Spring 2022
A Conversation with Congressman Antonio Delgado
Rep. Delgado is from Schenectady, NY, and lives in Rhinebeck with his wife, Lacey, and their twin sons, Maxwell and Coltrane. Rep Delgado earned a Rhodes Scholarship while attending Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, and after returning home from Oxford, he received a law degree from Harvard Law School. Rep. Delgado's professional experiences include a career in the music industry focused on empowering young people through Hip Hop culture, as well as working as an attorney in the complex commercial space, where he dedicated significant time to pro bono work in connection with criminal justice reform. Today, Rep. Delgado finds common ground across the aisle and delivers results for the people of New York's 19th Congressional District.
Daniel Mendelsohn, a memoirist, critic, essayist and translator, is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a translation of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and three collections of essays. His tenth book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate was published in 2020.
A Zoom Link will be provided
The Community is the Classroom
FYSEM is delighted to announce our first forum event of the Spring 2022 semester: 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 will introduce the event. The forum will incorporate clips from James Rutenbeck’s 2021 documentary A Reckoning in Boston, which follows the stories of two Clemente graduates, Kafi Dixon and Carl Chandler.
The Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities grew out of recognizing that many low-income residents have limited access to college education and no opportunity to study the humanities. The Clemente Course bridges that gap by making humanities instruction accessible to disadvantaged members of our communities, giving them the possibility to reengage with education.
This forum is a space for reflection on what it means to forge and nurture community in and out of the classroom. As we begin our second semester of FYSEM, we look toward the Clemente Course as a model in community engagement, activism, and agency.
ATTENDANCE AT THIS EVENT IS MANDATORY. Masks are required and there will be room for generous spacing. Students who have special requests with respect to attendance are asked to speak with their FYSEM instructor.
Fall 2021
First-Year Seminar Welcome Reception
Choreographer Mark Morris's Adaptation of Henry Purcell's Opera Dido and Aeneas
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
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.
Our event will consist of a screening of a performance of this 50-minute work, preceded by remarks by Aaron Mattocks, the former manager of the Mark Morris Dance Company, who will speak on elements of Morris’s technique and about “Dido” more specifically.
ATTENDANCE AT THIS EVENT IS MANDATORY. Masks are required and there will be room for generous spacing. Students who have special requests with respect to attendance are asked to speak with their FYSEM instructor.
The Self and the Language of Music
No music is assigned in FYSEM, but yet music co-existed with all the required reading in both semesters.
This lecture/performance is designed to inspire curiosity about how music, as a form of life, independent of words, images, and any explicit or implicit storyline, reframes time, holds our attention, suggests meaning, appeals to our memory, and becomes easily associated with feelings. The music that will be performed and discussed was not written to narrate a movie or a play. It was not inspired by a vision or a painting or any image. It is rather an eloquent example of musical ideas and thought.
ATTENDANCE AT THIS EVENT IS MANDATORY. Masks are required and there will be room for generous spacing. Students who have special requests with respect to attendance are asked to speak with their FYSEM instructor.
Past Events: 2020–21
Journeys in a Time of Contentment: A panel discussion with First-Year Seminar students and faculty
A Conversation with Congressman Antonio Delgado: The Self in the World
Self, Statehood, and Tradition: A Conversation with Chiara Ricciardone
The Self and the Soul: A Conversation with Dinaw Mengestu
Past Events: 2019–20
Encounters, Oppression and Recuperation: A Conversation with Gregory Duff Morton
First-Year Seminar Welcome Reception
The Self in the World / Bard in the World
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Who lived here before us? How does a sense of place, and its layered histories, contribute to our sense of self as students, as individuals, and as a community? Join us for a presentation and panel discussion about Hudson Valley history with Myra Armstead, Vice President of Inclusive Excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies; Susan Merriam, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, and Heidi Hill, Historic Site Manager at the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, NY.
Special Preview of the New Documentary College Behind Bars
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Directed and produced by award-winning filmmaker Lynn Novick, produced by Sarah Botstein, and executive produced by Ken Burns, College Behind Bars reveals the transformative power of higher education through the experiences of incarcerated men and women earning degrees in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the country’s most rigorous college-in-prison programs. This preview event will feature segments from the documentary followed by panel discussions with Lynn Novick, BPI Executive Director Max Kenner ’01, and BPI alumni featured in the film.
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Acclaimed tenor and Associate Professor of Music Rufus Müller, together with Bard colleagues and students, presents selections from Purcell’s 1689 opera, Dido and Aeneas. Inspired by the Dido episode in the fourth book of the Aeneid, Purcell’s work translates into music the tragic love story at the heart of Virgil’s epic.
Experiencing The Tempest
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
As you read Shakespeare’s drama of fantastical encounters, magic, love, and betrayal, Bard College Artist in Residence Jonathan Rosenberg and a cast of professional actors perform scenes from The Tempest and discuss the interpretive choices they make when performing the play.
Literacy, Race, and Memory in Douglass and Undocumented
Presented by Dan-El Padilla Peralta, Department of Classics, Princeton University
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
This talk will examine the relationship of literacy to the formation of the racial subject by reading a scene in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave against a chapter of Padilla Peralta's own best-selling memoir, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.
Cosponsored by American Studies and the Council for Inclusive Excellence
Ourselves in the World: Reflections on First-Year Seminar
Past Events: 2018–19
Experiencing Caesar
First-Year Seminar explores the dramatic story of the demise of the Roman military commander and “dictator in perpetuity,” Julius Caesar. Bard College Artist in Residence Jonathan Rosenberg and a cast of four professional actors—Ezra Knight, Keren Lugo, Ken Marks, and Richard Topol—perform scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and discuss the interpretive choices they make when performing the play.
Also Sprach Zarathustra
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
As students in Bard’s First-Year Seminar read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, conductor and historian Leon Botstein explores the relationship between Nietzsche and music. A discussion is accompanied by musical excerpts, then a full performance by The Orchestra Now, followed by an audience Q&A.
Past Events: 2017–18
Experiencing Revolution
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Bracko: A Reading of Sappho’s Poetry by Anne Carson, with Amy Khoshbin, Robert Currie, Nick Flynn, and Sam Anderson
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Past Events: 2016–17
Experiencing Coriolanus
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Experiencing Malcolm X
Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
As we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, First-Year Seminar presents The Acting Company (described by The New York Times as “the major touring classical theater in the United States”) in X: Or Betty Shabazz vs. The Nation, a new play written by Marcus Gardley (according to The New Yorker, “the heir to Garcia Lorca, Pirandello, and Tennessee Williams”) and directed by Ian Belknap.
2017 Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature: Francine Prose on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center
Eugene Meyer (1875–1959) was the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first president of the World Bank. Previous Eugene Meyer speakers include Sir David Cannadine, Colm Tóibín, Andrew Roberts, Fintan O’Toole, and David Reynolds.
National Theatre Live Encore: Frankenstein
Avery Arts Complex (South Campus)