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. 

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. 

Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a historian of cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He grew up in Alaska and served as an officer in the US Navy before following that well-worn path from the military to medieval history. He earned a Master's at Georgetown University and King's College, London, and received his PhD in History from Harvard in 2019. He is co-editor of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Dumbarton Oaks Press, 2022), and has published articles on the history of scholarship, Byzantine oratory, and late medieval politics.  He is currently working on a book about the political and ideological legacy of the Roman Empire in the late medieval Mediterranean. Other projects investigate the collection and interpretation of medieval material culture in the early modern Mediterranean and the unrecognized intersections between scholarship and colonialism.

Andrew K. Atwell is an anthropologist, Judaism and Middle East specialist, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bard College. He is broadly interested in moral imagination in its relation to political theology, political economy, and traditions of critical reflectivity, and his primary focus is on national-religious Israeli Judaism. His current book project, Lod Alight: National-Religious Activism, Moral Imagination, and the Limits of Reflection, is a study of the moral imagination at work in a national-religious “social settlement” movement that has settled in Israel’s binational cities since the mid-1990s. He also received doctoral training and an MA in physics at the University of Virginia where he worked on the CMS Experiment’s search for supersymmetric decay modes and dark matter candidates at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. This combination of scholarship drives a particular interest in intersections of social and physical sciences. His research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, a Fuerstenberg Fellowship in Jewish Studies, and the University of Chicago. At Bard since 2024.

PhD (University of Chicago)


 

Bevin Blaber is a scholar of philosophy of religions. Her work centers on continental philosophy, ethics, and modern Jewish thought and literature, with particular emphasis on post-Holocaust thought. In her first monograph, an interdisciplinary project combining philosophical, literary and historical analyses, she examines French philosopher and theorist Maurice Blanchot’s earliest work: articles published in right-wing French journals in the years preceding World War II. Her current work explores ways that conceptions of guilt and atonement are figured in instances of state or community-perpetrated atrocities, and the impact of these definitions on attempts, both legal and extra-juridical, to grapple with legacies of these events.

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.

 

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.  

Johnny holds a BA in philosophy and music from Bard (class of 2010), an MA in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, and a PhD in philosophy from Fordham University. His research focuses on the ethics and epistemology of trust—what trust is, its social importance, and what significance it has for issues of moral status, moral injury, knowledge, and expertise. His work has been published in Philosophical Studies, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy & Technology, Social Epistemology, and The Philosopher. 

Before returning to Bard, Johnny was a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Fordham, where he taught Intro to Philosophy and Ethics as part of the core curriculum required of all undergraduate students. Similar to FYSEM, this core curriculum investigates fundamental questions about what it means to be human. He also has experience in faculty development, having managed Fordham's Preparing Future Faculty program—an advanced pedagogy certificate for PhD students. 

In addition to teaching, Johnny is the Director of Institutional Support at Bard, where he aids faculty and administrators in their grant-seeking efforts to support the College. 
 

John Burns is Associate Professor of Spanish Studies at Bard College. Originally from Maine, he has lived in Chile and Spain and spent a semester teaching in Japan. He is interested in literature and literary translation, with a specific focus on contemporary Latin American poetry. He has written about experimental writers from Chile and Mexico and the ways in which their work intersects with politics and history. He is excited to teach FYSEM again for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because he still remembers how important the texts that comprise the course were to him as a young man and how they continue to resonate with him all these years later. 
 

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.

Bill Dixon is the Director of the Language and Thinking Program. He also teaches political theory and American politics in the Political Studies Program. Bill has taught at Bard since 2010. His current research interests include democratic theory, theories of citizenship and political action, political economy, cosmopolitanism, and climate change. Some of the political thinkers who interest him most include Thucydides, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and Walt Whitman. He thinks of FYSEM as one of the most challenging and rewarding courses at Bard, in large part because of the deep connections that students often make between FYSEM, Language and Thinking, and Citizen Science. He is excited to be reading Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” with students in FYSEM and thinking through the difficult questions that the text inevitably raises about contemporary democracy in the United States.      

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.
 

Jess Feldman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Jess's research focuses on ideas of collective action in the history of political thought. Their book manuscript, Reinventing the General Strike develops an account of how the general strike has shaped the meaning of equality, of freedom, and of politics itself. Jess has published work on W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, and their essay on Hannah Arendt's proposal for a government of revolutionary councils won the Best Paper Award (2024) from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. Jess developed a love for liberal arts education during their undergrad years at Amherst College. They earned a PhD in Political Science from Brown University. For more information about Jess and their work, visit jlfeldman.com. 

Molly J. Freitas is Associate Dean of Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Bard.  Molly’s greatest passion is helping students to develop the skills and confidence necessary to achieve their academic, personal, and professional goals.  As Associate Dean of Studies, she provides supplemental advising on various forms of academic enrichment and excellence, including for students applying for prestigious scholarships such as the Rhodes and Fulbright and those interested in study abroad programs and independent studies.  As a faculty member, she teaches personal narrative, first-year seminar, and literature classes at Bard. 

Molly 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. 

