Language and Thinking Faculty

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William Alba

Hello, world. I was born in the Bronx, raised in small-town Ohio, and studied at Cornell University and UC Berkeley. For seventeen years I directed the Science and Humanities Scholars Program and the Pre-College Summer Session at Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier, I was Associate Dean of Studies at Bard High School Early College; Tutor [Professor] at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, where I founded the Monte Sol Writing Workshop in association with the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking; Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Coordinator of Mathematics and Science at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Bard College; and Instructor of Chemistry and Physics at Phillips Academy. Current interests include travel, translation, and issues related to communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Kimberly Alidio

Kimberly Alidio is a poet, essayist, historian, and teacher currently writing poetic-essay criticism on Filipino diasporic, postcolonial arts, theory, and aesthetics. Recent publications include “On Being Porous” in e-flux journal; “The Girls and a Joke”: 1080 Press Newsletter #144; and Teeter, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She is the author of three additional books of poetry—why letter ellipses,  : once teeth bones coral : , and after projects the resound—, and four  chapbooks—ROOM TONE, a cell of falls, shaping and edging, and solitude being alien. A long poem is forthcoming in Tripwire, and her fifth book, Traceable Relation, is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions in Fall 2025. Her criticism is published in Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of the Nation and Diaspora (New York University Press), Poetry Foundation, American Quarterly, Social Text, Journal of American Ethnic History, and the Journal of American History. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College (History/ English double major, gender studies minor); a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (History, with a Certificate in Gender Studies); and a M.F.A. from University of Arizona (Poetry). She has held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, a Spencer Foundation/ National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Kundiman Fellowship, Naropa Summer Writing Program’s Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship, and an Assistant Professorship of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas. She has been Social Studies/ History faculty at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas; Writing Faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts; workshop faculty for The Poetry Project, Kundiman and the Naropa Summer Writing Program; and mentor for The Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship. She currently teaches language studies, essay writing, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial history for the Bard Prison Initiative, Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, and Bard’s Masters of Art in Teaching. She lives on Munsee-Mohican and Lenape lands along the Mahicannituck River, otherwise known as New York’s Hudson Valley, and supports collective resistance, collective refusal, and collective flourishing to dismantle settler colonialism everywhere.

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Miriam Atkin

Miriam Atkin is a Catskills-based poet. Her creative practice has been largely concerned with the possibilities of poetry as a medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music and dance, and has lately extended to the co-founding of Pinsapo, a publishing collective of international artists across disciplines. She has contributed essays, reviews, interviews and poems to Art in America, Art Handler, Haunt Journal, Caesura,The Recluse and elsewhere. She was a 2014 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She holds an MFA in art criticism from School of Visual Arts and a PhD in English literature from CUNY Graduate Center. 

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Jonathon Atkinson

I’m a writer and a teacher. My fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in outlets including Public Books, Rain Taxi, Asymptote, New Ohio Review, and Bright Wall / Dark Room. I’ve taught elementary school students (at Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School), high school students (at the Athenian School, in Northern California), and college students (at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities). For almost a decade I’ve worked as a mentor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. I received my B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where I studied English literature and philosophy, and my M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where I focused on fiction writing.

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Andrew K. Atwell

PhD (University of Chicago)
Andrew K. Atwell is an anthropologist, Judaism and Middle East specialist, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bard College. He is broadly interested in moral imagination in its relation to political theology, political economy, and traditions of critical reflectivity, and his primary focus is on national-religious Israeli Judaism. His current book project, Lod Alight: National-Religious Activism, Moral Imagination, and the Limits of Reflection, is a study of the moral imagination at work in a national-religious “social settlement” movement that has settled in Israel’s binational cities since the mid 1990s. He also received doctoral training and an MA in physics at the University of Virginia where he worked on the CMS Experiment’s search for supersymmetric decay modes and dark matter candidates at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. This combination of scholarship drives a particular interest in intersections of social and physical sciences. His research has been supported by the Wenner- Gren Foundation, a Fuerstenberg Fellowship in Jewish Studies, and the University of Chicago. At Bard since 2024.

