Our online network is designed to connect current Bard parents, grandparents, and guardians. Annandale Insider, a monthly e-newsletter containing the latest campus news, notification of family events, and volunteer/mentorship opportunities, keeps our families informed about student life in Annandale.
Family Leadership Council
Members of the Family Leadership Council (FLC) play a leadership role in the Bard community through a range of activities. FLC members develop and participate in on-campus and regional recruiting and mentoring events, promote and provide career opportunities for students, and participate in peer-to-peer fundraising. Parents on the FLC play a prominent role in the success of the Bard College Fund through annual gifts of $1,500 or greater. The Family Leadership Council meets two times each year: once during Family Weekend and once in the spring.
Visiting Us
Bard College campus grounds in Annandale are open to the community. Visitors who are vaccinated and boosted are welcome in campus facilities (except residence halls and the gym, which remain off limits to visitors) with advance approval from the Response Team.
Donna Ford Grover, visiting associate professor of literature and American studies. Photo by Chris Kayden
Faculty in the News
Bard’s extraordinary faculty are dedicated to the philosophy of teaching. Today and throughout Bard’s history, members of the faculty have effected change in medicine, the arts and letters, international affairs, journalism, scientific research, and education, among other endeavors.
Keep your records up to date. If you have updates or changes to your contact information, please email [email protected].
The Family Programs Office sends out a monthly e-newsletter, Annandale Insider, as well as important messages from the College and news on networking events, student and faculty achievements, and more.
Bard College Presents “Why We Die,” a Talk by Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, on April 26, 2024
On Friday, April 26, 2024, the Bard College Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing will present “Why We Die,” a talk featuring Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and author of the book Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality.
Bard College Presents “Why We Die,” a Talk by Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, on April 26, 2024
On Friday, April 26, 2024, the Bard College Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing will present “Why We Die,” a talk featuring Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and author of the book Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality. The event will be held at the Olin Auditorium on Bard’s campus, taking place from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm, and will include a Q&A followed by a reception. For more information, please contact [email protected].
The last few decades have seen dramatic advances in human understanding of aging and death, and along with that knowledge comes an impulse to negate some of the causes of aging to improve health in old age. Some would wish to postpone aging and death, perhaps indefinitely. Ramakrishnan will explore these issues, including our current understanding of the causes of aging and efforts to tackle it, while also touching on the potential social and ethical implications of such work.
Venki Ramakrishnan grew up in India and left at the age of 19 for the US. After a long career there, he moved in 1999 to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He works on the structure and function of the ribosome, an enormous molecular complex that reads the genetic information on mRNA (itself copied from a stretch of DNA) to synthesize the proteins they specify. His work also showed how many antibiotics work by blocking bacterial ribosomes, which could help to design better antibiotics. For this work, he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. From 2015-2020, he was president of the Royal Society, a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Ramakrishnan is the author of a popular memoir, Gene Machine, a frank description of the race for the structure of the ribosome and the science and personalities involved, and Why We Die, about the biology of aging and our current efforts to combat it.
This talk is made possible thanks to the support of the Office of the Dean of the College and the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing.
Post Date: 04-17-2024
2024 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to One Bard Faculty Member and Two Bard Alumnae
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College. Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, Shatz was among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship. Bard alumnae Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 and Ahndraya Parlato ’02 were also named Guggenheim Fellows for 2024.
2024 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to One Bard Faculty Member and Two Bard Alumnae
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College. Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, Shatz was among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship. Bard alumnae Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 and Ahndraya Parlato ’02 were also named Guggenheim Fellows for 2024.
“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”
In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community.
Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2024 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.
Adam Shatz, who will be working on a book about jazz throughout his Fellowship, is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among other publications. He is also host of the podcast Myself with Others, produced by the pianist Richard Sears. His political reporting and commentary have covered subjects such as Trump and the white supremacists in Charlottesville, mass incarceration, Israel’s Putinization, the deep state, and Egypt after Mubarak. Published profiles and portraits include Franz Fanon and Michel Houellebecq (London Review of Books), Nina Simone (New York Review of Books), saxophonist Kamasi Washington (New York Times Magazine); French cartoonist Riad Sattouf (New Yorker); and jazz great Charles Mingus (The Nation). Shatz previously taught at New York University and was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.
