mastiff,
Owen the Wonderdog.
Karyn Kloumann was married to Lucas Cushanick in August
2004, after meeting him online in 2001. They live in Brooklyn
Heights with two cats, Philo and Porphyrio. Karyn has worked in
production at Lucky magazine for the past five years, and maintains
an art studio in her neighborhood, where she experiments with
resin-based paintings.
Katya McElfresh is a social worker in Brooklyn, working as a therapist
with families who are at risk of having children placed in foster
care.
Christina O’Connor still lives in Branford, Connecticut, on the Farm
River Estuary, but now she’s married! She and her husband, Michael
Mahoney, eloped on April 29, 2005, after a 12-year courtship. They’ve
been renovating their 1928 stone house for the past year and a half,
The American Composers Orchestra presented Stefan Weisman’s
work in May 2005, as part of its Underwood New Music Readings.
On March 1, 2006, male soprano Anthony Costanzo and the Ensemble
Newspeak will perform Weisman’s piece “From Frankenstein” at Merkin
Concert Hall in New York City, as part of the “Ear Department
Emerging Composers” series. Stefan’s 90-minute opera Darkling was
commissioned by American Opera Projects and was included in
the Guggenheim Museum’s “Works & Process” series in November
2005. For more information, visit www.stefanweisman.com.
Ellen Wickersham and her husband, Pascal Vincent, are thrilled to
announce the arrival of their daughter, Uma Lee Vincent, born at
home in San Diego on July 25, 2005. Assuming that domestic
duties allow her the time, Ellen will graduate from acupuncture
school this spring. The couple is dying to move back to Philadelphia
soon, where Ellen will start her practice. She would love to hear
from anyone who might have moved or lost touch. Contact her at
ellengvincent@yahoo.com.
Susanne Williams is back to freelancing as a lighting technician in
TV and Broadway after an exhausting four-year stint at Good
Morning America in New York City. She is still living in Park Slope,
Brooklyn, where many other Bard alumni/ae have chosen to settle.
She’s currently searching for a mentor in gymnastics choreography,
a field she would like to enter. P.S.: Has anyone seen Carlos Luna?
’93
In 2005, Joseph O. Iannacone received a study and travel fellowship
from the Goethe-Institut. He toured Germany’s historic sites,
museums, attended lectures, and met German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder.
Danielle Woerner lives in Shokan, New York, with her husband,
Claude Johnson. She is working as a singer, voice teacher, and writer. In
June 2005, she sang Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5
for one soprano and eight cellos at the Maverick Concert Hall in
Woodstock. Danielle is also a faculty adjunct voice teacher at Vassar,
57

Bard, and Dutchess Community Colleges. She is writing her first
novel, for which she recently made a research trip to France.
Danielle’s first-person essay, “Struggling to Make Peace with the
Atom,” which appeared in the July 11, 2005, issue of Newsweek,
dealt with her father’s work on the Manhattan Project and her own
work as a peace activist.
’94
Renee Cramer’s book Cash, Color and Colonialism: The Politics of
Tribal Acknowledgment was published in June 2005 by the
University of Oklahoma Press. In December 2004, she gave birth to
an amazing baby boy, Wyatt Saille. She, Wyatt, and Wyatt’s dad,
Aaron, are still in Long Beach, California, but are hoping to move
somewhere more rural soon.
Mark L. Feinsod’s short film, Virginal Young Blondes, was screened as
part of the NewFilmmakers series at the Anthology Film Archives in
New York City in June 2005. The Pioneer Theater in New York
hosted a retrospective of Mark’s short movies on January 9, 2005.
Gary Green is a visiting assistant professor of art at Bowdoin College
in Brunswick, Maine. His photographs were purchased for the permanent
collections of the Portland Museum of Art in Portland,
Maine, and Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, where
his work was shown in Off the Coast: A Landscape Chronology in
August 2005.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Alex John London a
New Directions Fellowship, to develop rigorous standards for the
ethical evaluation of how medical research is conducted. Alex is an
associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University.
’96
10th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Jennifer Abrahms Thompson, jennifer@abramstechnology.
com. Aaron Shottenfeld, aaronperi23@hotmail.com;Walter Swett,
walter@charlieangel.org. Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-
7406 or kemm@bard.edu
Krista David is a staff psychiatrist at A.W.A.R.E. in Helena,
Montana. She and her husband, Len Lantz, are thrilled to announce
the birth of their daughter, Lucy Coral Lantz, in April 2005. They
enjoy living in Helena.
Staci Schwartz is the photo editor for the Village Voice. As a photographer,
she has been shooting various New York social events over the
past 10 years that feature parties, personalities, and pop culture. She
writes, “No matter what full-time photo-editing positions I have
undertaken, I have never ceased to stop shooting my documentary
projects. It is this personal work that gives me the drive and fulfillment
of being an artist.” Staci has lectured at the School of Visual
Arts and Empire State College. She is a portfolio consultant for the
International Center of Photography, and her work has been featured
in American Photo, Trace, and Photo District News. She will have a
solo exhibition of photographs documenting Long Island proms at
San Bernardino University Museum in California. To see some of
her photography, visit www.stacipop.com.
Works by William Lamson MFA ’07 (above), Matthew Porter ’98 (opposite
page, top left), Matthew Spiegelman ’97(left), and Ben Ruggiero MFA ’05
(opposite page, bottom) were all represented in the Art and Commerce
2005 Festival of Emerging Photographers, which took place at the Tobacco
Warehouse in Brooklyn in October. Selections from their photographs and
accompanying texts were published in the exhibition’s catalogue, Peek.
58

’97
Class Correspondent:
Julia Munemo ’97, juliamunemo@yahoo.com
Marina Prager-Kranz and her husband, Jim, climbed Mount
Kilimanjaro (19,240 feet) in Tanzania, Africa. This adventure was
followed by an extraordinary safari experience, including visiting a
Masai village.
Imteaz Mannan is finishing a two-and-a-half-year stint at a Save
the Children initiative called Saving Newborn Lives, a project to
improve maternal and neonatal health in rural Bangladesh. In
September 2005, he presented results of a research project on ensuring
health-service equity at a meeting of the Global Forum for
Health Research in Mumbai, India.
Andrew McIntosh works as caretaker of the River Valley Waldorf
elementary school during the day and teaches a hip-hop history
Marina Prager-Kranz ’97 at Uhuru Peak, Tanzania
class by night at Lehigh University. He is living happily in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Elleyn. Their 10-year-old
daughter, Anna, is in fifth grade; their son, Philip, is 6, and the
newest member of the family, Margaret, is a wild 1-year-old.
Andrew would like to thank the Tewks 208 crew for surprising him
on his 30th birthday in July 2005.
Julia Wolk Munemo and her husband, Ngonidzashe Munemo ’00,
have returned from another six-month trip to southern Africa.
Their son, Julius, is almost three.
Matthew Spiegelman was represented by nine works in Art and
Commerce’s Festival of Emerging Photographers, which took place in
October 2005 in New York City (see photo, page 58). He also had a
portfolio of images published in Big magazine’s “Broadway” issue in
October/November, and a photograph included in Looking at Los
Angeles, a coffee-table book published by Metropolis Books.
’98
Kristina Olson gave birth to a son, Liam Timothy Malouf, on
April 8, 2005. She is finishing her Ph.D. in Italian literature at
Columbia University.
Paul Rich married Holly Andres in July 2005 in a nontraditional
double wedding. In attendance were jugglers, stilt walkers, and fire
dancers. Paul and Holly have three Siamese kittens and can be seen
driving around in two matching Saabs. Holly teaches at Portland
State University and at the Art Institute of Portland, Oregon, and
Paul has been photographing weddings. To view Paul’s work, visit
www.paulrichstudio.com.
’99
Susan Murtha Bandrowsky and her husband of five years, Todd
Bandrowsky, celebrated the birth of their son, Garrett Sheridan
59

