JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times

REGISTER

Thursday, October 16th

10:00 am 
Introduction
Deirdre d’Albertis

10:10 am
Joy: Loving the World in Dark Times
Roger Berkowitz

10:30 am
Operation Lightness
Teju Cole
Discussant: Roger Berkowitz

11:30 am
Joy and Gratitude in Transcendence
Matthew Crawford and Anthony Kronman
Moderators: Karen Sullivan and Alexander Castleton

12:30–2:00 pm Lunch
 
1:00-2:00 pm [OPTIONAL] Breakout Sessions (smaller group discussions):
 
2:00 pm
Poetry and Tragedy
Ilya Kaminsky with Ella Dershowitz
Moderator: erica kaufman
 
3:15 pm: Break

3:45 pm
Dark Charisma
Donovan Hohn and Charles Baxter
Moderator: Francine Prose

5:00 pm
The Joy of Submission
Marilyn Simon 
Moderator: Jill Stauffer

6:00 pm
Wine & Cheese Reception
Olin Hall Atrium

Friday, October 17th

9:30 am
Introduction
Leon Botstein

10:00 am
Language Where Languages End
Jeremy Eichler 
Discussant: Leon Botstein

11:00 am
In a dream you saw a way to survive
Bill T. Jones
Discussants: Roger Berkowitz and Wyatt Mason

12:00-1:30 pm Lunch

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm [OPTIONAL] Breakout Sessions (smaller group discussions):
1:30 pm   
Amor Mundi and Joy as Flowing Proximity
Robin Wang
Discussant: Niobe Way and Lisa Cypers Kamen

2:30 pm Break

3:00 pm
"O frabjous day!" Notes on Difficult Joy
Ann Lauterbach
Discussant: Thomas Bartscherer

3:45 pm  
A Few Words toward Joy
Shane McCrae
"Brute beauty and valour and act"
Wyatt Mason

4:45 pm
Concluding panel
Uday Singh Mehta, Allison Stanger, and Thomas Chatterton Williams
Discussant: Roger Berkowitz

5:30 pm
Wine & Cheese Reception 
Olin Hall Atrium

6:00 pm Staged Reading:

Jenny Lyn Bader

Jenny Lyn Bader is a dramatist whose work has been produced internationally and across the U.S. and streamed on 5 continents in over 30 countries. Her play about Hannah Arendt had a sold-out Off-Broadway run at 59E59 Theaters this season. She has been named a 2025 “Visionary Playwright” by Theater Masters.

Thomas Bartscherer

Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He works in the humanities and the arts and writes on philosophy, literature, politics, and contemporary culture. He is co-editor of the critical edition Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (2025) and of When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice. His opera, Stranger Love, created with composer Dylan Mattingly, was commissioned and premiered at the LA Phil in 2023. 
 

Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter is the author of Blood Test: a Comedy, published by Pantheon in 2024;  his most recent book of stories, There’s Something I Want You to Do was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2016.  His novel, The Sun Collective, was published in late 2020 by Pantheon in hardback and Vintage in paperback. He is also the author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, published in 2011, The Soul Thief, published in 2008, by Pantheon, and of Saul and Patsy, published in 2003 by Pantheon. His third novel, The Feast of Love (Pantheon/Vintage), was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into a film starring Morgan Freeman. He has published two other novels, First Light and Shadow Play, and four books of stories. He has also published essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House (Graywolf), The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, and Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Fiction (2022) and has edited or co-edited several books of essays, The Business of Memory, published by Graywolf, Bringing the Devil to His Knees (The University of Michigan Press), and A William Maxwell Portrait, published in 2004 by W. W. Norton. He has edited the stories of Sherwood Anderson, published by the Library of America in 2012. He now lives in Minneapolis and was the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among other journals and magazines. His fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories seven times, eleven times in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and translated into many languages. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. A Professor of Politics, Philosophy,  and Human Rights, Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.  VIEW MORE >>

Leon Botstein

Leon Botstein is president and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts of Bard College. Founder of Bard High School Early College, Dr. Botstein put into practice a vision of high school as a public space where young adults, with the guidance of a college level faculty, explore their intellectual potential.

He has published widely in the fields of education, music, and history and culture and is the author of several books including Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, and editor of The Compleat Brahms and The Musical Quarterly. He is the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now (TŌN), and conductor laureate and principal guest conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director. He is the founder and artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. His work has been acknowledged with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harvard University, government of Austria, and Carnegie Foundation. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.

He is also music director and principal conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the American Symphony Orchestra, artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Botstein is editor of The Musical Quarterly and writes on music and culture.

