Bard Common Courses

Faculty: Jack Ferver, Dumaine Williams, Jaime Alves, Erin Braselmann, and Corey Sullivan

Disability and Difference is a Common Course that utilizes close readings of canonical and contemporary texts; critical and creative writing assignments; films; movement explorations; and  guest lectures to deepen students’ understanding of disability and difference. Students will work with the cohort of professors in different contexts throughout the course, as well as collaboratively with their classmates on analytic and creative projects. Professor Alves will offer a set of literary-critical tools for analyzing how texts featuring disability represent the experience of living with a nonconforming body and/or mind. Students will explore various literary forms---including short fiction, poetry, and the essay---and consider how such texts operate in the creation of disability as a category of identity. Professor Braselmann will help students engage with first-person narratives describing the lived experience of disability. Students will examine the importance of personal narrative to create societal change and challenge ableism. Professor Ferver will open the semester with body/mind centered physical practices. Through somatic experiencing, students will learn to connect to their own body and strengthen their subjective kinetic relationship. Prof. Sullivan will explore representations of identity and difference through a survey of self-portraiture in media history. Through this multidisciplinary study of the creative process, students will consider how each artist’s practice navigates and impacts perceptions of disability, while also reflecting on our own understandings and presentations of self. Professor Williams will examine how intersectional disability experiences and systems of disadvantage and exclusion impact the formation of disability identity and influence our cultural understanding of disability.

Faculty: Thomas Bartscherer

In 2001, Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the sole member of the United States Congress to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force that formed the legal foundation for military action in Afghanistan, and subsequently, many additional deployments of the U.S. military. Her vote was praised by many as courageous, and condemned by many others. Lee was celebrated in a poem by Fred Moten as “the unacknowledged legislator.” What is courage? In this course, we shall approach this question both directly and obliquely. We begin with Homer’s Iliad and with philosophical accounts from 5th century Athens. Should courage be understood the same way in all contexts? Is a warrior’s courage the same as that of a philosopher or a legislator? Who is truly courageous, the one who defends the regime, the one who critiques it, or both? Is the courage of Hektor or Achilles the same as that of Socrates or Antigone? Our discussion will proceed through close readings of philosophical texts and essays, both ancient and modern (Plato, Aristotle, Tillich, Arendt, Baldwin, Abani) and imaginative representations in literature and film (Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Fugard’s The Island, Bergman’s Shame). We will be asking, among other things, whether and in what way it makes sense to speak of a single virtue, courage, being manifest in varying circumstances and in different times and places; whether and in what sense courage brings people together or sets them apart; and what we may mean today when we characterize people or acts as courageous. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Joshua Boettiger

The classical period of Hebrew prophecy (8th century to 5th century BCE) yielded/inspired an extraordinary range of literature. While these prophetic works differ in many respects, much of it is consistent in terms of depicting the prophet as someone who embodies courage – especially in bringing their understanding of God to bear as a social and political critique. This course will explore some of these startling and powerful prophetic accounts – especially the books of Amos, Jeremiah, and the earlier saga of Elijah detailed in 1 Kings – in their historical contexts. Reading the prophets through the lens of courage, we will examine the phenomena of calling and covenant, the theology and philosophy of pathos, and look together at conflicting definitions of justice. Our core text will be Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets, though as the semester progresses we will expand outward to think about the prophetic impulse in modern contexts, including in the subsequent development of Judaism and Christianity, and also in the contemporary poetry of Ilya Kaminsky, C. D. Wright, and Chris Abani. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Maxim Botstein

What are the responsibilities of educational institutions and their members in times of political or social crisis? What are the forms that spiritual or intellectual courage (and cowardice, opportunism, and human frailty) take in such a context, and what relationships do thought and action, intellectual rigor and moral virtue, have to each other? This course will explore these questions, and others like them, by examining the history of German and American universities from the 1930s to the 1960s. We will look at the response of German academics to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and of Americans to McCarthyism and the Student Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. We will read the works of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, William F. Buckley Jr., and Sidney Hook with an eye towards the context which shaped their thought and philosophy, as well the writings of less well-known students and scholars who grappled with the same difficult questions, and helped shape modern higher education. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Jana Mader