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To register, go to www.collegecentral.com/bard
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Now you may search for mentors, jobs, and internships,
or post your resume. From here on in, just click
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Access ID and Password, and you’re there!
Please call Career Development at 845-758-7539
if you have any questions.
Bandrowsky, on May 8, 2005. Susan works as a full-time mom, freelance
photographer, and moderator of a popular mental health website,
and also plays mom to three 85-pound lapdogs and two killer
tabby cats. In her spare time, she sleeps.
’01
5th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006
Contacts: Max Kenner, kenner@bard.edu; Sung Jee Yoo, sujeyo@
gmail.com; Lori Fromowitz, lfromowitz@yahoo.com. Staff contact:
Heather Deichler, 845-758-7663 or deichler@bard.edu
Tyrone Santana Copeland collaborated this year with the Harlem
YMCA Arts Collective in New York City to present his latest short
film, Pioneers Lost, which centers on a retired DJ who relives his
youth through hip-hop music.
Bernard Geoghegan was awarded a 2005 Jacob K. Javits Fellowship,
one of the nation’s most competitive awards in the social sciences,
arts, and humanities. Geoghegan received a master’s degree in media,
technology, and society from Northwestern University in 2004, and is
remaining at Northwestern to earn a doctorate. His research focuses
on the history of computing and its influence upon philosophy, aesthetics,
and representation; he is especially interested in how changing
technologies affect the form and content of communications.
’02
James Curcio’s first novel, Join My Cult!, has been published by New
Falcon Press, the Arizona-based publisher of Timothy Leary, Robert
Anton Wilson, and Aleister Crowley. According to Peter Carrol, “Join
My Cult! reads like a stroboscopic MTV docudrama of Ulysses and
Illuminatus.” To find out more, visit www.jamescurcio.net.
’03
Bianca D’Allesandro is teaching English language arts to seventhand
eighth-graders at KIPP Bridge College Prep, a middle school
located in West Oakland, California. The school follows the KIPP
(Knowledge is Power Program) model, which is known for its high
expectations and focus on academic results. Most of the students are
African American or Hispanic, and all of them plan to attend private
schools when they graduate. Each homeroom is given the name of a
college. Bianca has chosen Bard as hers!
Sarah Schendel works as a paralegal with Prisoners Legal Services
in Ithaca, New York.
’04
Yishay Garbasz had an exhibition of Holocaust photography, titled
In My Mother’s Footsteps, as part of Noorderlicht Photofestival 2005
in the Netherlands. The exhibition, which traced his mother’s “journey
into hell” through a series of concentration camps, was on display
in a synagogue from September 4 through October 2. It was
the result of his yearlong Watson Fellowship project.
Connor Gaudet spent time this past year videotaping life at Nativity
Preparatory School in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
’05
Emily Schmall was selected from more than 1,000 applicants to be a
National Public Radio (NPR) summer intern. As executive producer
of the intern-produced program, Intern Edition, her duties included
managing staff activities and production of the audio program. She
led all staff meetings; oversaw the story assignment process with
interns; assisted with reporting, writing, editing, and music selections
for the program; and ensured a finished product. She was also instrumental
in facilitating communication between interns and NPR’s
60

professional staff, especially for Intern Edition. A native of Chicago,
Emily has written and produced stories for NPR, the London
Financial Times, Salon.com, and the Miami Herald.
Taun N. Toay, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in
spring 2005, received a Fulbright Award to study economics in
Greece. He will concentrate on isolating and studying the euro’s
inflationary effects on the Greek economic system.
Milton Avery Graduate School
of the Arts
MFA correspondent:
Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, ABTOK@aol.com
’84
David Abel moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1997, after success with
the Bridge Bookshop in New York City and Passages Bookshop &
Gallery in Albuquerque. He recently sang the role of Dr. Knox in the
Liminal Performance Group’s The Resurrectory, and performed in the
third annual Richard Foreman mini-festival at Performance Works
NW. He is an organizer of the monthly Spare Room reading series
(www.flim.com/spareroom). He also organized a reading tour of the
Southwest in the fall of 2004, and did a residency at THE LAND/an
art site (near Albuquerque).
’87
Maddy Rosenberg had several paintings in two group exhibitions
during the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival in Brooklyn in
October 2005. Maddy’s work was shown at Safe-T-Gallery and at
the Brooklyn Arts Council, where she also had a solo show in April.
’90
Together with artist Lisa Kaftori, Joan Giroux founded Compassionate
Action Enterprises, a collaborative promoting art geared toward
ecofeminism as well as social, political, and cultural activism. Using
art and art strategies to raise awareness and cultivate understanding,
CAE has performed actions and exhibited in Japan, Korea, Israel,
and the United States since 2000.
’92
Grace Markman had her second solo painting show, titled Rainbow
Twist, at Holland Tunnel, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Marilyn Wenker continues to teach creative writing in the English
Department at Brooklyn College. Her play, Meet, was performed at
the Neighborhood Playhouse in Manhattan.
’93
Leslie Fry completed a public art commission from the Broward
County Public Art and Design in May 2005, which included four
large sculptural wall-reliefs for branch libraries in Fort Lauderdale,
Florida.
’94
Brian Patton composed and designed the sound for several plays
around the country and has a busy schedule for the coming year. He
will open a new play by James Lapine, starring Mia Farrow and Julia
Stiles, at Playwrights Horizons, and also contribute to productions
of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play at Second Stage (with Jo
Bonney); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at ACT San Francisco, directed by
Israel Hicks; Manic Flight Reaction with Trip Cullman (also at
Playwrights Horizons); and The Trip to Bountiful at Signature
Theater, as well as several other productions in New York City and
elsewhere in the United States. He gives his best to all his friends
from the Avery School. If anyone would like to attend a production,
please write him at fitzpatton@mac.com and he will be happy to
arrange for tickets.
’96
Tara Conant received an Artist Fellowship Award in photography
from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She also received a 2005
Artist Grant Recognition from the Massachusetts State Senate for
Photographic Excellence. Her work was included in Photography
Now: Selections from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grants
Awards (hosted by the Art Space Gallery, Maynard); a members exhibit
at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum in Provincetown,
Massachusetts; and a solo exhibit of Sites at Westfield State College
in Westfield, Massachusetts.
’97
Jasmina Danowski was awarded a 2005 Pollock-Krasner Foundation
grant.
Nick Tobier collaborated with the site-specific theater group, Red
Dive, on Peripheral City, a walking tour and performance staged
along the banks of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.
’98
Anna Moschovakis continues her work with the Brooklyn-based
collaborative Ugly Duckling Presse (uglyducklingpresse.org). Her
first book of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone,
will be published next year by Turtle Point Press.
’99
Geoff Bouvier received the 2005 American Poetry Review/
Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry. The prize, made possible by
a partnership between American Poetry Review and The Honickman
Foundation, includes a monetary award and publication of a volume
of poetry. Bouvier’s Living Room, with an introduction by Heather
McHugh, will be published in the fall of 2005, with distribution by
Copper Canyon Press through Consortium.
61