BRAD Comedy Club

BRAD Comedy Club is Bard College's club for all things funny, silly, and goofy. We write sketches. We do improv. We dabble in stand-up from time to time.

Erica Brown

Erica Brown is a Kingston native and the Community Engagement Coordinator at Radio Kingston, where she thrives on managing multiple projects and building connections across the community. Passionate about access, inclusion, and diversity, Erica works closely with nonprofits to support services and programs that empower individuals and strengthen the city as a whole. She also serves on the boards of the TMI Project, Good Work Institute, and the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency, where she fosters collaboration between local organizations. Erica holds two degrees from SUNY New Paltz—a Bachelor’s in Business (2010) and in Psychology (2016)—and is grateful every day to do work that reflects her belief that it takes a village to create lasting community change.

Alexander Castleton

Alexander Castleton is a sociologist from Uruguay and the Academic Director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics program at the University of Montevideo. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Carleton University (Canada) and has been a Fulbright-Canada scholar at the University of Montana and an Assistant Professor at MacEwan University (Canada). His research explores the intersections of technology, identity, aging, and Indigenous peoples, as well as the sociology of culture and social philosophy, with a focus on José Ortega y Gasset and Hannah Arendt. He is currently completing a second doctoral degree in philosophy at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain).

Teju Cole

TEJU COLE is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. His books include the novels Open City and Tremor, the novella Every Day is for the Thief, the essay collections Known and Strange Things and Black Paper, and a number of projects that set photographs alongside texts. He has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize, among others. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College from 2012 to 2015. He delivered the 2024 Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford. Teju Cole is currently Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.

Matthew Crawford

Matthew B. Crawford earned a degree in physics, then a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. A Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, he writes philosophically-inflected cultural criticism, often with an historical angle. He is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft (a New York Times Bestseller), The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive. His shorter writings have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street journal, First Things, American Affairs, Unherd,The New Atlantis, Compact, Le Monde, Le Figaro, The Sunday Times of London, and many other publications. 

Deirdre D'Albertis

Deirdre D'Albertis is the Vice President and Dean of Bard College. As chief academic officer, Dean Deirdre d'Albertis works with the president and the faculty to advance the central academic purpose of Bard College.

Ella Dershowitz

Ella Dershowitz has performed in new plays Off-Broadway (at New Group, Vineyard Theatre, 59E59, and Clubbed Thumb) and across the country (mostly in New England, New Jersey, and the Bay Area), as well as on TV and film. When not acting, she creates crossword puzzles for the New York Times, LA Times, and Wall Street Journal.

Jeremy Eichler

Jeremy Eichler is the John McCann Assistant Professor of Music History and Public Humanities at Tufts University. His book Time’s Echo: Music, Memory and the Second World War received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award as well as three National Jewish Book Awards including “Book of the Year.” It was also named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times and hailed as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by the Times Literary Supplement.

Eichler served for 18 years as chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker. In 2024-25, he served as the first Writer-in-Residence of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. For more information, please visit www.jeremy-eichler.com.

Donovan Hohn

Donovan Hohn is the author of The Inner Coast: Essays and Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His essays have appeared in such publications as Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham's Quarterly, and The New Republic. A recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hohn spent a number of years editing essays, fiction, and literary journalism at Harper’s, and a few years as features editor of GQ. He has taught nonfiction in the MFA program of the University of Michigan and is now Director of Creative Writing at Wayne State University in Detroit and acting editor of Lapham's Quarterly.

Bill T. Jones

BILL T. JONES (Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) was the Associate Artist of the 2020 Holland Festival and recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; the 2013 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!; a 2007 Tony Award, 2007 Obie Award, and 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation CALLAWAY Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2007 USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; the 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography forThe Seven; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and the 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 2010, Mr. Jones was recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”  
 
Mr. Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in 1982. He has created more than 140 works for his company. Mr. Jones is the Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating. For more information visit www.newyorklivearts.org.

Lisa Cypers Kamen

Lisa is the Principal Facilitator at Harvesting Happiness, a global lifestyle management consultancy supporting clients in fostering greater overall well-being and enhancing quality of life. She also the founder of Harvesting Happiness for Heroes a 501(c)(3) nonprofit providing stigma-free recovery services to Military personnel and their loved ones. Services include life-crisis triage, addiction and trauma recovery fortification, and corporate wellness programming. Lisa is an author, documentary filmmaker, podcast host, frequent radio, television and print media guest expert, TEDx speaker and contributor. Lisa infuses science and heart, humor, and gravitas to support others in cultivating sustainable happiness and growth—regardless of life’s drama, trauma, or challenges. Visit www.harvestinghappiness.com

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the US in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

erica kaufman

erica kaufman is a poet, writer, and teacher, and the author of three books of poetry: POST CLASSIC, INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books), and censory impulse (Factory School). she is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974.  recent poems can be found in Ursula and e-flux. kaufman's prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in: The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies; Reading Experimental Writing; and The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. she is the director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking and the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College where she is also Writer-in-Residence. 

