Spring 2026
Constitutional Law
Taught by Roger Berkowitz and Peter Rosenblum
This course will provide an introduction to constitutional theory and the evolution of constitutional law in the United States The course begins with a look at the history and theory of constitutionalism with a particular focus on the writing of Aristotle, Montesquieu and Arendt. We then explore the advent of written constitutions in the United States and the Federal Constitution, before diving into developments in US Constitutional law from the founding through the New Deal. Finally, we will explore some key issues in emerging constitutional law that wrestle with core concepts of constitutionalism, including voting rights, campaign finance and the administrative state. The course confronts the role of a constitution in the state and the particular challenges of a written constitution enforced by courts. In addition to theoretical and historical materials, the course will include substantial case law readings as well as legal writing by contemporary scholars.
Foundations of Law
Taught by Roger Berkowitz
Corporate executives hire high-priced lawyers to flout the law with impunity. Indigent defendants are falsely convicted, and even executed for crimes they did not commit. We say that law is the institutional embodiment of justice. And yet, it is equally true that law, as it is practiced, seems to have little connection to justice. As the novelist William Gaddis writes: “Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you have the law.” This course explores the apparent disconnect between law and justice. Can contemporary legal systems offer justice? Can we, today, still speak of a duty to obey the law? Is it possible for law to do justice? Through readings of legal cases as well as political, literary, and philosophical texts, we seek to understand the problem of administering justice as it emerges in the context of contemporary legal institutions. Texts will include Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, and selections from Dostoevsky, Twain, Melville, Plato, Blackstone, Holmes, Milton, Kant, and others.
Reading Joy
Taught by Roger Berkowitz and Thomas Chatterton Williams
This is a course in which students will read widely on the topic of Joy as it has been written about throughout history and in many different disciplines. The goal is to find great writing about Joy that can be excerpted and then included in Yearbook of the Hannah Arendt Center in co-production with the humanities journal Lapham's Quarterly. Students will read transcripts of talks from the Arendt Center Conference on Joy and then be guided in their independent research to find essays, excerpts from books, poems, and art that could be included in the 2026 Arendt Center Yearbook on Joy.
Intermediate German
Taught by Jana Schmidt
For students who have completed three semesters of college German (or the equivalent). The course is designed to deepen the proficiency gained in the German Intensive and the January program in Berlin by increasing students’ fluency in speaking, reading, and writing, and adding significantly to their working vocabulary. Students improve their ability to express their own ideas and hone their strategies for understanding spoken and written communication. We will read a contemporary novel supplemented by audiovisual materials. Please consult with the instructor if you are unsure about your proficiency level.
Principles of Prose
Taught by Wyatt Mason
This workshop presents the breadth of formal possibilities available to writers of prose. The course will consider how a sentence functions in a written work, our reading moving us beyond limiting categories (fiction; non-fiction) into spaces where, whatever the label, writing might achieve authority. Students will workshop—i.e., read and comment on—writing by Hilton Als, Aristotle, Roberto Bolaño, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Guy Davenport, Lydia Davis, Emily Dickinson, Gustave Flaubert, Jon Fosse, Mary Gaitskill, Louise Glück, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bohumil Hrabal, Edward P. Jones, Jamil Jan Kochai, Nam Le, Denise Levertov, Alfred Lobel, Janet Malcolm, Javier Marías, Shane McCrae, Leonard Michaels, Maggie Millner, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigrid Nunez, Marcel Proust, Christina Stead, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mark Twain, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and William Butler Yeats. By workshopping established writers, students will learn to weigh what writing can do and to notice how it achieves its effects. In addition to daily writing, students will produce five pieces of prose to be workshopped during the term, pieces that will pursue the expressive varieties of form. As we cultivate a rigorous aesthetic practice, we will also be addressing the essential matter of fairness, exploring the ethical implications of our attempts at representation.
Principles of Journalistic Practice
Taught by Wyatt Mason
This once-weekly, two-credit course in journalistic practice is open to all students in the college, but *mandatory* for those students who intend to work for the student-run Bard Observer newspaper. By “work,” I mean you are going to be, or want to be, on the paper’s staff, whether as a managing editor, story editor, art editor, photo editor, circulation director, business manager…. You get the picture. That said, for all who attend, this class will take you through the process of pitching and writing and editing articles, learning the very basics of journalistic form — how it differs from the kinds of writing you will have done for your classes or for yourself in the past. The specific formal focus this term will be Criticism: a piece about a work of art, whether written, filmed, danced, painted, sculpted, performed, recorded.... Note that should you take this class, whether or not you work for the paper, one of your assignments will be to pitch two pieces to the paper's editors. If you *are* taking this course so that you can work for the paper, you are also *required* to attend a second session of the class each week, one led by the paper’s editors, not by me. As the faculty advisor for the paper, I have no involvement in editorial decision-making: I just help you figure out the basics. Attendance at these second sessions (to be scheduled by the editors in the spring) will be taken. Should you not attend consistently, you will not pass the course (of course). The staff of the paper right now are a great group, and the process, not just the product, is super-fun. You’d have a great time joining the team, and getting into journalism. Need I remind you that — more now than ever — we need a new generation of journalists to help keep our democracy going? You can play a part in that essential form of resistance.