Stephen Clair’s latest album, Under the Bed, was released on October
25, 2005, by Valley Entertainment. His first child, Esther Rose, was
born June 12, 2005.
Becky Howland’s work was shown in an exhibition titled Downtown
New York, curated by Carlo McCormick, at the Grey Art Gallery at
New York University. At Jeffrey Deitch’s Wooster Street space, she
participated in a benefit for the artist-run alternative space ABC No
Rio, which she cofounded.
’00
Mary Pinto participated again in a three-week summer residency at
the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
’01
Michelle Handelman had a solo show at Rx Gallery, San Francisco.
A selection of her video work was shown at the International Art
Connection, vols. 1 and 2, which took place at 00130 Gallery in
Helsinki, Finland.
Holly Lynton’s work titled then I woke up, and it was still there was
included in the fall 2005 exhibition at Ambrosino Gallery in North
Miami, Florida.
exhibition at Samson Projects, a new gallery in Boston, in February.
David Levi Strauss will be featuring her work in the third installment
of his public conversation with Daniel Martinez in the forthcoming
CAA Art Journal.
Alexandra Newmark was a 2005 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner
Foundation grant. She has an upcoming exhibition at the Carl Berg
Gallery in Los Angeles. She lives in Brooklyn.
’03
In July 2005, April Gertler was in Voices Off, a group show presented
during the Arles Photography Festival, in Arles, France. She
participated in an artist residency with 12 other international artists
in Verneusses, Normandy, and the work produced there was exhibited
in a group show in Le Havre in November 2005. In fall 2005,
April’s series Still Lives was presented in the Greek photo magazine,
Photo Book.
Joel Griffith was awarded a Peter S. Reed Foundation grant in June
2005. The Dutchess County Arts Council included his work in an
exhibition in Poughkeepsie that was part of the 2005 Empire State
Games. Joel is working on a second suite of paintings commissioned
by the Village of Tivoli, which will be unveiled in September 2006.
Judy Radul had two new multiscreen installation works exhibited at
Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, from
September 17 to October 30, 2005. Downes Point, filmed in a grove
on Hornby Island, featured two panoramic projections spatially
configured to interpose the viewer in middle of the scene. And So
Departed (Again), a DVD installation presented on three screens,
documented five directors rehearsing an actress in a death scene
over a period of 12 hours.
’02
Jen DeNike’s wrestling and dunking videos have been acquisitioned
for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Selections of her video work were included in the Greater New York
2005 exhibition at P.S.1 MoMA. A portfolio of her video stills was
published in the fall 2005 issue of Topic magazine. She has forthcoming
solo exhibitions at the Oliver Kamm Gallery in New York
City and 404 Contemporari in Naples, Italy.
In May 2005, Kelly Kaczynski had her New York solo debut in an
exhibition titled air is air and thing is thing at Triple Candie. A member
of the visiting faculty at Northwestern University in Chicago, she
will also be a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago.
Carrie Moyer had a painting installation included in the Next Next
Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2005.
She also participated in Around About Abstraction (curated by Ron
Platt at the Weatherspoon Museum); a queer sandwich-board project
at the University of California at Davis; a group exhibition called
Young American Artists at the Galeria Marlborough in Madrid; and an
5 North Road by Joel Griffith, MFA ’03
The first suite is on permanent display in the Watts dePeyster Hall
in the village.
In August 2005, Litmus press published Jennifer Hayashida’s translation
of Inner China—a Tale, a book-length prose poem by Swedish
author Eva Sjödin. In 2005 she was a visiting lecturer at the University
of California at Davis.
Sunsook Roh was busy in 2005. She participated in a stage production
of traditional Korean music and dance in Seoul in April, and
appeared in collaborative shows at two venues in Japan—in Tokyo’s
62

Ginza in July and in Kawasaki in August. She also had a solo show
in Ono Gallery, Tokyo, in September.
Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the
Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture
’99
Judith Gura recently published The Abrams Guide to Period Styles for
Interiors (Abrams, 2005). Her Sourcebook of Scandinavian Furniture
will be published by W. W. Norton in 2007.
’00
Joanna Pessa has returned to The Stradlings Antiquarians in New
York City, where she is the firm’s research director.
Jennifer Pitman married Bobby Hager on May 14, 2005, in New
York City.
’02
Ron Labaco curated the first exhibition in the United States on
Ettore Sottsass, the Italian architect-designer. Ettore Sottsass:
Designer covers its subject’s designs in furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork,
and product design. The show opened at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art on March 12 and runs through June 11.
Ron edited and contributed to the accompanying catalogue, Ettore
Sottsass: Architect and Designer, which reviews Sottsass’s contribution
to architecture and design.
’03
After more than five years, Melissa Cohn Lindbeck has left the
Merchant’s House Museum, where she had been a volunteer, cocurator,
and most recently, the museum’s education coordinator. Her
husband’s company has transferred them to the Durham/Raleigh
area. Melissa would love to get in touch with BGC alums in North
Carolina!
Alexa Griffith Winton received grants from the Graham Foundation,
Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, and New York State Council
on the Arts in support of her book project on Dorothy Liebes. She
teaches design history at Pratt.
’04
Emily Wheat Maynard has started her own jewelry business in
Louisville, Kentucky. The business is called Elva Fields, in honor of
Emily’s great-grandmother. Some of the collection can be viewed
online at www.elvafields.com.
Han Vu completed a yearlong documentary project on a 9/11
memorial sculpture by Sassona Norton. As writer and director, Han
followed the memorial from its initial conception to its dedication
at the Norristown Courthouse in Pennsylvania.
Manhattan. She plans to translate her background as a freelancer
into a specialty in financial planning for the self-employed.
Catherine Youngman and her husband, Cameron, welcomed a
baby girl, Kelly Forbes Youngman, on July 22, 2005.
’05
Marcella Ruble Harris’s law firm, Harris & Ruble, filed a case to
recover La Belle Ferronière, a painting attributed to Leonardo da
Vinci. The painting achieved fame in the 1920s when the art dealer,
Lord Joseph Duveen of Millbank, disputed its authenticity. The
current case is of particular interest to Marcella, who wrote her master’s
thesis on Lord Duveen.
Center for Curatorial Studies
’96
Regine Basha, adjunct curator, Arthouse, Jones Center of
Contemporary Art, Austin; Gilbert Vicario, assistant curator of
Latin American Art and coordinator, International Center for the
Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Sofia
Hernandez ’00, curator and program manager, Art in General, New
York City, were among a group of international curators who
selected the film and video works for e-flux video rental (EVR), a
project comprising a free video rental store, public screening room,
and film and video archive.
Goran Tomcic, director of Moti Hasson Gallery in New York City,
has temporarily moved to Berlin to help facilitate the Gallery’s
expanding vision for a European audience.
’97
Rachel Gugelberger resigned as associate director of the Galleries
at the School of Visual Arts in order to focus on independent curatorial
projects.
’98
Jessica Hough was promoted from associate curator to curatorial
director at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield,
Connecticut.
Victoria Noorthoorn has been very active as an independent curator
in Buenos Aires, curating exhibitions in various museum, galleries,
and other public spaces. She is also associate curator of the
permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
Neuquén, a new branch of the national Fine Arts Museum in
Argentina.
Zhang Zhaohui, Ph.D. candidate at the Central Academy of Art,
Beijing, has been working as a researcher of Chinese art at the Asia Art
Katherine Wahlberg recently joined Ameriprise Financial, formerly
American Express Financial Advisors, as a financial adviser in
63