Anthony Kronman

Anthony T. Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He was appointed to this  position in 2004. Professor Kronman served as dean of the Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004.  He joined the Yale faculty in 1978 after teaching for two years at the University of Chicago  School of Law and for one year at the University of Minnesota Law School. His teaching areas  include constitutional law, contracts, legal philosophy and law and religion. He also teaches  philosophy, literature and history and politics in the Directed Studies Program in Yale College.  

Professor Kronman is the author or co-author of many books and articles on various scholarly  and other subjects. His most recent book, “After Disbelief” (2022) explores the meaning of God  in an age of disenchantment. “The Assault on American Excellence” (2019) decries the ways in  which the consuming passion for diversity and the erosion of free speech undermine educational  values and threatens the standing of our colleges and universities in the country at large. His  2016 book, “Confessions of a Born Again Pagan,” offers a sweeping account of the history of  Western thought and an original diagnosis of our current spiritual predicament. In 2007,  Professor Kronman published “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have  Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” and in 1993, “The Lost Lawyer,” which deals with the  contemporary state of the American legal profession and the movement away from what he calls  the lawyer-statesman ideal of responsible law practice.   VIEW MORE >>

Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh collection of poetry, Door, was bublished by Penguin Random House in March 2023. She writes at the intersection of poetics, politics and the visual arts. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993), she is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature (Written Arts) at Bard College.

Jana Mader

Jana Mader is the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies and the Humanities at Bard College. She has published four books, including a novel and a comparative analysis of 19th-century literature from the Hudson Valley and the Rhine. Her latest book, Walk Her Way New York City. A Walking Guide to Women's History, was released in spring 2025. More about her work can be found at janamarlene.com.

Steve Maslow

Steve Maslow was/is the first Chairman of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Hannah Arendt’s work with Jerome Kohn, her teaching assistant and literary executor, and established the Center’s Genius for Friendship Award in honor of Arendt and Kohn. While his career has been in finance, he has maintained a long-standing engagement with Arendt’s ideas. Maslow lives in New York City.  VIEW MORE >>

Wyatt Mason

Wyatt Mason is a journalist, essayist, critic and translator. His work has been published in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, GQ, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine, where he is a contributing writer. His journalism has won the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize and a National Magazine Award. He has translated the work of contemporary French authors Eric Chevillard and Pierre Michon, as well as essays by Michel de Montaigne and poems by Marcel Proust. His translations of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud are published by the Modern Library, in three volumes. He has taught for the Bard Prison Initiative and Bard’s Center for Ethics and Writing, is a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, and is a writer in residence at the college, where he has taught since 2010.

Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is the author of ten books of poetry, including New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a book-length poem; The Many Hundreds of the Scent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); Cain Named the Animal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), a finalist for the Forward Prize; Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Rilke Prize; In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. Read his work here.

Uday Mehta

Uday Singh Mehta is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and the 2022 Yehuda Elkana Fellow (awarded by Central European University and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College). Professor Mehta has taught at several universities, including Princeton, Cornell, MIT, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Hull and Amherst College. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke(Cornell University Press, 1992) and Liberalism and Empire, (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Liberalism and Empire was awarded the J. David Greenstone prize for the best book in Political Theory by the American Political Science Association in 2002. In 2003, Mehta was one of ten recipients of the prestigious “Carnegie Scholars” prize given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” His forthcoming book is titled A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality.

