Undergraduate Courses

Courage to Be Courses

“Courage is indispensable,” Hannah Arendt reminds us, “because in politics not life but the world is at stake.” What does it mean to act courageously in the 21st century? Which crises, conditions, and causes most demand courageous action by individuals and groups? In what ways does modern, bureaucratic society make the contours of courage difficult to discern due to shifting notions of responsibility, evil, truth, justice, and morality? How do the scale and scope of courageous action change under different historical, cultural, and political contexts? Each of the four distinct classes in this Common Course will address these questions by approaching the concept of courage from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, exploring its many articulations from antiquity to our contemporary moment, and its relevance in fields such as law, literature, human rights, religion, politics, and philosophy. This cluster of courses shares a core of two common texts: Hannah Arendt’s essay Humanity in Dark Times and Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be. In addition, the entire cohort enrolled in this Common Course will come together three times during the semester for dinner conversations, accompanied by guest speakers who will share their experiences, research, and insights on contemporary examples of courage.

2027 Courses

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More About the Courage to Be Program

Fall 2026

Reading Solidarity (PS 240), Roger Berkowitz and Jana Tirey
This is a course in which students will read widely on the topic of Solidarity as it has been written about throughout history and in many different disciplines. The goal is to find great writing about Solidarity that can be excerpted and then included in the 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 Solidarity taking place on October 15-17 at Bard College. We will guide students in independent research to find essays, excerpts from books, poems, and art that could be included in the 2026 Arendt Center Yearbook on Solidarity. The class meets for six 1 hour meetings: September 28, October 5, October 19, October 26, November 2nd, and November 9th. The goal is for each student to discover, excerpt, and prepare 4-6 excerpts from texts about Solidarity that would then appear in the Yearbook of the Hannah Arendt Center.

Radical American Democracy (PS 358), Roger Berkowitz
This seminar is an exploration of radical American democracy. While most characterizations of democracy see it as a form of government, this course explores the essence of democracy as a specifically modern way of life. To do so, it turns to some great thinkers of American democracy such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. DuBois, and Hannah Arendt. What unites these radical democrats is the conviction that democracy is a practice of individuals rather than an institutional form of governance. As an ideal of radical individualism, American democratic thought offers, perhaps surprisingly, an aristocratic critique of the limits of democratic government even as it, seen from another side, makes possible our culture of narcissistic consumerism. Our aim is to understand the democratic spirit of radical individualism that has proven so seductive and powerful since its modern birth in the American revolution. Texts will include Emerson’s essays The American Scholar and Experience, Thoreau’s Walden, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Arendt’s On Revolution. This course is part of the College Seminar on Crises of Democracy; students will be required to attend parts of the Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Crises of Democracy.”

Landscape Studies: The Hudson Valley (ES 206), Jana Tirey
For centuries, the land on which Bard College stands has been inhabited and shaped by diverse cultures. This course critically examines the existing landscape to uncover the “story” of the land we call home. Areas of study include the history of Native Americans, colonialism and slavery in the region, the Hudson Valley’s role in 19th-century American identity, native plants, and agriculture, the river and environmental activism, as well as green spaces and campus buildings. We will explore the past, present, and future of the Hudson Valley through primary and secondary sources, including Anne Whiston Spirn’s The Language of Landscape, Patrick Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, Myra Armstead’s From Property to Proprietor, Susan Fox Rogers’ My Reach, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Lucy Sante’s 19 Reservoirs, and John Stilgoe’s The River. While some meetings will be in the classroom, we will also visit sites such as Old Growth Forest, Montgomery Place, Blithewood, Bard Farm, Bard Field Station, Tivoli Bays, and the Hessel Museum to analyze how the landscape has changed over time. Students will pursue semester-long research projects culminating in an exhibition. Walking-based learning activities will take place outdoors, requiring moderate-distance walking as part of our engagement with the land and course materials.