"Words, words, words."
Taught by Wyatt Mason
“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary?” David Bowie said, in 1999. “When I first read it, I thought it was a really, really long poem about everything.” In this course, we will read from that "poem about everything," not seeking the definitions of words, or not merely. Rather, their histories, via their etymologies, and the ways in which particular writers, through time, have deployed their language decisively. We will neglect the novel; ignore the story; forsake the essay; and, instead, embrace words. Our primary text will be the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Some 500,000 words have passed in and out of use in English in its 1000-year history. The average educated English speaker knows between 20,000 and 40,000. That leaves much room for discovery, not merely in the 450,000 words we don’t know but, moreover, the tens of thousands we think we do. The course will be a sort of scavenger hunt, one that will begin with the histories of individual words and then wade into the 3.5 million quotations the OED has compiled — each demonstrating a writer’s keen attention to usage. Armed with those quotations, we'll seek out — research; find; read — the books and essays and poems from which they've been selected, along with additional examples from the work of George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, H.D., Christina Stead, Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, Emily Dickinson and Shane McCrae.
Literature from the Margins
Taught by Thomas Wild
“The world is made of matter / that demands a close look,” poet Ilse Aichinger wrote, adding elsewhere, “It’s the people at the margins who will be remembered, not those in the spotlight.” Writers and artists whose works eventually are considered canonical have frequently been denounced and rejected in their own time. We will explore the perspective, often shared among writers and artists, that those on the margins of power and influence can see more clearly into a culture's steady center. Heinrich v. Kleist’s dramatic works were condemned by Goethe as “invisible theatre”. Heinrich Heine was forced into exile, where he wrote his great poems and songs of longing and belonging. The persecuted human rights activist Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” and “Lenz” continue to inspire contemporary works that take up themes of political and psychological precarity. The critic Edward Said called such experiences a “plurality of vision” and a “contrapuntal awareness.” We will read and discuss (in writing, conversation, and regular translation exercises) a variety of works from different genres and media, both past and contemporary, asking what it means to make work from the periphery that provokes unsettling, generative insights. – This course meets a requirement for the second focus in Translation Studies.
On Power: Theories and Stories
Taught by Thomas Wild
What constitutes power? This question has recently become both urgent and perplexing. Is power something a single person holds, or a group or movement, or an anonymous structure or system? Is power there to dominate and rule, or can power also connect and be generative? What is the role of the intellectual straddling critical distance and active concern? How do we conceptualize ‘power’, historically and today, in literature and theory? To explore these questions, we will read foundational theoretical works on power by Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Foucault, Arendt, Carmichael and King. And we will discuss literary works on the complexities and contradictions of power by authors such as Shakespeare, Kleist, Baldwin, and Alexievitch. Contemporary materials will include memoirs and films, songs and podcasts. This class envisions to be a common exercise in how to approach and explore a topic that might seem challenging to tackle, yet vital to understand. Critical and creative approaches are equally welcome; student work will include regular reading responses and a semester-long project.
The Life of the Mind
Taught by Thomas Bartscherer
This tutorial will be an intensive study of Hannah Arendt’s last book, The Life of the Mind, along with short readings from some of Arendt’s principal interlocutors, which may include philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger; biologist Adolf Portmann; and fiction writer Franz Kafka, among others. Central themes will include Arendt’s account of the distinction between “cognition” and “thinking”, and the related distinction between “truth” and “meaning”; her tripartite division of mental activities (thinking, willing, judging); and her critique of the “two-world theory”. We will also take up the question she raises of whether thinking may condition human beings against evil-doing, and consider whether and how Arendt’s account of mental activities in The Life of the Mind may be brought to bear on the analysis and interpretation of literature and music.
Camus, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche
Taught by Thomas Chatterton Williams
This course explores how three of the modern era's most original and influential thinkers wrestled with the sudden collapse of traditional sources of meaning and the sweeping threat of nihilism. Through close readings of Camus’s The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Rebel; Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; and selected writings of Nietzsche, we will examine the philosophical, literary, and existential/absurdist responses to a world suddenly bereft of transcendence. Students will engage with questions of freedom, morality, faith, will, rebellion, and affirmation, tracing how each author sought not only to diagnose the post-Enlightenment abyss but also to articulate strategies for surviving it.