In this course, we will explore the theme of courage in artistic encounters with nature. Through the lens of artists like Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Werner Herzog, we will examine how creative expression can serve as a powerful tool for environmental activism and cultural transformation. Literary works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring will illustrate the profound impact of courageous writing on ecological consciousness and conservation efforts. The course will delve into the ephemeral art of Andy Goldsworthy, whose creations, formed from natural materials, emphasize the transient beauty of nature and the impermanence of human interventions. We’ll also explore the bold and innovative approaches of filmmakers like Terrence Malick, whose films invite a spiritual contemplation of nature, and composers such as John Luther Adams, whose music evokes the vastness and power of the natural world. Throughout the semester, we will engage with various forms of creative expression, e.g. literature, visual arts, photography, film, music, and poetry, to examine how these artists and thinkers courageously confront the complexities of nature, whether by challenging societal norms, revealing uncomfortable truths about human impact on the environment, or inspiring a deeper, more mindful connection to the Earth. By the end of the course, we’ll have gained a deeper understanding of how art can both reflect and shape our perceptions of the natural world, and how courage in the arts can lead to profound environmental and social change. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Thomas Williams

Though many racists and anti-racists engage and portray “black” thinking and sensibility as homogenous, for as long as there has been a tradition of black thought in America there has also been a robust and formidable thread of contrarianism and heterodoxy to defy it—even to deny there is such a thing as “blackness” (or whiteness, for that matter) to begin with. It has become a cliché to pay lip service to the notion that "blackness is not a monolith," and yet so many of us continue to speak and act as if it were.  In this common course, which will be comprised of shared texts as well as the work of iconoclastic and independent black thinkers—from Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison to Barbara Fields, James Baldwin and Adrian Piper—we will examine the question of what it means to create and define the self in a shared world that too often imprisons us all in ready-made categories. We will explore the tension between the courage-to-be-with and the courage-to-be-apart, specifically focusing on the idea of acting in common and the intellectual and moral courage it takes to stand alone and the price of prioritizing self-authenticity over consensus and group cohesion. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Faculty: Maria Sonevytsky Iuliia Skubytska

This course’s core text will be Internationalism or Russification? by Ivan Dzyuba, a vital and understudied book from the tradition of mid-century Soviet Ukrainian anti-colonial and dissident thought. Our aim will be to juxtapose arguments from Dzyuba and other Ukrainian theorists against anti-, post-, and de-colonial thinkers from around the world, including Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Gerald Vizenor, Glen Coulthard, Sheryl Lightfoot, Walter Mignolo, and Madina Tlostanova. Theoretical debates will then be paired with case studies in Ukrainian culture, history, and political economy. Russia’s 21st century war of aggression against Ukraine has prompted many to reconsider Ukraine’s relationship to the question of what it means to “decolonize.” This course asserts that the study of Ukraine enriches and, at times, challenges the critical insights of theorists of decolonization. This present-day revaluation of Ukraine’s complex imperial inheritances has centered primarily on Ukraine’s historical relationship to the Russian Empire (and the Russocentric Soviet Union), often to the exclusion of Ukraine’s Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and other imperial inheritances. This tragic moment of reflection raises a number of bedeviling questions. Can we narrate a decolonial history of Ukraine? Is it possible, or desirable, to disentangle Ukrainian culture from empires of the past and present? Can we imagine a future political and economic order for Ukraine that is not wholly dependent upon more powerful global and regional actors? Students will gain exposure to texts written by African, Indian, South American, North American Indigenous, and Eastern European thinkers on the subject of decolonization. In parallel, we will study key Ukrainian artistic, political, and social movements with an emphasis on music: from queer decolonial activist marching bands, to calls to redefine the canon of classical music, art history, literature, and cinema. We consider debates about “decommunization,” the racialized dynamics of migration, and what it means to call oneself Ukrainian after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Students will design and carry out an independent research project related to the course themes. This course is designated as Difference & Justice because it is critically oriented towards questions of justice, survival, genocide, nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty, and will touch on themes related to race, queer politics, and religious diversity.

