Language and Thinking Faculty

Language and Thinking draws faculty from Bard College and from institutions throughout the United States and abroad. Our instructors include scholars and artists from a wide range of fields who are trained in the program’s innovative approach to interdisciplinary inquiry.

2021 Faculty

Kimberly Alidio

Kimberly Alidio

Kimberly Alidio’s most recent books are why letter ellipses (selva oscura press) and : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna*), a Lambda LIterary Award Finalist. Her works-in-progress include Teeter, a hybrid book and album on sound composing and language, and Ambient Mom. She is a nominee for a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, a 3 Hole Press Fellow, and on teaching faculty at Bard’s Language and Thought Program, Bard Prison Initiative, Kundiman, and Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona.
Alexis Almeida

Alexis Almeida

Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. Her recent poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, Gulf Coast, Folder, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. Her long poem, I Have Never Been Able to Sing, is forthcoming from Ugly Ducking Presse, and her translation of Roberta Iannamico's Wreckage is just out from Toad Press. Her translation of Marina Yuszczuk's Single Mother is forthcoming from Spork Press, and her translation of Dalia Rosetti's Dreams and Nightmares is forthcoming from Les Figues. She is the recent recipient of a Fulbright research fellowship to Argentina, and has received awards and residencies from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, the Center for Book Arts, Bread Loaf, and the Banff Center. She has served on the editorial board of Asymptote and The Elephants, and is currently putting together, with many other translators, an anthology of contemporary female poets living in Argentina. She lives in Providence, where she teaches and makes broadsides for 18 Owls Press.
Tim Casey

Tim Casey

Tim Casey (B.F.A., M.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design). Painter; has had solo exhibitions in New York City at Pratt Gallery, Gabrielle Bryers Gallery, The Clocktower, and Tomoko Liguori Gallery, and at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York. Has also exhibited at Artists' Space, New York City; Margulies-Taplin Gallery, Miami; Lesley Heller Gallery, New York City; and Pierogi Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, and Momenta Gallery in Brooklyn. Reviews in Arts Magazine, Art in America, New York Times. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Jewish Museum, and other public and private collections. He teaches Visual Art and First Year Seminar at Bard High School Early College, and has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Tufts University, SUNY Purchase, New York University, Pratt Institute, and Middlebury College. Participant, Yale Writers Conference, 2012.
Rajnesh Chakrapani

Rajnesh Chakrapani

Raj Chakrapani lived in Myanmar as a teacher for the US Department of State and served as Peace Corps Volunteer in Romania and Liberia. He received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At Iowa he wrote his collection of poems Brown People with Colonial Histories and his MFA thesis on Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene. He also took classes in experimental film and translation. He recently completed a series of short films that explore his family video archives and communities with shifting perspectives of home. His poems are placed or forthcoming in Lana Turner, Speculative City, Word Thug, Sequestrum and http://Crevice.ro. The first part of his trilogy of films will be published on Triquarterly this summer and the rest are available on youtube. He writes interviews for The Rumpus and recently interviewed the novelist SJ Sindu.
Sean Colonna

Sean Colonna

Sean Colonna is a PhD candidate in historical musicology at Columbia University, where he is writing a dissertation entitled “Drugs, Music, and the Aesthetic: A Decolonial Analysis of Germany’s Transition to Romanticism.” His research compares historical accounts of drug-induced experiences with contemporaneous descriptions of musical aesthetics in order to explore the influences of coloniality on Western theories of subjectivity and consciousness. He has two forthcoming publications: “Using Mastery Objectives to Foster Inclusive Teaching” in Teaching Gradually: Practical Pedagogy and Classroom Strategies for Graduate Students, by Graduate Students (Stylus, 2021); and "Coffee and Music: Anthropotechnologies of the Enlightenment" in the upcoming issue of World of Music Journal.
Stephen Cope

Stephen Cope

Stephen Cope (B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, San Diego) teaches English and Comparative Literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, where he is an Assistant Professor specializing in Global Modernisms. His recent critical writing has appeared in The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry and essays on the refusal of work in James Joyce’s fiction and the erotics and politics of reading engendered by Gertrude Stein’s “fiction” are forthcoming. Cope’s critical edition of the previously unpublished and uncollected writings of George Oppen was published by the University of California Press as George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, and he is the host of Conference of the Birds (http://confbirds.blogspot.com), an internationally celebrated weekly radio program and podcast of "classical, folk, demotic, art, and experimental musics from Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, the Americas, Europe and places between and beyond.” Cope was a founding editor, with Catherine Taylor and Eula Biss, of Essay Press, the first publishing imprint to focus on book-length experimental and lyric essays. In addition to his work in traditional academic settings, Cope has taught in the Bard Prison Initiative, and he is a faculty sponsor of Hobart and William Smith's Second Chances prison education program in Western New York. His book project, Modern Problems, addresses the cultural politics of literary form in experimental, global Modernisms. “Conference of the Birds,” his ongoing series of poems, emerges from a critical and creative engagement with the music featured on his podcast. Cope has served on the faculty of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program since 2007.
Ziad Dallal