Telling Stories About Rights (LIT 2509), Thomas Bartscherer
What can fiction tell us about human rights? And what can we learn about fiction and literature by focusing on themes of justice and injustice, suffering and struggle, oppression and resistance? This course will focus on a wide range of fictions, from a variety of writers and filmmakers with different backgrounds and from different parts of the world, that tell compelling stories about individual rights and communal experiences of justice and injustice. We will look at the ways in which literary forms can present and interrogate universalizing claims, and how themes such as political oppression, forced migration, disenfranchisement, racism, poverty, and lack of access to education and health care can affect the dignity of all humans. Readings may include: Sophocles’ Antigone; Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars; Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine; Nottage’s Sweat; Camus’ The Plague; The Island by Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona; and Mukasonga’s Cockroaches. Film screenings may include The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo), Hotel Rwanda (Terry George), and This is not a Film (Jafar Panahi). In addition to literary analysis, students will conduct and present original research on contemporary forms of storytelling in relation to human rights. This course fulfills the Difference and Justice distribution requirement because we read texts from a range of different geographical, cultural, and ethnic contexts that explore, among other things, themes of citizenship status, class, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and socio-economic background. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Principles of Prose (WRIT 122), 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 Ethical Journalism (WRIT 212), Wyatt Mason
We live in an era when reporting is increasingly practiced with a lethal combination of dishonesty and incompetence. One might claim that this reflects the political divisions of the moment. But one could argue — I do argue — that the political divisions of the moment are fed and fomented by slipshod journalism: journalism written and edited by people who have very little understanding of what the job entails, and little investment in the outcome. This course will address, in philosophy and practice, what the job entails. We will read examples of excellent reporting; we will read examples of reprehensible reporting: we will learn to discern the difference, to the end of being able to practice journalism with integrity and competence. This once-weekly, two-credit course 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. Note that should you take this class, whether or not you work for the paper, you will 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 fall) will be taken. Should you not attend consistently, you will not pass the course (of course). The staff of the paper are a great group, and the process, not just the product, is super-fun: you’d have a great time joining the team. Now more 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.

Literature with an Axe: Introduction to German Modernism (GER 332), Jana Schmidt
When Franz Kafka wrote that “a book is an axe for the frozen sea inside us” he conceived of literature as devastation, the scene of contact with a force that could shatter our sense of safety. For Kafka, as for many other modernists, literature’s unsettling effect consisted in violently turning away from the social world and risking a step into the unknown. We will pursue this impulse and get to know the German modernist canon through a series of works that startle, pierce, and hack away at the certainties of family, gender, and nation. Supplemented by theoretical and essayistic texts by Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus, we will retrace the development from the “proto-modernist” Georg Büchner to fin de siècle-decadence, the apocalyptic satires of Joseph Roth on the eve of National Socialism, and Anna Seghers’ embrace of exile. Against the convulsive background of their time, what did modernists writing in German discover in the space of literature.

Refugee Conversations: German Literatures of Exile and Flight (LIT 311), Jana Schmidt
In his 1933 theater play “Refugee Conversations” Bertolt Brecht presents the refugee’s situation as a fundamental crisis of meaning and community. A refugee is, in the words of another famous exile, Hannah Arendt, someone whom the political circumstances have rendered “superfluous.” This course will explore the figure of the refugee as it appears in literary, theoretical, and political texts from the time of WWII to today. To this end, we will acquaint ourselves with different definitions of refugeedom. How, for instance, does the definition provided in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention differ from the notion of exile as it was discussed by writers of the Frankfurt School-in-Exile? What kinds of critiques of human rights discourse and its provisions regarding refugees did exiled writers articulate? Can the experience of flight described by writers like Hermann Grab, Brecht, or Hermynia Zur Mühlen be recognized on the political plane? In reading our way toward contemporary German exile literature, we will try to think about how movement, time, and belonging are rewritten in literary response to the refugee regimes of the present.

