Bard MAT Faculty and Staff 2024 - 2025
Molly Albrecht, Education Faculty
Molly lives with her family in the Hudson Valley where she enjoys hiking with her daughter and two standard poodles.
Kimberly Alidio, History Faculty
Kimberly Alidio holds a B.A. from Oberlin College (History/ English double major, gender studies minor); a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (History, with a Certificate in Gender Studies); and a M.F.A. from University of Arizona (Poetry). She is a poet, essayist, historian, and teacher. She has held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, a Spencer Foundation/ National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, and an Assistant Professorship of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas. For six years, she was Social Studies/ History faculty at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas. She has been Writing Faculty for the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and the Naropa Summer Writing Program, designed and led writing workshops for The Poetry Project and Kundiman, and a mentor for The Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship. She currently teaches language studies, essay writing, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial history for the Bard Prison Initiative, Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, and Bard’s Masters of Art in Teaching. Recent publications include an essay in e-flux journal; “The Girls and a Joke”: 1080 Press Newsletter #144; and Teeter, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She is the author of three additional books of poetry—why letter ellipses, : once teeth bones coral : , and after projects the resound—, and four chapbooks—ROOM TONE, a cell of falls, shaping and edging, and solitude being alien. Her fifth book, Traceable Relation, is forthcoming in Fall 2025. Her scholarly essays are published in Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of the Nation and Diaspora (New York University Press), Poetry Foundation, American Quarterly, Social Text, Journal of American Ethnic History, and the Journal of American History. She is currently writing a book of poetic essay criticism on Filipino postcolonial, diasporic arts. She lives on Munsee-Mohican and Lenape lands along the Mahicannituck River, otherwise known as New York’s Hudson Valley, and supports collective resistance, collective refusal, and collective flourishing to dismantle settler colonialism everywhere.
Jaime Osterman Alves, Associate Professor of Literature and MAT Faculty Chair, Bard Master of Arts in Teaching Program; and Faculty Associate, Institute for Writing & Thinking
Jaime Alves is an associate professor of literature and the MAT faculty chair in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. She also teaches a variety of courses in the undergraduate college, and develops programming to support new- and mentor teachers in secondary schools, through international partnerships with OSUN network faculty, and locally throughout the Hudson Valley. Areas of particular research interest include nineteenth-century literary representations of schoolgirls and female education; domesticity and gender studies; science, medicine and disability studies; newspapers/periodicals and archival research; museums as purveyors of knowledge and sites of informal learning. Among other publications, Jaime's scholarship has been featured in Legacy and American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard; she is the author of Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge 2009; paperback 2013).
E-Mail: [email protected]
Amy Boyd, History Faculty
Amy Boyd majored in Urban Studies and Anthropology at Barnard College at Columbia University before earning a Masters degree from Fordham in Teaching Secondary Social Studies and a Masters in School Leadership from Hunter College. She uses her New York State School Building and District Level certifications to inform her systems-approach to leadership coaching as a Behavior Specialist. Amy facilitates opportunities to liberate and empower young people and adults in her current role as a Behavior Specialist with the Mid-Hudson Regional Partnership Center. While she spent her first decade as a public school teacher and leader in the Bronx, Amy has also expanded to partner with rural, suburban and private school networks. Amy enjoys exploring nature with her two daughters, doing yoga, and inevitably drinking (or contemplating her next) coffee.
Deirdre Branford, History Faculty
B.A. in Philosophy, Politics & Law, minor in Women’s Studies from SUNY Binghamton; MAT in History from Bard College. Deirdre is a 2007 Bard MAT graduate, mentor teacher, and adjunct faculty member for the program. Since graduating from the MAT, Deirdre has been a Social Studies teacher at Kingston High School teaching Global History & Geography II. Deirdre lives with her two children and husband (Bard MAT ‘08 in Literature) in Kingston and enjoys playing board games, baking cupcakes, and crafting.
