First-Year Seminar Faculty

Rob Cioffi teaches in Classical Studies, Literature, and History. The first class he taught at Bard College was a section of First-Year Seminar, and he’s very much looking forward to helping to lead a program that shaped his experience of Bard. His research focuses on the relationship between ancient Greek literature and ancient Egypt, which was the subject of his first book, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Greek Novel. He sometimes writes for the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. In January, he can be found excavating in Hermopolis Magna in Middle Egypt. During the rest of the year, he is the McWilliams House Professor.

Simon Gilhooley is an Associate Professor in the Politics program at Bard College, where he teaches courses on American politics and political thought. Originally from the United Kingdom, Simon became interested in the US Constitution as an undergraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, where his weekend job was managing a kilt shop. Pursuing that interest (the Constitution, not kilts) has took him on an academic journey to the University of London and Cornell University where he studied, before taking up teaching positions at Ithaca College and then Bard College. Interested in the ways ideas interact with historical moments, he is excited to explore the different conversations that the First-Year Seminar gives rise to.

Kathryn Tabb is a member of the Philosophy Program, and also teaches in Experimental Humanities and Human Rights. She is interested in madness - its history, its ethics, and how it defines us. Along with teaching on the history and philosophy of psychiatry, she offers classes on early modern philosophy, on medical ethics, on disability, on feminist philosophy, and on history and philosophy of science more broadly. She is completing a book on John Locke's theory of irrationality and its role in the political sphere. She has long been an enthusiast for core curricula like FYSem. Before coming to Bard in 2019, she completed the University of Chicago's core curriculum as an undergraduate and taught in Columbia's core curriculum as a professor, experiences that left her convinced of the value of close encounters with transformative texts for which one has little preparation, guidance, or special expertise - especially when undertaken in the company of others. 

Born in Rabat, Morocco, Youssef A. Benasser (they/he) received a BA in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and an MSc in Economics and Public Policy from Ecole Polytechnique (X), before completing their PhD in Economics at the University of Oregon. Their research agenda is influenced by decolonial critics of the post-war international economic system and inspired by the Third World’s quest for an alternative economic project. It centers on empirical assessments of recent trends in international trade policy, such as policy uncertainty, reversals, or rivalries, and their impacts on the global flow of goods and money. Passionate about teaching and pedagogy, Youssef is thrilled to have the opportunity to teach the first-year seminar. As a new faculty member, they believe this is a unique chance to interact with fellow newcomers in the college community and collaboratively imagine our individual intellectual experiences at Bard.  

Jasmine Akiyama-Kim is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Bard College. Originally from Oregon, she studied Classics at University of Oregon (BA, 2015) and University of California, Los Angeles (PhD, 2024). Her research focuses on posthumous constructions of the Roman emperor Nero as well as issues of imposture, succession, mimesis, genealogy, and time. She aims to cultivate an awareness of the power of language to describe and transform the world, and she looks forward to exploring the nuances and opacities of the FYSEM texts with her students. 

Joshua Boettiger is Bard's Jewish Chaplain and also serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities, He is a Bard alum who has an MFA in Poetry (Pacific University, 2018) and a Masters in Hebrew Letters/rabbinic ordination (Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 2006). Joshua is a Rabbis Without Borders fellow, and in the larger community continues to teach Meditation and Mussar – Jewish approaches to mindfulness and service. He is excited to be back at Bard and to be part of the FYSEM journey.

 

Leon Botstein, conductor, music historian, and leader in education reform, has been president and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities of Bard College since 1975.

Max Botstein is currently the Fritz Stern Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Before coming to Bard in 2023, he received a PhD in History at Harvard, where he wrote a dissertation on the denazification and democratization of education in postwar Germany. His research interests include the transatlantic intellectual exchange between the United States and Europe, the interplay between ideas and institutions, and the relationship between politics, society, and culture. He is excited to be teaching FYSEM this year, where he will join students as they work through some of the most fundamental questions about how we should live with one another in a community.  

Andrew Bush is an anthropologist who studies ethics in various forms: in language, law, poetry, gender and sexuality, and religion. His research has been centered around the study of Islamic traditions in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2004. At Bard he teaches in linguistics and gender and sexuality, and he previously taught on topics of Islamic studies, legal studies, and gender at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he also taught seminars focused on writing. He was formerly a researcher at Cracow University of Economics and at Harvard Law School.

