Nadine Fattaleh and Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas Named as the Inaugural OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts Fellows at Bard College
The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) announced today that Nadine Fattaleh and Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas have been selected as the first recipients of the Center’s fellowship in human rights and the arts. The goal of the fellowship program is to support outstanding engagement in human rights and the arts by scholars, artists, and activists. Fellows are appointed for a one-year period to pursue their own research projects while contributing to the curriculum of the new MA program in Human Rights and the Arts.
Nadine Fattaleh and Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas Named as the Inaugural OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts Fellows at Bard College
The goal of the fellowship program is to support outstanding engagement in human rights and the arts by scholars, artists, and activists. Fellows are appointed for a one-year period to pursue their own research projects while contributing to the curriculum of the new MA program in Human Rights and the Arts. Both Fattaleh and Pedraza Vargas will be in residence at Bard during the 2021-22 academic year. In addition to teaching, they will offer lectures and organize workshops at Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, campus as part of the Open Society University Network (OSUN). Their presence at Bard and within OSUN will further CHRA’s mission of supporting multidisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production on the intersection of human rights and the arts.
“The fellowship program allows our MA Program to complement the course offerings of our permanent faculty,” said Ziad M. Abu-Rish, the program’s director. “Nadine and Oscar are talented young researchers with daring intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices. They will explore with our students a range of investigative and documentary strategies, theoretical frameworks, and case-studies that will bring the front-lines of the struggle for rights into our classrooms.”
Nadine Fattaleh is a writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. Her work focuses on spatial practices through cartography and film. She received a BA in Middle East, South Asian and African Studies from Columbia University, and a MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP. She previously worked on projects at Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research and Studio-X Amman, as well as the MMAG Foundation, Amman. Fattaleh describes her practice as “using the map to render visible structures of oppression in flagrant contradiction with human rights,” while also “remaining attentive to the realities of everyday life and the need to listen to the voices of activists and advocates that are inevitably silenced by the abstractions of data and visual representation.” Her research at Bard will concern issues of food sovereignty and agrarian rights in the Arab World.
Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas is a historian and anthropologist with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from CUNY Graduate Center and a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Social Anthropology from Universidad de Los Andes. He has worked extensively with grassroots movements associated with indigenous, farmer, labor, and victim communities in Colombia and Latin America. Pedraza Vargas specializes in the analysis of transnational human rights institutions, discourses, and practices that define the value of life and death in cases of coal-related violence in Colombia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He has also served as a main researcher for a collaboration between Forensic Architecture and the Colombian Truth Commission. During his fellowship at Bard, Pedraza Vargas will produce work for a book and an exhibition on the Truth Commission, and write on what he describes as “the subjects of earthly memory and the methodologies to address black boxes as evidentiary possibilities.” His courses will be informed by his experience mediating between a justice institution and an academic/artistic research group.
“Nadine and Oscar embody the scholar-activist-artist nexus. Their research and praxis on spatial justice, truth and reconciliation, and food justice are of particular relevance to CHRA’s programming. We are pleased to support their research while they inspire our students, faculty, and the public,” said Tania El Khoury, Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and The Arts at Bard College.
Details on the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts and other CHRA activities can be found at chra.bard.edu.
About the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College
The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) researches, inspires, and extends the intersection of art and human rights. Through robust public programming, an arts biennial, publications, and a series of digital commissions, CHRA brings critical attention to innovative forms of art and activism that investigate human rights violations and develop creative tools of resistance. Designed by Bard’s Human Rights Program, the Fisher Center at Bard, and the Central European University, and launched through the Open Society University Network (OSUN), its interdisciplinary MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts brings together an international cadre of scholars, artists, and activists to explore the highly charged relation between artistic practices and struggles for truth and justice. CHRA also collaborates with partners across the OSUN network and provides fellowship and grant opportunities for students, scholars, artists, and activists at Bard College and around the world.