Ziad Dallal

Ziad Dallal is Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic at Bard College. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. His first research project, Arab Literary Politics, studies how nineteenth century Arab authors deployed the discourse of civilization in their literary narratives to imagine their place in the modern world. His second research project, Uneventful Literature, investigates a trend in contemporary Arabic literature that rejects a commitment to politics as a structuring event. His research is informed by political philosophy, critical theory, and translation theory and praxis.
Anna Dolan

Anna Dolan

Anna Dolan (M.F.A., playwriting, Yale University; M.F.A., directing, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) teaches Playwriting in the Creative Writing Program and the English Department at Central Connecticut State University. She also teaches in the Young Writers' Workshop at Fir Acres and Bard College at Simon's Rock. She is a playwright and has written (and had produced) over 30 plays. She has recently written a recitation/adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me" for Maloney Theater in New Britain Connecticut, and an adaptation of "Men in the Sun" for the Freedom Theater of Jenin in Palestine. She received a grant from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community to write and direct two plays for the Sokhes Theater of Pohnpei in Micronesia-FSM, where she taught at the College of Micronesia-FSM for two years.
Florian Duijsens

Florian Duijsens

Florian Duijsens teaches at Bard College Berlin and is the co-founder of the Dead Ladies Show, a podcast and event series about women who achieved amazing things while they were alive. He works as a writer, editor, and translator (most recently of Hanna Bervoets’ Everything There Was), and for many years was the fiction editor of SAND Journal and senior editor of Asymptote.
Ursula N. Embola

Ursula N. Embola

Originally from the Republic of Cameroon in West/Central Africa, Ursula N. Embola has been living in the United States since 1997. Ursula worked as a non-profit fundraiser for 17 years prior to becoming an academic. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Buea, a Master of Arts in Writing from Manhattanville College, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from Drew University. Ursula currently teaches English and Writing at Mercy College and Westchester Community College. Her research interests include the connections between West African and African American women writers of the 20th Century.
Xhosa Frazier

Xhosa Frazier

Xhosa Frazier is a writer and educator. He has a Bachelor's degree in English literature from SUNY New Paltz, and a Masters degree in secondary education, with a focus on English literature, from Bard college. He taught for five years in special education in Hudson, NY and Athens, NY, and has been a middle school and high school English teacher at the Woodstock Day School for the past ten years.

He has been organizing poetry readings in Manhattan, New Paltz, Kingston, and Woodstock, for the past twenty years. Working under Janine Pommy Vega, he taught poetry workshops at Sullivan County prison. His poems have been published in Hunger magazine, and he recently had an essay published in The Forward. He currently lives in Woodstock, NY.
Lewis Freedman

Lewis Freedman

Lewis Freedman is a poet concerned with, among other questions, the question of experience. His most recent book is I Want Something Other than Time (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). He has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oklahoma State University, and Carthage College
Karen Gover

Karen Gover

Karen Gover (B.A., University of Richmond; Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) teaches philosophy at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. She has published scholarly articles in International Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and the Journal of Aesthetic Education. Her art criticism has appeared in Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics: Art and Perception, and the online magazine Artcritical. Gover is the recipient of a grant from the German Academic Exchange service, she was a fellow at Williams College's Oakley Center for the Humanities, and she is the 2011 recipient of the John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics. Gover's book, Art and Authority: Moral Rights and Meaning in Contemporary Visual Art is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Donna Ford Grover

Donna Ford Grover

Bio tbd.
Kythe Heller

Kythe Heller

Kythe Heller (B.A., Reed College; M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.Div., Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University) is an award-winning poet, essayist, performer, filmmaker, and doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, with a secondary field through Visual and Environmental Studies/Social Anthropology in Critical Media Practice. Her creative practice and research resonate with a matrix of philosophical, aesthetic, and theological sources, in which writing, spiritual training, performance, documentary film, and ethnography intersect and are shaped by the dynamic interface of subjectivity and language – the wound and the word -- and inquire into the incarnational and the transformational. In what ways can our writings become sites of evolution, sites of resistance, parts of an array of realizing new social and ecological relationships by considering how to use language to radically change our way of being in the world? Her poetry and essays have been published widely, most recently in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Tricycle, The American Poetry Review, and the Cambridge University Press volume White Light. She is author of the poetry collection Immolation and a recipient of grants and fellowships from Harvard University, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Laurels Foundation/PSU. Recent film and multimedia work has been presented at the Harvard Film Studies Center, SEEDS Festival/ Earthdance, Sonoma State University, WAXworks (NYC), BAX (NYC), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in various collaborations and street performances in NYC and elsewhere. She has taught contemporary poetics, religion, literature, arts and media courses at Harvard University, Sarah Lawrence College, Bard Prison Initiative, and Hofstra University, as well as in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, where she has taught as a poet on the faculty since 2007. More information is available at kytheheller.com.
View More >>
David Liu