Faculty: Betsy Clifton, Alex Kitnick, Julia Weist, and Nabanjan Maitra

Rules and regulations shape our lives, structuring everything from architecture to religion to sexuality to behavior on Bard’s campus. Even realms of thought typically imagined to be free from constraint, such as art and spirituality, are governed by sets of implicit and explicit guidelines. While we might associate rules and regulations with authority, and subscribe to them out of a sense of duty, or in fear of reprisal, they also create operating manuals that allow things to function (everything from games to societies). While we may capitulate to norms out of anxiety, shame, or fear–or defy them because they conflict with a deeply ingrained sense of self–they also create feelings of commonality and forms of communication. Sometimes, too, we must break–or bend–rules for the sake of novelty or out of a sense of injustice. In this course, we will seek to better understand these forces, and consider the differences between them. We will survey rules and regulations that have been implemented in the past and discuss which ones we would like to see in the future–that is, if we want to see any at all. We will also consider adjacent terms such as laws and norms. Our investigations will take a variety of forms: we will analyze theoretical texts, pursue case studies, and embark on creative projects that explore everything from the rules of the US postal system to the aesthetics of the DMV. Our “transformative” text will be Lorraine Daston’s Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, 2022).

Faculty: Johnny Brennan, Theresa Law, and Sarah Dunphy-Lelii

Trust is incredibly important for social life. It is the foundation of enriching personal relationships, it enables us to accomplish things we could not do on our own, it builds communities, and it expands knowledge. A single conceptualization of trust is elusive: what is trust; how is it developed, lost, and regained; how does it scale; and how does it adapt to constantly evolving social structures? Doing the hard work of theorizing trust is necessary, if we are to trust wisely. Through philosophy, students will investigate the abstract concept of interpersonal trust; through psychology, students will investigate the roles of intimate attachments and perspective-taking in children’s development of trust; through computer science, students will investigate questions of trust in technology, focusing on trust in robots.

Faculty: Michael Sadowski, Claudette Aldebot, Elena Kim, and Seth Halvorson

This course introduces students to theories that posit relational connection as a foundation of human development, drawing on evidence from psychology, sociology, primatology, neuroscience, and other fields. Course readings will be drawn from texts such as Franz de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (primatology), Matthew Lieberman’s Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (neuroscience), and Carol Gilligan’s In a Human Voice (psychology). After an introduction to this evidence, the class will engage with this question: What gets in the way of human connection? In this part of the course, we will examine the cultural forces that disrupt connection and relationships, and the different ways this disconnection manifests across cultures. Patriarchy, racism, homophobia and transphobia, interpersonal conflict, war, and other social issues will be examined as manifestations of cultural breaks in relationship. In the final segment of the course, readings and discussion will shift to a final question: How do we reconnect as human beings within cultures that drive us to separate, create divisions and hierarchies among people, and alienate us from one another? Perspectives from psychology, education, the arts, and other fields will be brought to bear on this question as students consider ways to cultivate individual and societal resilience to the forces that breed separation and division. Important Note: Students considering this course should be advised that readings address issues such as race- and gender-based violence, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, and related issues, and that personal writing and sharing will be an important aspect of the class.

Faculty: Nicholas Lewis and Drew Thompson

Ralph Ellison is traditionally known and celebrated as a literary writer. However, Ellison’s earliest artistic interests resided in classical music, as both a composer and performer on trumpet. Over the course of his life, Ellison engaged in serious, extended practice of sculpture, music, and photography. Through his explorations, Ellison cultivated relationships with Black cultural producers, including sculptor Richmond Barthé, painter Romare Bearden, writer and social activist Langston Hughes, photographer Gordon Parks, and writer and critic Albert Murray. Such exchanges inspired a range of creative outputs that proved fundamental to Ellison’s crafting of a Black aesthetic. This common course invites students to explore Ellison’s crafting of a Black aesthetic, and the material and relational worlds he constructed with other Black artists, intellectuals, and cultural producers. Readings will include correspondences between Ellison and his interlocutors and will address the socio-political and -cultural times in which they occurred. Participatory lectures, small group discussions, and public dialogues with leading contemporary artists and thinkers will introduce students to the creative outputs, institutions, and movements that resulted from these exchanges. Assignments ranging from dialogical journaling to visual and historical analysis are geared to students developing their own Black aesthetic and cultivating strategies for community building. Only in an interdisciplinary model consisting of visual, historical, cultural, and performance studies can students access and ascertain the multidimensionality of Ellison’s artistic practice and the ways in which people build and nurture community through the arts. This course will introduce students to possibilities for continuing their studies as part of Bard’s New York City study away program.

