Family + Alumni/ae Weekend Schedule

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Academic Classes

Art History 101, Perspectives in World Art
Katherine Boivin, associate professor of art history and visual culture; director, art history and visual culture; coordinator, medieval studies
Perspectives in World Art introduces the diversity of the visual arts worldwide over the course of two semesters.  Students may take either semester or both. The first semester examines painting, sculpture, architecture, and other artifacts from the Paleolithic period through 1500 C.E.  Works from Europe, Asia, and Africa are studied chronologically to create an integrated historical context. Readings from various critical perspectives present different methodological approaches.

Biology 122, Beautiful Birds
Ellie Diamant, visiting assistant professor, urban ecologist and evolutionary biologist
This laboratory course exposes non-majors to a variety of key concepts and scientific skills in biology, through exploring the magnificent and diverse world of birds. There are over 9,000 species of birds, the living dinosaurs that have adapted to rich and diverse ways of life. We will explore what makes birds birds, which we will use as an entry point to different subfields of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology. Such topics include the unique and diverse physiology of birds, evolutionary histories, animal behavior, sexual selection, urban ecology, and conservation biology. Students will engage in hands-on activities to ask scientific questions, build scientific literacy skills, and explore key concepts through online modules, analysis of graphical representation of data, pre-collected data with analytical exercises, and development of their own scientific question. Students will use the campus as an outdoor classroom to ob. Students will therefore become familiar with local fauna while develop higher order thinking, transferable skills, and a basis in scientific literacy.

Citizen Science
Kate Huffer, assistant director of Citizen Science
Through the lens of the PCB contamination and clean-up in the Hudson River, the Citizen Science Program tackles urgent, present-day questions related to water contamination and works to place these conversations within the students' daily lives and imagined futures. We will consider in what ways social, historical, and political factors are at work even when we think we are engaged in “objective” science. In 2025-2026 we will explore the properties of water, as well as how these properties influence the contamination (and decontamination) of water. Using laboratory investigations and active classroom discussions, the focus will be on the creation, analysis, and interpretation of scientific evidence.

Economics 258, Ecological Economics
Birte Strunk, assistant professor of economics
The course “Ecological Economics” offers an introduction to the field of Ecological Economics with a specific focus on the themes of climate change, inequality, and growth/degrowth. It is structured in four parts: Part I sets the scene by making a case for an economic perspective on climate change and contrasting the two main economic streams engaging with these matters: Environmental Economics and Ecological Economics. Part II delves in the theoretical foundations of Ecological Economics with a specific focus on the core themes outlined above: climate change, inequality, and (de)growth. Part III will expand the focus and survey current debates on Degrowth (particularly) in the Global North, ranging from questions around property rights and commons to discussions around welfare states and the Green New Deal, as well as to feminist debates on work and social provisioning. Part IV, finally, focuses on global issues for Ecological Economics and considers the role that decoloniality, indigenous perspectives, global structural trade dependencies, and Environmental Justice movements play.

Literature 131, Women in Leadership
Erin Cannan, vice president for civic engagement; deputy director, Center for Civic Engagement
Deirdre d'Albertis, dean of the College; professor of english
Michelle Murray, associate professor of political studies; chair of social studies division
It is 2025. Why aren't there more women in leadership positions? According to a 2018 Pew Research Center report, the majority of American men and women acknowledge the capacity of women to lead. Yet in certain domains--most notably electoral politics and business— women continue to be under-represented at the top and the American public remains skeptical that gender parity can be achieved.  Recent elections have galvanized the electorate around constructions of gender in particularly dramatic ways.  If we are living in a post-feminist society (as some claim), why do these questions and conflicts continue to arise? Identity is an urgent conversation in 21st-century politics and everyday life, and this includes awareness of how intersectionality shapes gendered experiences. What are the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about equality, representation, privilege, freedom, authority, and success? How do these inflect real-world outcomes for individuals and societies?  In this two-credit course we will explore some of the stories that circulate in our culture around women and power, both from an academic and from a practical, real-world perspective. What does it mean to lead? How do we use a language of empowerment? Why has the United States embraced certain narratives of gender equity and success as opposed to those being created in other countries and cultures? We will focus on learning from women who are committed to making a difference in the world through their personal and professional choices, hearing their stories, and reading texts that have been particularly important to them in their lives and work. So too, we will engage with stories from the past (archival research), from across disciplines (government, politics, the military, higher education, STEM, the arts, tech, media) and from a wide range of perspectives.  As an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course, this seminar will provide students with the unique opportunity to bring theory and practice together in a very immediate sense: by the end of the term you will have identified a story only you can tell, whether it is based in political activism, community engagement, or work experience. Drawing on the rich resources here in Annandale as well as through Bard's other campuses we will reach out to groups and organizations with a shared focus on gender. Network building is something we will explicitly address.

