Donna Ford Grover, visiting associate professor of literature and American studies.
Photo by Chris Kayden
Bard’s extraordinary faculty are dedicated to the philosophy of teaching. Today and throughout Bard’s history, members of the faculty have effected change in medicine, the arts and letters, international affairs, journalism, scientific research, and education, among other endeavors. These distinguished scholars are advisers as well as instructors: Bard has no graduate teaching assistants. And the average class size of 16 in the Lower College and 12 in the Upper College allows for intimate discussions and one-on-one interaction.
David Bloom. Photo by Bruce Kung
“What brought me to Bard, in a word, was the faculty.”
“To work with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and James Bagwell was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. I had long followed and admired their work, and then I found out that each of them taught here. It’s easy for musicians to focus only on music, whereas I wanted to have a broader education that would prepare me for a world that requires a more well-rounded base of knowledge and experience.”
—David Bloom ’13, BA in music with a concentration in composition and conducting, and MMus ’15 in conducting
Faculty News
Bard Physicists Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Li-Heng Henry Chang ’23, Ziyu Xu ’23, and Shea Roccaforte ’21 Coauthor Cover Story in the American Journal of Physics
Associate Professor of Physics Paul Cadden-Zimansky and three recent Bard graduates Li-Heng Henry Chang ’23, Ziyu Xu ’23, and Shea Roccaforte ’21, have coauthored the cover story in the July 2024 issue of the American Journal of Physics. Their peer-reviewed research article, “Geometric visualizations of single and entangled qubits,” presents a new way of visualizing the phenomenon of quantum entanglement between two interacting objects. More >
Professor Valerie Barr: “Visualizing Progress in Broadening Participation in Computing: The Value of Context”
Valerie Barr, Margaret Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Bard College, together with Carla E. Brodley and Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, examines in a new study how institutions of higher learning should reconsider the metrics by which they measure data to improve diversity and broadening participation in computing analysis and assessment. More >
Professor Warke’s research and teaching interests in South Asian history include colonialism, gender, political economy, contemporary politics, modern vernacular and print culture, cinema, and popular culture. Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin addressed “Secluded Capital: Baizabai Shinde and the Transnational Opium Trade in Nineteenth-Century South Asia.” Academic presentations and guest talks at various conferences and symposia covered subjects such as “Pilgrimage as a Mode of Political Diplomacy”; “Indian-American Immigrants Post 1965: Moteliers and IT Professionals”: and the significance of Tarabai Shinde in Gender History. Works in progress include “Royal Power and a Piece of Bread: Sufi Discipleship and Dargah Worship in the Maratha Empire,” an article for South Asian Studies; and “Baizabai (1784–1863): Queen-Regent and the Transnational Opium Trade.” Teaching assistantships at the University of Texas included the courses An Introduction to Asian American History; The United States 1492–1865; and The United States since 1865.
BA, Ramnarain Ruia College, Mumbai; MA, MPhil, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi; PhD, University of Texas at Austin. At Bard: 2021–23.
Julia Weist is a visual artist whose work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (acquisition in progress) among others. Her work explores how the process of record-keeping reveals social truths around shared systems of knowledge and power. Recent exhibitions include Governing Body, Rachel Uffner Gallery, which focused on the relationship between artists and government; ARCA, in collaboration with Cuban artist Nestor Siré, at galleries in Havana and New York; and Parbunkells, 83 Pitt Street, New York. Public artworks include Campaign (Times Square) and Public Record, both in New York City; and View-Through, Miami. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues throughout the United States and internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Madrid, Taiwan, St. Louis, Antwerp, and Chicago. Commissions, grants, and residencies from Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Ox-Bow; City of New York Department of Records and Information Services; New York State Council on the Arts/Wave Farm; Jerome Foundation Fellowship at the Queens Museum; and many others. Weist’s writing has appeared in publications such as Triple Canopy, Frieze, Rhizome, Art in America, BOMB, and the artist book Sexy Librarian: A Novel, Critical Edition. She and her work have been the subject of articles in, among others, Artnet (“Artist Julia Weist Is Protesting the R Rating of Her New Film by Advertising the Project on a Times Square Billboard”); Document Journal (“Julia Weist’s Governing Body Questions What We Deem Indecent in the Scope of Mainstream Cinema”); Hyperallergic (“Julia Weist’s Public Record Probes the Impact of Artists on Cities”); Art in America (“Julia Weist Transforms New York City’s Archival Records into Artworks That Live in Digital Public Space”); and the New York Times (“Artists as ‘Creative Problem-Solvers’ at City Agencies”). She previously taught at Pratt Institute, and has served as MFA studio adviser at the Maine College of Art & Design. Weist also served as board member of Shandaken Projects from 2012 to 2021.
BFA, Cooper Union School of Art; MLIS, Pratt Institute. At Bard: Spring 2023.
