Fall 2024
The Blazing World of Margaret Cavendish
Monday, October 28, 2024 at 5:15 pm
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Margaret Cavendish—natural philosopher and fashionista, creatoress and courtier—was for a time in the 17th century one of the most famous women in the world. But for centuries her materialist philosophy, her prodigious literary production, and her colorful life have been rarely taught, much less read or discussed. Some four hundred years after her birth, Cavendish is finally again in vogue, thanks in large part to our two panelists. In this conversation, Alison Peterman, author of a fascinating forthcoming introduction to Cavendish’s philosophy, and Francesca Peacock, author of Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, which has been covered by the BBC, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, will shed light on her, her life, her philosophy, and why she matters now as much as ever.
Margaret Cavendish—natural philosopher and fashionista, creatoress and courtier—was for a time in the 17th century one of the most famous women in the world. But for centuries her materialist philosophy, her prodigious literary production, and her colorful life have been rarely taught, much less read or discussed. Some four hundred years after her birth, Cavendish is finally again in vogue, thanks in large part to our two panelists. In this conversation, Alison Peterman, author of a fascinating forthcoming introduction to Cavendish’s philosophy, and Francesca Peacock, author of Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, which has been covered by the BBC, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, will shed light on her, her life, her philosophy, and why she matters now as much as ever.
Attendance is mandatory for all First-Year Seminar Students.
Reason's Ear
Monday, September 23, 2024 at 5 pm
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Leon Botstein leads the Bard Conservatory Orchestra in a performance of Haydn Symphony no.101 in D major.
This incarnation of First-Year Seminar explores the challenges that arise from membership in a democratic community,the obligations imposed and possibilities enable by citizenship, and ultimately the very notion of community and social life. Students are reading important works from across history, drawn from literature, philosophy, and civic membership across time and space. As Plato argues, culture (including music) plays an important role in framing how we collectively form our life together. Tonight's performance speaks to, and illustrates, this dimension of the human experience in society and political life.
Attendance is mandatory for all First-Year Seminar Students.
Leon Botstein leads the Bard Conservatory Orchestra in a performance of Haydn Symphony no.101 in D major.
This incarnation of First-Year Seminar explores the challenges that arise from membership in a democratic community,the obligations imposed and possibilities enable by citizenship, and ultimately the very notion of community and social life. Students are reading important works from across history, drawn from literature, philosophy, and civic membership across time and space. As Plato argues, culture (including music) plays an important role in framing how we collectively form our life together. Tonight's performance speaks to, and illustrates, this dimension of the human experience in society and political life.
Attendance is mandatory for all First-Year Seminar Students.
Spring 2022
Antonio Delgado and Daniel Mendelsohn
A Conversation with Congressman Antonio Delgado
United States Congressman Antonio Delgado, who represents our district, engaged in a Zoom conversation with FYSEM codirector Daniel Mendelsohn on April 5 at 4:45 about politics and literature. Congressman Delgado discussed the books that have influenced him as well as other topics related to literature, politics, and life.
Photo by Pete Mauney '93 MFA '00
The Community is the Classroom
Monday, February 14, 2022, at 5:00 pm
A presentation and discussion about the Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities, with Professor Marina van Zuylen (the national academic director of the Clemente Course), graduates of the program, and Clemente faculty members Christian Crouch and David Shein. Bard President Leon Botstein introduced the event. The forum incorporated clips from James Rutenbeck’s 2021 documentary A Reckoning in Boston, which follows the stories of two Clemente graduates, Kafi Dixon and Carl Chandler.
Fall 2021
Aaron Mattocks - Photo by James Clark
Choreographer Mark Morris's Adaptation of Henry Purcell's Opera Dido and Aeneas
Monday, October 4, 2021, at 4:45 pm
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
A screening of the modern dance piece Dido and Aeneas, with choreography by Mark Morris set to the music of the 17th-century English composer Henry Purcell. The ill-fated love affair between Aeneas and Dido, queen of Carthage, is one of the most memorable and significant episodes of Virgil’s epic, dramatizing the human costs of the hero’s empire-founding mission: it has been adapted, riffed, and rewritten by a host of writers and creative artists over the past two thousand years. The most famous of these is Henry Purcell’s one-act opera Dido and Aeneas, written in the 1680s, which searingly presents the despair of the abandoned Dido. In 1995, the choreographer Mark Morris premiered his ballet, set to Purcell’s music, which amplified the story’s interest in gender: he himself danced the part of Dido.
Bard College Orchestra
The Self and the Language of Music
Monday, November 1, 2021, at 4:45 pm
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
FYSEM is a course that focuses on language. It asks us to read texts closely, to write about them, and to talk about them. It seeks to deepen and widen our understanding of what words can and cannot do. Although most of our exchanges with ourselves and with others assume a linguistic character, at the same time we appear also to be a musical species. In Europe and North America, the use of sounds, notes, rhythms, and the combination of all the elements of music making developed into an elaborate world of communication and expression with its own distinct system of notation, making it possible to reach an audience well out of earshot. This tradition of music has migrated across continents and cultures, notably to Asia and Latin America. Music in this incarnation is not a language. Yet it seems to be a shortcut to one's emotions. Perhaps it is a mystical means of communication clearer and more powerful than language and therefore a link to the divine?
Past Events: 2020–21
A Library by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ilya Milstein, 2018.
Journeys in a Time of Contentment: A panel discussion with First-Year Seminar students and faculty
Monday, April 26, 2021, 4:30 pm
First-Year Seminar takes us on journeys real, spiritual, and metaphorical—from Odysseus’s voyage home to Ithaka to Frederick Douglass’s quest for freedom and Derek Walcott’s imaginative roaming over space and time. Yet many of us have spent the past year in unprecedented physical confinement. This final FYSEM forum discussion considered how our experiences of isolation have inflected our ideas about reading and writing, and asks whether journeys and adventures are possible when movement is not.
Antonio Delgado
A Conversation with Congressman Antonio Delgado: The Self in the World
Many of the assigned readings for First-Year Seminar revolve around intellectual, emotional, and political journeys, underscoring the value of literature through the ages for personal and intellectual growth. We were honored to welcome Congressman Antonio Delgado, the US Representative for our district, New York-19, to speak about the books that played a crucial role in his own development as a person, thinker, and politician.
Chiara Ricciardone
Self, Statehood, and Tradition: A Conversation with Chiara Ricciardone
In the first of three panel conversations around the texts and ideas of First-Year Seminar, first-year students and faculty spoke with Chiara Ricciardone, a scholar and activist whose research and teaching interests encompass critical theory and ancient Greek philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Using Virgil’s Aeneid as our touchstone text, this student/faculty panel discussed what it means to read classical texts in the contemporary world. Is it possible or useful for us, as we grapple with defining the political community we belong to, to engage with or appropriate an ancient text? How could our relationship with ancient texts inform, provoke, and inspire questions about the world we want to live in?
Dinaw Mengestu
The Self and the Soul: A Conversation with Dinaw Mengestu
In the second of three panel conversations around the texts and ideas of First-Year Seminar, first-year students and faculty spoke with Dinaw Mengestu, the highly-acclaimed Ethiopian-American novelist and journalist who directs Bard’s Written Arts Program. Using Dante’s Inferno as our touchstone text, this student/faculty panel discussed how and why Mengestu is inspired to create (in the words of the New York Times Book Review of his third novel, All Our Names), “disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place, and human connection.”