About the Open Society University Network
The Open Society University Network (OSUN) is a new global network of educational institutions that integrates learning in the social sciences, humanities, sciences, and arts. Advancing a new model of global higher education, it promotes the advancement of knowledge on undergraduate and graduate levels and across both geographic and demographic boundaries. It is dedicated to promoting civic engagement on behalf of open societies, and works to expand access to higher education for underserved communities. opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org
Post Date: 07-12-2021
Bard College’s Award-Winning Literary Magazine Conjunctions Celebrates the Launch of Its Fortieth Anniversary Issue with an Online Reading Hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company on July 7
On July 7, novelist and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow, founding editor of Conjunctions, will host an online evening of readings to celebrate the publication of the fortieth anniversary issue of Conjunctions, the celebrated literary journal published by Bard College. Morrow will be joined by Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue contributors Fred D’Aguiar, Samuel R. Delany, Ann Lauterbach, and Sofia Samatar.Bard College’s Award-Winning Literary Magazine Conjunctions Celebrates the Launch of Its Fortieth Anniversary Issue with an Online Reading Hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company on July 7
ABOUT THE ISSUE
Published by Bard College in spring 2021, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue celebrates forty years in print, with new and previously unpublished work by Ben Okri, Karen Russell, Peter Cole, Ann Lauterbach, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Akil Kumarasamy, John Ashbery, Joyce Carol Oates, Sofia Samatar, Richard Powers, Shane McCrae, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William H. Gass, Can Xue, Jessica Campbell, Fred D’Aguiar, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carole Maso, Julia Alvarez, Genya Turovskaya, Mark Irwin, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sanjena Sathian, Peter Orner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Colin Channer, Isabella Hammad, Lance Olsen, Diane Williams, Laird Hunt, Laynie Browne, Wendy Xu, JoAnna Novak, Megan Kakimoto, Quincy Troupe, Tomaž Šalamun, Julia Elliott, and Robert Coover, with a foreword by Rick Moody.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Fred D’Aguiar’s books include the novel Children of Paradise, the poetry collection Letters to America, and the forthcoming memoir, Year of Plagues.
In 2016, Samuel R. Delany was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. His books include the Return to Neveryon series; an autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water; and the paired essays Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
Ann Lauterbach’s tenth poetry collection, Spell, was published by Penguin. She is David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, and has been a contributing editor to Conjunctions since 1984.
Sofia Samatar is the author of four books, most recently Monster Portraits. Her fiction has received several honors, including the World Fantasy Award. Her memoir, The White Mosque, is forthcoming from Catapult Books.
Bradford Morrow is the author of ten books of fiction and the founding editor of Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal.
#
The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”
Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions showcases innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.
For more information on the latest issue, please visit http://www.conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail conjunctions@bard.edu, or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.
[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail primoff@bard.edu]
# # #
(6.22.21)Post Date: 06-23-2021
Bard College Anthropology Professor John Ryle Awarded an OBE, Officer of the Order of the British Empire
John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College and cofounder of the Rift Valley Institute, has been awarded an OBE, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, “for services to research and education in Sudan, South Sudan and the Horn of Africa.” The educational work that Ryle does in Eastern Africa—in collaboration with Tom Odhiambo, a colleague at the University of Nairobi—takes place largely under the auspices of the Open Society University Network and Bard.Bard College Anthropology Professor John Ryle Awarded an OBE, Officer of the Order of the British Empire
“The award of the OBE recognizes the growing importance of the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) over the past two decades,” said Ryle, thanking RVI staff, interns, consultants, fellows and board members, past and present, for their contributions to the development of the Institute, in particular current Executive Director Mark Bradbury. “I would also like to thank Bard College, where I teach, which for many years has given the Institute a home in the United States. I am grateful for the professional and personal support I have had from the President, Leon Botstein, and from colleagues in the Anthropology and Human Rights Programs. I am happy that the Open Society University Network—led by Bard and the Central European University—now includes the Rift Valley Institute as one of its core partners.”
“Bard is very proud of the high honor bestowed on our esteemed colleague, John Ryle, a wonderful teacher and mentor,” said Bard President Leon Botstein.
About John Ryle
John Ryle is a writer, teacher, filmmaker, publisher, and social activist, specializing in Eastern Africa and Brazil. He was born in England and educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford University. Ryle has been Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College since 2007, and currently is leading the Open Society University Network’s (OSUN) Oral History and Literature graduate-level seminar with Dr. Tom Odhiambo of the University of Nairobi. Ryle also serves as director of studies for OSUN’s Eastern Africa Hub for Connected Learning Initiatives.
In 2000, with Jok Madut Jok and Philip Winter, Ryle founded the Rift Valley Institute, a research, training and public information organization operating in Eastern Africa. He was executive director of the Institute from 2001 to 2017 and currently leads an RVI research project on the role of customary authorities in South Sudan. He has been an activist in the international landmines ban campaign, anti-slavery movement, LGBTQI rights, and open access publishing. He was a board member of the Open Society Landmines project and a member of the International Eminent Persons Group, which reported on slavery and abduction in Sudan.