Katherine Hubbard ’10 uses photography, writing and performance to plumb photography’s continuing significance. Considering analog photography as a mimesis of the body, Hubbard asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs, the physical positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, culling the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking, bridging the imaginary with the familiar. She is currently Associate Professor and MFA Director at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.
Ahndraya Parlato ’02 is an artist based in Rochester, New York. She has published three books, including Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Parlato has exhibited work at Spazio Labo, Bologna, Italy; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Aperture Foundation, New York, New York; and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. She has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop and was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant recipient.
Post Date: 04-17-2024
July 26–August 4: Bard SummerScape presents first new U.S. production of Meyerbeer’s grand opera Le prophète in 47 years
As a highlight of the 2024 Bard SummerScape festival, the Fisher Center at Bard presents the first new American production in almost five decades of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, an all-too-topical grand opera in which religion, politics, and power collide. Featuring the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Bard Festival Chorale under the leadership of festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein, Le prophète runs for five performances in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center on Bard’s bucolic Hudson Valley campus (July 26, 28, 31; August 2, 4).
July 26–August 4: Bard SummerScape presents first new U.S. production of Meyerbeer’s grand opera Le prophète in 47 years
As a highlight of the 2024Bard SummerScape festival, the Fisher Center at Bard presents the first new American production in almost five decades of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, an all-too-topical grand opera in which religion, politics, and power collide. Robert Watson, Jennifer Feinstein, and Amina Edris star in an original staging by Christian Räth, the director behind SummerScape’s celebrated treatments of Das Wunder der Heliane and The Silent Woman, which confirmed the festival’s reputation for “essential summertime fare for the serious American opera-goer” (Financial Times, UK). Featuring the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO)and Bard Festival Chorale under the leadership of festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein, Le prophète runs for five performances in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center on Bard’s bucolic Hudson Valley campus (July 26, 28, 31; August 2, 4). Botstein will give an opera talk before the first Sunday matinee (July 28) and there will be a premiere party and intermission toast on the opening night (July 26), with a maestro dinner after the penultimate performance (August 2). Chartered coach transportation from New York City will be available for two matinees (July 28 and August 4) and the third performance will stream live online (July 31) with an encore presentation three days later (Aug 3).
Rounding out Bard’s operatic lineup this summer, Botstein, the ASO, and the Bard Festival Chorale also anchor La damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz (August 18). Starring Joshua Blue, Sasha Cooke, and Alfred Walker, their concert performance forms the final program of the 2024Bard Music Festival, which undertakes an in-depth reexamination of “Berlioz and His World.” Once again, chartered coach transportation from New York City will be available for the performance, which will stream live online.
These operatic offerings follow last season’s SummerScape success with the first major American production of Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII. This was chosen as one of the “Best Classical Music Performances of 2023” by the New York Times, which observed: “Botstein, and his annual opera production at Bard, seem more invaluable by the year.” The Fisher Center at Bard, Botstein, and the American Symphony Orchestrahave long been recognized for their ardent championship of rare French opera. Other past productions include the first fully staged American production of Chausson’s King Arthur (“Le roi Arthus”), the first staged revival of the original version of Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui, and a rare revival of Meyerbeer’s extravaganza Les Huguenots, of which the UK’s Financial Times declared: “Les Huguenots in Bard’s staging is a thriller from beginning to end. ... Five stars.” As Musical America put it, Bard SummerScape is now “an indispensable part of the summer operatic landscape.”
Meyerbeer’s Le prophète at SummerScape
Giacomo Meyerbeer (1792–1864) was the 19th century’s most frequently performed composer of opera. A German Jew who synthesized German orchestral techniques with Italian vocal style, he nevertheless came to epitomize the heyday of French grand opera. His third contribution to the genre was Le prophète (1849), which followed Les Huguenots as the second panel in his Reformation diptych. Set to a libretto by Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps after passages from Voltaire, Le prophète offers a fictionalized account of the Anabaptist uprising of the 1530s, when an innkeeper known as John of Leiden turned the city of Münster into a millenarian theocracy with himself as king.
