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Professor Omar G. Encarnación for TIME Magazine: “Why Bolsonaro’s Conviction Matters”

For TIME magazine, Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics at Bard College, examines the significance of the recent conviction of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup to stay in power following his defeat in the 2022 Brazilian election.

Professor Omar G. Encarnación for TIME Magazine: “Why Bolsonaro’s Conviction Matters”

For TIME magazine, Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics at Bard College, examines the significance of the recent conviction of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup to stay in power following his defeat in the 2022 Brazilian election. Encarnación discusses the trial’s impact on Brazilian democracy, how it will affect US-Brazilian ties, and the importance of understanding how the prosecution was achieved. “No single factor accounts for Bolsonaro’s successful prosecution,” Encarnación writes. “Instead, there’s a mingling of legal, political, and societal factors. The main one is the assertion of judicial power by the Federal Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court. In the Bolsonaro era, these institutions have shown extraordinary independence in the pursuit of accountability.”

The Politics Program at Bard welcomes students who care about politics and want to reason critically about political outcomes and debates at the local, national, and international levels. The program is designed to inform responsible participation in American and global public affairs, and prepares students for work and further study in political science, international affairs, public policy, law, cultural studies, and related fields.

Further reading: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/brazil/irony-trumps-spat-brazil
Read More in TIME

Post Date: 09-24-2025

Omar G. Encarnación Published in the New York Times Opinion Section

Professor Omar G. Encarnación wrote about Spain’s recent innovations in human rights for the New York Times Opinion Section. His essay “Spain Is an Example to the World” argues Spain has taken a “humane and pragmatic approach” to migration by welcoming a large number of immigrants from outside Europe.

Omar G. Encarnación Published in the New York Times Opinion Section

Professor Omar G. Encarnación wrote about Spain’s recent innovations in human rights for the New York Times Opinion Section. His essay “Spain Is an Example to the World” argues Spain has taken a “humane and pragmatic approach” to migration, welcoming in a large number of immigrants from outside Europe. Spain’s economy depends on immigrant workers, Encarnación writes, and the country has progressive attitudes about immigration in general. Despite recent challenges, the country is proving immigration is “a resource for growth and renewal that Spain’s peers spurn at their cost.”

Encarnación studies South American and Southern European politics, focused on democratization, social movements, and LGBTQ politics. He has taught at Bard since 1998.
Read the Essay in the New York Times

Post Date: 08-13-2025

Professor Simon Gilhooley Wins an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship

Simon Gilhooley received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The fellowship will support Gilhooley’s book project which focuses on the correspondence of Declaration signers John Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Treat Paine, and the papers of key political families of the period.

Professor Simon Gilhooley Wins an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship

Associate Professor of Politics Simon Gilhooley received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society for 2025–26. The fellowship will support his project "The Declaration of Independence as Constitutional Authority in the Long Nineteenth Century," which studies how political actors across American history have invoked the Declaration not just as a rhetorical device but as a set of principles to guide interpretation of the Constitution. He is one of only nine individuals offered an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for the upcoming academic year.
Gilhooley’s book project will focus on the correspondence of Declaration signers John Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Treat Paine, and the papers of key political families of the period, all of which he will consult during the fellowship. Awardees receive $3,000 to complete four weeks of residency.
More About the Fellowship

Post Date: 06-10-2025
More News
  • William Helman ’25 Receives Hudson Institute Fellowship

    William Helman ’25 Receives Hudson Institute Fellowship

    Bard graduate William Helman ’25 has been announced as a recipient of the Political Studies Summer Fellowship in the Theory and Practice of Politics by the Hudson Institute. Helman’s fellowship will run from June 15 through July 25, during which he will engage in daily seminar classes and policy workshops at the think tank’s headquarters in Washington, DC. Seminars will examine works such as Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, along with selections from the Federalist Papers, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and current scholarship on American foreign policy. “William has a profound engagement with the theory and practice of politics, so I have no doubt this is the start of a very bright future for him,” said Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History and Helman’s advisor. “He has just written an outstanding History and Film Studies senior project on elections and political advertising in the 1980s and 1990s, so this is a chance for him to put some of that history and communication theory to the test somewhere that sits at the intersection between the worlds of politics and ideas.”