Rachel Cavell teaches in Bard’s Language and Thinking Program, and is a Faculty Associate with Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. She teaches Essay and Revision at Bard, and writing and civics at the Bard Prison Initiative. She has worked with faculty development at Bard-Smolny College (St. Petersburg State University in St. Petersburg, Russia), and has taught in the Bard Masters in Teaching Program. Rachel is also a writer, with recent publications in the Adelaide Literary Journal; an attorney, and a practitioner of Restorative Justice. She received her B.A. in English Literature from Harvard University. She is very excited to be discussing, thinking and writing about the great texts in First Year Seminar.

I have enjoyed teaching in the First Year Seminar every decade since I began teaching at Bard, and prior to that I also benefited, as a student, from the Seminar in its original format. The syllabus and approach change from year to year without losing consistency, and students bring new perspectives and insights to the course in a way that delivers excitement.

The past year has seen me concentrate on the Aramaic language for purposes of research, as part of a project I have conducted on the basis of various appointments in England, Germany, Hong Kong, and France, as well as the United States. Aramaic has been spoken continuously longer than any other tongue (including Greek and Hebrew) and yet has never been able to find itself a secure place in the Western “canon.” I will welcome re-orienting myself to the West by means of FYSem, and yet will be looking for opportunities to disclose its roots in the Middle East. As is ever the case, studying the Humanities involves transforming the subject, and transforming ourselves at the same time.

In addition to editorial work for Musical Quarterly and assisting with the Bard Music Festival, Sean Colonna is teaching First Year Seminar as Felicitas Thorne Postdoctoral Fellow in Music. A Bard graduate from the class of 2012, Sean went on to work as a Teach for America Corps Member and a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant before receiving his PhD in historical musicology from Columbia University in 2023. His research centers on the relationship between musical aesthetics, mind-altering substances, and theories of consciousness and selfhood. He is currently working on an article that analyzes the ways in which musical experience and intoxication were theorized as tools for re-enchantment during the early Romantic era, enabling individuals to experience themselves as inhabiting a magical world of spirits in which nature is conscious and communicative. Sean enjoys a daily meditation practice, and one of his favorite reads so far this year is Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Nesrin Ersoy McMeekin is a Visiting Instructor in the Humanities at Bard College, teaching the First-Year Seminar since Fall 2014; and at Bard Early College-Hudson Valley since Fall 2017. 

Born in Bulgaria, and emigrated to Turkey as a child, Nesrin specializes in Early Turkish Republican era-specifically in its relations with the Soviet Union, and Turkish Emigration from Bulgaria during the 20^th century.  Her first book Turkey’s Relations with the Bolsheviks (1919-1922) was published by VDM Publishing House Ltd., in 2009.
 
Prior to Bard, Nesrin taught Turkish Culture and History at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey from 2012 to 2014; and History of the Republic of Turkey at Bilkent University in Ankara from 2007 to 2012.   She enjoys teaching FYSEM and having lively conversations on our texts.
 

Molly J. Freitas is Associate Dean of Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Bard.  As an educator, Molly’s greatest passion is helping students to develop the skills and confidence necessary to achieve their academic, personal, and professional goals.  She holds a Ph.D. from Tufts University and an M.A. from Georgetown University, both in English.  Prior to coming to Bard, Molly was an Assistant Professor of English and led the prestigious scholarship program at West Point, the United States Military Academy.  She has also taught literature, critical thinking, and professional development courses at Tufts University, Emerson College, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a book editor at Oxford University Press.  A feminist literary critic by training, Molly published an academic book, From Subjection to Survival:  The Artistry of American Women Writers (Routledge 2023), on aesthetics and American women writers; her scholarly articles have also appeared in American Literary Realism, Soundings, and Studies in the Novel.  She lives in Beacon, NY with her husband and two young daughters, who are the light of her life. 

 

Valentina A. Grasso is a Sicilian professor of Medieval History at Bard. At the age of 19, she realized that she wouldn't become a post-punk bass guitar star or the clever engineer her parents had dreamed her to be. Thus, she published a convoluted novel and some poems and took root in the UK to confect her Ph.D. on the history of pre-Islamic Arabia between ferocious water polo matches against Oxford, sherry-hazy formal dinners, and dainty old manuscripts in Arabic, Syriac, and Ge'ez. Having conducted fieldwork in Iraq, Jordan, and Ethiopia and having taught in NYC and DC, Valentina is excited to experience a less exciting life in the Hudson Valley where she will work on several new projects on Afro-Eurasia in the “Medieval period”, questing her cat soul mate whom she will name Mani.