Archive in Hong Kong. He also works as a consultant to curators,
critics, and gallery owners interested in contemporary Chinese art.
’99
Alejandro Diaz is an artist and independent curator living in New
York. Public Art Fund presented his A Can for All Seasons—a series
of sculptural renditions of brand-name canned goods enlarged to
the size of planters—on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, across
the street from the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Xandra Eden left her position as assistant curator at The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto to become curator of exhibitions
at Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro, where she is an adjunct faculty member.
Judy Kim, curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of
Arts, and Allison Peters ’01 curated INterACTION at the Hyde
Park Art Center, Chicago, where Allison is exhibition coordinator.
’01
Cecilia Brunson left her position as assistant curator of Latin
American Art at the Jack S. Banton Museum of Art in Austin to
pursue curatorial projects in Chile, her native country.
Gabriela Rangel, visual arts director of the Americas Society,
curated Beyond Geography, the Society’s archival exhibition celebrating
40 years at the vanguard of visual arts in the Americas.
Formerly, Gabriela was assistant curator for Latin American Art at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she helped establish the
museum’s Department of Latin American Art.
’02
Gillian Cuthill works at the National Portrait Gallery in Scotland.
Jill Winder lives in Berlin, where she is an ICWA Donors’ Fellow
studying Germany through the work, ideas, and viewpoints of its
contemporary artists. Prior to six months of intensive study of
German in Berlin, she was a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, studying
postcommunist art practice and the cultural politics of transition in
the former Soviet bloc.
’03
Rob Blackson and Candice Hopkins were among many CCS
alumni/ae in attendance at the Venice Biennale in June. Also on
hand were Goran Tomcic ’96, Anne Ellegood ’98, Mercedes
Vicente ’00, Lizzie Fisher ’02, Tairone Bastien ’04, Camilla
Pignatti Morano ’05, and Pelin Uran ’05.
Kate Green, assistant curator of education and exhibitions at
ArtPace in San Antonio, curated Mental Maps at the Dorsky
Gallery in Long Island City.
Christel Tsilibari works as a researcher at Saint Martins College in
London and interns at Spruth Magers Lee gallery. Christel and
Marketa Uhlirova are curating a film festival that focuses on fashion
in the moving image for two London venues.
’04
Mayumi Hirano has returned to Japan, where she is working for the
Yokohama Triennial.
Steven Matijcio left his job as curatorial assistant at the Agnes
Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario. He is now curator at
Plug In ICA, a laboratory for the research and presentation of contemporary
ideas manifested as works of art, in Winnipeg,
Manitoba.
Yasmil Raymond accepted a permanent position as assistant curator
at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She was previously a
curatorial fellow in the Visual Arts Department at the Walker.
Ryan Rice finished up a contract for a newly formed organization
for Aboriginal curators and has begun a one-year curatorial residency
at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario,
where he will work on two of his own exhibitions.
’05
Nicole Caruth is the interpretive materials manager at the
Brooklyn Museum.
Judy Ditner began work in August as collection assistant of the
Historical Black and White Photography Collection at Ryerson
University in Toronto. Gifted to the school in June 2005, the collection
includes nearly 3 million photographs that document photojournalism
as we know it, including iconic images that were published in
popular media such as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post.
Erin Salazar is a curatorial assistant at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Ramona Piagentini writes that she is settling into her new position
as exhibition assistant at Independent Curators International in New
York City.
Camilla Pignatti Morano returned to her native Italy, where she
accepted the position of assistant curator at Castello di Rivoli
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli.
Yasmeen Siddiqui is assistant curator/programs coordinator at
Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, a nonprofit
organization committed to advancing innovative positions in art,
architecture, and design.
The Conductors Institute at Bard
’04
Richard A. Haglund is the assistant conductor of the Illinois
Symphony Orchestra and music director of the Sangamon Valley
Youth Symphony. He has also served as the pops conductor for the
64

Newburgh Symphony, and will be a guest conductor in Bulgaria
this year.
Takyua Nishiwaki entered the doctor of musical arts program at
the University of Maryland in the fall of 2005.
’05
Elizabeth Askren-Brie was chosen as assistant conductor for the
Centre de la Voix of Royaumont’s opera project involving two versions
of Finta Giardiniera: the one created by Mozart in 1775, and
the one presented the previous year in Rome by Pasquale Anfossi.
The production will tour Europe this year. Askren-Brie is the cultural
attaché for the Fondation des Etats-Unis in Paris, where she
lives with her husband and musical partner, violinist Paul Brie, and
is in her fifth season as music director of the chorus and orchestra
of Sciences Po (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris). This spring,
the ensemble will perform the European premiere of Bard faculty
member Kyle Gann’s “Transcendental Sonnets” in an all-American
contemporary program.
In Memoriam
’28
Edward Gustave Colin Lodter died on January 4, 2005. Born in
Newport, Rhode Island, on November 8, 1907, Professor Lodter
majored in French at St. Stephen’s College, now Bard. He received
his master’s degree from Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois, with a major in foreign languages, in 1929. He did a year of
further graduate study at Columbia University, New York City, before
taking a faculty position at Milligan College in 1931, where he taught
French and German. In 1949 he became chairman of the
Department of Foreign Languages and professor of French and
German at East Tennessee State College (now University). During
this time he initiated a program of elementary French at what is now
University School. His survivors include his wife of 64 years, Carsie
Hyder Lodter; a daughter and a son; and eight grandchildren.
’35
William H. Meyer Jr., 92, died on July 6, 2005. He worked in his
family’s grocery business for many years, and put that background
to use in World War II, when he worked for the food-rationing program
in Washington, D.C. Born in Haverstraw, New York, he was
designated his hometown’s village historian a few years ago, and
wrote a history column for the Rockland County Times. His daughter,
Sandra Jean, died in 1946, and his wife, Helen, died in 1986. He
is survived by his two sons, Richard and William III, and by numerous
grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
’36
The Hon. Jack Wilson Lydman died on September 17, 2005, in
Washington, D.C. In his long career with the U.S. Department of
State’s Foreign Service, he served as deputy chief of mission to the U.S.
Embassy in Indonesia (1960–69) and political consul to the U.S.
Embassy in Malaysia (1969–74). Among his other assignments were
deputy chief of mission in Australia, economic counselor in Indonesia,
principal officer in Surabaya, and deputy director for research,
SEATO-Bangkok. Prior to his career in the Foreign Service, he
worked for the Department of State in Washington, D.C., and served
as an operations analyst in the Pentagon and in the Pacific Theater
during World War II.
Lydman was an instructor in German at Bard from 1937 to
1940, and an instructor in German and drama from 1940 to 1943.The
College awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1973. He
was a Bard trustee from 1976 to 1981, and then served as a trustee
associate. He also served on the boards of the Humane Society of the
United States, the Asia Society Washington Center, and DACOR
(Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired). He and his wife, Janine
Cabirol Bowie, had an extensive and highly regarded collection of
miniature Chinese ceramics. In addition to his wife, his survivors
include three stepchildren, a nephew and a niece, and several stepgrandchildren,
grandnephews, and grandnieces.
’57
Eugene Mittelman died on May 19, 2005. Born in 1935 in New
York, he earned his law degree from Columbia University. He
served as minority counsel to the U.S. Senate Labor and Public
Welfare Committee, where he helped to shape progressive labor
legislation. Subsequently, he practiced privately and specialized in
litigation and labor issues. He is survived by his wife, Frances; two
daughters; his mother; and a grandson.
’83
John Cardello died at 43. Born in Everett, Massachusetts, he had
lived in Saugus, Massachusetts, for the past 36 years. In addition
to being a Bard alumnus, he was a graduate of the University of
Southern Florida and the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
earning degrees in math, computer science, and teaching. He
taught for several years at Matignon High School in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Chelsea High School in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Prior to teaching, he worked in the computer software department
at Raytheon in Burlington, Massachusetts. His survivors include his
mother, a sister, two nieces, and a large extended family.
’87
Avery Lincoln Chappell-Smith died on May 14, 2005. She worked
as a broker for Stribbling and Associates. Survivors include her husband,
J. Kevin Smith; her children; her parents; and her brother.
65