Politics of Citizenship (PS 100), Bill Dixon
Citizenship is one of the most important, yet complex elements of communal life. It can be a marker of belonging or exclusion, set boundaries or open them, be progressive or conservative, and operate at the local, national, or global levels. It has the capacity to bestow power on an individual and create obligations and duties for an individual. It is both a modern idea and ancient one. And at the current moment in time, the ideas associated with citizenship are in flux and contested. Questions around globalization, immigration, pandemic, climate justice, and racial justice require us to think deeply about what it means to be a citizen at the current moment in time. This course seeks to understand how ideas of citizenship change over time and across cultures. Questions addressed may include: what does it mean to be a citizen? How does citizenship shape feelings of belonging and exclusion? How does the practice and effects of citizenship differ at the local, national and global levels? How does citizenship mediate the relationship between individuals and the community? How does experience of citizenship differ across time and different geographical and cultural spaces?

Global Citizenship (PS 207), Michelle Murray
What does it mean to be a global citizen? This question has gained increasing salience as the world has become more globalized. With globalization new problems surface that cut across national borders and fall outside the jurisdiction of individual nation-states. In response new forms of political organization have emerged to address these problems, which challenge the state as the primary locus of political authority and ultimate source of individual rights. In particular, these individuals and groups have appealed to a kind of global citizenship from below to call for action on and demand redress for the harms created by globalization. This interdisciplinary course critically examines the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the concept of global citizenship and investigates how the idea might work in practice. We begin by considering the conceptual, philosophical and historical debates about citizenship. What does it mean to be a citizen of a particular state? What obligations and responsibilities accompany citizenship? How have understandings of citizenship changed and expanded over time? What is global citizenship and how does it differ from national citizenship? Next we evaluate these ideas about citizenship in the context of globalization and the new problems created by an increasingly interdependent world. Topics covered may include: migration and refugees; the environment and resources; (in)security and borders; health and infectious disease; and development and inequality. We conclude by assessing the role (if any) global citizenship can play in global governance and consider how the international system might be transformed to better address the challenges of globalization.

Literatures of Human Rights: Post-1945 (HR 275), Ingrid Becker
This course introduces students to the global history of literature and human rights since 1945, during a period in which such rights became more widely asserted and contested, threatened and gained. And while human rights are often, and importantly, read through legal documents and declarations—like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—this class will complement and complicate political and juridical traditions of human rights by exploring the central ways in which human rights discourses have been addressed, defined and advanced through literary texts. We will begin with works that grapple with the Holocaust in Europe and move on to approach literature dealing with military dictatorships in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and Apartheid in South Africa. We will end by considering contemporary texts that confront issues of war in the Middle East, immigration and detainment, and the treatment of refugees. Throughout the term, we will pose such questions as: what exactly are human rights, and how have they been allocated to particular groups and denied to others in different places and at different times? How can literature, alongside or as a challenge to state actors or NGOs, support human rights claims by appealing to feelings of empathy and collective recognition? What strategies do works of art use to bear witness to human rights violations, compel their audiences to act against injustice, and help victims heal? What are the possibilities and limits of the written word in the face of the inarticulable, and of aesthetic representation in the face of atrocity and trauma? In our search for answers, we will examine a range of literary genres, from memoir to the graphic novel and the photo essay, to drama and poetry, as well as accompanying theoretical pieces. Readings may include works by such authors as Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Art Spiegelman, Susan Sontag, Haing Ngor, Ariel Dorfman, Pablo Neruda, Augusto Boal, Antjie Krog, Solmaz Sharif, Anoud, Mark Nowak, and Behrouz Boochani.