Seth David Halvorson is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He earned his BA from Macalester College, an MA from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he taught in the Core Curriculum.  For the past 11 years he was Associate Professor of Philosophy, History, and Political Studies at Bard High School Early College, Newark- where he was founding faculty and coach of the debate team.  Professor Halvorson has taught Language and Thinking at Bard for many years and his interests include Political, Ethical, and Social Philosophy, Policy Analysis, Legal Studies, and Philosophy of Technology. He has presented at national and international conferences on diverse topics.  Prior to his graduate education, he spent 3 years at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. He is undertaking a book-length study of the civic, moral, and educational dimensions of speed in the spheres of social life. In addition to FYSEM, Halvorson teaches classes in the intersection of Politics, Ethics, Law, Education, and the History of Ideas. Originally from Minnesota, Seth is a painter and a musician and with his partner, a practicing Psychoanalyst, is laughing with and learning from their two young children.  Their youngest child is also a first year student at Bard, at the Abigail Lundquist Botstein Nursery School.  He is thrilled to teach FYSEM because of his love of open dialogue with students on the big issues and questions that spring from the texts and class discussions. 

Sucharita Kanjilal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Her current manuscript, Home Chefs: Indian Housewives Produce for the Global Creator Economy, examines the entanglements of gender, race, caste and religious nationalism in the growth of global digital capitalism, through an ethnographic study of food media producers in India’s growing content “creator economy”. Her research combines approaches from economic anthropology, anthropology of media, digital anthropology, anthropology of food, and theories of affect, while highlighting feminist, postcolonial, and anti-caste epistemologies. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, the Routledge Companion on Caste and Cinema in India, Feminist Media Studies, Scroll.in, Quartz.com, Hindustan Times, and the Heritage Radio Network and Eat This podcasts. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, the UCLA International Institute and the Sambhi Foundation at UCLA. Prior to moving to the United States, Sucharita was a journalist in Mumbai, India.

Prof. Pınar Kemerli teaches political theory and Middle East politics at Bard College. She completed her PhD in the Department of Government at Cornell University, and holds a BA from Boğaziçi University in Turkey, and MA degrees from Goldsmiths College of the University of London and Cornell University. Her interdisciplinary research addresses theories and practices of resistance, decolonization, violence/nonviolence, and religion and politics, and she offers courses on these topics. She is currently completing a book manuscript on decolonization and antiwar politics in Turkey. Her articles and reviews have appeared in a range of journals including Political Theory, New Political Science, Theory & Event,  International Journal of Middle East Studies,  Radical Philosophy, and Political Theology.

Nicholas Lewis is Associate Vice President for Academic Initiatives and Associate Dean in the office of the Dean of the College at Bard, where he has newly rejoined the campus community in January 2022. His main areas of interest reside at the intersection of music, African diasporic cultures, religion, and social ethics. Nicholas is also a clarinetist and composer steeped in the sensibilities of improvisational music with a Blues aesthetic. He is the clarinetist and co-founder of the BLAK-New Blues Ensemble, an ensemble co-founded with composer-pianist Anthony Kelley and based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. As the ensemble’s manifesto reads, the BLAK-New Blues Ensemble was created to “explore an ensemble’s ability to circumnavigate, through improvisation, the codes and tropes of African-American, European, and music of other parts of the world in ways that produce a coherent and fresh musical product.”

Christopher McIntosh is an Assistant Professor of Political Studies who works on the intersection of contemporary global politics, political violence, time, and critical/poststructural international theory. Originally from Marietta, Georgia, he has studied at and received degrees from the University of Georgia, Georgetown, and the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book that argues how we understand time and choose to relate past, present, and future play a crucial role in the practice of politics. Beyond FYSEM, he teaches courses on time and political violence, gender, global ethics, sovereignty and war, terrorism, nations and nationalism, security, and international relations. He has taught FYSEM since 2010.

Franz Nicolay is a musician and writer. In addition to records under his own name, he was a member of cabaret-punk orchestra World/Inferno Friendship Society, “world’s best bar band” the Hold Steady, Balkan-jazz quartet Guignol, co-founded the composer-performer collective Anti-Social Music, was a touring member of agit-punks Against Me!; and recorded or performed with dozens of other acts. He studied music at New York University and writing at Columbia University (where he was awarded a Felipe P. de Alba Fellowship). He received fellowship residencies in composition at the Rensing Art Center and writing at the Ucross Foundation and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and he has taught at Columbia University and UC–Berkeley.

