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Professor Jim Keller Receives ITERATA Fellowship for His Research on Generative AI in the Classroom

Bard professor Jim Keller has been honored with a Small Grant Fellowship from ITERATA, the Institute for Transformational Education and Responsive Action in a Technoscientific Age. The $5,000 award will enable Professor Keller to advance his research and writing for publication, “‘The Technological within Its Own Bounds’: Responding to Generative AI with ‘Speaking Speech’ and Embodied Learning Models for Transformative Pedagogies.” Keller is director of the Learning Commons, visiting associate professor of academic writing with a faculty affiliation in philosophy, and senior faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.

This fellowship will support Keller in expanding on insights that he shared in his 2022 American Association of Colleges and Universities presentation, copresented with two Learning Commons tutors and director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking, Erica Kaufman. He plans to explore embodied cognition and literacy education, disseminating the Learning Commons’ innovative best practices, position, and principles across various platforms to faculty and administrators and advocating for learning approaches founded on understandings of language and education founded in enactive, embodied accounts of thinking.

Post Date: 02-06-2024

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Bard Professor Kathryn Tabb Receives $40,000 NEH Fellowship in Support of Her Book Project Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking

Bard College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Kathryn Tabb has been awarded $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund her book project, Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, that explores Locke’s theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. Based on her dissertation, which focused on laying out Locke’s theory of madness as caused by the association of ideas, this book will be the first to present Locke’s theory of irrationality, and will invite other scholars to challenge how we think about Locke—and perhaps other historical figures—on key themes such as personal identity, nativism, religious toleration, freedom and enslavement, private property, and empire. The NEH grant will support her work over an 8-month term beginning in January. Previously, Tabb was an investigator for the NEH grant project, “Humanities Connections Curriculum for Medicine, Literature, and Society” (2017–20).

“I’m so grateful to the NEH and to Bard for providing me with the support I need to dedicate this whole academic year to research and writing. It’s an enormous luxury, and will allow me, I hope, to finally finish a project that has been a long time coming,” said Tabb.

John Locke’s wide corpus of writings is generally considered to contribute to three areas of philosophy, namely politics, metaphysics, and epistemology. But Locke was also a doctor. Tabb’s account presents him not primarily as a political theorist, metaphysician, or epistemologist, but rather as a physician concerned with reason and its limits. Tabb sees the normative study of the mind as Locke’s central project, and some of his most celebrated theories as deriving from it. Locke thought that the correct management of our ideas over the course of a lifetime was requisite for discovering truth, living virtuously under a commonwealth, and assuring our salvation. In this sense Locke’s central project, what Tabb terms his ethics of thinking, provides the foundation for his assessments of what sort of lives—and, indeed, which lives—are worth living. Because of Locke’s influence on American colonists, these assessments found their way into the founding documents of the states, justifications for the imperialist project, and, later, the terms in which independence was conceived of and argued for. 

Tabb will present her account of Locke’s ethics of thinking through a series of what he would call archetypes: kinds of people who exemplify the various ways in which we can go right—and more often wrong—in the conduct of our understandings. Taken together, these archetypes will allow the reader to recognize previously unappreciated commitments in Locke’s work that ground Locke’s ethics of thinking. The book’s chapters will work together to present Locke’s ethics of thinking and show how it motivates diverse facets of his philosophy.

Post Date: 01-18-2024

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Stranger Love by Dylan Mattingly ’14 and Professor Thomas Bartscherer Among New York Times Best Classical Music Performances of 2023

The one-night-only, six-hour-long opera Stranger Love by composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, has been selected as one of the best classical music performances of 2023 by the New York Times. The performance was conducted by Mattingly’s fellow Bard alumnus David Bloom ’13. “For all its abstraction and timelessness — what is more ageless than the opera’s themes of love and beauty? — this work is absolutely of its time, slowing down emotion in a world that moves uncontrollably fast,” writes Joshua Barone. “The premiere run, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in May, was just a single evening, but Stranger Love deserves a life far beyond that.”

See the Best Classical Music Performances of 2023 from the New York Times

Read the New York Times Review of Stranger Love

Post Date: 12-12-2023