Faculty
Artine Artinian, 97, Professor Emeritus of French and a member
of Bard’s faculty for nearly 30 years, died on November 19, 2005, at
his home in Lantana, Florida. In addition to teaching, his multifaceted
career embraced the rigors of scholarship, the joys of collecting,
and literary immortality—the last as a thinly disguised version of
himself in novels by his Bard colleague Mary McCarthy and his
friend Gore Vidal.
Born on December 8, 1907, in Pazardzhik, Bulgaria, to
Armenian parents, Artinian came to the United States with his family
in 1920. As a bootblack working in Attleboro, Massachusetts, he
had his tuition to Bowdoin College paid for by a group of prominent
citizens whose shoes he had shined. He subsequently earned a B.A.
from Bowdoin, an M.A. from Harvard University, a doctorate from
Columbia University, and honorary degrees from Bowdoin and
Appalachian State University. He also earned a diploma from the
University of Paris, and was eventually named Officier d’Academie
de la Legion d’Honneur by the French government. While in Paris,
he began his lifelong exploration of French literature—in particular
the works of Guy de Maupassant, whose short stories he translated
in what is deemed to be the definitive English-language edition.
Artinian’s active teaching career at Bard lasted from 1936 until
1964. Esteemed by his colleagues for his convivial, expansive nature as
well as his considerable scholarship, he nevertheless was at the center
of a controversy involving Paul de Man, the Belgian deconstructionist
who served the College as an instructor of French from 1949 to 1951.
Professor Artinian helped de Man to obtain his job at Bard; two years
later, after allegations of thievery and dishonesty were levied against de
Man, Artinian helped to get him fired. Almost 40 years later,
Artinian’s account of de Man’s stormy tenure at Bard formed part of
the afterword to the paperback edition of David Lehman’s book, Signs
of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man.
Over the years, Artinian assembled a collection of original letters
and manuscripts that included an unpublished text by Marcel
Proust as well as rare works by de Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola, and
other French writers. He sold a large part of his collection to the
University of Texas shortly before retiring from Bard. In later years,
he also collected portraits of artists and writers such as Jules Verne,
Marcel Marceau, and the poet Rabindranath Tagore.
His wife, the former Margaret Willard Woodbridge, who died
earlier in 2005, also taught at the College, from 1948 to 1949 and
from 1958 to 1961. They were married in 1936, having met as graduate
students at Columbia. He is survived by a son, Robert; two
daughters, Ellen Artinian Strickland and Margaret Artinian Laske;
two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Justine Augusta Salton, 33, a visiting assistant professor of biology,
died on October 28, 2005. She came to Bard in the fall of 2004 after
earning a master’s degree from Hampshire College and a doctorate in
ecology and evolutionary biology from The Graduate School and
University Center, City University of New York. Prior to Bard, she
had taught at New York University Medical Center, Hunter College,
and Baruch College, and had done fieldwork in Madagascar and
Bolivia. A great lover of animals, she spent much of her free time volunteering
at shelters; over the years, she adopted many of their inhabitants.
She is survived by her husband, Raphael Allison, a member of
the faculty of Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program; her mother,
Edith Salton; a sister, Gillian, and a brother, William; and her beloved
dogs: Bert, Monday, Oscar, and Shaba.
Mary Lee Settle, 87, a preeminent American novelist and a professor
at the College from 1965 to 1978, died on September 27, 2005,
in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the most acclaimed contemporary
writers of historical fiction, her “Beulah Quintet” novels, written
between 1956 (O Beulah Land) and 1982 (The Killing Ground),
were praised by critics for their “seamless, flowing narratives” that
combined impeccable research, strong characterizations, dialogue
true to time and place, and an exacting eye for detail. She also wrote
and published other novels, works of nonfiction, memoirs, short
stories, essays, plays, and screenplays.
During her tenure at Bard, Settle won a National Book Award
for Blood Tie (1977), a novel about American expatriates in Turkey,
and wrote the fourth novel in the Beulah series, The Scapegoat. She
returned to the Annandale campus on several occasions in the early
1980s to give readings, and was granted the honorary degree of
Doctor of Letters at the College’s 125th anniversary academic con-
Mary Lee Settle speaks at the President’s Dinner in 1979 as part of Bard’s
119th Commencement.
66

vocation in September 1985. In bestowing the honorary degree, the
presenters praised Settle’s “generous capacity for friendship, for
human love across all boundaries, and for true independence of
mind and imagination,” adding, “She restores our faith in eloquent
writing, and in so doing, she bears witness to our possibilities for
decent survival.”
In addition to teaching at Bard, she taught at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lived, at one time or another,
throughout her life. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a fashion
model and later as a magazine editor. During World War II, she
served in the women’s branch of England’s Royal Air Force, an
experience she described in All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft
Woman 2nd Class 2146391. She was the recipient of Guggenheim fellowships
in 1958 and 1960, a Merrill Foundation Award in 1975, and
an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters in 1984, among other honors. She founded the
PEN/Faulkner Award—the first major award to be given to writers
by writers, independent of the publishing industry—in 1980.
In an address given at a Bard faculty seminar in the fall of 1976,
she had this to say about the discipline of writing: “The will and the
rigor are in the sitting down, the closing of a door, the day after day
after day. There is often here the accusation of self-indulgence. I will
surprise you. There is none. You have been misled. That retiring is
its opposite. To face the blank and yet unformed for so much time
with so much necessary patience is a rigor in itself that must be
demanded of the apprentice, and the one who tries it should be
JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS
On December 16, 2005, the members of the John Bard
Society gathered for their annual luncheon in New York
City. Justus Rosenberg, Bard Professor Emeritus of
Languages and Literature and a member of the Society,
spoke to the group about his 40 years of teaching at Bard
and the impact that the College has had on his life. Leon
Botstein followed with a discussion on the state of the
College and its future plans.
Justus Rosenberg
Bob Edmonds ’68 and Herbert “Jimmy” Schwarz Jr. ’49
Eric Goldman’ 98 and Karen Olah ’65 David Schwab ’52, Charles P. Stevenson Jr., and Robert Amsterdam ’53
For information on how to join the John Bard Society, please contact Debra Pemstein at 845-758-7405 or
pemstein@bard.edu. All inquiries will be kept confidential.
67