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Felix Bernstein ’13

Felix Bernstein stages psychofictional scenes as lectures, essays, satire, and melodrama, using errant bodies of imagery and discourse to bore holes through crusty ideals. He is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2016) and Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press, 2015), and director, with Gabe Rubin, of Madame de Void (2018). He has performed at institutions including Artists Space, LA MOCA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Bevin Blaber

Bevin Blaber is a scholar of philosophy of religions. Her work centers on continental philosophy, ethics, and modern Jewish thought and literature, with particular emphasis on post-Holocaust thought. In her first monograph, an interdisciplinary project combining philosophical, literary and historical analyses, she examines French philosopher and theorist Maurice Blanchot’s earliest work: articles published in right-wing French journals in the years preceding World War II. Her current work explores ways that conceptions of guilt and atonement are figured in instances of state or community-perpetrated atrocities, and the impact of these definitions on attempts, both legal and extra-juridical, to grapple with legacies of these events. She has previously taught at the University of Chicago and Grinnell College. BA, Williams College; AM, PhD, University of Chicago Divinity School. Also studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, where she was Visiting Dissertation Research Fellow. At Bard since 2022

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Ernest A. Bryant III

Ernest A. Bryant III is a transdisciplinary artist and critic. His interests include drawing, printmaking, nature, new media, conflict, aesthetics, and value. As L.P.I. Bryant is the founder and host of the online forum and discussion series "Criticism and Value" a forum for sharing experimental essays about art, criticism, and hosting live public conversations between living and non-living national and international artists.   Bryant was an SEI research fellow and assistant professor in the Experimental Foundation Studies Division, and the Illustration department at RISD. He was an inaugural fellow and faculty for the Yale Prison Education Initiative, and taught for the BARD Microcollege at the
Brooklyn Public Library. Bryant has served as a resident critic and teaching fellow at the Yale Norfolk School of Art, as a guest critic in Graphic Design at Pratt Institute, in Sculpture and Textiles at RISD, and in Painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Bryant was in residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Shangyuan Art Scene in Beijing, China. He has received fellowships for his work from the Jerome Foundation, the Bush Foundation, Yale University, RISD and the Lunder Institute for American Art.

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Nicole Caso

A.B., Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Professor Caso's areas of specialty include Hispanic languages and literature and Latin American literature. She is the author of Practicing Memory in Central American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); has contributed a chapter to The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature; and explored the implications of literacy in “‘Walking the Path of Letters’: Negotiating Assimilation and Difference in Contemporary Mayan Literature,” published in CHASQUI: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana. Additionally, her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Revista Iberoamericana and Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos; and she has contributed to critical compilations analyzing novelists such as Manlio Argueta and Rosa María Britton. At Bard since 2004. 

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Stephen Cope

Stephen Cope is a scholar, poet, editor, podcaster, and radio host. Essays, poems, reviews and other writings of his have appeared internationally in academic and non-academic journals. He is Editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (U of California Press), and q Founding Editor at Essay Press. Forthcoming publications include a book of poems, Bellerophonic Letters (Station Hill), and selections from an interlacing, many-titled, in-process work of poems entitled (variously) Conference of the Birds, Inference of the Voids, Deference of the Bards, A Protest of Pages, Ingresos du al Cello, errance a la foulce, Contested Offal, etc. Current writing projects include Pedagogy of the Depressed (essays) and Modern Problems, a critical reading of global Modernity’s deformed and disabled literatures (i.e. Modernism). He is an Associate Professor of Global Modernism in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and served as the initial Site Director, as well as a mentor and faculty member, for Bard Prison Initiative’s new Albion campus.

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Abby Crain

Abby Crain (she/her) is a dance artist who works through words, the body, and images in an attempt to make sense of the world, trouble what is considered sensible, and offer ways of seeing and being otherwise.  She was a professor in the Mills Dance Department on Ohlone land (Oakland, California) from 2016-2022 and currently teaches interdisciplinary writing at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her performance, choreographic, curatorial, and dance teaching work has been presented nationally and internationally; she co-organizes the Kathleen Hermesdorf FRESH Festival in San Francisco; and is the artistic director of the PORCH.Veranda program at Ponderosa Tanzland in Germany.