From 1995 to 2000, Ryle was a weekly columnist for the Guardian, and he has been a contributor to the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Granta, and Times Literary Supplement. He has served on the boards of the Media Development Investment Fund, Human Rights Watch Africa, and the journal African Affairs. In 1996–97, he was a research fellow of Nuffield College Oxford; and, in 2015–16, a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
In the late 1980s, Ryle was a project officer for the Ford Foundation in Brazil and subsequently lived in an Afro-Brazllian religious community in Salvador da Bahia. In the 1990s, he was a consultant to relief and development organizations in Sudan and the Horn of Africa. Previously, he worked as a doorman at the Embassy Club in London, as a roustabout for the Royal American Shows and the Canadian Pacific Railway, and as a ghostwriter for Mick Jagger.
Ryle’s publications include: Warriors of the White Nile, 1984, an account of the Dinka people of South Sudan; The Sudan Handbook, 2011, coedited with Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut; Peace is the Name of my Cattle Camp: Local responses to conflict in Eastern Lakes State, 2018 (with Machot Amuom); and What Happened at Wunlit? An oral history of the 1999 Wunlit peace agreement in South Sudan (editor; 2021).
Ryle was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen’s 2021 Birthday Honours for services to research and education in Sudan, South Sudan, and the Horn of Africa.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
# # #
(6/21/21)Post Date: 06-21-2021
More CFCD News
-
Author, Educator, Classicist, and Tattooer Phuc Tran ’95 to Give Book Talk in Honor of World Refugee Day
Author, Educator, Classicist, and Tattooer Phuc Tran ’95 to Give Book Talk in Honor of World Refugee Day
On Friday June 25, author, educator, classicist, tattooer, and Bard College alumnus Phuc Tran ’95 will give a book talk in honor of World Refugee Day. Tran’s talk is presented by Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, the Office of the President, and Alumni/ae Affairs, along with the OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives. This special event, which takes place at 5 p.m. EDT, will be moderated by James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program. Join via Zoom link.
Phuc Tran ’95, who migrated with his family from Vietnam in 1975, has been a high school Latin teacher for more than 20 years while simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. Tran graduated from Bard College in 1995 with a BA in Classics and received the Callanan Classics Prize. He taught Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in New York at the Collegiate School and was an instructor at Brooklyn College’s Summer Latin Institute. Most recently, he taught Latin, Greek, and German at the Waynflete School in Portland, Maine.
Tran’s 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s TED Radio Hour. His acclaimed memoir, SIGH, GONE: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction. He tattoos and lives with his family in Portland, Maine.
Bard College has a deep and longstanding history as a sanctuary and refuge for vulnerable populations. Beginning in the mid-1930s and throughout the war years, Bard gave refuge to distinguished writers, artists, intellectuals, and scientists fleeing Nazi Europe. Since the 1980s, Bard has brought scholars at risk from Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East to teach and do research in Annandale-on-Hudson, and continued its strong commitment to refugees directly through initiatives such as the Bard Sanctuary Fund, which supports undocumented students and refugees by providing scholarship, living, legal, and other necessary support while they are enrolled at Bard.
