2018 Rostrum Events
Transgender Feminism
Professor Grayson Hunt (Philosophy)
What is Transgender Feminism? If being transgender means changing or not aligning with the gender one was assigned at birth, how then does transgender experience reflect or disrupt feminisms that are organized around a stable category of "woman"? How do trans people fit into feminist herstory? What makes trans experience feminist, and what makes feminism trans-inclusive?
August 15th at 11:00 AM (Weis Cinema, Campus Center)
Assimilation / Exodus / Annihilation
Professor Paul Cadden-Zimansky (Physics)
What happens to an object or an individual when it enters a new environment? Using equations, rhetoric, statistics, and close reading, practitioners of the liberal arts have many techniques to address this question, with physical scientists, biological scientists, social scientists, and humanists each exhibiting their own preferences. This talk will examine some of these techniques and preferences in an effort to understand the ways in which an object or individual ultimately finds a place in its new environment, departs from it, or is destroyed by it.
August 16th at 11:00 AM (MPR, Campus Center)
Hannah Arendt on Action, Citizenship, and Civil Disobedience
Professor Roger Berkowitz (Politics) and Professor Annie Seaton (Director of Difference & Media Project)
From antifa, Occupy, #metoo, Black Lives Matters, and sanctuary cities, to the Tea Party, Patriots, #fakenews, and fundamentalist bakers in Colorado, the tradition of American civil disobedience is being reinvigorated as a form of mass political citizenship. The Arendtian tradition of citizenship and civil disobedience involves not individual acts of conscience, but political movements that mobilize organized minorities. Civil disobedience is an act of citizenship by which minorities can change the minds of majorities. Thus, disobedient minorities—those groups who collectively dissent from majority opinion—are not traitors or rebels, but are part of the fabric of democratic government. Hannah Arendt knew that being an active citizen is dangerous. She famously wrote, “Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness. Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence.” As dangerous as political action is, it is also the lifeblood of democratic political change. The outbreak of civil disobedience today manifests the fraying of a consensus around questions of economic and racial equality as well as social discrimination, immigration, and the uses of American power abroad. So many various minorities are dissenting from the established way of doing things that we ask whether there is still something that holds our diverse and divergent nation together. In raising the questions of citizenship and civil disobedience, we ask if and how a new democratic American ideal can emerge.
August 16th at 2:00 PM-3:30 PM (Weis Cinema, Campus Center)
Plenary
The Tsar’s Bride
Lyubov Petrova, soprano; Nadezhda Babintseva, mezzo-soprano; Yefim Zavalniy, baritone; Andrey Valentiy, bass; Yakov Strizhak, bass; Joel Sorensen, tenor; Gerard Schneider, tenor; Teresa Buchholz, mezzo-soprano, and others; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; designed and directed by Doug Fitch; lighting design by Anshuman Bhatia; projection design by Brian McSherry; costume design by Moe Schell
All Language and Thinking sections will attend a rehearsal of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tsar’s Bride (1898), performed by The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein. Set in sixteenth century Russia during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the opera tells a tragic story of love, jealousy, betrayal, court intrigues, magic potions, and self-sacrifice.
August 17th at 10:30 AM (Fisher Center for Performing Arts)
The Bard Prison Initiative and the Future of Liberal Arts
What differences do freedom, and unfreedom, make for the pursuit of a college education? What can incarcerated students teach their non-incarcerated peers about what it means to be a serious undergraduate thinker, writer, and scholar? How should students of the humanities reimagine their work in an era of mass incarceration? And, what needs to be the case for mass incarceration to be otherwise? Begun in 1999 by then-Bard student Max Kenner, the Bard Prison Initiative is the largest program of its kind in the United States. BPI enrolls nearly 300 incarcerated men and women across a full spectrum of academic disciplines, and offers over 70 courses each semester. To date, there are nearly 450 Bard College alumni who have received degrees through BPI. This panel will feature four distinguished BPI graduates reflecting on their experiences as incarcerated liberal arts students.
August 20th at 2:00 PM-3:30 PM (MPR, Campus Center)
Be Bored, Be Distracted, and Beware of Focus. A Counterintuitive Talk about Reading.
Professor Marina van Zuylen (French and Comparative Literature)
In this talk, Marina van Zuylen will discuss some counterintuitive theories of reading, all endorsed by philosophers, scientists, and anthropologists who have warned against the dangerous effects of extreme focus. With Kierkegaard, Darwin, Woolf, and Barthes, we will learn how boredom, daydreaming, and distraction can actually help us become better readers.
August 21st at 11:00 AM (MPR, Campus Center)
Opus 40 – Sculpture Park & Museum
Artist Tad Richards
American sculptor Harvey Fite’s work is found in private collections around the country, and some of his breathtaking large wood sculptures, such as Modern Dance #1 and Modern Dance #2, and other carvings can be seen in Opus 40’s Art Gallery and the Quarryman’s Museum. As Opus 40 increasingly consumed his energy and vision, Fite focused less on carving and exhibitions, and avoided publicity in order to escape the distractions of visitors. His work, however, has been consistently recognized throughout the decades, and its reputation has grown after his death, since his masterwork has been open to the public. The significance of his signature achievement was recognized in 2001, when the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, placed Opus 40 on the National Register of Historic Places.