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Susan D'Agostino ’91

Susan D’Agostino is a mathematician and science writer whose work has been published in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Scientific American, WIRED, Quanta, BBC, Nature, National Public Radio, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other newspapers and magazines. Susan's book, How To Free Your Inner
Mathematician (Oxford University Press, 2020), received the Mathematical Association of America's Euler Book Prize for an exceptionally well written book with a positive impact on the public's view of math. Susan spent the 2023-24 academic year as a Spencer Fellow at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism working on a book about responsible computing. Her writing has been recognized with fellowships from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, the National Association of Science Writers, the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation, Columbia University, and the Mila–Quebec AI Institute. Susan earned a PhD in mathematics at Dartmouth College, an MA in science writing at Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in anthropology at Bard College. She lives and works on the New Hampshire seacoast.

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Bill Dixon

Bill Dixon is a political theorist (PhD. Johns Hopkins University) and Visiting Assistant
Professor in the Politics Program at Bard College, where he also teaches First Year Seminar and
in the Bard Prison Initiative. He served as director of the Bard College Language and Thinking
Program from 2016-2024. He has also taught political science courses at Johns Hopkins and
Oberlin College. His current research interests include cosmopolitanism, democratic theory,
American politics, and climate policy. Some of the political thinkers who interest him most
include Thucydides, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Walt
Whitman, Hannah Arendt, and Sheldon Wolin. In the Fall Semester in 2024 he will be teaching
seminars on “The Modern American Presidency” and “Civic Knowledge and Social Change.”

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Anna Dolan

Anna Dolan teaches FYSEM for the American University of Afghanistan and Documentary film
making at Parami University in Myanmar. She co-directs the Young Writers Workshop at Bard
College at Simon’s Rock. She has taught at universities on several continents. She is a
playwright, of funny/magical-realistic plays, has had over 60 produced plays, and works to make
theater in differing cultural contexts – including Ethiopia, Venezuela, Micronesia and Guatemala.

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Florian Duijsens

Florian Duijsens works as a translator and editor, and teaches at Bard College Berlin. Recently, he has also taught in the Young Writers Workshop at Simon’s Rock and at the Free University in Amsterdam. The co-founder and co-host of the Dead Ladies Show event series and podcast, he is also the senior editor of BLAU International and has moderated discussions at the International Literature Festival Berlin, LCB, and elsewhere. Aside from translating (children’s) books, he edits and translates work for artists, museums, and galleries around the world, and his writing and translations have appeared in Aperture, the Guardian, Asymptote, Ursula, and other publications.

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Shannon Forrester

Shannon Forrester is an artist working internationally in the expanded field of
painting, a practice-led researcher in contemporary art and has taught at institutions
in the US as well as UK. Forrester’s research includes her transdisciplinary practice-
led Ph.D. project titled The Reparative Turn in Painting – Monstrous Interventions in
Art and Identity Studies. It presents a first look at reparative painting practice theory
which reveals the potential of the reparative turn in painting, aesthetics, and narrative
to subvert dynamics of identity-based marginalization. Forrester’s work has been
included in exhibitions of international scope including the Kochi-Muziris
Biennale collaterals and Volta NY, at academic conferences globally including the
National Women’s Studies Association, the American Studies Association, the
National Association for Fine Art Education, as well as Foundations in Art: Theory
and Education. Publications include an article in the Art/Research International: A
Transdisciplinary Journal special issue “Encountering Artistic Research Practices:
Analyzing their Critical Social Potentialities” and more experimental writing in
collections such as CARE(Less) a Supplement to On Care. Forrester was recently a
FORENSIS Seminar Fellow at the New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry.
Forrester’s education includes a Ph.D. in Fine Art Research as well as a
Postgraduate Certificate in Art and Design Education from the Royal College of Art
(London), an MFA in Painting as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies from Boston University, and a BFA from SAIC. A new project
related to reparative painting in the context of the events of January 6th is in
development and with it work at University of Massachusetts Lowell where Forrester
is a Candidate for the Graduate Certificate in Security Studies. Shannon served on
the College Art Association’s Committee for Diversity and Committee for Research
and Scholarship. Aside from art, Shannon is always excited about purple, skiing,
vegan food, or nice chats with good coffee.