Faculty: Yarran Hominh, Ingrid Becker, and Yebel Gallegos

Movement is both a metaphysical or cosmological concept and an essential human concept that is shaped by and shapes everyday cultural practices. Metaphysically, according to some philosophies, everything is movement—whether the process of Becoming that creates all things or the Way that is followed by all creatures. Practices of physical movement inherently connect a person to themselves and, in turn, to the space around them. This course examines the multiple meanings of movement, both literal and metaphorical, embodied and imagined, individual and social, that are central to our conceptions of ourselves and the world and how we live in it. The theoretical component will be text-based. The core transformative texts will be Gloria Anzaldúa’s Luz en Lo Oscuro/The Light in the Dark and Laozi’s Dao de Jing, with additional supplementary readings. The practical component focuses on exploring and expressing these concepts through improvisational prompts and martial arts-inspired practices. Throughout the course, we will ask questions such as: Where does movement begin in the body or mind, and how can it extend in space or figurative thought? How do our relationships with other bodies impact our understanding of our relationship with our own bodies, from our internal “fibers of being” to social gestures, including those that suggest tension and invite connection? How can we conceptualize or physically inhabit the feelings of stuckness and static experienced by selves/bodies in detention or dominated by normative social arrangements, and what forms of individual or collective movement can disrupt borders and invent new spaces of freedom? The assessment for this course will include weekly writing and in-class engagement with embodied practices, a midterm individual project, and a final group project that incorporates physical movement and a reflective component.

Faculty: Julia Rosenbaum, Yuka Suzuki, and Krista Caballero

A bright blue ring of baubles frames the entrance. An elaborate arch welcomes potential visitors. While we tend to associate human architects with the structures we call home, nonhuman animals such as Bowerbirds are also creative designers, carefully constructing environments like the one described above. What is at stake in distinguishing between the spaces that Bowerbirds and humans create and inhabit? Inspired by feminist and Indigenous frameworks, this course introduces students to the concept of home on multiple scales to explore how human and nonhuman animals imagine and make a sense of place. How, for example, do we define home and habitat? Whose homes and habitats do we interact with and move through? How do memory and storytelling shape our understandings of such places? How have ideas and practices of home and habitat changed and what will they look like in the future? This course addresses such questions through four specific themes: place-making and belonging; mobility and rootedness; aesthetics and animals; and site/non-site. Each section includes human and nonhuman experiences and is anchored with two to three key texts, a set of case studies, and interdisciplinary practices of art making.

Faculty: Michelle Murray, Simon Gilhooley, and Ani Mitra

This course aims to (re)introduce students to the important issues and ideas at stake in the 2024 election, to interrogate our own relationship to them, and to offer students the tools necessary to be politically literate citizens. Many consider the right to vote to be one of, if not the most important right that American citizens hold. It is through regular, contested elections that individuals make their preferences known, and in doing so, we shape our collective fate as citizens and endow our institutions with legitimacy. And yet, despite the ostensible power of the franchise, confidence in the health of American democracy has been in steady decline. Growing political polarization that makes compromise difficult, the increasing influence of corporate interests in politics, and the urgency of the problems we face—from climate change to war to economic inequality—have left individual citizens increasingly skeptical of institutions and overcome with political despair. What does it mean to participate in electoral politics, and why is such participation important to the health of democracy? How can citizens navigate an information environment saturated with misinformation? What role does and should domestic political issues, the economy, and foreign policy play in presidential elections? How can citizens–and especially young citizens–overcome the politics of despair, reclaim their political agency, and author the collective future they desire? To answer these questions and others, this course will use the framework of “keywords” to interrogate the vocabularies we use in the conversations we have with each other about this election. Keywords are meant to help individuals understand the concepts and ideas they encounter in their daily interactions with others and observe in our public discourse, to map controversies and disagreements about them, and to treat these terms as sites of unresolved contestation.