F A C U LT Y N O T E S
Peggy Ahwesh, associate professor of film and electronic arts, was
featured in Brides of Frankenstein at the San Jose Museum of Art,
an exhibition of work by women artists about virtuality, hybrid
bodies, and synthetic intelligence. She was interviewed about her
videos on This Spartan Life, a Web-based talk show. Ahwesh and
Barbara Ess, associate professor of photography, performed last
summer at Tune (Out)))side, an audio microcasting event. They are
featured on the CD Tune (In))) The Kitchen (audio dispatches
026), sponsored by free103point9, which curates works in radio
and other transmission arts.
Raphael Allison, faculty, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program,
published an essay, “David Antin’s Pragmatist Technophobia” in the
Journal of Modern Literature last November. His essay “Muriel
Rukeyser Goes to War: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Politics of
Ekphrasis” is forthcoming this April in College Literature. With
MAT faculty member Derek Furr he organized a panel presentation,
“Sounding Modernism: Tapping the Oral Archive,” at the 2005
conference of the Modernist Studies Association, held in November
in Chicago. The panel subject was poets and recording technologies;
Furr and Allison presented “Reading the Poetry Reading,” a cowritten
paper about the uses of recorded poetry.
Myra Young Armstead, professor of history and faculty, The Master
of Arts in Teaching Program, published “Revisiting Hotels and
Other Lodgings: American Tourist Spaces through the Lens of
Black Pleasure-Travelers, 1880–1950” in a special issue (No. 25) of
The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts on the American hotel.
Where Shall I Wander, by John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Professor
of Languages and Literature, was nominated for a National Book
Award in poetry. Ashbery was a subject of Invisible Listeners: Lyric
Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery, a new critical study by
Helen Vendler, who received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree
from Bard at Commencement 2005. Ashbery was also the subject
of a profile in The New Yorker. He participated in several benefit
readings: in Philadelphia for the American Poetry Review; and in
New York City on the 25th anniversary of the National Poetry Series,
at the City University of New York Graduate Center’s benefit for the
victims of Hurricane Katrina, and for the Walt Whitman Hom(m)age,
an anthology and reading celebrating the 150th anniversary of the
publication of Leaves of Grass.
James Bagwell, director of orchestra and choral music and associate
professor of music, was appointed music director of the Dessoff
Choirs in New York City. He conducted the choirs in three concerts
this season, in addition to collaborating with Michael Tilson Thomas
on a concert with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall.
Ethan Bloch, professor of mathematics, has a paper, “The angle
defect for odd-dimensional simplicial manifolds,” forthcoming in
Discrete and Computational Geometry. The paper defines and studies
a new type of curvature function for simplicial polyhedra; “this curvature,”
says Bloch, “which somewhat surprisingly uses the
Bernoulli numbers, behaves particularly nicely on odd-dimensional
simplicial manifolds.”
Roddy Bogowa, faculty in film at the Milton Avery Graduate
School of the Arts, had two films screened: I Was Born, But . . ., his
latest work, at the American Film Institute Silver Springs Theater
in Washington, D.C., as part of the Asian Pacific American Film
Festival; and an early short, Four or Five Accidents, One June, at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His essay “If Films
Could Smell” is forthcoming in Yard magazine.
Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in
the Arts and Humanities, spoke about the necessity of reforming
public secondary education to superintendents attending the fall
meeting of the Tri-State Consortium, an organization dedicated to
improving the curricula of public school districts in New York, New
Jersey, and Connecticut. He led a seminar for the faculty and
administration of the Scarsdale (New York) Public Schools in which
he discussed the early college movement and described the successes
of Bard High School Early College in New York City. At Brown
University, he participated in a symposium, “Reinvigorating the
Humanities,” that focused on recent recommendations of the
Association of American Universities to improve the status of the
humanities in liberal arts education. The lecture he delivered last fall
at the United Nations, “Why Music Matters,” was published in The
Musical Quarterly. He spoke about Paul Dukas’s opera Ariane et
Barbe-Bleue for a New Visions at the Guggenheim evening, which
68

accompanied his premiere at the New York City Opera, for which
he conducted six performances of the work. As guest conductor, he
led the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra in a performance of
Brahms’s German Requiem. He conducted the Jerusalem Symphony
Orchestra ( JSO), for which he is music director, on a tour of eastern
and southern United States. After engagements in Connecticut,
Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York,
and Virginia, the orchestra finished its tour with performances at
Carnegie Hall and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing
Arts. In Israel, he conducted the JSO in a memorial concert for
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the 10th anniversary of his assassination.
In addition, he fulfilled regular conducting responsibilities
with the American Symphony Orchestra.
Richard Davis, professor of religion, gave several invited talks last
fall: “The Art of the Procession” at St. Lawrence University in
September; “Chittrai Revisited: Continuity and Change in an
Urban Temple Festival” at the Columbia University South Asia
Seminar (October); and “Ritual Inside and Outside the Text” at the
University of Chicago South Asia Seminar (November). In April,
he will present “What’s that British Couple doing in Jagannatha’s
Procession” at the annual conference of the American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, held in Montreal, and “The Art of the
Procession” as the Lehman Lecture at Bowdoin College.
Laurie Dahlberg, associate professor of art history and photography,
presented papers at Smolny College (“Vulgar Success: The Conflicts
and Conquests of Early Photography”) and the State Hermitage
Museum (“Of Nudity and Nationality: Photography and the Nude
in 19th-Century Europe”) in St. Petersburg in October.
Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography, spoke at
the Whitney Museum of American Art in connection with The
New City: Sub/Urbia in Recent Photography, in which his work was
included. He presented a solo exhibition at Galerie Rodolphe
Janssen in Brussels. He lectured at Mills College in Oakland and
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and published
articles in ArtForum and Foam magazine.
Jennifer Day, assistant professor of Russian, published “Strange
Spaces: Balabanov and the Petersburg Text” in the Winter 2005
Slavic and East European Journal.
Linh Dinh, faculty in writing, Milton Avery Graduate School of
the Arts, published two collections of new poems last year: American
Tatts (Chax Press) and Borderless Bodies (Factory School). He is the
recipient of a David K. Wong Fellowship, to be spent at the
University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.
Mark Alice Durant, faculty in photography, Milton Avery Graduate
School of the Arts, curated Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary
Art, Technology and the Paranormal, which opened last October at the
Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County. He is also editor of the accompanying catalogue,
which features essays by Lynne Tillman, Marina Warner, Jane D.
Marsching, and himself.
“Coming to Terms with Iraq,” by Omar Encarnación, associate
professor of political studies, was published in the winter issue of
Ethics & International Affairs. The essay reviews recent books about
the U.S. occupation of Iraq and reflects on the history of U.S.
attempts to export democracy abroad.
Joanne Fox-Przeworski, director of the Bard Center for Environmental
Policy, gave an invited talk on BCEP’s innovative modular
graduate program to educators at “Integrated Education for
Sustainable Development,” held in Tokyo last September. From
Japan she went to Szenzhen, China, to speak to mayors at the
Sustainable Communities Conference about a model partnership,
the New York City Watershed Agreement.
Derek Furr, faculty, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, has a
short story, “Feed My Sheep,” forthcoming in Potomac Review, and
an article, “Listening to Millay,” forthcoming in the Journal of
Modern Literature.
Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music, gave
lectures over the summer at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center,
Sembrich Opera Museum, and New York City Opera. His article
“From Haus to Konzerthaus: Orchestrations of Schubert’s Erlkönig
and other Lieder” appeared in Liberamicorum Isabelle Cazeaux:
69