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Xhosa Frazier ’10

Xhosa Frazier graduated from the Bard MAT program in 2010. He currently teaches English 101 through SUNY Ulster Community college at the Woodstock Day School, as well as middle school and high school ELA. He taught a course titled “Poetry and the Spoken Word”, and he also taught a course titled “Alice Walker's The Color Purple and the African American Vernacular” in the Bard Early College Summer Academy. He has been a mentor teacher for the Bard MAT program for the past six years, which focuses on the process of teaching aspiring teachers how to teach. This is his 6th year teaching in the Language & Thinking program. 
Along with his teaching, Xhosa also writes essays and poetry. His poems and essays have been published in Hunger magazine and Forward. His current research is focused on the poetry and critical essays of Louis Zukofsky, and more specifically, Xhosa is exploring the cultural and theoretical influence Zukofsky has had on the development of his own work as a poet. 

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C Gómez Montoya

Carolina Gómez Montoya (MA and PhD in Latin American and Peninsular Literature, University of Maryland) has taught at various Bard programs and partnerships, including Bard High School Early College, the Writing Knowledge Program and the Language and Thinking Program. Carolina is co-editor of an upcoming poetry anthology for Stenen Press and will soon be joining the faculty at the Young Writer’s Workshop at Simon’s Rock. Carolina’s writing appears in Literal: Latin American Voices/Voces Latinoamericanas; ¡Basta! Mujeres colombianas contra la violencia de género (Bogotá: Debate escrito, 2015) and in Oregon Humanities magazine. In September, Carolina is moving to Paris to pursue a creative writing program at Université Paris 8. 

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Seth David Halvorson

Seth David Halvorson’s (B.A., Macalester College; M.A., Stanford University; M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University) interests include Political, Ethical, and Social Philosophy, Policy Analysis, Classical and Contemporary Theories of Democracy and Citizenship, and History of Technology. He currently is Professor of History, Philosophy, and Political Studies at BHSEC-Newark. Seth has been a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University and has taught, directed programs, and held appointments in Philosophy and Argumentation at Stanford and the University of Iowa. While he taught undergraduates in Columbia's Core Curriculum, he pursued the practical side of his interest in technology and for four years was Project Manager for Digital Humanities Teaching and Scholarship. Halvorson has been repeatedly recognized for excellence in Undergraduate teaching and has presented at national and international conferences on diverse topics in Philosophy, Education, Ethics, History, and Politics. Prior to his graduate education, Seth spent 3 years at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. His recent work has focused on the use of ethico-ecological vocabularies in the Anthropocene. He is undertaking a book-length study of the civic, moral, and educative dimensions of speed in the spheres of American social life. In his spare time he paints and is learning how to play the banjo. Seth and his spouse Heather, a practicing Modern Psychoanalyst, live in Newark, NJ and are preparing for the birth of their daughter. 

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Cole Heinowitz

Cole Heinowitz was born and raised in San Diego, California; completed her Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature at Brown University; and has been a professor of literature at Bard
College for the last two decades. Her books of poetry include Daily Chimera (Incommunicado,
1995), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour, 2002), and The Rubicon (The Rest, 2007). Cole
translates widely from Spanish into English, concentrating on 20 th -century Latin American
poetry. Recent books include Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic (Ediciones
Sin Fin, 2023) and Bleeding from All 5 Senses (White Pine, 2020), both by Mexican infrarrealist
poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro; A Tradition of Rupture, the collected essays of Argentine poet
and fiction writer Alejandra Pizarnik (Ugly Duckling, 2019); Succubations & Incubations:
Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (Infinity Land, 2020); and Primeval Wing by Mexican poet
Mara Larrosa (forthcoming this year from Ediciones Norteadas). Cole’s scholarly and critical
writings have appeared in The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Wordsworth Circle, Nineteenth-
Century Contexts, The Chicago Review, and The Boston Review as well as in the edited volumes
The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose and Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Tragedy in the
Age of Empire. She is also the author of the critical monograph Rewriting Conquest: Spanish
America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Since
Rewriting Conquest, Cole has been working on a book-length study exploring the poetics of
direct communication with the nonhuman world, Poetry as Coexistence.