Bard’s global work to support refugees and advance human rights was strengthened profoundly in 2020 when the College cofounded the Open Society University Network (OSUN) with Central European University and support from the Open Society Foundations. Providing access to students from communities that have faced barriers and exclusion, including incarcerated people, the Roma, refugees, and other displaced groups is a central part of OSUN’s work to make higher education more inclusive and accessible worldwide. Supporting that work, OSUN was elected cochair in 2020 of the Taskforce on Third Country Education Pathways, launched by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. The task force is charged with developing best practices for higher education pathways that respond to the needs of refugees, internally displaced individuals, and others displaced by crises across the globe.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
Post Date: 06-17-2021
-
Award-Winning Literary Journal Conjunctions and Founding Editor Bradford Morrow Celebrate Fortieth Anniversary in Latest Issue
Award-Winning Literary Journal Conjunctions and Founding Editor Bradford Morrow Celebrate Fortieth Anniversary in Latest Issue
In 1981, the price of a first-class stamp rose from 15 cents to 20, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, MTV started broadcasting, the first space shuttle, Columbia, was launched, the AIDS virus was identified, and Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice. Nineteen eighty-one was also the year that twenty-something Bradford Morrow founded and edited the first issue of a literary journal called Conjunctions. Since Conjunctions:1 brought together Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Octavio Paz, Josephine Miles, John Hawkes, and dozens of others, the journal has published nearly two thousand writers—some avowed masters, some at the beginnings of their careers. As Morrow notes with pride, Conjunctions has featured debut and very early appearances in print by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, William T. Vollmann, Can Xue, Forrest Gander, Brian Evenson, Chinelo Okparanta, Shelley Jackson, Mary Caponegro, Jim Crace, Martine Bellen, H. G. Carrillo, Nam Le, Robert Antoni, Raven Lelani, Vanessa Chan, and many others like Ben Okri, Julia Elliott, Karen Russell, and Isabella Hammad, who are included in the latest issue, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue (spring, 2021). The recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, Conjunctions continues to forge ahead some three decades after Bard College became its publisher, and four since it first saw the light of day.
In his Editor’s Note, novelist and Bard Literature Professor Morrow celebrates many moments across Conjunctions’ four decades, among them, trading ideas about starting a literary magazine with poet Kenneth Rexroth in the latter’s converted barn library, a launch party hosted by the Gotham Book Mart, an interview with Chinua Achebe in his modest home in Annandale for Conjunctions’ tenth anniversary issue, and the day he was “mesmerized by a story titled ‘Good Old Neon’ sent by a polite young guy named David Foster Wallace.”
“The way I wanted to set off into the future was by honoring the past, in particular one of my publishing heroes, James Laughlin, who had founded New Directions—home to Rexroth, Pound, Williams, Stein, et al.—and provided me with an informal education like no other,” says Morrow, winner of the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing a Literary Journal. “As I’ve written before, Conjunctions is a living notebook, one in which new voices, along with those of writers who are further along on their journeys, enrich and complicate the flow of literature. Even heralded masters were once unknown fledglings. And all are engaged in the difficult feat of gathering words, those everyday haggard incandescent things, into a poem or story or essay, part of an inspired and necessary continuum of which we’re honored to be a part.”
Longtime Conjunctions contributor Rick Moody writes, in the foreword to the Fortieth Anniversary Issue, that “it is not outrageous to say that [Conjunctions] is the best literary magazine in the United States of America” and praises Morrow for his editorial vision and unwavering leadership and support.
“At no time in these decades did I ever fail to know well the support of Bradford Morrow, nor did he ever forbear noting when I was not doing the job terribly well and could do better,” writes Moody. “And in this way did I always feel that I had a home in these pages, a situation I know is shared by many, many other writers, all of us feeling that we could rely on Conjunctions for its welcome, its standards, its consistent excellence, as a place that would take our furthest-out fancies, but also provide a consistently astounding residence, containing a worldview, an idea of literature, a confraternity of the surprising and original.”
Edited by Morrow, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue features hybrid fiction by Booker Prize–winning poet and novelist Ben Okri; a portfolio of poems by MacArthur fellow Ann Lauterbach; a short story by Pulitzer Prize recipient Richard Powers, and new writing by Karen Russell, Peter Cole, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, John Ashbery, Shane McCrae, William H. Gass, Can Xue, Fred D’Aguiar, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Julia Alvarez, Jayne Anne Phillips, Peter Orner, Diane Williams, and Robert Coover. Additional contributors to include Akil Kumarasamy, Joyce Carol Oates, Sofia Samatar, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jessica Campbell, Carole Maso, Genya Turovskaya, Mark Irwin, Sanjena Sathian, Rosmarie Waldrop, Colin Channer, Isabella Hammad, Lance Olsen, Laird Hunt, Laynie Browne, Wendy Xu, JoAnna Novak, Megan Kakimoto, Quincy Troupe, Tomaž Šalamun, Julia Elliott, and cover artist Oliver Lee Jackson.
The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”
Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2021, 2018, and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.
For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail conjunctions@bard.edu, or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.