David Liu

David Liu is a Visiting Scholar at Duke University, where he was also on faculty - and a bumbling, cooking dad of three. Born in Taiwan and taught in several countries across the world, he has toiled widely in the humanities, arts, critical media and science studies, crossing geotemporal divides. He likes giving "diascopic" courses on pressing contemporary issues, or those on specific books in the original (lately Boethius, Deleuze, Weil). His main intellectual projects are to construct a transcultural, post-Deleuzian metaphysics, as well as a theory of posthumanist, mediated culture called “curiosity.” Recent writings include essays on “religion," Deleuze and capitalized affect, and Daoist (me)ontology. In his imaginary spare time David still makes music, translates philosophic (and) poetic texts (these days Laozi, Dante, Heine), and works on his native Taiwanese as a newly written language in Han characters. More broadly, he is helping folks launch a new college, and conceiving a global institute in Rome. David is always open to (un)learning from and with all he encounters. For him, radical learning and unlearning go hand in hand in living into the sublime, intricate texture of things.
Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss

Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss

Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss (B.A., New School for Social Research; M.A., Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research; Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Training and Research Institute for Self-Psychology; Psy.D. (critical theory/psychology), Wright Institute/Professional School of Psychology, 2012) works on the role of high culture in Jewish assimilation and the pairing of high culture and barbarism in the Holocaust. She is founding director of the Terezin Publishing Project and editor of the forthcoming English-Language edition of H. G. Adler's "Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community" (Cambridge University Press, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Terezin Publishing Project, 2014). The Terezin Publishing project has also brought out a reprint of "The Terezin Requiem," "Psychological Life in Terezin," "Composers in Theresienstadt" and other newly-translated works on Jewish life in Central Europe. Her articles have appeared in such publications as The Journal of the International Political Science Association, International Journal of Political Psychology and Political Socialization, The New York Times and The Prague Post. She is currently writing articles for TIKKUN and Jewish Currents. She has written extensively on the Jewish encounter with modernity and is author of the forthcoming "Songs in the Wilderness: Music in the Holocaust and the Betrayal of 'Bildung.'" She sits on the Board of Directors of Partners for Progressive Israel (MeretzUSA). Her many interdisciplinary affiliations include the International Society for Political Psychology and the International Psychohistorical Association, and she has given presentations on the Jewish encounter with modernity at conferences, schools, religious centers and JCCs in the United States and abroad (Poland, Austria, Holland, Czech Republic). She is the recipient of grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and Internaciones. This past spring, under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College (with a grant from the Bertha Effron Fund), she curated the inaugural concert/lecture series, "Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism."
Andrew McCarron

Andrew McCarron

Andrew McCarron (B.A., Bard; M.T.S., Harvard University; M.Phil, Ph.D, Graduate Center of The City University of New York) currently chairs the Religion, Philosophy, & Ethics Department at Trinity School in Manhattan, and also teaches in the English Department. He has published a collection of poetry called Mysterium (Edgewise Press, 2011), and two book-length psychological studies of artists’ lives: Three New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle, and Paul Violi (Station Hill Press, 2015), and Dylan on Dylan: the transfigurations of an American troubadour (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2015).
Jesse Miller

Jesse Miller

Jesse Miller (B.A., Oberlin College; Ph.D., University at Buffalo) is a writer, musician, and teacher whose interests include literary modernism, improvisation, cultural approaches to health, illness, and disability, and the role of writing and the arts in precipitating social change. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Writing in the University at Buffalo School of Management and is currently a faculty fellow with the University at Buffalo Experiential Learning Network. His academic book project "The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Modernism, Bibliotherapy, and the Aesthetics of Health, 1916–1944" excavates a link between the work of American modernist writers such as Kenneth Burke, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Toomer, and early twentieth-century efforts to promote the practice of therapeutic reading. He has studied the contemporary application of his research on the history of reading for mental health as a 2015-2016 Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellow. He makes music with the band Lalalangue and is also Managing Reviews Editor for Full Stop Magazine (www.full-stop.net), a web publication aimed at engaging with contemporary literature and publishing with a focus on debuts, small press publications, and works in translation.
Theresa Morris

Theresa Morris

Theresa Morris (M.A., Ph.D., New School for Social Research) Theresa Morris's work in philosophy explores responsibility as a mode of being for human beings, particularly as responsibility pertains to the ecological preservation of the planet and to care for future generations. Her manuscript, Hans Jonas's Ethic of Responsibility, was published by SUNY Press in 2013. Theresa's interests include the relation between practical action and human self-understanding, and the problem of motivation in ethics, particularly in relation to climate change. She is an adjunct associate professor of philosophy at Pace University. She is also a poet.
Jillian Peña