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Brooke Kipling ’15

Brooke Kipling (she/they) is a seventh year PhD candidate in the department of Spanish and
Portuguese at the University of California Davis. Their research engages the intersection of
critical disability studies and migration studies by analyzing Central American migrant cultural
productions, including digital narratives and photographs. As part of the project, Humanizing
Deportation, she collaborates with migrants across Mexico and California to record their
experiences of migration in the form of digital stories. Brooke engages the methodology of
digital storytelling in her courses at UC Davis including Latin American Culture, Latinx Culture,
and Critical Gender Studies. As a 2015 Bard alum, she is excited to return to Bard as an L&T
instructor.

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Christopher Kondrich

Christopher Kondrich is a poet, writer, editor, and educator. He is the author, most recently,
of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), a winner of the National Poetry Series, a Library Journal
best book of the year, and a finalist for The Believer Book Award, as well as Contrapuntal (Free Verse
Editions, 2013). He is also the co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal
Conservation (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2024). His poetry and essays appear widely
in such venues as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, The
Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of
Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. He has received
fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the I-Park
Foundation, Columbia University, and the University of Denver where he received his PhD in
English & Literary Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing as a Visiting Assistant
Professor at the College of the Holy Cross, as a Writer-in-Residence at the State University of
New York at New Paltz, as well as for George Washington University and Bard College. He is
currently a faculty member for Eastern Oregon University’s low-residency MFA in Creative and
Environmental Writing, and an Associate Editor for the literary magazine 32 Poems.

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Nicholas Alton Lewis

Nicholas Alton Lewis is the clarinetist and co-founder of the BLAK-New Blues
Ensemble, an ensemble founded with composer-pianist Anthony Kelley and based
at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The BLAK-New Blues Ensemble was
created to explore an ensemble’s ability to circumnavigate, through improvisation,
the codes and tropes of African-American, European, and music of other parts of
the world in ways that produce a coherent and fresh musical product. As a soloist,
Nicholas has been featured in performances of the Mozart Concerto for Clarinet
and Sinfonia Concertante with the Williamsburg Symphony, and of the David Baker
Jazz Suite for Clarinet and Orchestra with the Richmond (VA) Symphony and the
Soulful Symphony in Baltimore, MD. At the College, Nicholas serves as associate
vice present for academic initiates and associate dean of the college in the Office
of the Dean of the College where he works to promote and amplify the academic
and intellectual culture of the College through his work as co-director of the
Center for Faculty and Curricular Development (CFCD), initiatives to celebrate the
artistic and intellectual contributions of faculty, and through grant-supported
initiatives to amplify meaning-making, purpose, and calling throughout the
academic program.
Nicholas teaches in the Bard College Conservatory of Music,

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Bill Martin

Bill Martin is a Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking Associate and has been facilitating Language & Thinking workshops since 2007. He has also taught for Al-Quds Bard College in Palestine, where he headed the Literature and Society program 2017–2019, and in the Common Core and the German Department at both Colgate University and The University of Chicago. Currently he teaches in Pratt Institute’s program in Berlin, where he lives. He is a literary translator from German and Polish and has recently translated Michał Witkowski’s novel Eleven Inch (Seagull, 2021) and Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (Fitzcarraldo, forthcoming).

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Andrew McCarron ’98

Andrew McCarron is a teacher and writer born and raised in the Hudson River Valley. He holds a
Ph.D. in Psychology, chairs the Religion, Philosophy & Ethics Department at Trinity School in
Manhattan, and teaches in the English Department. His books include: Mysterium, a poetry collection (Edgewise Press, 2011); Three New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle & Paul Violi, a collection of critical biographies (Station Hill, 2016); Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan, a study of the Nobel Laureate’s religious identities (Oxford University Press, 2017); and The Ballad of Sara and Thor: A Novella (Station Hill, 2017). In addition to teaching and writing, Andrew has also served on the ethics committee of New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.