Literature 282, Like Family: Domestic Worker Characters in Fiction
Marina van Zuylen, Clemente Chair in the Humanities at Bard College; national academic director, Clemente Course in the Humanities
This course will delve into the idea that female domestic workers (maids, nannies, cooks), often portrayed as invisible and powerless, can also wield considerable influence and authority over their employers, affecting the structure of everyday life. Far from only being consigned to the margins of storytelling, mere backdrop to the narrative, our examples will show these workers in different light. Starting with excerpts from the comedic tradition where the “servant” uses role reversals to subvert traditional social hierarchies (Terence, Cervantes, Molière, Kundera), we will then tackle the ethical and social implications of figures that are both part of and excluded from the household. Self-destructive loyalty (Flaubert, A Simple Heart, Ishiguro, Remains of the Day), skewed hierarchies (Szabo, The Door, du Maurier, Rebecca), Class warfare (Ndiaye, The Cheffe, Slimani, The Perfect Nanny), cultural upheavals (Faizur Rasul, Bengal to Birmingham). 

Music 177, Jazz Through the Prism of History I
Angelica Sanchez, assistant professor of music
This course is a two-semester course and will explore the history of the black American art form called Jazz from its roots to the 1960’s against the backdrop of American History. We will explore and gain a deeper awareness of the provocative history of jazz from an economic, social, and political perspective. Students will identify key jazz players and examine how their lives and their innovative contributions have often reflected societal inequalities. In addition to surveying the history of jazz, students will also gain listening skills that will enable them to identify style, instrumentation, historical and musical content within the jazz idiom.

Political Science 261, Student Voting: Power, Politics, and Race in the Fight for American Democracy
Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs; director, Center for Civic Engagement; professor of political studies
Simon Gilhooley, associate professor of political studies
The course will be a historical and interdisciplinary examination of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlaws age discrimination, using it as a prism through which to examine both the history of disenfranchisement and the fight for voting rights in the United States. The role of college communities, particularly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, will be the central focus. The course will connect four institutions in the US that have been the sites of voting rights struggles via a network collaborative course (with a section held at each institution – Bard, Tuskegee, NC A&T, Prairie View). The history of the struggle at each institution will be engaged by students in order to produce a broad study of youth voting rights in the United States. The course is co-designed by faculty from the respective institutions and will be taught simultaneously, with key assignments shared by the campus sites with the aim of facilitating synchronous classroom discussions and collaborations between the different sites. By the end of the course students will have developed an understanding of the history of the struggle for student voting rights and the challenges to those rights that are being faced today.

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Academic Classes

Architecture 111, Architecture as Media: Narrative and Counternarrative Architecture
Ross Adams, assistant professor of architectural studies; codirector, architecture
Architecture narrates worlds. It tells its stories not with words, but with its walls, floors, surfaces and sites. To understand architecture as narrative is to acknowledge architecture as an instrument crucial to the maintenance of social relations, a medium that re-presents how we understand nature, and a technology of capital. Yet the capacity of architecture to narrate is largely ignored by its practitioners—overlooked and unrecognized, allowing certain narratives to be reproduced across the built environment. This course will center architecture’s narrative capacity as a transformative power for design to narrate otherwise: architecture as counternarrative. Taking architecture-as-narrative as an analytical and productive framework, this studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries and the engagement with contested ideas. In this way, the course is simultaneously an introduction to architecture’s media, as it is an opportunity to explore how architecture mediates. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drawing, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments in the history of architecture and related visual cultures that will help to situate our practice today. Our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture.

Computer Science 251, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 
Annabel Rothschild, assistant professor of computer science
An introduction to artificial intelligence principles and techniques.  This course is intended to provide a first course in artificial intelligence for students who have at least one semester of computer programming experience.  The course will explore the application of artificial intelligence techniques to particular application areas.  Techniques include automated reasoning, machine learning, evolutionary learning, heuristic search, and behavior-based robot control. Application examples will be drawn from artificial life, robotics, game play, logic, visual perception, and natural language processing. This course will also include regular discussion of the role of artificial intelligence in society. 

First Year Seminar
Kathryn Tabb, assistant professor of philosophy
The current moment presents a historical juncture in which assumptions about government and public life, in the United States and beyond, are being challenged in renewed and disconcerting ways. Economic and political stability, once regarded as the dividend of the ending of the Cold War, can no longer be taken for granted even in the so-called mature liberal democracies of the North Atlantic region. Faith in democracy as a form of government, and in free speech, cosmopolitanism, and a separation of religion and politics as supporting pillars of such a government, are in decline. International challenges, associated with climate change and global public health, press a world system built upon independent nation-states. Against such a backdrop, students across the world are confronted with an urgent need to re-examine, articulate, and perhaps rejuvenate what it means to live together in a shared society. This incarnation of First-Year Seminar explores the challenges that arise from membership of a democratic community, the obligations and possibilities of citizenship, and the very notion of a collective society. Students read important works from across history drawn from literature, philosophy, political theory, science, and the arts that have shaped how people think about citizenship and civic membership across time and space. In the process, students develop the core skills needed to succeed at Bard, from engaging in active, critical reading and conversation to writing original, thought-provoking, and persuasive essays. The fall semester takes Plato’s Republic as an anchoring text to focus on the idea of the Republic as a commitment to organizing society and political life as a shared endeavor. The spring semester will build from the constitutional documents of the United States and elsewhere to address the obligations and possibilities that arise for individuals as a consequence of membership of such a community. Authors including Aeschylus, Plato, Burke, Douglass, Wollstonecraft, Locke, Hobbes, Liang, Ellison, and Rousseau, as well as challenges to existing constitutional orders, such as those offered by the Suffragists, Native American groups, and others, will aid our thinking.