Fall 2026 Classes connected to Solidarity

Theory in Translation (LIT 210), Elizabeth Holt
Theory in Translation interrogates social histories of solidarity, soft power, transcultural politics, and translatability through networks of translation active in the middle decades of the twentieth century. We will pay special attention to the theoretical promise and historical legacy of collective translation projects, orality, multilingualism, and anonymity in transnational and transcultural projects of intercontinental solidarity. Our focus will be on theory circulating in the context of empire and anticolonialism between Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Spanish, as well as through symbolic registers such as graffiti, film, and poster art. Case studies will be drawn from the publications and reception of Mao Tsetung, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ghassan Kanafani, William Faulkner, and T.S. Eliot, and the course will end by considering the role of these and other translation networks in the articulation of network theory in the final decades of the twentieth century.

Telling Stories About Rights (LIT 2509), Thomas Bartscherer & Nuruddin Farah
What can fiction tell us about human rights? And what can we learn about fiction and literature by focusing on themes of justice and injustice, suffering and struggle, oppression and resistance? This course will focus on a wide range of fictions, from a variety of writers and filmmakers with different backgrounds and from different parts of the world, that tell compelling stories about individual rights and communal experiences of justice and injustice. We will look at the ways in which literary forms can present and interrogate universalizing claims, and how themes such as political oppression, forced migration, disenfranchisement, racism, poverty, and lack of access to education and health care can affect the dignity of all humans. Readings may include: Sophocles’ Antigone; Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars; Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine; Nottage’s Sweat; Camus’ The Plague; The Island by Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona; and Mukasonga’s Cockroaches. Film screenings may include The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo), Hotel Rwanda (Terry George), and This is not a Film (Jafar Panahi). In addition to literary analysis, students will conduct and present original research on contemporary forms of storytelling in relation to human rights. This course fulfills the Difference and Justice distribution requirement because we read texts from a range of different geographical, cultural, and ethnic contexts that explore, among other things, themes of citizenship status, class, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and socio-economic background.

Refugee Conversations: German Literatures of Exile and Flight (LIT 311), Jana Schmidt
In his 1933 theater play “Refugee Conversations” Bertolt Brecht presents the refugee’s situation as a fundamental crisis of meaning and community. A refugee is, in the words of another famous exile, Hannah Arendt, someone whom the political circumstances have rendered “superfluous.” This course will explore the figure of the refugee as it appears in literary, theoretical, and political texts from the time of WWII to today. To this end, we will acquaint ourselves with different definitions of refugeedom. How, for instance, does the definition provided in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention differ from the notion of exile as it was discussed by writers of the Frankfurt School-in-Exile? What kinds of critiques of human rights discourse and its provisions regarding refugees did exiled writers articulate? Can the experience of flight described by writers like Hermann Grab, Brecht, or Hermynia Zur Mühlen be recognized on the political plane? In reading our way toward contemporary German exile literature, we will try to think about how movement, time, and belonging are rewritten in literary response to the refugee regimes of the present.

Beyond the Nation-State (ANTH 204), Jeff Jurgens
This course examines the recent emergence of cross-regional and transnational perspectives in anthropology and related fields. These perspectives not only challenge the state-centric approaches and “methodological nationalism” that have defined scholarly inquiry since the nineteenth century. They also illustrate how understandings and practices of race, class, gender, sexuality, kinship, and domesticity have been reconfigured by capitalism, colonialism, and other global economic and political forces. As we consider these larger issues, we will also explore a range of topics related to nationhood, geographic and economic mobility, and collective memory. How do people learn to imagine themselves as members of distinct national communities and nation-states, and how do national affiliations come to seem obvious and natural (even in an interconnected world)? What prompts people to move within and across nation-state boundaries, and what leads them to pursue certain aspirations rather than others? And finally, what do people both remember and forget about their pasts, and which of the many available pasts do they come to call their own? We will reflect on these and other questions through a series of case studies in and beyond the contemporary Middle East, although we will also consider examples from Africa, North America, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia.