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Jamal Davis Neal, Jr.

Jamal Davis Neal, Jr. (He/They)
Jamal is a recent graduate of Yale Divinity School and UConn School of Social Work where they
graduated with a Master of Divinity in 2024 and Master’s of Social Work in 2022 as a part of
their joint-degree program.

He first taught at Bard for Citizen Science during Winter Intercession 2024 and looks forward to
teaching CitSci again this coming academic year. However, this will be their first-time teaching
L&T and they’re looking forward to developing relationships with new students as they figure
out their independent and autonomous lives in this time and space beyond high school and other
pre-Bard commitments.

Outside of Bard, Jamal is looking to practice psychotherapy as an LMSW in the nearby area and
looks forward to their coming ordination as a minister in the American Baptist Churches USA.

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Laura Nelson

Laura currently lives in Los Angeles, where she works to celebrate and co-create spaces of study
and gathering. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University and has taught
courses on literature, film, cultural history, and education at Harvard University, Deep Springs
College, and Tidelines Institute. Alongside teaching, she co-organizes experimental spaces of
gathering and learning in cities and has been a part of collective projects including the Library of
Study, the Oakland Summer School, and Place Settings. Her writing on film, art, and themes of
community and collectivity has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, e-flux, and Social
Text. She is currently working on a book, After School: Radical Experiments in Study and
Collective Life, which looks at histories of radical and experimental education.

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Joel Newberger

Joel Newberger is a poet and teacher who lives in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of several
books of poetry, including Hexateuch, Under the Window, and In Titan’s Goblet. He is the editor and publisher of The Swan, and an editor of New Books. He recently received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Antonio Ortiz ’18

Antonio Ortiz is a Visiting Instructor in the Humanities at Bard College, teaching Language and Thinking (L&T) and First Year Seminar (FYSEM). Antonio graduated from Bard College in 2018 with a BA in Economics, specializing in macroeconomic policy and the economic history of Latin America. After graduating from Bard, he attended Yale Divinity School where he earned his Master of Divinity degree in 2023. During his time at Yale, Antonio's research focused on the Hebrew Bible; in particular, how biblical narratives of violence were used to construct communal identity in ancient Israel, and surrounding ancient West Asian cultures. In addition to his teaching role, Antonio is also a Program Associate in the Office of the Dean of the College, working directly with the Associate Vice President for Academic Initiatives and Associate Dean of the College, Nicholas Alton Lewis, on building a climate of inclusion and community at Bard College. Outside of academia, Antonio is a practicing Buddhist, and an avid soccer fan.

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Chiara Pavone

Chiara Pavone’s research is broadly concerned with the production, canonization, and
circulation of disaster narratives. Her doctoral dissertation topic at the University of
California, Los Angeles, focuses on media and works of literature produced after the March
2011 Great Eastern Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. Her work draws on
scholarship in ecocriticism and ecofeminism, political philosophy, and queer theory to
propose a mode of reading she calls ‘Radioactive Aesthetics.’ Her publications in English
include “Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams
of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman” in Literature after
Fukushima (Routledge, 2023). Professor Pavone is a former Japan Foundation Fellow and the
recipient of numerous honors from UCLA, including a dissertation year fellowship and
Sasakawa graduate fellowship. She previously taught in UCLA’s Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures on subjects ranging from global narratives of crisis to beginner and
intermediate Japanese and Japanese civilization. At Bard since 2023.
BA: University of Bologna
MA: Ca’ Foscari University, Venice
Ph.D.: University of California, Los Angeles

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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.