Susan Oberman

Susan Oberman has been a member of the Hannah Arendt Center and the Virtual Reading Group since 2016. In 2021 she initiated the Hannah Arendt Center Dialogue Project which offers HAC members the opportunity to engage in dialogue with other Arendt readers. In 2023 she became an Associate Fellow of HAC. She is a proponent of dialogue as a way to provide space for everyone to be seen and heard, and as a model for addressing conflict. Susan has been practicing mediation since 1987 and established Common Ground Negotiation Services in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999. She developed the Sustainable Knowledge Model of Norm-Educating Mediation which she uses in mediation, group facilitation, and negotiation coaching.  She sees conflict as an opportunity--to clarify differences in issues and values, rather than something to be avoided. Susan lives in Hurley, NY, with her oldest son and his family and is the proud grandmother of 6. She is an avid international folk dancer. For more information see www.commongroundnegotiation.com

Francine Prose

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised 1974: A Person History, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Marilyn Simon

Marilyn Simon earned her PhD on Shakespeare from the University of Toronto. She is known for her writing on sex and women, but she also writes more broadly on culture and joy. She's working on her first book titled Submission: How Falling in Love with Shakespeare Made Me a More Joyful Woman, Wife, and Lover. Her writing appears regularly in Unherd and Quillette, and more recently in The Hedgehog Review.

Allison Stanger

Stanger’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Conversation, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wired. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale University Press, 2019) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2009). She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Stanger is the co-editor (with Hannes Werthner et. al.) of Introduction to Digital Humanism: A Textbook (Springer, 2024), which is open access, and co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press, 2020). She is the creator of the Accountability Archive.

Jill Stauffer

Jill Stauffer is an Associate Professor at Haverford College. Her book Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, was published by Columbia University Press in 2015. The book was used as a model for the series of dialogues amongst Indigenous nations that lead to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a cooperative request to the Australian government for indigenous voice in Parliament. Stauffer is also on the editorial board of the human rights oral history book series Voice of Witness. Her edited volume (with Bettina Bergo), Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God, was published by Columbia University Press in 2009. Her next book, Temporal Privilege, about the relation between time and law and also the urgent need for all of us to learn to tell a wider range of stories about temporal experience, is forthcoming in 2026.

Karen Sullivan

Karen Sullivan is Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture at Bard College. She is the author of Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen; The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions; The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors; and Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature, all published by the University of Chicago Press, and The Interrogation of Joan of Arc, published by the University of Minnesota Press. She has a book on Introducing the Medieval Bear forthcoming from the University of Wales Press next year.

Eva Tenuto

Eva Tenuto co-founded TMI Project in 2010, spearheading a movement using true storytelling as a liberation practice for social justice. With an unwavering commitment to releasing shame and stigma through true storytelling, Eva has propelled TMI Project from her living room to the United Nations, and many places in between. Since then, she has guided thousands of people to write and share their stories.
 
In addition to being TMI Project’s executive director, Eva is a multi-disciplinary artist. She is the co-host of the award-winning podcast, The TMI Project Story Hour. She is the editor and director of multiple solo shows, one of which was awarded Best Comedic Script in the United Solo Festival. Her award-winning documentary shorts Vicarious Resilience, Locker Room Talk, and One Story at a Time: Celeste Lecesne have screened around the world, including at esteemed festivals like DC/DOX, Woodstock Film Festival, and GlobeDocs by The Boston Globe. Eva’s personal essays have appeared in assorted anthologies and online publications. 
 
Eva is a sought-after speaker on topics such as storytelling, social justice, women’s leadership, recovery, and shame. She has presented at many institutions, including UN Women, Omega Institute, and A Call to Men, among others. In 2018, she had the privilege of presenting #MeToo founder Tarana Burke with the Eleanor Roosevelt Center’s Medal of Honor.

S. Leigh Thompson

S. Leigh Thompson is a white and Native queer trans genderqueer person with disability who has worked at the intersections of art and social and political justice for over 25 years. Leigh has worked as a trainer, campaign strategist, community organizer and lobbyist for organizations such as the ACLU, GLSEN and Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation. They hold a BA in Theatre from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and an individualized MA from Gallatin at NYU, focusing on utilizing creative participation for political and social change with course work in change theory, community studies, public policy, nonprofit management and campaign strategies.

​Leigh is currently a consultant, facilitator and strategist supporting deeper understanding of equity, inclusion and justice and building tools to dismantle systemic power, privilege and oppression. His consulting clients include small local to large global nonprofits, educational institutions, movement coalitions and businesses from around the world. 