    Post Date: 06-02-2025
  • Lucas G. Pinheiro Named a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study

    Lucas G. Pinheiro Named a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study

    Assistant Professor of Politics Lucas G. Pinheiro has been named a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey, for the 2025-2026 academic year. One of two scholars chosen from liberal arts colleges, he will join 21 colleagues to pursue a year of intense study focused on interdisciplinary exchange. The Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 1930 as a scholarly refuge where members could pursue research without administrative responsibilities.

    Pinheiro will use his time at the Institute to work on his book project Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch. The book imagines the factory as a foundational institution in the histories of modern political thought and global capitalism, using case studies to trace the factory’s evolution across Britain, Africa, and the Americas. Pinheiro’s research focuses on the development of global capitalism, empire, racial slavery, and abolition in the Atlantic world from the late 17th century to today.

    Post Date: 05-19-2025
  • Omar G. Encarnación Reflects on the Legacy of the First Latin American Pope

    Omar G. Encarnación Reflects on the Legacy of the First Latin American Pope

    For Time magazine, Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics at Bard, considers the legacy of Pope Francis after his passing on Easter Monday. Although Francis did not reverse the decline of Catholicism in Latin America, as the Vatican had hoped, he did transform the Church in the image of Latin America, writes Encarnación. In his first papal announcement, Francis denounced the twin evils of poverty and inequality, citing “idolatry of money” and criticizing “unfettered capitalism as a new tyranny,” ideas drawn from Liberation Theology, a progressive philosophy originating in Latin America that married Marxist critiques of capitalism with traditional Catholic concerns for the poor and marginalized. The Argentine pontiff’s second legacy, informed by an understanding of the devastating impacts of Amazonian deforestation especially on vulnerable populations, was that he “unambiguously aligned the Vatican with the fight against climate change.” Pope Francis’s third and most surprising legacy, asserts Encarnación, was his support of the LGBTQ community’s struggle for dignity and respect, a perspective shaped by the divisive culture war over same-sex marriage in Argentina, the first country in Latin America to legalize gay marriage in July 2010. “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” the Pope once said when asked about homosexuals in the Catholic clergy. Encarnación writes, “he made the Church more progressive at a time when the far-right is ascendant around the globe. Whether that direction continues will be up to the next Pontiff. But one thing is certain: Francis will be a tough act to follow.”
    Read in Time

    Post Date: 04-23-2025
  • Ella Walko ’26 Recognized for Voter Registration, Education, and Turnout Efforts

    Ella Walko ’26 Recognized for Voter Registration, Education, and Turnout Efforts

    Walko ’26 Is One of 232 College Students Nationwide Recognized for Their Nonpartisan Voter Registration and Turnout Successes in 2024

    Bard College and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge (ALL IN) honored Ella Walko ’26 as part of the fourth annual ALL IN Student Voting Honor Roll. The 2025 ALL IN Student Voting Honor Roll recognizes college students at participating campuses who have gone above and beyond to advance nonpartisan student voter registration, education and turnout efforts in their communities. Ella Walko ’26 is one of 232 students who mobilized their fellow students to make their voices heard in a historic election cycle. At Bard, Walko is majoring in politics with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. She is actively involved with Election@Bard, a student-led initiative that helps students register to vote, provides information about candidates, hosts forums in which candidates and students can meet, and protects the rights of students to vote and have their votes counted.

    “The Bard Center for Civic Engagement chose to honor Ella on the All-In Student Honor Roll because she exemplifies all of the best qualities of a Bard student,” said Sarah deVeer ’17, Bard CCE Outreach Coordinator Special Events Administrator. “Ella is a dynamic and consistently hardworking leader, who has risen to meet the needs of her generation through her work on the Election@Bard team. Ella is one of the most communicative, intentional, and collaborative forces of a student that I have had the pleasure of working with. We look forward to seeing where Ella's post-Bard journey takes her.”

    “I am honored to receive this award, but what is even more gratifying is working alongside my peers and team members to build an informed, engaged, and civically active community,” said Walko. “I’m so proud of our efforts this past year and all we’ve been able to accomplish!”

    “Whether they hosted nonpartisan voter registration drives or early voting celebrations, the students honored today made sure their peers did not sleep in on Election Day,” said Jen Domagal-Goldman, Executive Director of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. “With 100,000 local elections happening across the country in 2025, ALL IN students continue to ensure that everyone on their campuses has the information they need to cast their ballot. The 232 Student Voting Honor Roll honorees lead by example, making nonpartisan voter participation a lifelong habit for themselves and their peers.” 

