2022
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Thursday, December 8, 2022 PASOLINI AND THE SACRED Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian filmmaker, poet, journalist, and public intellectual. Contradiction defined his life and work: he was a communist who rejected and was rejected by the Italian communist party, a gay man who refused to be a spokesperson for the gay community, a bourgeois intellectual who idealized the subproletariat. He was also an avowed atheist whose gaze was turned obsessively toward representations of the sacred. He sought out the sacred in lands far removed from his own—places like Yemen and Tanzania—while still hoping to find traces of it in the fast-paced world of his native Italy during the post-War economic boom. The figure of Christ was omnipresent in his works, as was the ambiguous specter of the Catholic Church. He invested in the sacred as a language, an aesthetic, a currency, a lost past, and a fading present. In this discussion, we will explore Pasolini’s complex, often contradictory views on the sacred. Email: [email protected] with questions. |
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Monday, November 14, 2022 Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Bard’s new Carceral Studies speaker series launches with a visit from the NYU Prison Education Project. Their recently published book Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality explores how the car, despite its association with American freedom and mobility, functions at the crossroads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility– the American debt economy and the carceral state. We will be joined by four of the Lab members, a group representing formerly incarcerated scholars and non-formerly incarcerated NYU faculty. |
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Tuesday, October 25, 2022 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Dmitri Bykov is a preeminent Russian author of prose fiction, poetry, biography, and essays, who is currently residing in exile in the United States as a vocal critic of Putin's regime. His hugely popular “Citizen Poet” project, launched in 2011, provided poetic commentary on contemporary political and cultural events, as Bykov's numerous articles, broadcasts, interviews, and blogs still do, aiming “to help Russia to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.” In this lecture Bykov explores the roots and sources of Putin’s mythology, explains his success in capturing public opinion in Russia and predicts the decline of his political era. Bykov examines in detail the origin of Putin’s image and the meaning of secret service in Russian collective subconsciousness. Woland of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1967); Ostap Bender of Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Little Golden Calf (1931); and Colonel Stierlitz, the hero of the 1973 Soviet TV series about a Soviet spy operating in Nazi Germany, are the true heroes of Bykov’s analysis, while “the small bureaucrat Putin” is relegated to its margins. |
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Thursday, October 20, 2022 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Russia escalated the war against Ukraine eight months ago, shocking the world and leading to a major upheaval in international politics. The goal of this roundtable is to explicate why this happened from an analytical distance. Bard scholars Sean McMeekin, Archie Magno, and Michelle Murray will discuss the causes and effects of Russia’s assault against the neighboring state in the context of general problems of war and peace that humanity, mutatis mutandis, has faced throughout its history. Three decades between the attack on Ukraine and the end of the Cold War revived age-long dreams of eternal peace due to an impression that the most bitter national and ideological antagonisms in Eastern Europe belonged to the past. Many “new wars” (Mary Caldor) abounded, but they remained relatively small-scale and asymmetrical. Before February 24, 2022, war itself appeared to many to be illegitimate, since it was portrayed in Western media as a clash between the forces of civilized democracies and those of authoritarian “rogue states.” Now, in contrast, the world seems to be thrown back to the earlier patterns of aggression, reminiscent of “old” wars of imperial conquest and geopolitical competition among great powers. Along with the participants of the roundtable, the Bard community is invited to ponder the gravity of this situation from the perspectives of history, political science, and philosophy. |
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Friday, September 30, 2022
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The talk will explore current challenges related to voting rights, including jurisprudence regarding the 26th Amendment (which lowered the voting age to 18), voting on college campuses, including the litigation at Bard, and issue of non-citizen voters. Attorneys, Michael Donofrio and Douglas Mishkin, who helped shape Bard’s legal case with regard to voting rights on campus, will join Yael for the Q&A portion of the talk. In addition to Yael Bromberg’s work with AGF, she serves as a Lecturer at Rutgers Law School, where she teaches Election Law & the Political Process, and is a Visiting Associate with the Eagleton Institute of Politics. She currently works with the Harvard Kennedy School's William Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice on a youth voting rights project, and serves on the advisory council for American Promise, an organization dedicated to ending big money in our political system. She previously worked in the Washington, D.C. headquarters of Common Cause, and taught and supervised litigation in Georgetown University Law Center’s Civil Rights Clinic and Voting Rights Institute. |
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Monday, May 9, 2022
Henderson 106 (Mac Lab) 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In February 2022, Russia launched an unprovoked, genocidal attack against the Ukrainian people. This lecture will review the origins of the conflict, how the United States and our NATO allies are likely to respond and what possible outcomes are on the horizon. Scott Licamele ’91 is a Russia expert with over 20 years of experience dealing in the former Soviet Union. He has worked in various Russia-related capacities, including capital markets (at Sberbank CIB, Troika Dialog, and Alfa Bank) and government-related activities (at an NGO in Russia which was funded by the United States Information Agency in the 1990s). Licamele has lived and worked in Russia and Ukraine for seven years and is fluent in Russian. He is a graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he studied Russian political economy. He received his BA in European History at Bard College. Licamele is currently unaffiliated with any Russia-related business or political entities. |