[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, or to arrange interviews with Conjunctions Founding Editor Bradford Morrow please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail primoff@bard.edu.]# # #(6.16.21)
Post Date: 06-16-2021
-
Bard College Awarded 2021–22 Big Read Grant from National Endowment for the Arts for Community-Wide Reading Program in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston
Bard College Awarded 2021–22 Big Read Grant from National Endowment for the Arts for Community-Wide Reading Program in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in partnership with Arts Midwest, has awarded Bard College a $19,985 NEA Big Read grant to support the Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, a dynamic community-wide reading program offering reading groups, performances, workshops, and events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. Focused on the Big Read selection, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Big Read Hudson Valley, which takes place next March-April, 2022, is a collaboration among Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine, with support from Bard’s Written Arts Program, the Bard Conservatory, and Conjunctions literary journal, along with partner libraries and community organizations, including Radio Kingston, the Kingston Library, the Red Hook Library, Tivoli Library, Starr Library, the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History, Ramapo for Children, Oblong Books, and Rough Draft Bar & Books.
“For 15 years the NEA Big Read has supported opportunities for communities to come together around a book, creating a shared experience that encourages openness and conversations around issues central to our lives,” said Ann Eilers, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “We congratulate all of the new NEA Big Read grantees and look forward to seeing the range of meaningful activities they create for their communities.”
Big Read Hudson Valley is one of 61 grants totaling $1,070,000 supported by NEA Big Read in 2021-2022. The grants, managed by Arts Midwest, will support dynamic community reading programs designed to encourage conversation and discovery, all inspired by a book from the NEA Big Read library. The 2021-2022 NEA Big Read grantees are located in 28 states, with 43 percent of the organizations located in communities with populations under 50,000. Nearly half (44 percent) of the recipients are first-time recipients of an NEA Big Read grant. Each organization is receiving a matching grant ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.
About the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read
The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, a partnership with Arts Midwest, broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Since 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts has funded more than 1,700 NEA Big Read programs, providing more than $23 million to organizations nationwide. In addition, Big Read activities have reached every Congressional district in the country. Over the past 15 years, grantees have leveraged more than $50 million in local funding to support their NEA Big Read programs. More than 5.7 million Americans have attended an NEA Big Read event, over 90,000 volunteers have participated at the local level, and over 40,000 community organizations have partnered to make NEA Big Read activities possible. Visit arts.gov/neabigread for more information about the NEA Big Read, including reader resources—such as book overviews, discussion questions, and interviews with the authors—as well as community stories from past NEA Big Read grantees. Organizations interested in applying for an NEA Big Read grant in the future should visit Arts Midwest’s website for more information.
Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is the independent federal agency whose funding and support gives Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the Arts Endowment supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America. Visit arts.gov to learn more.
Arts Midwest believes that creativity has the power to inspire and unite humanity. Based in Minneapolis, Arts Midwest grows, gathers, and invests in creative organizations and communities throughout the nine-state region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. One of six nonprofit United States Regional Arts Organizations, Arts Midwest’s history spans more than 30 years. For more information, visit artsmidwest.org.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.# # #(6/10/21)
Post Date: 06-11-2021
-
Yarran Hominh to Join Faculty of Bard College Philosophy Program in Fall 2022
Yarran Hominh to Join Faculty of Bard College Philosophy Program in Fall 2022
Bard College is pleased to announce that Yarran Hominh will join the faculty of the Philosophy Program as assistant professor of philosophy, effective fall 2022. Hominh’s research sits at the intersection of moral psychology and social and political philosophy, drawing on the global pragmatist tradition in John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and B.R. Ambedkar, among others. His work examines how modern social and political institutions shape human agency, and how human agency can in turn be used to change those institutions. He also has research interests in philosophy of law, ethics, colonialism, early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of the social sciences.
About Yarran Hominh
Yarran Hominh’s dissertation is entitled The Problem of Unfreedom. It examines the question of whether people who are unfree can make themselves free, given that their agency is constrained and limited by the social institutions in which they live. Through examining key modern institutions of unfreedom, Hominh argues that the unfree can make themselves free. The problem of unfreedom is a vicious cycle. Social conditions constrain agency, which in turn further entrenches the social conditions. A virtuous cycle is possible. Agents can change their conditions, reducing the constraint on their agency, in turn enabling greater change. Hominh is working on a new project on the moral psychology of ongoing structural injustices. The project examines the role that emotions and attitudes like anger, blame, hope, trust, and distrust play in continuing and in addressing structural injustices. His work has been published in The Pluralist, Res Publica, and the Australasian Journal of Legal Philosophy, among other venues.