Symbols, Parallels and Discoveries in Her Honor. His book The Life of
Schubert has been issued in a Greek translation.
Richard Gordon, professor of psychology, contributed an article,
“Towards a Clinical Ethnography,” to a special issue of the journal
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. The issue, edited by the psychiatrist
and anthropologist Anne Becker, addressed the spread of eating
disorders across the globe. It contained articles from Fiji, Japan,
Curacao, and South Africa, in a unique approach in which cultural
issues are studied in depth in order to understand clinical problems.
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, photography faculty,
Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, were commissioned to
create four new video works, one for each program in the third season
of the PBS television series, Art in the 21st Century, which aired
last fall. The two received a 2005–06 Landis & Gyr Foundation grant
for a studio residency in London. Their fall exhibitions included
Museum Sammlung Goetz, Münich; Galerie Bob van Orsouw,
Zürich; Les Abbatoirs Museum, Toulouse; and Württembergischer
Kunstverein, Stuttgart.
Last fall, Peter Hutton, professor of film, presented a program of
his recent work from Bangladesh and South Korea at Harvard
University, Massachusetts College of Art, and The Museum School
in Boston. In January Hutton traveled on a Russian freighter from
the Gulf of Mexico to St. Petersburg, Russia, to shoot the final section
of his film trilogy on the sea.
Paul Ramírez Jonas, assistant professor of studio arts, presented work
last fall in two exhibitions: The Plain of Heaven, an international show
organized by Creative Time and inspired by the impending redevelopment
of the High Line, the unused elevated rail structure that runs
up the west side of Manhattan; and Dreaming of a More Better Future
in the Reinberger Galleries at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, was one of the featured
scientists in the “Profiles of Ecologists” series at the 90th
meeting of the Ecological Society of America, held in Montreal last
August. She coauthored three papers presented at that meeting:
“Effects of large mammalian herbivores on snakes in an African
savanna” (coauthored by Jennifer Peters ’06); “Linearities, nonlinearities,
and thresholds in the ecology of Lyme disease”; and
“Effects of guinea fowl on blacklegged ticks in eastern New York.”
She also organized a symposium on the ecology of infectious disease
as part of the meeting. A paper Keesing cowrote with Lindsay
O’Reilly ’05 was accepted for publication in the Journal of African
Ecology. The paper describes O’Reilly’s study of the effects of fire on
savanna bird communities in Kenya, based on work she did in
Keesing’s “Ecology of African Savannas” class.
David Kettler, research professor in social studies, is the author of
several essays published or forthcoming this year: “Political Theory
and Political Science: The Heart of the Matter” in Making Political
Science Matter: The Flyvbjerg Debate and Beyond (NYU Press);
“Negotiating Exile: Franz L. Neumann as Political Scientist” in Fruits
of Exile; and “Women and the State: Käthe Truhel and the Idea of a
Social Bureaucracy” in Festschrift für Claudia Honegger. He is editor of
“The Limits of Exile,” a special issue of Journal of the Interdisciplinary
Crossroads published in April. Last September he organized a workshop
and gave the opening presentation on “Limits of Exile: Exile
Studies and Comparative Historiography” in St. Petersburg, Russia,
under the joint auspices of Bard and Smolny Colleges. Last spring he
published “Robert Cumming, 1916–2004” in Political Theory.
Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages
and Literature, was a visiting art critic last September at the
Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado, where she also gave a reading
from her two recent books, The Night Sky (prose) and Hum (poems).
Nancy Leonard, professor of English, chaired a session of film
scholars and musicologists at “Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing
Music and Cinema,” a conference at the University of Minnesota.
This spring she will read from her recent poetry at the National Arts
Club in New York City.
Steven Mazie, faculty in politics at Bard High School Early
College, published “Consenting Adults? Amish ‘Rumspringa’ and
the Quandary of Exit in Liberalism” in the December 2005 issue of
Perspectives on Politics. His first book, Israel’s Higher Law: Religion and
Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State, will be published this spring by
Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.
Altruism in World Religions was edited by Jacob Neusner, Research
Professor of Religion and Theology, and Bruce Chilton ’71, chaplain
and Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion.
Published last fall by Georgetown University Press, the book is
based upon a conference of the same name that was presented in
2004 by the Institute of Advanced Theology, of which Chilton is
the executive director.
Amy Ogata, associate professor at The Bard Graduate Center for
Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, was the recipient
last year of a senior fellowship at the Lemelson Center for the
Study of Invention and Innovation, at the Smithsonian Institution.
Her article on the design of educational toys and postwar American
culture appeared in the summer 2005 issue of Winterthur Portfolio.
Over the summer and fall, she presented her research on the material
culture of postwar American childhood at the National
Museum of American History and at the Society for the History of
Children and Youth conference in Milwaukee. She spoke on
World’s Fairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, and this spring she is
presenting papers at the College Art Association Annual Meeting
in Boston and the European Social Science History Conference in
Amsterdam.
Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college,
Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, and president of the Levy
Economics Institute, was interviewed on June 28 by Cheryl Glaser
70