August 22nd 9:00 AM-1:00 PM (Opus 40 -- shuttles departing from Kline at 9:15 AM)
What needs to be the case for you to live sustainably at Bard? A look at water, food, and waste systems at Bard.
Professor Katrina Light (Director of Food Sustainability), Professor Katherine Heupel (Assistant Dean of Studies), Professor Laurie Husted (Environmental & Urban Studies)
This rostrum is designed to make Bard a more sustainable campus by helping students make change at the local level and connect these practices to larger global sustainability goals. Using the lenses of the Environment, Economy, and Equity we will take several walking tours of campus, make cognitive maps of our walks and plot and talk about where on these walks we encounter these goals, their possibilities and obstacles in their way. Who and what do you see and not see? How do you intersect with sustainability goals? How can you find opportunities to thrive in this place and help others to thrive, while at Bard and beyond?
Suggested reading: Kuhn - Sustainability is a paradigm shift.
Local Montgomery Place fruit provided.
August 22nd at 11:00 AM (various outdoor locations) – Rain location: RKC
Science & Politics: Science Literacy for Activists
Professor Felicia Keesing (Biology)
The role of science in public life in the United States has never been more contested.
Some have suggested that science shouldn't be politicized, while others have participated in overtly political and global marches in support of science. In this talk, Keesing will provide a brief overview of the role of politics in science and of science in politics, laying a foundation of science literacy that focuses on current controversies. She will also provide a preview of the January Citizen Science program.
August 22nd at 11:00 AM-1:00 PM (Weis Cinema, Campus Center)
Influences on Human Creativity
Artist Donna Payton (Sculptor/Painter)
Themes for works of art are culled from many sources. How does science, literature and religion influence human creativity? What must the artist consider to create a work that will communicate to us? The unsettled fragmentation in contemporary life, the whirl of global communications, the political dynamics and the discrepancies over gender, race, and religion provoke, challenge, and confuse the present. This energy is stimulating the integration of art with science, literature, and media in new ways through investigation and experimentation. In this presentation, Donna Payton, a mixed media artist, will present her and other artists’ works from two recent exhibitions that have been inspired by scientific and religious literature. Along with delving into the subject matter of the works, processes and media will be explained. Also discussed will be her latest series of work called “Intertwined”. The theme of this work concentrates on the interconnectedness of all things and the relationship between humanity and nature.
August 23rd at 2:00 PM (Weis Cinema, Campus Center)
A Poet’s Life
Poet Eileen Myles
I am going to talk about the career choice of being a poet. I'll read some work (poems) and then go on a bit on how by EXPANDING on what the role of the poet is and in particular by FOCUSING on the improvisational nature of the poet's training we can produce a lot (as well as poems) and how the bunch of it allows poems, poetry and poets to survive culturally and actually.
August 24th at 2:00 PM-3:30 PM (Olin Hall Auditorium)
Beginning at the End (Again)
Poet Erica Hunt
It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of (racial) capitalism. So, what can we see at the brink? Can a broken clock at its end be replaced by clocks based on alternative calibrations? What can the humanities offer for turning worn out ends into generative differences, producing new measures of justice, dignity, and meaning?
August 27th at 2:00 PM-3:30 PM (Olin Hall Auditorium)
Euripides’ The Bacchae
Professor Daniel Mendelsohn
Euripides’ The Bacchae makes extraordinary and unsettling claims about beauty, divinity, desire, violence, justice, prophecy, kinship, love, and the place of human beings in the cosmos. Much of the play’s originality and power revolve around Euripides’ rendering of Dionysus, a young new god at odds with a young new prince, Pentheus, who is also his cousin. Professor Daniel Mendelsohn will discuss Euripides’ play with a view toward the broader traditions of ancient Greek tragedy.
August 27th at 11:00 AM (MPR, Campus Center)
Second Person Plural: Images, Texts, and Addresses: A Language & Thinking Faculty Panel Inspired by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
Professor Kristy McMorris, Professor Stephen Cope, and Professor Tonya Foster
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen opens with a series of vignettes, written in the second-person plural, that recount everyday instances of radicalized micro-aggression. Who, this panel will ask, is the ‘you’ these texts invoke? And who are ‘we’ to say? What do we mean when we say ‘we’ and ‘who’ do we address when we say ‘you’? Who are we as addressees? What assumptions, exclusions, responsibilities, freedoms, and limitations are entailed by our various forms of inclusion (elective or otherwise), exclusion (elective or otherwise), and interpellation. We often assume that we are citizens of nations, states, regions, communities, a planet, a campus and college community… But what’s the difference between a citizen and subject? This panel features members of the Language and Thinking Faculty Stephen Cope, Tonya Foster, and Kristy McMorris.
August 28th at 9:30 AM-10:30 AM (MPR, Campus Center)