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Iana Whalen Robitaille

Iana Whalen Robitaille is a doctoral fellow in English at the University of Texas at Austin, where
her teaching and research focus on post-1945 American literature and culture, postcolonial
theory and cultural studies, and histories of race, immigration, and citizenship in the United
States. Her current project examines the formal deployment of inheritance—legal, biological,
cultural—as a conceptualization of transnational memory and human rights in contemporary
U.S. fiction. Prior to returning to academia, she worked professionally in publishing and
nonprofit fundraising; she continues to work with cultural institutions as a development
consultant on an occasional basis. Iana’s writing appears in Studies in the Novel, Public Books,
Black Studies, the E3W Review of Books, and AMS:ATX. She lives in Austin, Texas with her
partner and their two dogs, and in her spare time she can be found running or singing around the
city.

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Will Roudabush

Will Roudabush is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Southern Methodist University with research interests in Renaissance drama, poetry, and visual culture. Originally from Tennessee, he received his BA from Rhodes College, where he developed his love for language and learned what it really means to read, write, and think. He then earned his MA from the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. His studies and research have also taken him to St. John’s College, Oxford, the Folger Institute, the California Rare Book School, and Venice International University. He teaches wide-ranging courses that encourage students to make creative associations between past and present, and to discover what they have to say through writing. His scholarship has appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin and Notes & Queries, and he is currently working on his first book, which examines how early modern English poets and playwrights translated contemporary advancements in perspective painting into their own poetic and dramatic forms. He lives in Dallas with his partner and two dogs, Lucia and Milton.

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Suzanne Schulz

Suzanne lives in Queens, NYC and is a professor at Bard High School Early College Queens, where she teaches courses on experimental film, documentary media, and South Asian cinema. Suzanne holds a Master’s degree in South Asian Languages and Cultures and a PhD in Radio-Television Film from UT-Austin. She has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation and was recently a Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Fellow at the Library of Congress. Suzanne is currently an MFA candidate in the Integrated Media Arts at CUNY-Hunter College. Her videos, which explore debt, reconciliation, friendship, and work have screened at Rooftop films, Hunter College, and at the University Film and Video Association.

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Miles Strucker

Miles Strucker is a fiction writer interested in creating a dialogue between the sciences
and the humanities. He teaches a first-year seminar on design history and theory at Parsons
School of Design, and has previously taught writing at Columbia University, SUNY FIT, and
Meredith College.

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Wally Suphap

Wally Suphap (he/they) is a nonfiction writer, lawyer, editor, translator, and
educator. They are the author of Thirteen Ways of Interrogating an
Incident (Fish Publishing, 2022), a hybrid-mode short memoir examining the
intersectionality of queerness, masculinity, and power, selected as the overall
winner of the Fish Short Memoir Prize. They also received named placements
in the Writer’s Digest Personal Essay Contest, CRAFT Hybrid Writing Contest,
and Globe Soup Short Memoir Contest. They were awarded fellowships and
residencies from Anaphora Literary Arts, Asian American Writers’ Workshop,
Hudson Valley Writers Center, Kenyon Review, Tin House Summer Workshop,
and Yale Writers’ Workshop. Their writings have appeared in Assay: A Journal
of Nonfiction, Columbia Journal, Fish Anthology, New Writing: The
International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Journal
of Creative Writing Studies, The Margins, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere.
Their translation work covering Southeast Asian literature has been supported
by the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press. They are the
founding editor of The Plentitudes literary magazine, and formerly served on
the editorial staff at Columbia Journal and Creative Nonfiction. Originally from
Bangkok and raised in Los Angeles, they hold a BA, JD, and MFA from
Columbia University. Prior to transitioning to a career as a writer-teacher, they
practiced corporate law as a dual qualified New York attorney and Hong Kong
solicitor. At Columbia, they have taught undergraduate writing, legal writing,
creative nonfiction, and journalism, along with serving as a part-time writing
consultant at the University Writing Center. They currently reside in New York
City.