He has created, co-created and collaborated in a wide variety of projects that live at the intersections of art, social justice and wellness. They were a co-creator and President of the TransMasculine Community Network, an organization supporting AFAB trans and nonbinary folk in NYC; the Managing Director of the Orange Blossom, an arts and education community squat; a co-designer of Fuck Your Health, a comedy performance exploring reproductive health for LGBTQ folk; and the co-founder and -director of the Kingsmen, a drag performance troupe. Leigh directed Occupy the Stage, engaging occupiers and bystanders in creative dialogue about  economic disparity  and the dangers of capitalism; designed and managed audience support, dialogue  and education project for the Slave Play, a Tony-award winning play; wrote the education toolkits for the award-winning documentary film, Disclosure; and much more.  VIEW MORE >>

Robin Wang

Robin R. Wang is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles and The Berggruen fellow (2016-17) at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Stanford University. Her teaching and research focus on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy, particularly Daoist philosophy, as well as the intersections of women and gender in Chinese thought and culture. She has published a wide range of essays, that bridge classical Daoist philosophy with modern philosophical discourse, offering critical insights into their relevance in addressing contemporary global challenges. She is the author of the acclaimed book, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and the editor of Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, (SUNY Press, 2004) and Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period to the Song Dynasty (Hackett, 2003). She is the member of the Steering Committee member for Fédération Internationaledes Sociétés de Philosophie (International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP 2018 to present) where she actively engages in shaping the future of philosophical inquiry on a global stage. She has regularly given presentations in North America, Europe, and Asia, and has also served as a peer reviewer for academic journals and publishers, contributing to academic excellence across multiple disciplines. She was President of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, 2016-18.

Niobe Way

Dr. Niobe Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology and the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University (PACH). She is also past President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) and co-director of the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education at NYU.

Her work focuses on the intersections of culture, context, and human development, with a particular focus on social and emotional development and how cultural ideologies influence developmental trajectories. The Listening Project, her current project with Joseph Nelson, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, David Kirkland, and Alisha Ali, aims to foster curiosity and connection in and outside of middle school classrooms across New York City.

In addition, she created and teaches a core course for undergraduates at NYU called The Science of Human Connection. The course describes her theoretical and empirical framework developed over three decades and discussed in her latest co-edited book The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solution (NYU Press).  VIEW MORE >>

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool, Self-Portrait in Black and White, and Summer of Our Discontent. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Prior to that he was a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s. He is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. He is a visiting professor of the humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

The Taconic State Parkway and the New York State Thruway provide the most direct routes to our campus. Click the Google link above or get directions by entering the following address into your GPS: 51 Ravine Road, Red Hook, NY 12571. 

From the East: If you are traveling from east of the Hudson River in New York State, take the Taconic State Parkway to the Red Hook / Route 199 exit, drive west on Route 199 through the village of Red Hook to Route 9G, turn right onto Route 9G, drive north 1.6 miles, turn left at the traffic light and continue on Annandale Road through our campus.

From the West: If you are traveling from west of the Hudson River, take the New York State Thruway (I-87) to exit 19 (Kingston), take Route 209 (changes to Route 199 at the Hudson River) over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge to Route 9G, turn left onto Route 9G, drive north 3.5 miles, turn left at the traffic light and continue on Annandale Road through our campus.

There are two train stations close to Bard College: one in Poughkeepsie (Metro North), New York, and the other in Rhinecliff (Amtrak), New York. Taxi service is available from either station to bring you to campus.  

Amtrak provides service from Albany and from Pennsylvania Station in New York City to Rhinecliff, about 9 miles south of Annandale. Taxi service is available at the station. Travel Time: Approximately two hours (one hour and 40 minutes by train and 15–20 minutes by taxi). Contact Information: Rhinecliff station can be reached at 845-876-3364. Reservations and schedule information at wwe.Amtrak.com

Metro-North commuter railroad provides service from Grand Central Station in New York City to Poughkeepsie, about 26 miles south of campus. Taxi service is available at the station. Travel Time: Approximately one hour and 30 minutes (40–50 minutes by train and 40 minutes by taxi).

Olin Hall

Bard College's main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City, 50 miles south of Albany, NY, and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Conference takes place in Olin Auditorium in the Olin Humanities Building (C3 on the Bard Map). 

Accomodations

A comprehensive list of nearby hotels, inns, and B & B’s may be found through Dutchess County Tourism and through Ulster County Tourism. Please review these lists. We recommend booking your accommodations and restaurant dining as soon as possible. We do not offer housing options on campus for guests. There are several Air BnB options in the nearby towns; Red Hook and Tivoli. Please be prepared to use Uber, Lyft, and Taxis to get around. Note: The roads surrounding Bard College are not walkable and due to the rural area, local transport is limited. Please keep this in mind when planning your stay. Still need help? Check out visiting Bard College for more helpful hints, click here.

Local hotel offering a Bard Rate during the conference: 

Parking is Free

There are two main parking lots; One across from Olin and one south of Olin Hall -- Please park in either lot. Additionally, you may also park in the gravel lot across from the Stevenson Gymnasium off of Annandale Road. Please click HERE to see the venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.