 

Academic Director, Center for Foreign Languages and Cultures; Coordinator, Foreign Languages and Literature Program
 

Stephanie Kufner is Visiting Associate Professor of German Studies at Bard College. Originally, from Germany, she has lived in the US for almost 35 years and came to Bard in 1990. She has taught FYSEM regularly for over 10 years, and is excited to be part of this year’s new FYSEM team and curriculum.  Prof. Kufner enjoys teaching intensive language and culture classes on various levels, German literature and theater, and for many years helped students produce bilingual German/English theater plays. In her role as Academic Director of the Bard Language Center, Prof. Kufner hires an international staff of up to 20 students. They help provide the Bard Community with a wide range of carefully researched academic, cultural and popular language resources, study- and self-evaluation tools, as well as course –specific supplements for learners on any level in all languages taught at Bard. Do stop by any time to say hi or if interested apply for a job!

Nabanjan Maitra migrated to the U.S. from India in 2000, at the age of fifteen. Since then, he has been trying to figure out who he is. The pursuit of that question has brought him back to the classroom and to teaching. After graduating from college, Nabanjan taught Special Education in Washington D.C. for a few years before realizing that it was too hard. Since entering graduate school, Nabanjan has been interested in the role of teaching in forming subjects (citizens, disciples, initiates). Specifically, he is interested to study and describe the techniques that monastic institutions, in medieval and premodern India, developed to govern their subjects, and what these techniques and practices might tell us about the ways in which monastic power operates. Nabanjan prefers spending the summer months playing cricket in England. 

Sean McMeekin teaches courses in modern European, Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history.  He is excited to be teaching FYSEM again, as he always enjoys connecting with new Bard students.  Born in Idaho and raised in Rochester NY, McMeekin received his Ph.D. and M.A. in History from UC Berkeley and his B.A. from Stanford.  He has also taught at Koç University, in Istanbul; at Yale; at Bilkent, in Ankara; and at NYU. He is the author of Stalin’s War (2021); The Russian Revolution (2017); The Ottoman Endgame. War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Penguin, 2015), awarded the Arthur Goodzeit Book Prize; July 1914: Countdown to War (2013), reviewed on the cover of the NY Times Sunday Book Review; The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011), which won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize; The Berlin to Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010), winner of the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize; History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (2008); The Red Millionaire (2004); and numerous articles and essays. McMeekin also reviews books regularly for the Sunday Times, The Literary Review, American Historical Review, History Today, the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and the Journal of Cold War Studies. At Bard since 2014. 

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.

Luisanna Sardu is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Bard College. She studied Comparative Literature, with a specialization in Early Modern Studies, specifically in Italian and Spanish female authors. Her research analyzes the use of anger in the texts of Italian and Spanish early modern women writers. Her studies include the history of emotions and the use of affect theory in the interpretation of women’s literature, as well as the role of emotions in the acquisition of foreign languages. Her research interests also include translation studies and contemporary African Italian women authors.  She looks forward to engaging in conversation with her FYSEM students, debating and questioning ideas in literature and philosophy.

Steven Simon has been at Bard since Fall 2016, where he is an Associate Professor of Mathematics.  He received his Phd from New York University in 2011 and his BA from Yale University in 2005 after switching from Philosophy to Mathematics in his  junior year.  Although he primarily teaches mathematics, he still has great interest in the history of philosophy, and in particular has designed and frequently teaches a course on Zeno’s paradoxes. He also enjoys the humanities more broadly and is very excited to be teaching First-Year Seminar for the second time this semester. In his spare time, he loves playing with his two young daughters, listening to music from around the world, and hiking.
 

Corey Sullivan (’03) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working in theater, film, and interactive media. He is currently the Assistant Dean of Students and, as a Bard graduate who benefited greatly from taking FYSEM, he is very much looking forward to addressing class materials from a broad spectrum of perspectives. Prior to returning to the Bard community, Corey was an Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at New York University, where he taught courses in performance theory, film, literature, and art history in New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi. He also taught courses in directing and media theory at Harvard University as well as workshops and lectures on interdisciplinary collaboration for academic and artistic institutions across five continents. He holds degrees from Bard College and Harvard University.

As a member of the experimental arts collective Theater Mitu, he works as a dramaturg, filmmaker, interactive media designer, performer, writer, and director. Notable presentations include: Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY); New York Theatre Workshop (New York, NY); Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA); Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans, LA); Manarat Al Saadiyat (Abu Dhabi, UAE); MESS Festival (Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina); Cairo Opera House (Cairo, Egypt); Teatro La Memoria (Santiago, Chile); and Kontakt International Theater Festival (Toruń, Poland). He has also presented work at The Public Theater, American Repertory Theater, Galapagos Art Space, Moscow Art Theater, and EYEBEAM, among others. 

Karen Sullivan is Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Culture and Literature at Bard College. She is fascinated by the past, especially by the patterns of thought represented in old books that may at first seem utterly foreign to us but, on further reflection, can appear familiar and even reasonable. One of the principal aims of First-Year Seminar, as she sees it, is to enable us to recognize the assumptions we hold most dear as products of the culture we live in and, in doing so, to encourage us to open our minds to alternate ways of thinking, from environments radically different from our own. At Bard, she teaches courses on medieval literature, history, and religion in Western Europe. She has published books on Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Arthurian romance, heretics, and inquisitors, and she is currently writing a book about medieval bears.   

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.

Daniel Williams is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College. He specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture and also works on the literature of contemporary South and Southern Africa. His interests include history of science and philosophy, environmental humanities, and law and literature. 

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.