Henry Mielarczyk ’25 Joins Stennis Program for Congressional Interns
Bard alumnus Henry Mielarczyk ’25, a philosophy and music performance major, has been accepted into the 2025 Stennis Program for Congressional Interns. The internship, given by the Stennis Center for Public Service in Washington, DC, is a competitive program that aims to provide its interns with an opportunity to better understand the role of Congress as an institution and its role in the democracy of the United States.
Henry Mielarczyk ’25 Joins Stennis Program for Congressional Interns
Bard alumnus Henry Mielarczyk ’25, a philosophy and music performance major, has been accepted into the 2025 Stennis Program for Congressional Interns. The internship, given by the Stennis Center for Public Service in Washington, DC, is a competitive bipartisan program designed to provide congressional interns with an opportunity to better understand the role of Congress as an institution and its role in the democracy of the United States. Interns will connect with current and former senior congressional staff through a series of discussion sessions designed to provide an in-depth look at Congress and its operations with other institutions. The Stennis Center is a bipartisan legislative branch agency created by Congress in 1988 to promote and strengthen the highest ideals of public service in the United States. The center aims to develop and deliver a portfolio of unique programs for young people, leaders in local, state, and federal government, and congressional staff.
Bard College is pleased to announce that Bard junior Lauren Mendoza ’26, a double major in physics and philosophy, has been announced as a recipient of the 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. The scholarship supports college sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
Bard College Junior Lauren Mendoza ’26 Wins Goldwater Scholarship
Bard College is pleased to announce that Bard junior Lauren Mendoza ’26, a double major in physics and philosophy, has been announced as a recipient of the 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. The scholarship supports college sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Mendoza currently conducts research in astrophysics with Professor Clara Sousa-Silva and had previously conducted research in nanofabrication with Professor Paul Cadden-Zimansky. After graduating from Bard, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in astronomy with a focus on the solar system and instrumentation, and aims to promote effective scientific communication between academics and the wider public.
The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, established by Congress in 1986 in honor of Senator Barry Goldwater, aims to ensure that the U.S. is producing highly-qualified professionals in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Over its 30-year history, Goldwater Scholarships have been awarded to thousands of undergraduates, many of whom have gone on to win other prestigious awards such as the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship, Rhodes Scholarship, Churchill Scholarship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship that support the graduate school work of Goldwater scholars. Learn more at https://goldwaterscholarship.gov/
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, and senior faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking.
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.
Olin Humanities, Room 3075:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Professor Ungvary will be speaking about the ancient Christian Saint St. Anthony and the birth of hegiography as a literary genre.
Friday, November 3, 2023
Christopher Moore (Penn State) Hegeman 204A12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Some intellectual traditions take the four cardinal virtues – wisdom, justice, courage, and self-discipline – to constitute the virtuous (moral and successful) life. This list of canonical virtues, and an account of its sufficiency, is ascribed to Plato. In this presentation, I argue against doing so. Rather than asserting how things stand with virtues, Plato depicts many conversations about an already emerging (fifth-century) view of human goodness as articulable as a cluster of virtues. Throughout his dialogues, his Socrates criticizes the explanatory value of such clusters. A clinched tetrad of virtues sometimes proves dialectically helpful for him but, at the end of his writing career, Plato says that we need to keep investigating the number and nature of the virtues. I argue that Plato is depicting – and is advancing in the very process – perhaps the prime step in the development of ethics as a field of philosophical reflection: debating which virtues matter to the well-lived life.
Friday, October 20, 2023
Susan Buck-Morss (CUNY Graduate Center) Hegeman 204A12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 My book Year 1 (2021) is a philosophical recounting of historical time inspired by Walter Benjamin. Its thematic converges with the humanitarian border crises that now include the Hamas-Israeli war. The task is to address the destructive convergence of history and myth, nation-state and human rights, sovereignty and ecological survival, not by taking sides, but by addressing our shared state of emergency with every intellectual resource that we have.
Friday, September 22, 2023
Hegeman 20412:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Interested in learning more about the Philosophy Program at Bard? Come to our Philosophy Program Information Session to meet faculty and current majors and to learn more about courses, requirements for moderation and graduation, senior projects, etc.! There will be light refreshments!
Friday, April 21, 2023
Yarran Hominh, Philosophy Aspinwall 30212:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 What role is there for hope in hopeless times? The present is, if any, a time where to respond objectively to the state of the world is to despair. The systems of oppression and domination that comprise the basic structure of society are rampant; the political democratic means available of changing those systems are powerless, sunk in institutional deadlock and political polarization. The world continues to suffer from an ongoing pandemic, and to top it all off, we seem incapable of even so much as slowing our rush towards an uninhabitable future. The predominant forms of hope that are culturally available have been co-opted. At best, they are politically inert. At worst, they act as ideological figleaves by which existing systems and destructive ways of being are maintained and reproduced. Yet, I argue, drawing on a 1983 conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, even in such hopeless conditions there is still a place for hope. It is a hope not for a future way the world could be, but a hope in others, tied to the present possibilities of collective agency.
Friday, March 10, 2023
Marina van Zuylen (Literature) and Garry Hagberg (Philosophy) Olin 20512:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Join the Philosophy & Literature Programs for a conversation between Marina van Zuylen and Garry Hagberg on the connections between philosophy and literature. What might it mean to read philosophy as literature? Does literature count as philosophy? In what ways can literature and philosophy together help people live a good life, or one that is good enough?
Speakers: Clara Sousa-Silva, Assistant Professor of Physics, and Kathryn Tabb, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Olin 20412:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Physics Phriday and Philosophy Salon will be cohosting a conversation on the intersections between science and philosophy. How might philosophers help scientists in their work? How and when does the practice of science give rise to philosophical questions? What is the nature of life? Does the scientific attitude give rise to humility or to hubris?