Contemporary Cultural Theory (ANTH 350), Laura Kunreuther
This course is intended as an introduction to advanced theories of culture in contemporary anthropology. Required of all anthropology majors, this course will also be of interest to students wishing to explore critical innovations in the study of local, national, and mass culture around the world. In contrast to early anthropological focus on seemingly isolated, holistic cultures, more recent studies have turned their attention to contest within societies and the intersection of local systems of meaning with global processes of politics, economics and history. The class will be designed around an influential social theorist, such as Bourdieu, Bakhtin, or Marx, and the application of their theories by anthropologists, such as Aihwa Ong, Judith Irvine, or Michael Taussig. The seminar will involve participation from all of the faculty in the anthropology department. It aims to inspire critical engagement with an eye towards developing theoretical tools and questions for a senior project that makes use of contemporary theories of culture.

The Ottoman Empire (HIST 134), Ali Ugurlu
This course is a general historical survey of the Ottoman Empire, which lasted for more than six centuries (1299-1923) and whose borders spanned 3 continents––Asia, Africa, and Europe. Although it ceased to exist a century ago, the political-economic and legal legacy of the Ottoman state, and the religious, cultural, and even the gastronomical elements of the multiple communities that lived within its borders continue to inform the everyday in the Middle East and North Africa, Southeastern Europe, the Caucuses, and West Asia today. While our focus will mostly be on the various political, cultural, legal, and economic dynamics of this vast empire, we will also ponder how the Ottoman experience may offer us new ways to think about the globe in each respective historical junction we will be studying. Our progression will be chronological for a great deal of the course, after which we will shift to themes and concepts that have structured the historiography of the empire: political economy, religion, gender, the role of women, literary culture, science and technology, race, colonialism, and nationalism in the Ottoman world. To that end, each week we will have at least one primary source that will help us gain this perspective as well as form the core of our discussion in the second half of our meetings. Unpacking this shifting and multi-layered history will offer us different ways to think about a post-Ottoman order perennially embroiled in “crisis,” as well as help us ask new questions about a region (and world) that was, and may be, otherwise.

A Haunted Union: Twentieth-Century Germany and the Unifications of Europe (HIST 141), Gregory Moynihan
Three major attempts have been made to integrate Europe as a political structure and idea in the modern era: twice by violent conquest — Napoleon’s imperial reorganization and Hitler’s racial-imperial war of annihilation — and once, in reaction to these earlier catastrophes, through negotiation, in the European Union (EU). This course examines the history of Europe and the European Union as it is haunted by these earlier, coercive attempts at unification, taking as its central case the politically fragmented German-speaking lands of central Europe, including the instructive outlier of the Swiss Confederation. Modern Germany serves as a laboratory for European modernity: even as it is the chronologically youngest of the major European powers and epitomizes the rapidly industrializing nation-state, its history is particularly revealing of the nested traumas and complex institutional responses to Europe’s longer past. Beginning with Napoleon’s dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, the course traces the formation of the German Empire in 1871, the catastrophic arc of two World Wars, the parallel development of the FRG and GDR during the Cold War, the reunification of Germany after 1989, and the gradual emergence of the EU as a new kind of political entity — including its complex place in contemporary global politics, particularly in relation to the United States and the Russian Federation. Sustained attention will be given to the dialogue between Germany and Europe regarding regional structural dynamics and the contested idea of Europe itself, with particular focus on state form and Realpolitik, capitalism and communism, the second industrial revolution and institutional development, and systems of state surveillance and rights. Drawing on an array of primary documents — constitutional texts, propaganda, literary and philosophical writing, legal instruments — the course focuses on four historiographical debates: the Sonderweg thesis and its critics, the relation of global colonialism to colonialism within Europe, the role of structure and intent in social control and genocide, and political theories of European integration.