This historical source material allowed Meyerbeer and his librettists to explore the dark world of false prophets, mass hysteria, and the violence that ensues when religion, politics, and power collide. In their retelling, John of Leiden becomes Jean de Leyde, whose story is complicated and humanized by his relationships with his mother, Fidès, and fiancée, Berthe. Complex and conflicted, Jean is initially motivated by love and the desire for justice. However, when faced with Berthe’s abduction by a despotic count and the machinations of three self-interested Anabaptists, he soon falls prey to hubris and revenge. The results are catastrophic; as the libretto has it, “All are guilty ... and all are punished.”
Despite its long recent neglect, Le prophète remains one of the most successful operas ever written. A bona fide sensation at its Paris premiere, Meyerbeer’s opera was rapturously received throughout Europe, receiving more than 570 performances in the French capital alone. In the States, it was an audience favorite at the Metropolitan Opera from the company’s earliest seasons until the late 1920s. After a 1977 revival at the New York house, the New York Times reported: “Judging from the audience response, the Metropolitan Opera has a hit on its hands.”
Until now, however, that revival was the last American staging of Le prophète. As a member of the 1977 Met audience, Leon Botstein recalls his astonishment on discovering that the works of so famous, influential, and pivotal a cultural figure could have been all but erased from the repertoire. He explains:
“Meyerbeer was the victim of a concerted and successful campaign of derision, resulting not only from the emerging split between so-called high art and popular culture, but also from the prominence of antisemitism in the cultural politics of Europe after 1850.”
A key figure in both developments was Richard Wagner. Botstein says: “The experience of opera theater was fundamentally transformed by Wagner, who pioneered in the use of music to fashion the illusion of realism.” Meyerbeer’s subsequent fall from grace strikes Botstein as richly undeserved. He says:
“Meyerbeer has wonderful invention, and a Mozartean instinct for time. He doesn’t wear out his welcome! He has an unerring sense of contrast and dramatic development, and his work is extremely well-orchestrated. There’s a wide range of sonorities that play into the colorful theatricality of his stagecraft. And he has a real regard for the vocal brilliance of his protagonists – he’s a singer’s friend.”
Furthermore, Meyerbeer’s stories continue to resonate. Though drawn from history, his plots were intended as veiled commentaries on the political and social issues of his day. Written at a time of religious and political upheaval, Le prophète illuminates the dangers of mixing the two. Through the Anabaptists’ use of inflammatory oration to usurp civic power, the opera addresses the rise of demagoguery. And by presenting Jean as an outsider in a hostile environment, it explores the challenges faced by members of minority groups, like the composer himself. These are issues of acute relevance to us today. Botstein says:
“We are now seeing a revival of antisemitism in the modern world. We’re also seeing the nefarious influence of modern fundamentalist religions. It’s ironic that this impact on politics, and also the manipulation of the masses through social media and other means, both recommend Le prophète.
Director Christian Räth shares Botstein’s powerful response to the opera. He says:
“Le prophète is unique because, beyond its historical elements, it has so many parallels to the world that we live in today. I don’t see how you could stage it today as just a historical piece. It is an opera that has a great deal to say about our times. It talks to us about how religion and other kinds of ideology can be misused to manipulate people, and about the consequences for their personal relationships and for society as a whole.”
The German director’s work has taken him to many of the world’s leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, Vienna State Opera, La Scala, and Royal Opera House. At SummerScape, his 2022 production of Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman was a New York TimesCritics’ Pick and his 2019 U.S. premiere of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane prompted Musical America to marvel: “Opera productions don’t get much better than this.”
To create their performing edition of Le prophète, Räth and Botstein worked closely with Professor Mark Everist of the University of Southampton. Because Meyerbeer originally composed more music for the opera than could feasibly be performed, making cuts was unavoidable. To guide their choices, Everist turned to the earliest source materials, aiming to create a historically coherent version of the opera that its first audience would have recognized. The SummerScape production will also showcase the substantial overture that Meyerbeer wrote for Le prophète but found himself forced to omit from performance. For more than a century, the overture was believed to survive only in piano arrangements, but after the rediscovery of the full score, a new edition was published in 2010.