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Thursday, April 28, 2022 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Stanford University This event is presented on Zoom. 11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olympic design needs to express the universal values that the Olympic Movement promotes, and it should be understood easily by a global audience; at the same time, it needs to set the host apart from other nations visually and highlight the uniqueness of its culture. This is a particularly difficult task for non-Western countries, whose national culture and identity can easily fall victim to Orientalism when presented on the world stage. This lecture examines the design style and strategies chosen for the 1988 Summer Olympics and how this design project, which is deemed successful by many, “spectacularly failed” to understand the concepts such as universalism, modernity, modernist design, and Orientalism. Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung studies politics and aesthetics of modern design with a focus on South Korean and Silicon Valley design. She received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2020. Trained in graphic design, Gabrielle also writes on the issues of design and feminism. Her book project, Toward a Utopia Without Revolution: Globalization, Developmentalism, and Design, looks at political and aesthetic problems that modern design projects generated in South Korea, a country that has experienced not only rapid economic development but also immense political progress in less than a century, from the end of the World War II to the beginning of the new millennium. In Fall 2022, she will join the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine as Assistant Professor of Korean Art History. |
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Wednesday, April 27, 2022 Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 When the U.S. military finally withdrew from Afghanistan, an old tally reappeared in the news. Our “forever wars” were not only the live military operations we’d pursued in the Middle East since 9/11; they also encompassed some 500 U.S. bases and installations all over the world, stretching back to the early 20th century. Some call this “empire;” some call it “security,” even “altruism.” In East Asia, the long arm of U.S. power reaches intimately into people’s lives. South Korea has hosted U.S. military personnel since World War II and remains a primary base of operations in the Asia Pacific. Some thirty thousand U.S. soldiers and marines are stationed there, on more than 70 installations. In 2018, U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys opened in the city of Pyeongtaek, at a cost of $11 billion. Humphreys is now the largest overseas U.S. military base by size and the symbol of a new era in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Meanwhile, South Korea has become the tenth-richest country in the world and has one of the largest militaries—thanks to universal male conscription and an extraordinary budget. The country’s arms industry is also world-class, known for its planes, submarines, and tanks. This talk will draw on reporting and family history to explore the evolving U.S.-South Korea alliance. How do the martial investments of these historic “allies” affect the lives of ordinary South Koreans—and Korean Americans? And if the two Koreas are still technically at war, what kind of war is it? E. Tammy Kim is a freelance magazine reporter and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, covering labor issues, arts and culture, and the Koreas. She cohosts Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast on Asia and Asian America, and is a contributing editor at Lux, a new feminist socialist magazine. She holds fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Type Media Center. In 2016, she and Yale ethnomusicologist Michael Veal published Punk Ethnography, a book about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary world music. Her first career was as a social justice lawyer in New York City. This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series. For more information, please contact Nate Shockey: [email protected]. |
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Thursday, April 21, 2022 Online Event 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4 The field of post/colonial East Asian cultural studies has recently rediscovered the transpacific potential of the theme of ethnic passing, a problematic that is deeply rooted in North American racial contexts but might serve to disrupt global fictions of race and power. Although tropes adjacent to ethnonational passing frequently appear in minority literatures produced in Japan, particularly Zainichi Korean fiction, the salience of the phenomenon was often obscured within the avowedly-integrative and assimilative cultural production of Japanese colonialism. This talk will challenge that aporia by demonstrating how the structural possibility of Korean passing left behind indelible traces of racialized paranoia in the writings of the Japanese colonial empire that have long outlived its fall. Introducing narratives and speech acts in Japanese from disparate genres, past and present, I argue that paranoia was as an effect of insecure imperial modes of containing the passing specters of Korea and Korean people uneasily absorbed within expanding Japan by colonial merger. I trace how disavowed anxieties of passing merge with fears of treachery, blurred borders, and the unreadability of ethnoracial difference in narrative scripts that traveled across space, from the colonial periphery to the Japanese metropole along with migrating bodies, between subjects, and through time. If imperial paranoia around passing took its most extreme expression in narratives of the murderous 1923 “Korean Panic,” popular Zainichi fiction today exposes not only the enduring structures of Japanese Koreaphobia (and Koreaphilia) but the persistence of shared anxieties and precarities binding former colonizer and colonized a century later. This meeting will be on Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89025574917 |
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Thursday, March 10, 2022 Online Event 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Covid-19 has become a staple headline for the past two years. Has it changed the way we communicate or write about pandemics? Amy Maxmen, an award-winning science writer who covers the entanglements of evolution, medicine, science policy and of the people behind research, will join us to discuss. Amy won the Victor Kohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting in 2021 for her body of work covering Covid-19 and other diseases. RSVP here |
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Thursday, February 24, 2022
Jorge Maldonado Rivera is a union representative with the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and a former staff organizer with UNITE HERE.
Campus Center, Yellow Room 214 3:30 pm – 4:50 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk is part of a speaker series on political organizing. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Engagement, the Human Rights Project, and the Political Studies program. It is open to all members of the Bard community, especially students interested in labor organizing. |
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Thursday, February 3, 2022 Online Event 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5 China will host the 2022 Winter Olympics amid controversy—the worsening Covid-19 pandemic and a diplomatic boycott of the games over China's treatment of the Uyghur Muslims. Should the games go on? Jules Boykoff says no—for reasons that go beyond COVID and genocide. The Olympics create serious problems for local populations. Join us for a discussion that looks at why the Olympics are broken. RSVP here |