Latin America: Independence, Sovereignty, and Revolution (HIST 152), Miles Rodriguez
Latin America is one of the world’s most diverse regions, now with over six hundred million people of African, Asian, European, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and interracially-mixed descent, in at least twenty different independent nations. The largest Latin American country, Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and the second largest, the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking country, Mexico, as well as countries in the Spanish Caribbean like Cuba, Central America, and in Spanish South America, encompass rich and complex cultures and peoples. This course is an introductory historical survey of Latin America. It focuses on the tremendous, troubled, and often traumatic transformations and transitions that many of its distinct nations and peoples have experienced in struggles for independence, sovereignty, and revolution. The class examines the main historical issues and challenges of Latin America’s post-colonial independent national period, including persistent inequality, regional and national integration and disintegration, and global and international relations, as well as revolution, war, military rule, popular social movements, civil reconciliation, and continual violence. Its goal is to understand the incredibly complex and diverse meanings and histories of Latin America to the present.

From Shtetl to Socialism (and Beyond): East European Jews in the Modern Era (JS 215), Cecile Kuznitz
Eastern Europe was the largest and most vibrant center of Jewish life for almost five hundred years. In that period East European Jewry underwent a wrenching process of modernization, creating radically new forms of community, culture, and political organization that still influence Jewish life today in the United States and Israel. Yet this rich history is often obscured by nostalgic stereotypes of the shtetl or by the horrors of the Holocaust. In this course we will consider topics including the rise of Hasidism and Haskalah (Enlightenment), modern Jewish political movements including Zionism and Bundism, pogroms and Russian government policy towards the Jews, and the development of modern Jewish literature in Yiddish and Hebrew. Course materials will include secondary historical sources as well as excerpts from memoirs, literature, and film.

Africa in the Americas (HIST 233), Folarin Ajibade
This course attempts to answer three complex questions: How have real and imagined ideas about Africa shaped the personal and social identities of Americans? How have these understandings impacted sociocultural and political developments on the African continent? And how have broader historical circumstances influenced these constructions? While we will focus largely on the historical relationship between Africa and the United States, we will also think about how Africa has shaped life in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will cover a range of topics, including but not limited to the preservation and transformation of indigenous African religions in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution, the American Colonization Society and Back-to-Africa movements, the Civil Rights movement, Pan-Africanism, US-Africa foreign policy during the Cold War, apartheid in South Africa, foreign aid and NGO activism, and popular music in Africa and the Americas.

Histories of Capitalism, Social Theory, and the Middle East (HIST 305), Ali Ugurlu
If there is any truth to Fredric Jameson’s claim that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism,” what are the tools at our disposal today for understanding this immutable form of collective life? Historically, the global expansion of capitalism in the long nineteenth century was accompanied by the emergence of “society” as a distinct object of study. And ever since the late eighteenth century, classical social theory has grappled with sweeping transformations in collective life wrought by the expansion of empires, colonialism, bureaucratization of the state, urbanization, as well as the dynamics of social cohesion pertaining to race, gender, family, and class. Today, the ample interdisciplinary scholarship on capitalism bears a strong relation to this classic literature. In this course, we will study the different conceptual frameworks and debates that have informed the study of capitalism as a historical phenomenon. We will begin with classical social theorists’ attempts to understand modernity’s break with so-called traditional society, continue with frameworks ranging from dependency and world-systems theory, orthodox and heterodox Marxism, feminist critiques, critical geography, and critical race theory, and devote the last month of our course to studies of capitalism in the Middle East and North Africa. Given the volume and contentious nature of the debates over the origins, logics, and consequences of capitalism, our collective study throughout the semester will occasion opportunities to explore and rethink both the histories of capitalism and classical and contemporary social theory’s ability to adequately grasp its contradictions. Global in scope and theoretical in its orientation, this is a class for all students irrespective of the geographic focus of their studies. The course satisfies the Major Conference requirement and historiography requirement for Historical Studies students.