Robert Weston’s research interests include the European Enlightenment, the history of education, social mediation, visual criticism, animality, and posthumanism; his teaching interests range from women’s, lesbian, gay, and trans rights, Queer Theory, and histories of sexuality, to philosophical anthropology, gift theory, and post-structuralism. Recipient of DAAD Research Fellowship (2000–01); Günther-Findel Research Fellowship, Herzog August Bibliothek (2004–05); Presidential Teaching Award, Columbia University (2005); and Ottaway International Fellowship, Al-Quds Bard, Palestine (2009-2012). At Al-Quds, he served as director of faculty and curricular development (2009–10); assistant dean (2010–11); and associate academic dean (2011–12). At Bard, Professor Weston has served as codirector of First-Year Seminar (2013–16) and coordinator of Gender and Sexuality Studies (2008–09; 2012– ). He was coeditor of Convolution: Journal of Experimental Criticism (2010–11) and has published in Semiotext(e), Social Text, Rethinking Marxism, and n/or. His work has been shown at New York’s Guggenheim Museum (2009) and Baxter Street Gallery (2015).
BA, University of Florida; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2005.
Emily White is an environmental chemist with expertise in aquatic biogeochemistry, water quality analysis, and environmental monitoring. She previously taught at Sewanee: The University of the South and Colby College and served as a postdoctoral scientist at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. White has extensive fieldwork experience, including an oceanographic research cruise in Antarctica. Her work has been published in Limnologyand Oceanography: Methods, Aquatic Science, Marine Chemistry, and other scholarly journals.
At Bard, White has taught Citizen Science and courses on drinking water treatment, methods of environmental analysis, environmental monitoring, climate change, and introductory chemistry. She is involved in efforts to monitor water quality in the Saw Kill and is working with the Office of Sustainability on the Annandale Dam Micro-Hydropower Project.
BS, Tufts University; MS, The Ohio State University; PhD, State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. At Bard since 2019.
M.A., Free University of Berlin; Ph.D., University of Munich. Also studied at University of Rome, La Sapienza. Has taught at institutions of higher learning in Germany, Vanderbilt University, and Oberlin College, and recently served as Alexander von Humboldt / Feodor Lynen Research Fellow at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests include 20th-century German literature and film; the political dimensions of culture, art, and thought; Hannah Arendt; and contemporary developments in German media and society after 1989. Among his publications are a monograph on Arendt�s relationships with key postwar German writers; an intellectual biography of Arendt; and a edition of poetry by Thomas Brasch. He coedited Arendt�s conversations and correspondence with the eminent German historian and political essayist Joachim Fest. He is also a literary critic and cultural correspondent for the German dailies S�ddeutsche Zeitung and Der Tagesspiegel. At Bard since 2012.
Daniel Williams works at the intersection of literature, the history of science, and the environmental humanities in 19th-century Britain and contemporary South and Southern Africa. Before coming to Bard, he was Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His current book project explores uncertainty as a phenomenon in the 19th-century British novel, understood in the context of developments in science, philosophy, and the law. He is also at work on a second book project about weather, climate, and social representation in 19th-century literature and science. His articles and reviews have appeared in venues such as ELH, Novel, Public Books, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literary Studies, Genre, Anglia, and Safundi, as well as in edited collections including The Link Between Animal Abuse and Human Violence and The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities. He coedited a special issue of Poetics Today on “Logic and Literary Form,” and coedits the “19th-Century Networks” section for the journal Literature Compass.
AB, Harvard College; MPhil, University of Cambridge, Magdalene College; PhD, Harvard University. At Bard since 2019.
Evan Calder Williams is an associate professor at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, where he teaches the yearlong course Theory and Criticism in Contemporary Art, in addition to elective graduate seminars and a seminar on disability studies in the undergraduate Human Rights program. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and two forthcoming books, Why Fire and Manual Override: A Theory of Sabotage. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism. His essays have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogs and in journals including Film Quarterly, Cultural Politics, The Italianist, Frieze, La Furia Umana, World Picture, The Journal of American Studies, Mute, and Estetica. He is part of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine and is a founding member of the film and research collective 13BC. His solo and collaborative films have been shown at institutions such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, 80WSE, MoMA, Images Festival, mumok, Portikus, Swiss Institute, and the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. He received a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Italy for his doctoral research. He is currently working on a book about sickness.
The Rev. Mary Grace Williams came to Bard in 2016, excited to work with college students. She received her BA from Rutgers University, where she studied theater arts (acting and directing). She moved to New York City directly after college to pursue a career in theater. But while living in the West Village, she rediscovered her deep interest in spirituality and religion, and that inspired her to complete an MA program in religious education from Fordham University. Eventually, she sought ordination as an Episcopal priest and attended Yale Divinity School, where she earned her MDiv degree.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of the memoirs Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race (W. W. Norton and Company, 2019) and Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (Penguin Press HC, 2010). His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. Williams, named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction, is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and New York Times Magazine. An adaptation of Self-Portrait was published in the New York Times in September 2019, titled: “My Family’s Life Inside and Outside America’s Racial Categories.” His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, Le Monde, the Guardian, Harper’s,London Review of Books, and the collections Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. A 2007 op-ed piece for the Washington Post, “Yes, Blame Hip-Hop,” generated a record-breaking number of comments. He is also the recipient of a Berlin Prize and has received support from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Berlin, where is a member of the Board of Trustees.
BA, Georgetown University; MA, New York University. At Bard: 2018–20; 2022– .