Derek Lance Furr, Dean of Teacher Education; Bard MAT Program Director; Literature Faculty
B.A., Wake Forest University; M.Ed., University of Virginia; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Dean of Teacher Education and a literature professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. He also teaches for the Bard Prison Initiative and the Institute for Writing and Thinking. He is the author of three books--Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (Palgrave 2010), Suite For Three Voices (Fomite 2012), and Semitones (2015)--and has recent work in Jacket2, Twentieth Century Literature, and Raritan. Before coming to Bard, he was an English Language Arts teacher and reading specialist in the Charlottesville City Schools.
Phone: 845-758-7136E-mail: [email protected]
Lauren Collet-Gildard, Education
B.A., SUNY New Paltz; MAT, Bard College; Ph.D., University at Albany. Lauren is a social studies educator and adjunct faculty member in the Bard MAT program. Her interests include critical pedagogy and social justice in education, and her research focuses on media literacy and discussions of controversial issues in secondary classrooms.
Email: [email protected]
Sarah Cioffi, English Language Learners (ELL/ ENL)
Sarah Cioffi has spent 34 years in education, with 16 years in leadership positions at Scotia-Glenville, Bethlehem, and Shenendehowa school districts in the Capital Region of New York State. She is the recently retired K-12 Academic Administrator for English as a New Language and World Languages at Shenendehowa, a district which experienced a 1000% increase in its English language learner population over 12 years. Sarah taught in the Clarkson University MAT program for several years, and recently joined the faculty of the Siena College MAT-TESOL program. Sarah sits on the NYS ELL Leadership Council, the NYS World Language Leadership Council, and the NYS Seal of Biliteracy Task Force, and is the former director of the Capital Region ENL Roundtable and Capital Area Language Leaders. She is also the founder of SBC Instructional Consulting, LLC, working with New York State school districts to improve the teaching and learning of their English language learners. Sarah has presented or taught at Capital Region BOCES, CASDA, NYSAWA, NYS-TESOL, the School Administrators' Association of NYS, and the Bard Early College Programs in Manhattan and Queens. Sarah completed her Doctorate in Educational Leadership at Russell Sage College, where her dissertation research was on the roles, responsibilities, and needs of content-area teachers of English Language Learners.
Brooke Jude, Associate Professor of Biology, Bard College
Erica Kaufman, Director, Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College
B.A., Douglass College, Rutgers University, M.F.A, New School University, dissertation in Composition and Rhetoric at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Kaufman is the Director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking and Assistant Professor of Education. She has taught in the English Department at Baruch College, worked with the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, and served as a Curriculum Specialist for the Holocaust Educators Network. She has been a visiting writer and visiting professor at Naropa University and Parsons the New School for Design. Her publications include the full-length poetry collections INSTANT CLASSIC (Roof Books 2013) and censory impulse (Factory School 2009). Kaufman is the co-editor of Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974 (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2014) and of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Venn Diagram, 2009). Prose and critical work can be found in: Jacket2, Open Space/SFMOMA and in The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations (ed. Mark Silverberg, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Additional critical work is forthcoming in the MLA Guide to Teaching Gertrude Stein (eds. L. Esdale and D. Mix) and Reading Experimental Writing (ed. Georgina Colby). Kaufman also co-coordinates the Teacher Resource Center for the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry MOOC in collaboration with the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Current research interests include: Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines; the interstices between contemporary poetics and Composition & Rhetoric; multiliteracies; feminism and the epic poem; and intergenerational Holocaust Studies.
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845.758.7383
Mary C. Krembs, Director, Citizen Science; Mathematics Faculty
B.A., Marist College; M.S., Ph.D., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Research interests: computational geometry, mathematics and music, and software development methodology.
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7454
Learn about the Citizen Science Program
Cecilia Maple ’01, Director of MAT Admission and Student Affairs; Teacher Certification Consultant, Bard High School Early College Network
BA, Bard College; MA, Pace University. Cecilia is currently pursuing her doctorate in educational leadership through Endicott College's School of Education.
Cecilia has been with the program since its inception in 2003. She is an educator and ally, as well as an animal lover and activist. Cecilia lives with an ever-growing family of rescued critters (from dogs to newts and everything in between).