Latin America: Race, Religion, and Revolution (HIST 331), Miles Rodriguez
This research seminar will study the violent interactions between race, religion, and revolution in Latin America from the early twentieth-century to the present, to understand how these interactions have mattered to the region’s history and how they explain some of its most violent current conflicts. The very name “Latin America” derived from and became associated with specific racial, religious, and revolutionary meanings through a history of violence. The seminar will begin by studying how racial concepts formed and became fixed ideas through distinct revolutionary-inspired intellectual debates on interracial mixture and indigenous rights. Based in Mexico and Peru, the formation of concepts like global mestizaje, a “cosmic race,” and indigenismo involved rival valuations of each nation’s indigenous and colonial histories and cultures, with lasting effects. The seminar will then explore the simultaneous rise of wars and conflicts over radically different religious meanings and faiths, within and outside of Catholicism, including native religions and the rise of Evangelical Protestant Christianity. The latter part of the seminar will focus on Guatemala, which dramatically combined extreme violence over race, religion, and revolution, and focused global attention on indigenous rights and human rights. These histories will allow for a deeper understanding of the rise of different forms of violence in Central America today, and therefore of the current human rights, migrant, and refugee crisis centered there and involving other parts of Latin America and the US. This seminar emphasizes the narratives, interpretations, and voices of participants in the history, and critical engagement with these primary sources in the writing of the history. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

The Politics of Citizenship (PS 100), Bill Dixon
Citizenship is one of the most important, yet complex elements of communal life. It can be a marker of belonging or exclusion, set boundaries or open them, be progressive or conservative, and operate at the local, national, or global levels. It has the capacity to bestow power on an individual and create obligations and duties for an individual. It is both a modern idea and ancient one. And at the current moment in time, the ideas associated with citizenship are in flux and contested. Questions around globalization, immigration, pandemic, climate justice, and racial justice require us to think deeply about what it means to be a citizen at the current moment in time. This course seeks to understand how ideas of citizenship change over time and across cultures. Questions addressed may include: what does it mean to be a citizen? How does citizenship shape feelings of belonging and exclusion? How does the practice and effects of citizenship differ at the local, national and global levels? How does citizenship mediate the relationship between individuals and the community? How does experience of citizenship differ across time and different geographical and cultural spaces?

Global Citizenship (PS 207), Michelle Murray
What does it mean to be a global citizen? This question has gained increasing salience as the world has become more globalized. With globalization new problems surface that cut across national borders and fall outside the jurisdiction of individual nation-states. In response new forms of political organization have emerged to address these problems, which challenge the state as the primary locus of political authority and ultimate source of individual rights. In particular, these individuals and groups have appealed to a kind of global citizenship from below to call for action on and demand redress for the harms created by globalization. This interdisciplinary course critically examines the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the concept of global citizenship and investigates how the idea might work in practice. We begin by considering the conceptual, philosophical and historical debates about citizenship. What does it mean to be a citizen of a particular state? What obligations and responsibilities accompany citizenship? How have understandings of citizenship changed and expanded over time? What is global citizenship and how does it differ from national citizenship? Next we evaluate these ideas about citizenship in the context of globalization and the new problems created by an increasingly interdependent world. Topics covered may include: migration and refugees; the environment and resources; (in)security and borders; health and infectious disease; and development and inequality. We conclude by assessing the role (if any) global citizenship can play in global governance and consider how the international system might be transformed to better address the challenges of globalization.

Reading Solidarity (PS 240), Roger Berkowitz & Jana Mader
This is a course in which students will read widely on the topic of Solidarity as it has been written about throughout history and in many different disciplines. The goal is to find great writing about Solidarity that can be excerpted and then included in the 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 Solidarity taking place on October 15-17 at Bard College. We will guide students in independent research to find essays, excerpts from books, poems, and art that could be included in the 2026 Arendt Center Yearbook on Solidarity. The class meets for six 1 hour meetings: September 28, October 5, October 19, October 26, November 2nd, and November 9th. The goal is for each student to discover, excerpt, and prepare 4-6 excerpts from texts about Solidarity that would then appear in the Yearbook of the Hannah Arendt Center.