Jillian Peña

Jillian Peña is a Latinx dance and video artist whose work seeks to make visible the confusion and desire between self and other. Her work is in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, pop media, and spirituality. Jillian received a 2016 Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in New York and was awarded the 2014 Prix Jardin d'Europe, the European Prize for Outstanding Emerging Choreography at ImpulsTanz Dance Festival in Vienna. Her videos have screened in over 13 countries, and her live performance has been presented internationally, including at Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory, 92nd St Y, Dance Theater Workshop and The Kitchen in New York, and at ImPulsTanz Vienna, Modern Art Oxford, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Sophiensaele Berlin, and the International Festival of Contemporary Art Slovenia. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, PS122, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research, the National Dance Center of Bucharest, and Archauz Denmark. Jillian has created work for American Ballet Theater, American Dance Festival's Footprints Program, and the University of the Arts. She was a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholar during which she was awarded an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a fellowship recipient, and a Practice-based MPhil at Goldsmiths University.
Kay Prevallet

Kay Prevallet

Kristin Prevallet (B.A., University of Colorado, Boulder; M.A., University of Buffalo) has published fiction, poetry, and essays in numerous anthologies, books, and journals including the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Chicago Review, and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. The author of five books of poetry and three books of creative healing, her essay "Blood on the Illusion: The Violent Side Effects of Capitalism" was chosen as a 2015 notable essay by the editors of the Best American Essays. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she has received grants, residencies and awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, Centre Internationale de Poesie, Spalding University, and Poet's House. She teaches for Bard's Prison Initiative and maintains a private mindbody coaching practice in Westchester, NY.
Anca Roncea

Anca Roncea

Anca Roncea grew up in Romanian, speaks Modern Greek, French, and writes in English. She has lived in Bucharest, Iowa City, Yangon, Los Angeles, Paris and is currently in New York. Through her work she explores the space where language can create pivots in the midst of displacement while incorporating the aesthetics of Constantin Brancusi and the women artists of the Dada Movement. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the UIowa Literary Translation MFA program. She also holds an MA in American Cultural Studies from the University of Bucharest and in 2012 was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley. Her work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Beecher's Magazine, Omniverse and Asymptote, the Bare Life Review and Lana Turner.
Sarah Rosenthal

Sarah Rosenthal

Sarah Rosenthal is a writer and educator. She is currently at work on a collection of essays examining anxiety and language in America. Her writing has appeared in Bitch Magazine, The Sun Magazine, GEN, Creative Nonfiction, Gay Mag, LitHub, Electric Lit, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, CrimeReads, The Adroit Journal, Columbia Journal, and beyond. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and her B.A. in Written Arts from Bard College.
Ali Faut Sengul

Ali Faut Sengul

Bio tbd.
Jay Steinmetz

Jay Steinmetz

Jay Steinmetz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fort Hays State University. He specializes in political theory and film, and the political development of the Hollywood film industry. He teaches courses on political theory, film theory, American politics, and public law. He is currently working on a book that interrogates the relationship between toleration and inequality in classic Hollywood film from 1927 to 1950. In addition to being a professor, Jay is a published poet and an active amateur astronomer.
Christopher Wall

Christopher Wall

Christopher Wall (A.B. Dartmouth, M.A. Boston University, M.F.A. New York University) is a playwright, essayist, and lyricist. He was commissioned in 2017 by New World Symphony (Michael Tilson-Thomas, artistic director) to write a mixed-genre play with music. The result, an exploration of what it is like to live with PTSD, was produced this year. His play Dreams of the Washer King premiered Off Broadway at the Playwrights Realm and was subsequently produced in LA. His other plays have been seen or produced at Northern Stage, Round House, HotCity, Source Theatre, Kitchen Dog, Abingdon, Dartmouth, Fairfield University, and at other theaters. Songs from his chamber musical, The God of In-Between, co-written with Howard Fishman, have been performed at Joe’s Pub, Subculture, and other venues in New York City. He has been in residence at SPACE on Ryder Farm and the Vermont Studio Center, and was a fellow at the Norman Mailer Center, where he pursued his other love, nonfiction. His essays have appeared in Longform, LA Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Poets & Writers, and other magazines. Three of his works have been cited as a Notable Essay of the Year in the Best American Essays anthology. He appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show, where he was interviewed by Phillip Lopate and read an excerpt from his prizewinning essay “The Size of the Room.” In 2017 he presented a paper at CCCC based on the innovative pedagogy he developed at Tisch to help students grapple with complexity by analyzing the same stories across different mediums. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.