    A recent survey from CIRCLE found that 48% of under-35 youth who did not vote in 2024 heard little or nothing at all about how to vote, compared to the 15% of under-35 youth who cast their ballots. By integrating nonpartisan voter registration and education into campus life, colleges and universities can have a measurable impact in encouraging students to become active and engaged citizens.

    The ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge empowers colleges and universities to achieve excellence in nonpartisan student civic engagement. With the support of the ALL IN staff, campuses that join the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge complete a set of action items to institutionalize nonpartisan civic learning, voter participation and ongoing engagement in our democracy on their campus. The ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge engages more than 1,000 institutions enrolling over 10 million students in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Campuses can join ALL IN here. 

    Post Date: 04-10-2025
  • Bard College Student Aleksandar Vitanov ’25 Named a Schwarzman Scholar

    Bard College Student Aleksandar Vitanov ’25 Named a Schwarzman Scholar

    Bard College senior Aleksandar Vitanov ’25 has been announced as a recipient of a prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship for 2025-26. Vitanov, who is pursuing a double degree in Politics and Music Performance at Bard and the Bard Conservatory, is one of 150 scholars—representing 38 countries and 105 universities from around the world—who will receive the opportunity to attend a one-year, fully-funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

    “I am very grateful to the Schwarzman Scholars Program for this opportunity,” Vitanov said. “I would also like to express my appreciation to my family and all of my mentors for their support throughout my journey.”

    Schwarzman Scholars has become one of the most selective graduate fellowship programs, with this year’s admitted students marking its tenth cohort. The program supports up to 200 students annually and is designed to build a global community of future leaders who will serve to deepen understanding between China and the rest of the world. This year, Schwarzman Scholars received the highest number of applications in its ten-year history, with the class of 2025-26 selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 candidates worldwide.

    “Our tenth cohort fills me with optimism for the future,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, founding trustee of Schwarzman Scholars. “This year’s selected Scholars are keenly interested in learning about China and broadening their understanding of global affairs, which are both now more important than ever. Our network, now ten classes strong, is already starting to make a global impact, and I am proud of our program’s continued success. I look forward to watching this inspiring community continue to grow.”

    Vitanov, originally from North Macedonia, is a student fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center and founder and former president of the Alexander Hamilton Society at Bard. He interned at Hudson’s Europe and Eurasia Center and Charney Research. Vitanov also founded the Musical Mentorship Initiative to provide free music education to Bard’s local community, and won, with a group of classmates, the Davis Projects for Peace prize to expand the initiative to Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya. As a Schwarzman Scholar, Vitanov hopes to study China’s strategy in Southeastern Europe.


    Post Date: 01-15-2025
  • Omar Encarnación Speaks with Reuters About the Political Fates of Trump and Bolsonaro

    Omar Encarnación Speaks with Reuters About the Political Fates of Trump and Bolsonaro

    Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies at Bard, was interviewed in Reuters in an article discussing how the political fortunes of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, and former US president Donald Trump have sharply diverged despite having long been aligned. That Trump will return to the White House despite several court cases while Bolsonaro is sidelined from upcoming elections is due to starkly different tools each country has for holding politicians accountable, Encarnación told Reuters. Trump was impeached twice by a Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives, but his Republican allies in the Senate held enough seats to acquit him. “It's one party out of only two, it buys enormous coverage for Trump, quite in contrast to Bolsonaro,” Encarnación said.
     
    Read more in Reuters

    Post Date: 11-25-2024

Political Studies Events

  • 10/23
    Thursday

    Thursday, October 23, 2025
    George Shulman, Professor Emeritus, NYU Gallatin
    Olin Humanities, Room 204 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Prof. Shulman’s paper explores the "the Dionysian" in the work of Nietzsche and Norman O. Brown, as mediated by  Freud and Melanie Klein. It works through 2 basic questions: what did this trope denote and connote?  Does the idea "the Dionysian" explain the fascist threat to democratic politics, or does it render both the premise of democratic politics and the crucial antidote to fascism? 

    Please contact Pınar Kemerli at [email protected] for a copy of the paper ahead of the workshop.

    5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olin Humanities, Room 204
  • 10/28
    Tuesday

    Tuesday, October 28, 2025
    John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology, in conversation with Peter Rosenblum, Professor of International Law and Human Rights
    Olin Humanities, Room 203 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    The Human Rights Project Presents: Corporate Social Responsibility for War Crimes in Sudan: A Witness Perspective on the Lundin Oil Trial.