on American Public Radio’s Marketplace regarding the structure of
the Federal Reserve; on September 29 by Richard Freeman at
Executive Intelligence Review regarding the financial system, speculative
funds, and the energy crisis; and on October 25 during Ben
Merens’s Ideas Network program on Wisconsin Public Radio, regarding
the nomination of Ben Bernanke to replace Alan Greenspan as
chair of the Federal Reserve. Papadimitriou was a participant and discussant
of “Keynesian Money Endogeneity” at an international conference
in Cassino, Italy, in September; keynote speaker (“The United
States and Her Creditors”) at the Centre for Full Employment and
Equity, University of Newcastle, Australia, in December; and guest
speaker (“The Outlook for the U.S. Economy”) at a conference,
“International Monetary Policy: The Role of Aspect Prices in Central
Banking,” on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, this past January.
Julia Rosenbaum, visiting assistant professor of art history, presented
a talk, “The Power of Nomenclature and the Contradictions
of American Impressionism,” at the College Art Association meetings
held in Boston in February. The talk was part of the Association
of Historians of American Art session.
Justus Rosenberg, professor emeritus of languages and literature
(1962–2003), gave a lecture at the Dahesh Museum in New York
City on the activities of the International Rescue Committee and
read from his translation (No Trojan War) of Jean Giraudoux’ play
La Guerre de Troie N’aura Pas Lieu.
Michael Sadowski, faculty, the Master of Arts in Teaching
Program, was a presenter at the second annual “Youth and Race”
conference, sponsored by the Institute of African American
Research and held in October at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill and Duke University. His topic was “The ‘Acting
White’ Hypothesis and Teacher Education: What Educators Need
to Know.” He discussed the classroom implications of the debate
over the “acting white” theory, which holds that some peer groups
of color reject academic achievement, and reviewed recent research
that has called this theory into question.
Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, is beginning
a collaboration with Pietro Perona, director of the Computational
Vision Group at California Institute of Technology. The group is
studying the bases of visual perception with the aim of applying this
understanding to computational vision. Shore presented his work in
four recent solo exhibitions: at the Hammer Museum in Los
Angeles, Galerie Sprüth Magers in Cologne, P.S. 1 MoMA in New
York City, and Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver. Last
October he gave public lectures at the University of Las Vegas,
Hammer Museum (with Michael Fried), and Tokion Magazine
Creativity Now Conference (with William Eggleston), and conducted
a workshop at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
Cut at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last fall. Sillman’s
work is included in Part 4 of The Triumph of Painting, on view at the
Saatchi Gallery in London until May 7, and she will have a solo
exhibition in April at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York City. A
book about her drawings, with an essay by Wayne Koestenbaum, is
forthcoming this spring from Gregory R. Miller & Co.
Benjamin Stevens, visiting assistant professor of classics, received
his Ph.D. last August from the University of Chicago’s Committee
on the Ancient Mediterranean World. In January he presented a
paper, “Lingua olet: The Scent of Language and Social Synaesthesia
at Rome,” at the 137th annual meeting of the American
Philological Association, held in Montreal.
Elaine Thomas, assistant professor of political studies, will publish
“Keeping Identity at a Distance: France’s Renewed Reaction to the
Islamic Headscarf ” in the March 2006 issue of Ethnic and Racial
Studies. Last September she presented a paper on a panel titled
“Immigration and Political Theory” at the American Political
Science Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
Hap Tivey, artist in residence, presented work in Leucos Transit at
the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, last November
and December.
Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, published “The Power of
Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan’s Fiction, Criticism and
Editorial Activity” in Yale French Studies No.106, a special issue
devoted to Jean Paulhan.Trudel is guest editor of the Etudes Françaises,
Vol. 42, No. 2, “Figures artistiques du littéraire,” forthcoming this
spring, which includes his introduction and an article, “Spectres de
la peinture. Paulhan (et Ponge) face à Braque et Fautrier.”
Marina van Zuylen, associate professor of French and comparative
literature, published an essay, “The Secret Life of Monsters,” in
Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon, the catalogue accompanying
the Odilon Redon retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. She presented a paper, “Spiderman’s Strategy:
Odilon Redon and the Science of Monsters” at the Nineteenth-
Century French Studies Colloquium in Austin, Texas, last October.
Suzanne Vromen, professor emeritus of sociology (1978–2000),
participated in the Social Memory Studies International Workshop
at the University of Virginia last October and was keynote speaker at
“Resistance and Memory in Belgium,” organized in New York City
by The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. In
December she presented a paper, “The Rescue of Jewish Children by
Belgian Convents during the Holocaust and the Politics of
Commemoration” at the annual conference of the Association for
Jewish Studies, held in Washington, D.C.
Amy Sillman, MFA ’95 and faculty in painting at the Milton Avery
Graduate School of the Arts, presented work in the group exhibition
71

Edward McKeever ’05, Tiger, mixed media on wood. The piece was part of McKeever's Senior Project, titled “Liminal Space: An Eastern Boy in a
Western Body.” To see more of his work, visit edwardmckeever@hotmail.com.
Corrections
In the Fall 2005 Bardian, an item about Mark Lytle in the Faculty Notes section
incorrectly identified Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. The Bardian regrets
the error.
72

Photography
Cover: (foreground) Don Hamerman;
(background) ©Pete Leonard/zefa/Corbis
Inside front cover: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 1: Julia Jordan
Page 2: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 3, (left) Don Hamerman;
(center) Noah Sheldon;
(right) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 4: Don Hamerman
Page 6: Dennis Brack
Page 8: Don Hamerman
Page 9: Don Hamerman
Page 10: Don Hamerman
Page 11: Don Hamerman
Page 12: Don Hamerman
Page 13: Don Hamerman
Page 14: Bridget Hurlihy
Page 15: (all) Don Hamerman
Page 16: ©Cheryl Ravelo/Reuters/Corbis
Page 17: Lisa Kereszi ’95
Page 18: Keren Su/Getty
Page 20: ©Tom Brakefield/Corbis
Page 22: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 23: www.broadwaters.fsnet.co.uk/images/
six.gif, manipulated by Kevin Trabucco
Page 24: Noah Sheldon
Page 26: (all) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 28: Phil Suarez
Page 29: Phil Suarez
Page 31: Phil Suarez
Page 32: (all) Noah Sheldon
Page 33: (all) Noah Sheldon
Page 38: Julie McCarthy
Page 39: (all) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 40 (top right) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;
(bottom left) Tania Barricklo;
(bottom right) Karl Rabe
Page 41: Nina Chefakov
Page 42: (top) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;
(bottom) photographer unknown
Page 43: Noah Sheldon
Page 44: (top) Courtesy of Susannah Bradley;
(bottom) Tanio Barricklo
Page 45: Skippy-Racer Scooter, c. 1933,
The Eric Brill Collection
Page 46: (top) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;
(bottom) Christopher Lindner
Page 47: (top) Molly Page
(bottom) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;
Page 48: (top) Scott Swere
(bottom) Deborah Durant
Page 49: (all) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;
Page 50: (top) Brian Babineau
(middle) Courtesy of Rafael Vinoly Architects;
(bottom) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 51: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 52: Courtesy of Judith Trepp ’63
Page 53: ©Buddy Mays/Corbis
Page 54: Courtesy of Emily Hay ’78
Page 55: Stewart Verrilli
Page 56: (top) Courtesy of Allison Radzin ’88
(bottom) Courtesy of Linda Ganjian ’92
Page 57: Courtesy of Grace Markman ’92
Page 58: (left) Matthew Spiegelman ’97;
(right) William Lamson MFA ’97
Page 59: (top) Courtesy of Marina Prager-Kranz ’97;
(middle) Matthew Porter ’98;
(bottom) Ben Ruggiero MFA ’05
Page 62: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 66: Bard College Archive
Page 67: (all) Noah Sheldon
Page 68: (left) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;
(middle) Don Hamerman;
(right) Noah Sheldon
Page 69: (all) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Page 72: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Back cover: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99
Board of Trustees of Bard College
David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus
Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair
Emily H. Fisher, Second Vice Chair
Mark Schwartz, Treasurer
Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary
Roland J. Augustine
+Leon Botstein, President of the College
David C. Clapp
* Marcelle Clements ’69
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
Mark N. Kaplan
George A. Kellner
Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65
Murray Liebowitz
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
William Julius Wilson
* alumni/ae trustee
+ex officio
Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs
Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development
and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405 or pemstein
@bard.edu; Jessica Kemm ’74 Director of Alumni/ae
Affairs, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu; Sasha
Boak Kelly, Associate Director of Alumni/ae Affairs,
845-758-7407, boak@bard.edu; Taryn Hart
McGray '05, Administrative Assistant, Alumni/ae
Affairs, 845-758-7089 or mcgray@bard.edu
1-800-BARDCOL
www.bard.edu/alumni
Published by the Bard Publications Office
Mikhail Horowitz, Editor of the Bardian;
Ginger Shore, Director; Julia Jordan, Assistant
Director; Mary Smith, Art Director; Debby Mayer,
Editorial Director; René Houtrides MFA’ 97,
Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors;
Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Jamie Ficker,
Bridget Murphy, Francie Soosman ’90, Kevin
Trabucco, Designers
©2006 Bard College. All rights reserved. i

SAVE THE DATE
REUNIONS 2006
May 19–21
Reunion classes: 1936, 1941, 1946, 1951,
1956, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001
Would you like to help contact classmates?
Please call Jessica Kemm ’74 at 845-758-7406
or e-mail kemm@bard.edu.
Bard College
PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
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