SummerScape’s rare revival of Le prophète stars Robert Watson in the psychologically complex title role of Jean. Having headlined productions at Deutsche Oper Berlin, Zurich Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Dallas Opera, and Washington National Opera, Watson “commands a well-wrought tenor, with baritonal richness in the lower register and a fine blaze on top” (Dallas News). He is joined in the similarly nuanced role of Fidès, Jean’s mother, by mezzo-soprano Jennifer Feinstein, who returns to SummerScape after collaborating with Räth on Das Wunder der Heliane, in which her “gorgeous mezzo was a triumph” (Musical America). Completing the trio of principals as Berthe, Jean’s fiancé, is Egyptian-born soprano Amina Edris, who “reveals a burnished lyric soprano and splendid dramatic commitment” (Gramophone) on the acclaimed 2022 recording of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable. Bass Harold Wilson,returning for his third consecutive SummerScape after “command[ing] a sonorous bass” (New York Times) under Räth’s direction in the lead role of The Silent Woman, portrays Zacharie, the first of Le prophète’s three sinister Anabaptists. Last seen at SummerScape in 2021’s King Arthur, Grammy-winning bass Wei Wu sings Mathisen, the second, with Grammy-winning tenor Frederick Ballentine, a soloist at the 2019 Bard Music Festival, as Jonas, the third. Zachary Altman, praised for his “suave, sable baritone” (Opera magazine), makes his SummerScape debut as Count Oberthal.
To help realize his vision, Räth has brought together some of his most trusted collaborators. They include three members of his Silent Woman design team, with sets by Daniel Unger in tandem with the director, lighting by Tony and Drama Desk Award winner Rick Fisher, and costume design by European Opera Prize-winner and SummerScape regular Mattie Ullrich, whose Silent Woman costumes were “a feast for the eyes” (Bachtrack). Similarly, Räth has reunited with two of his Heliane creative partners, with choreography by Catherine Galasso, whose “expressive choreography ... provide[d] a window into Heliane’s psyche” (Bachtrack), and projections by Elaine McCarthy, whose honors include a Henry Hewes Design Award and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the U.S. Institute for Theater Technology.
Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust at Bard Music Festival, Program 11
Like Meyerbeer, Hector Berlioz (1803–69) wrote a grand-scale dramatic work whose intially decent protagonist allows himself to be corrupted by the forces of evil. Like Le prophète, the younger composer’s “dramatic legend” (originally subtitled “Opéra de Concert”) premiered in Paris in the 1840s. Its reception, however, could not have been more different. Recalling the work’s two poorly attended and ill-received first performances, Berlioz wrote: “Nothing in all my artistic career ever wounded me so deeply as this unexpected indifference.” He had no way of knowing that, of all the musical settings of Goethe’s Faust, from which so many Romantic composers drew inspiration, La damnation de Faust (1846) would go on to become one of the best-known and most highly respected. Expanding and enriching material from Huit scènes de Faust (1828–29), his own earlier treatment of the same story, La damnation is now a beloved repertory staple.
As the titular scholar, Bard’s concert performance stars British-American tenor Joshua Blue, who “reached ecstatic heights” as a member of the “marvelously effervescent cast” (Observer) of last season’s semi-staged production of Sir John in Love. Blue sings opposite the Marguerite of two-time Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, who brought “gleaming sound and a touch of self-destructive volatility” (New York Times) to SummerScape 2021’s King Arthur. In the role of Méphistophélès, the devil in disguise, the two are joined by bass-baritone Alfred Walker, who combines “vocal heft and theatrical intensity” (Wall Street Journal) and who drew rave reviews for his SummerScape performances in Das Wunder der Heliane and in the leading role of last season’s Henri VIII. Bass Stefan Egerstrom, who recently joined the roster of Lyric Opera of Chicago, completes the cast as the student Brander. Anchored by the American Symphony Orchestra under Botstein’s leadership, their concert performance forms the 2024 Bard Music Festival’s eleventh and final program, “Faust and the Spirit of the 19th Century” (August 18).
Round-trip bus transportation from New York City
Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for the matinee performances on Sunday, July 28, Sunday, August 4, and Sunday, August 18. This may be ordered online or by calling the box office, and the meeting point for coach pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center, Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is availablehere.
SummerScape tickets
Tickets for mainstage events start at $25. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visitfishercenter.bard.edu. or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin & Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Educational Foundation of America, the Ettinger Foundation, the Herman Goldman Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.