Political Organizing: Theory and Practice (PS 251), Mie Inouye
This course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of political organizing. What distinguishes organizing from other approaches to social change, such as activism and advocacy? How do organizers develop and evaluate strategies and tactics? And how do they understand the role of leadership and authority in organizing? We will explore these questions through a range of theoretical, historical, and practical readings by political scientists, political theorists, and organizers, including Theda Skocpol, Antonio Gramsci, Saul Alinsky, Ella Baker, and Jane McAlevey. We will also consider how tenant organizers in today’s housing justice movement approach these questions. We will speak with tenant organizers from the Hudson Valley and beyond, and we will go into the field to experience and reflect on the practice of tenant organizing. This course is appropriate for students who are interested in American politics, housing politics, and political theory. It is especially geared toward students who are currently engaged in political organizing projects and want to reflect on challenges they have encountered in their practice, as well as students who are considering careers as organizers.

Radical American Democracy (PS 358), Roger Berkowitz
his seminar is an exploration of radical American democracy. While most characterizations of democracy see it as a form of government, this course explores the essence of democracy as a specifically modern way of life. To do so, it turns to some great thinkers of American democracy such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. DuBois, and Hannah Arendt. What unites these radical democrats is the conviction that democracy is a practice of individuals rather than an institutional form of governance. As an ideal of radical individualism, American democratic thought offers, perhaps surprisingly, an aristocratic critique of the limits of democratic government even as it, seen from another side, makes possible our culture of narcissistic consumerism. Our aim is to understand the democratic spirit of radical individualism that has proven so seductive and powerful since its modern birth in the American revolution. Texts will include Emerson’s essays The American Scholar and Experience, Thoreau’s Walden, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Arendt’s On Revolution. This course is part of the College Seminar on Crises of Democracy; students will be required to attend parts of the Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Crises of Democracy.”

Exhibiting (Im)mobility: Art, Museums, Migration (HR 379), Dina Ramadan
Can artists and museums respond to the current refugee crisis? The 21st century has witnessed the undeniable prevalence of the refugee, the migrant, the stateless, and the politically displaced — categories produced by global capitalism’s uneven distribution of resources. Against this harsh reality, artists and curators have actively engaged with representations of the disposed, and more recently, welcomed refugees into their spaces as part of broader initiatives centered on integration. This class will consider how contemporary exhibitions and artistic projects have sought to integrate the figure of the refugee into the traditionally reified space of the museum and examine the possibilities and limitations of art to transcend cultural and political barriers to generate empathy, and even solidarity. Topics to be discussed include art programming and refugee integration, museum responses to the migrant crisis, attempts to decolonize museums, migration and repatriation, boycott and divestment efforts.

Science of Human Connection (CC 111), Michael Sadowski and Seth Halvorson
This course introduces students to theories that posit relational connection as a foundation of human development, drawing on evidence from psychology, sociology, primatology, neuroscience, and other fields. Course readings will be drawn from texts such as Franz de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (primatology), Matthew Lieberman’s Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (neuroscience), and Carol Gilligan's In a Human Voice (psychology). After an introduction to this evidence, the class will engage with this question: What gets in the way of human connection? In this part of the course, we will examine the cultural forces that disrupt connection and relationships, and the different ways this disconnection manifests across cultures. Patriarchy, racism, homophobia and transphobia, interpersonal conflict, war, and other social issues will be examined as manifestations of cultural breaks in relationship. In the final segment of the course, readings and discussion will shift to a final question: How do we reconnect as human beings within cultures that drive us to separate, create divisions and hierarchies among people, and alienate us from one another? Perspectives from psychology, education, the arts, and other fields will be brought to bear on this question as students consider ways to cultivate individual and societal resilience to the forces that breed separation and division. IMPORTANT NOTE: Students considering this course should be advised that readings address issues such as race- and gender-based violence, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, and related issues, and that personal writing and sharing will be an important aspect of the class.

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.

2026 Courage to Be Professors

Read reflection pieces written by our undergraduate students on Medium.

FROM OUR STUDENTS