History 241, Popular Culture in Africa
Folarin Ajibade, assistant professor of African history
Popular culture is usually the first place that the uninitiated encounter real and imagined ideas about Africa. From film to photography to literature to music to fashion, the forms of popular culture that we consume significantly shape how we see ourselves and how we interact with others. This course explores the long history of popular culture in Africa. We will familiarize ourselves with varied forms of popular culture on and about the African continent, and we will think through the historical contexts within which these cultural forms developed as well as how they relate to local and global historical events.

Literature 125, The Odyssey of Homer: An Intensive Reading
Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities
This course will consist of an intensive reading of Homer’s Odyssey over the course of a single semester. The course is designed to introduce first-year students to more profound and sophisticated techniques of reading and thinking about texts than they will have thus far encountered. After two introductory sessions, in which students will be introduced to the large issues particular both to this genre (the archaic Greek world, oral composition, the Homeric Question) and to this particular text (“sequels,” epic cycle, the prominence of women, narrative closure), we will read through the epic at a rate of two books per week; two summary sessions will conclude the semester as we look back at the large literary and cultural issues raised by this essential document of the Western tradition: travel as a narrative vehicle for (self-) discovery, the competing satisfactions of the journey and the arrival, the poem’s special interest in poetry and narrative creation.

Literature 267, The Land of Disasters: A Cultural History of Catastrophic 'Japan'
Chiara Pavone, assistant professor of Japanese
In a famous speech given shortly after the occurrence of the Great Tōhoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster in 2011, writer Murakami Haruki affirmed that “To be Japanese means, in a certain sense, to live alongside a variety of natural catastrophes.” This course’s main objective will be to explore and dispute the origins and genealogy of this – widespread and undisputed – claim. Each class will introduce literary works and media tracing Japan’s history of natural and man-made disasters, explore different methodologies in disaster research (including disaster anthropology, sociology, post-colonial theory and ecocriticism), and engage critically with issues shaping the perception and representation of disasters – such as the proximity of narrators and narratees to the epicenter of the catastrophe, minority populations’ vulnerability to hazards and systemic discrimination, authority and biases in the process of memorialization. The course will offer some critical instruments to answer the question through the close reading of literary works, films and visual artifacts; and by situating these pieces in a larger cultural and technological history that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Japanese nation.

Physics, Demystifying Quantum
Paul Cadden-Zimansky, associate professor of physics
The year 2025 marks 100 year since the formulation of quantum mechanics, an anniversary that prompted the United Nations to officially proclaim next year The International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. At the same moment, governments and corporations are spending billions of dollars to develop "quantum computers," Hollywood screenwriters are invoking the workings of "the quantum realm" to fill sci-fi plot holes, and the press and YouTube creators are regularly describing quantum as "weird," "spooky," "strange," and "impossible to understand." With politics, money, and hype swirling around the topic, the average person is left to wonder what all this fuss is about and if they'll ever have hope of comprehending any of it. In this course, intended for non-science majors, we'll begin at the beginning -- historically and conceptually -- to figure out what is so interesting and important about quantum science and technology. Along the way, we'll aim to separate science fact from science fiction, genuine philosophical questions raised by quantum mechanics from incoherent sophistry, and future possibilities from unfounded hype. By the end of the course, students will come to see that the quantum realm isn't a fictional place. It's the world they've been living in all along.

Political Science 270
Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs; director, Center for Civic Engagement; professor of political studies
Erin Cannan, vice president for civic engagement; deputy director, Center for Civic Engagement
Malia DuMont '95, chief of staff; vice president for strategy and policy
This course focuses on the study of, and engagement with, local politics and is animated by the question: why does local government matter?  Local government is often overlooked, but plays a critical role in the day-to-day life of citizens (as was most recently demonstrated during the pandemic by town and county governments across the country). In spite of this, the structure and activities of local government are poorly understood.  The course will seek to answer the following questions: What role does local government (village, town, and county) play in the day-to-day lives of citizens? How do local politics intersect and differ from state and national politics? What experiments in local governance can inform national discourse on democracy? The course is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences Course and is organized around an internship/practicum. Students will commit to a semester-long internship with a government office or agency, that normally averages four hours per week. Students will also participate in a series of seminars and attend meetings with village, local, and county officials, attend sessions of local government bodies, and read primary and secondary sources concerning the issue of local governance. The class will meet twice each week: (a) once for a classroom session of one hour and twenty minutes and (b) once for an internship session that averages four to six hours (usually on a Friday). Students in the class may also be asked to attend some public meetings, like Town Board meetings. In the classroom and at the internship, we strive to link the classroom to the world.