    In most of the world the human rights movement is under threat or in retreat. In Sweden, however, the government has launched a large-scale criminal prosecution of the directors of a Swedish oil exploration company, Lundin Oil, for complicity in war crimes.

    Ian Lundin and his colleague Alex Schneiter stand accused of involvement in violent displacement and killing of civilians in a remote area of South Sudan during the 1983-2005 civil war ("Oil Billionaire Ian Lundin Risks Jail was the headline in Bloomberg News). According to an article in Politico, it is the first time since the Nuremberg trials that senior executives of a large company have been arraigned for war crimes. The trial, which began in 2023 and is due to end next year, is the longest and costliest in Swedish history.

    The directors of Lundin Oil are accused of aiding Sudan government military forces in a campaign of forced displacement in their concession area. The prosecution alleges that Lundin requested security for their exploration operations from the government of Sudan, aware that this would involve violent displacement of civilians. 

    Professor John Ryle is a specialist in Sudan with field experience in the oil zone, and was called to testify in July 2025 in the District court in Stockholm. He will describe the experience of testifying – and being cross-examined by the defense  – with clips from field video recordings that were played in court. Other topics to be discussed include the wider effect of oil exploration on the communities in the oil zone, and the global importance of the Lundin case in bringing to account corporate interests working in natural resource extraction, including reference to some other recent cases: the attempts under the US Alien Tort Statute to hold US oil companies to account in Sudan and Nigeria, civil prosecutions of Shell Oil in the Netherlands, and cases in France against TotalEnergies regarding the company's operations in Mozambique.

    5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olin Humanities, Room 203
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2025

Friday, October 10, 2025
  A Talk with the President of French Polynesia, Moetai Brotherson
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
As the prospects of deep sea mining increase in the region, French Polynesia bears the weight of nuclear testing and unfinished decolonization in the Pacific.  Its journey illustrates the quest for justice, resilience, and lasting peace across the region. 
President Brotherson is from Tahiti. He has a degree in computer science and has  held various offices in the region since 2001. In 2007 he published a novel, Le Roi Absent (“The Absent King”). In 2010 he participated in the O Tahiti Nui Freedom expedition, which sailed a single-hulled Polynesian outrigger canoe from Tahiti to Shangha. French Polynesia is an autonomous overseas collectivity of France.  He has been president since 2023.


Friday, April 11, 2025
Moderated by Daniel Brinkerhoff Young, Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Union College
Union College, Lippmann 100  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for the third session of the Hudson Valley Political Theory Workshop this Friday, April 11. Spring Semester workshops will take place at Union College. The Hudson Valley Political Theory Workshop is a new collaborative project launched by Bard College and Union College. The workshop aims to bring together political theorists working in or near the Hudson Valley Region in a series of workshops to share their work in progress, create new networks, and open up possibilities for new collaborative research projects that further advance humanities.We are delighted to welcome Daniel Brinkerhoff Young, Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Union College.


Tuesday, April 8, 2025
  Memory-Studies Talk Series: Elise Giuliano
Olin Humanities, Room 303  12:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk discusses Dr Giuliano's current research about discourse among ethnic minority populations in Russia’s regions and how to think about the subjectivity and identity of ethnic minorities in multi-ethnic states. Following the end of communist rule in eastern Europe in 1989, most of the new nation-states dedicated themselves to reconstructing a history that viewed Soviet domination following WWII as a departure from their nation’s natural democratic path. Leaders in the post-Soviet states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took a more differentiated approach, especially with regard to the recent Soviet past. In Ukraine, especially since Russia’s invasion in 2022, public memory about Soviet history has become more urgent and politicized. This talk will consider what varied interpretations of critical historical episodes mean for the attempt to define a coherent nation-state and discuss how citizens’ lived experiences and personal family histories interact with attempts by political authorities to define a common public memory.


Download: Giuliano.pdf

Friday, March 28, 2025
  Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join the Alexander Hamilton Society at Bard for an insightful discussion with diplomat and public servant Matthew Nimetz. On March 28th at 5 pm, Nimetz will explore the state of American foreign policy under a second Trump administration. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from an expert with decades of experience in diplomacy, law, and public service.


Download: Poster-for-AHS-Speaker-EventMatthew-Nimetz.pdf

Politics Resources

  • Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program
  • Politics Library Resources
  • Hannah Arendt Center
  • Center for Civic Engagement
  • Center for the Study of the Drone
  • Bard Abroad
  • Division of Social Studies
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