He is the associate editor of the American Philosophical Association’s APA Newsletter on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies, and has been an organizer with the Graduate Workers of Columbia UAW Local-2110 and with the Minorities and Philosophy initiative. Before taking his PhD at Columbia University, where, among other things, he served as a lead teaching fellow and senior lead teaching fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning, Hominh completed undergraduate and master’s degrees in philosophy and law from the University of Sydney. Before joining Bard in fall 2022, he will spend the 2021-2022 academic year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.# # #(6/2/21)
Post Date: 06-02-2021
-
Bard College’s Award-Winning Literary Magazine Conjunctions Celebrates the Launch of Its 40th Anniversary Issue with an Online Reading Hosted by Oblong Books on June 4
Bard College’s Award-Winning Literary Magazine Conjunctions Celebrates the Launch of Its 40th Anniversary Issue with an Online Reading Hosted by Oblong Books on June 4
On June 4, novelist and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow, founding editor of Conjunctions, hosts an online evening of readings to celebrate the publication of the 40TH anniversary issue of Conjunctions, the celebrated literary journal published by Bard College. Morrow will be joined by Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue contributors Robert Coover, Akil Kumarasamy, Shane McCrae, and Karen Russell. The livestreamed event, presented by Conjunctions and Oblong Books, takes place Friday, June 4, at 7 p.m. For reservations, please click here.
Edited by Morrow and published by Bard College in spring 2021, Conjunctions:76, Fortieth Anniversary Issue celebrates forty years in print, with new and previously unpublished work by Ben Okri, Karen Russell, Peter Cole, Ann Lauterbach, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Akil Kumarasamy, John Ashbery, Joyce Carol Oates, Sofia Samatar, Richard Powers, Shane McCrae, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William H. Gass, Can Xue, Jessica Campbell, Fred D’Aguiar, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carole Maso, Julia Alvarez, Genya Turovskaya, Mark Irwin, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sanjena Sathian, Peter Orner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Colin Channer, Isabella Hammad, Lance Olsen, Diane Williams, Laird Hunt, Laynie Browne, Wendy Xu, JoAnna Novak, Megan Kakimoto, Quincy Troupe, Tomaž Šalamun, Julia Elliott, and Robert Coover, with a foreword by Rick Moody.
For more information, visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76.
ABOUT THE READERS
Robert Coover has published more than twenty books of fiction and plays, including A Child Again (McSweeney’s, 2005), Noir (Overlook, 2010), The Brunist Day of Wrath (Dzanc, 2014), and Huck Out West (Norton, 2017). He is a pioneer in the field of electronic writing, and founded the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write program, at Brown University.
Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the story collection Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). She is the 2021 recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize and an Assistant Professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program.
Shane McCrae’s most recent poetry collections are Sometimes I Never Suffered and The Gilded Auction Block (both Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In 2021, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center will release an expanded edition of his first book, Mule. McCrae has received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award.
Karen Russell’s books include the novella Sleep Donation (Vintage, 2020), the story collection Orange World (Knopf, 2019), and the novel Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award.
Bradford Morrow is the author of ten books of fiction and the founding editor of Conjunctions. A Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College, he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal.
#
The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”
Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions showcases innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2021, The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.
For more information on the latest issue, please visit http://www.conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions76. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail conjunctions@bard.edu, or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.
[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail primoff@bard.edu]# # #(6.2.21)
Post Date: 06-02-2021
-
Bard History Professor Jeannette Estruth Awarded J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship by the American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress
Bard History Professor Jeannette Estruth Awarded J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship by the American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress
The American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library Of Congress has awarded Bard College History professor Jeannette Estruth the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History. The annual award is offered annually to support significant scholarly research in the collections of the Library of Congress by scholars at an early stage in their careers in history. The fellowship is named in honor of J. Franklin Jameson, a founder of the American Historical Association, longtime managing editor of the American Historical Review, formerly chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the first incumbent of the library’s chair of American history.
Jeannette Alden Estruth is an assistant professor of American History at Bard College, and a faculty associate at the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She received her doctorate in history, with honors, from New York University in 2018. In 2019, Estruth’s book project was a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Huntington Library, the University of Virginia Miller Center, and the Berkshire Conference. Estruth’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Business Insider, Public Seminar, and Enterprise and Society, among others. Prior to her doctoral work, she worked at Harvard University Press and the Radical History Review. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States.# # #(6/2/21)
Post Date: 06-02-2021