His first book, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (The New Press, 2016), was named a “Season’s Best Travel Book” by The New York Times; and Buzzfeed called his novel forthcoming Someone Should Pay For Your Pain was called a “knockout fiction debut." His writing has appeared several anthologies and in publications including The New York Times, Slate, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Threepenny Review, LitHub, and Longreads.

Antonio Ortiz is a Visiting Instructor in the Humanities at Bard College, teaching Language and Thinking (L&T) and First Year Seminar (FYSEM). Antonio graduated from Bard College in 2018 with a BA in Economics, specializing in macroeconomic policy and the economic history of Latin America. After graduating from Bard, he attended Yale Divinity School where he earned his Master of Divinity degree in 2023. During his time at Yale, Antonio's research focused on the Hebrew Bible; in particular, how biblical narratives of violence were used to construct communal identity in ancient Israel, and surrounding ancient West Asian cultures. In addition to his teaching role, Antonio is also a Program Associate in the Office of the Dean of the College, working directly with the Associate Vice President for Academic Initiatives and Associate Dean of the College, Nicholas Alton Lewis, on building a climate of inclusion and community at Bard College. Outside of academia, Antonio is a practicing Buddhist, and an avid soccer fan.

I’m an Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard. My research bridges political theory and social history by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, and the legacies of racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century. My current book manuscript, Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, develops a new historical and conceptual framework for understanding modern capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of racialization, discipline, and inequality from slave plantations to Amazon warehouses. My essays and reviews have been published in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, and Disability and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Before coming to Bard, I held positions at Dartmouth, the New School, and the University of Chicago, where I taught in the core curriculum—a similar program to FYSEM that invites students to participate in a year-long conversation about questions that have puzzled thinkers for millennia, from Plato to Judith Butler. I also explore many of the themes in my research and teaching through new media artforms. To that end, I’ve curated exhibitions at the New Museum, Rhizome, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. My artwork has appeared in LEFT: A Book of Words and Pictures and MACRO: An Anthology of Image Macros.

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco is an architect, historian, and educator. She is an assistant professor of architecture and co-director of the architecture program at Bard College. Santoyo-Orozco’s research focuses on the relations between architecture and property regimes in Mexico with an emphasis on understanding spaces of resistance against the privatization of common lands. Her writings have appeared in Avery Review, Scapegoat, New Geographies, and e-flux Architecture, among other publications. She received a PhD in architectural history from the Architectural Association, an M.Arch from the Berlage Institute, and a B.Arch degree from Universidad de las Américas.
 

Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching and research explore global documentary, Russian and East European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. She is currently at work on two edited volumes: Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (with Lukas Brasiskis), forthcoming from Berghahn Books and Contemporary Russian Documentary (with Anastasia Kostina),under contract at Edinburgh University Press. She is originally from Odesa, Ukraine, and holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies & Comparative Literature from Yale University.

David Ungvary is Assistant Professor of Classics at Bard College. Hailing from Buffalo, NY, he studied Classics at Duke University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University before joining Bard in 2018. Prof. Ungvary is a literary historian whose current research centers on intersections of Christian asceticism and poetry in the Late Roman and early medieval worlds. He teaches courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, Roman cultural history, and late ancient religion. Through FYSEM, he is excited to join students as they discover the complexities of their own philosophies of literature – what it means and what is at stake when we read and write about specific texts. He also bakes for his students.

The Rev. Mary Grace Williams, Chaplain of the College/Dean of Community Life, came to Bard College in 2016 and has taught FYSEM each semester since the spring of 2018. In the summer of 2023 she also joined the faculty for Language and Thinking (L&T).  She received her B.A. from Rutgers University where she studied Theater Arts (Acting and Directing) which led her to move to NYC directly after college to pursue a career in theater.  While living in the West Village, she rediscovered her deep interest in spirituality and religion and that inspired her to do a M.A. in Religious Education from Fordham University.   Eventually this led her to seek ordination as an Episcopal priest and she attended Yale Divinity School and earned a M. Div.  Mary Grace is excited to be part of the faculty for FYSEM and L&T where she gets to work closely with first year students.