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Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Robin Tremblay-McGaw lives in San Francisco and teaches at Santa Clara University and in Bard’s Language & Thinking Program.  She is the co-editor with Rob Halpern of From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (ON Contemporary Practice, 2017). Her book of poems, Dear Reader (Ithuriel's Spear), came out in August 2015. Some recent published work and talks include: “A Short Talk on a Long Topic:Whiteness in Poetry, Art, and Film: A Talk on a Poem in-Progress: BenjaminMoore’s White” (SCU Center for Arts and Humanities, May 2020); Poetry, Podcasts and Pop Culture: Emily Dickinson: Race, Class and Queer Love;  “A Made Up Thing” Full of Depth: The Queer Belonging of Robert Duncan and New Narrative, in Sillages critiques, December 2020; “Archive” a poem in Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, a special issue: Writing in the Pause, October 2020;  a poem/essay “the queen’s english ain’t her own” in Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry/philosophy/performativity, edited by Kyoo Lee, Roof Books, 2020; “A Real Fictional Depth”: Transtexuality & Transformation  in Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe in Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics. Medieval Institute Publications ( 2022); an article “Sounding Out: Nathaniel Mackey’s Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run”  in the Journal of Narrative Theory Winter 2022. B.A., English, the University of New Hampshire; M.A. English, San Francisco State University; M.L.I.S. University of California, Berkeley; PhD. Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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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.

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Sarah Wheeler

Sarah Wheeler has been a teacher for 25 years and is currently English Department Chair at Rhinebeck High School in Rhinebeck, NY.  She studied French and Italian literature at Columbia College, Columbia University, receiving a BA magna cum laude.  She holds an MS in Education from The George Washington University with a specialization in English as a New Language, as well as an MA in English from SUNY New Paltz.  Sarah taught high school English in Annandale, VA, Norfolk, VA, and Bensonhurst, NY, before moving to the Hudson River Valley.  She also served as adjunct faculty in writing programs at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, NJ, SUNY New Paltz, and Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY, where she gained experience supporting students in the transition from high school to college.  Sarah advises both the student newspaper Rhinebeck Reality and literary magazine Murmur, and she coaches students in RHS’s annual Poetry Out Loud competitions.  Her writing has been published in TESOL’s What Works, The Shawangunk Review, NCTE’s College Composition and Communication, and Living Rhinebeck, but her true passion is the performance art created in classroom collaboration with young minds and big ideas.

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Mary Grace Williams

The Rev. Mary Grace Williams, Chaplain of the College and Dean of Community Life, came to Bard in 2016 and has taught FYSEM every semester since the 2018 spring semester as well as other courses in religion and the Bible. She received her B.A. from Rutgers University where she studied theater arts, which led her to move to New York City directly after college to pursue a career in theater. While living in the West Village, she rediscovered her deep interest in spirituality and religion and that inspired her to do a M.A. in religious education from Fordham University. Eventually this led her to seek ordination as an Episcopal priest, and she attended Yale Divinity School, where she earned a M.Div. Mary Grace has two daughters: Grace, who is currently in medical school in NYC, and Kate who graduated from Bard in 2020 as a double major in human rights and dance and who now lives in Brooklyn performing and designing and creating clothing. Mary Grace lives in Rhinebeck and has three Cavalier King Charles dogs (Harry, George, and Charles).

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Mike Wood MAT ’15

Mike Wood M.A. English, King’s College London, M.A.T. (Literature), Bard College.
Mike has taught in private and public schools in New York City and the Hudson Valley.
Prior to this role he was an Associate Director of Admission in Bard College’s Office of
Admission. In addition to serving as the Dean of Students, Mike also teaches a section
of the program’s College Experience class, guiding students as they navigate the
college application process. Outside of work, Mike’s interests include drumming, piano,
softball, and volleyball. He is married with two daughters.

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Joseph Yearous-Algozin

Joey Yearous-Algozin is a poet, publisher and teacher. He is the author of A Feeling
Called Heaven, Utopia, and the multi-volume The Lazarus Project, among others. With
Holly Melgard, he co-authored the trilogy of books: Liquidation, White Trash, and Holly
Melgard’s Friends and Family. He is a founding member of the publishing collective,
Troll Thread. With an MA in Creative Writing from Temple University and a PhD in
English from the University at Buffalo, he teaches in NYU’s Liberal Studies Program and
is a writing consultant at Baruch College. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.