[email protected]
[email protected]
bard.edu/bhsec
845-758-7145 (phone)
845-758-7149 (fax)
Michael Sadowski, Associate Dean of the College; Associate Professor, Bard MAT
B.S. Northwestern University; Ed.M. Ed.D., Harvard University
Michael Sadowski, Interim Dean of Graduate Studies, also serves as Director of Inclusive Pedagogy and Curriculum in the Dean’s Office and an Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He teaches courses in youth identity development in the MAT program and LGBTQ+ Issues in U.S. Education in the Human Rights program. In addition to Bard, Michael has been an instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he completed his doctorate, and was a visiting professor in 2016-17 at Stanford University.
Michael has published extensively on the issues affecting LGBTQ+ students, immigrant students, and adolescents more broadly. His 2016 book Safe Is Not Enough was featured by NPR and was cited by GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings as "the most important book written on LGBTQ issues in education in my lifetime." His other books include In a Queer Voice: Journeys of Resilience from Adolescence to Adulthood (Temple University Press, 2013), based on a seven-year longitudinal interview study, Portraits of Promise: Voices of Successful Immigrant Students (Harvard Education Press, 2013), and the edited volume Adolescents at School (Harvard Education Press, 2020), now in its third edition and used in teacher education programs around the country and abroad.
He also is the editor of the Youth Development and Education book series for Harvard Education Press and was editor of the Harvard Education Letter, for which he won a National Press Club Award. Michael is also a creative nonfiction writer. His memoir, Men I've Never Been, was shortlisted pre-publication for the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for Nonfiction and will be released in Spring 2021 as part of the Living Out series by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Gautam Sethi, Faculty, Bard Center for Environmental Policy
E-mail: [email protected]
View Biography
Cassandra Taylor, Visiting Faculty, Teacher Opportunity Corps II Advisor
B.S.E., University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; M.S.E. in both Secondary English Education and Secondary Special Education, SUNY New Paltz. Cassandra Taylor is a English Language Arts teacher with over twenty-five years of experience in the classroom. She has helped pioneer African American Literature and History courses in both her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and in Kingston, New York, and has been a guest lecture on many social justice issues ranging from Black feminism, African Traditional Religions, poetry and literature from the prison system, and the importance of trauma-based care in residential facilities for youth. Cassandra is also the Curriculum Coordinator for The Underground Center - a nonprofit based in Saugerties, New York that teaches sustainable agriculture and natural building skills to those most marginalized by current sustainability movements.
Mike Tibbetts, Professor of Biology, Bard College
Robert Tynes, Director of Research; Site Director at Eastern State, Bard Prison Initiative
Wendy Urban-Mead, Associate Professor of History, Bard MAT
B.A., Carleton College; M.A., University at Albany; Ph.D., Columbia University. She is the author of The Gender of Piety: Faith, Family, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press, 2015). Areas of interest include African history, with emphasis on southern Africa; European imperialism; history of Christianity in Africa; religion and gender; the history of the First World War in global context. Taught secondary school social studies for five years in Red Hook and Arlington, New York, school districts. Member, American Historical Association, World History Association, The Africa Network, American Society of Church History, African Studies Association, Britain Zimbabwe Society. Awards: German Academic Exchange Service Grant (1984-85), Richard Hofstadter Fellowship (1995-2000), Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Grant (1999). Past editor of Social Sciences & Missions (Brill, 2007-2017). Articles in Journal of Religion in Africa, Mennonite Quarterly Review, Women's History Review, and chapters in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960 (Duke, 2010), Gendering Ethnicity in African Women's Lives, ed. Jan Bender Shetler (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), and African Christian Biography, ed. Dana Robert (Cluster Publications, 2018.)
E-Mail: [email protected]
Dumaine Williams, Vice President and Dean of the Early Colleges; Adjunct Faculty, Bard MAT
Dr. Dumaine Williams (Vice President and Dean of the Early College) oversees academic programming across the Bard Early College campuses and promotes the Sequence’s academic quality and integration with the broader Bard network. Dr. Williams was previously the founding principal of Bard High School Early College Newark and Bard High School Early College Cleveland. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology from Stony Brook University; an M.A. in Educational Leadership from Montclair State University; and a B.A. in Biology from Bard College.
[email protected]