The Arendt Forum 2026: Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?

Thursday, October 15th

9:00 am
Doors open

9:30 am
Music

10:00 am 
Introduction
Deirdre d’Albertis

10:10 am
Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?
Roger Berkowitz

10:30 am
In A Human Voice
Carol Gilligan
Discussants: Niobe Way and Roger Berkowitz

11:30 am 
Is Liberalism Compatible with Solidarity?
Patrick Deneen
Discussants: Chris Gibson and Zephyr Teachout

12:30-12:45 pm
Introduction to art project
Yazmany Arboleda

12:45–2:15 pm Community Lunch

2:00 pm
Music

2:30 pm
Solidarity: The Work of Recognition
Rowan Williams
Discussant: Amber Lapp

3:30 pm:
Break and music

4:00 pm  
What Still Binds Us? Solidarity After the Unwinding
George Packer
In conversation with Wyatt Mason

5:00 pm
Building Solidarity Today: The Immigration Debate
David Lapp
In conversation with Jim Robb and Diego Sánchez

6:00 pm
Wine & Cheese Reception with music

Friday, October 16th

8:30am
Doors open

9:00 am
Music

9:30 am
Introduction
Leon Botstein

10:00 am
Is A Shared America Project Still Possible?
Amber Lapp & Guests
Roundtable and interactive discussion

11:00 am
Fraternity Without Illusions: What Binds Us in a Broken World?
Eva Illouz
In conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams

12:00 pm
Labor and Solidarity!
Damon Silvers and Gerry Hudson
Moderator: TBA

1:00 pm - 2:30pm
Community Lunch

2:15-2:30 pm
Music

2:30 pm
What We Carry: An Altar for Solidarity
Yazmany Arboleda

3:15 pm   
Civic Love: How Democracy Can Bring Us Together
Helene Landemore 
In conversation with Phil Lindsay

4:15 pm  
Concluding Roundtable
Moderator: Roger Berkowitz
Discussants: Uday Mehta, Allison Stanger, Donovan Hohn, and Thomas Chatterton Williams

5:00 pm
Wine & Cheese Reception with music

Saturday, October 17th

8:30 am
Doors open

9:00-11:00 am
Envisioning Solidarity Together: an intimate debrief and networking opportunity 
Zephyr Teachout, Hélène Landemore, David Lapp of Braver Angels and Philip Lindsay, Director of the Arendt Center’s Democracy Innovation Hub

A special new feature of the Arendt Forum, this Saturday morning debrief will give participants time and space to connect with others and interact on a more personal level with several of the speakers from the conference. The Democracy Innovation Hub is a new initiative of the Arendt Center whose aim is to catalyze citizens’ assemblies and other innovative approaches to democratic reform.

Yazmany Arboleda

Yazmany Arboleda is a Colombian-American artist, architect, and civic designer whose work treats art as a collective action—something people do together to shape belonging, dignity, and public life. He is New York City’s inaugural People’s Artist at the Civic Engagement Commission and Founder and Artistic Director of The People’s Creative Institute, a civic art studio that transforms everyday public spaces into sites of storytelling, healing, and democratic participation. He also serves as Senior Artistic Advisor for the Community Arts Network and teaches futures-oriented design at Cornell University.

Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz is Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College and founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. He hosts the podcast Reading Hannah Arendt and writes the weekly Amor Mundi newsletter. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (2005) and the forthcoming A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026). He is the recipient of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought awarded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Leon Botstein

Leon Botstein 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.

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.

Patrick Deneen

Patrick J. Deneen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2012. He is the author or editor of eight books and dozens of articles on a wide range of subjects. His bestselling 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed has been translated into over 20 languages, and was recommended by former President Barack Obama. He taught previously at Princeton University and Georgetown University, and served as Special Assistant and Speechwriter for the Director of the United States Information Agency from 2005-2007. His latest book, slated for publication in July 2026, is entitled Our American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls (Creed and Culture Books).

Chris Gibson

Chris Gibson is a writer and analyst. He is the author of three books, The Spirit of Philadelphia published by Routledge in May 2025, Rally Point: Five Tasks to Unite the Country and Revitalize the American Dream published by Twelve Books in 2017, and Securing the State: Reforming the National Security Decision Making Process at the Civil-Military Nexus published by Routledge in paperback in 2019 (the hardcover edition was initially published by Ashgate in 2008). He has also published numerous scholarly journal articles, opinion pieces, a book chapter and a book review. As an analyst, he has appeared on Fox, Newsmax, CSPAN and NPR, among other outlets.  VIEW MORE >>

Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan's landmark classic, In a Different Voice, revolutionized the study of girls, women, and human psychology. She taught for over 30 years at Harvard where she held the university's first chair in Gender Studies, at the University of Cambridge as the visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, and is now a University Professor at NYU where she initiated the Radical Listening Project. In 1996 Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential Americans and in 2025 she received the Kyoto Prize in arts and philosophy. Her most recent book, In a Human Voice, was named a best book of 2023 by the Times Literary Supplement, and her novel, Solstice, described by Daphne Merkin as "a literary tour de force... an irresistible read,"  will be published in August. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her husband and the very old dog of their youngest son.

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.

Gerry Hudson

Gerry Hudson's outstanding commitment to labor, confronting the realities of long term care, and environmental justice spans decades. Recently honored by Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations for his extraordinary leadership, Hudson continues to have wide-ranging impact on the fight to improve the lives of working families and their communities. His dedication to addressing urban sprawl and the disproportionate impacts of environmental degradation on low-income and minority communities informed his participation in the first-ever U.S. labor delegation to the United Nations' climate change meeting in Bali in 2007. He has served on the advisory board of the Apollo Alliance, a labor-based organization that advocates for high-quality job creation in a clean energy economy. He's also served on the board for Redefining Progress, the nation's leading public policy think tank dedicated to developing innovative public policies that balance economic well-being, environmental preservation, and social justice. Hudson has previously served on the Executive Committee of SEIU, ensuring that SEIU members and all workers have a strong voice to hold politicians accountable and elect candidates at all levels who stand with working families. As a result of Hudson's previous leadership of the union's long term care work, SEIU's 580,000 long term care members are building a powerful voice in the workplace and the political arena for both themselves and for the seniors and people with disabilities they support. He came to SEIU in 1978 from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, N.Y., where he was a member of SEIU Local 144. Elected as executive vice president for the former-District 1199 in 1989, Hudson spent more than a dozen years supervising 1199 New York's political action, education, publications, and cultural affairs departments. During his tenure with 1199NY, Hudson coordinated the merger of the 30,000-member Local 144 into SEIU/1199. He also founded the 1199 School for Social Change - a former alternative school in the Bronx - and served as a trustee of the Local 1199 Training and Upgrading Fund, Home Care Workers Benefit Fund, and Michelson Education Fund. Hudson also has considerable political experience. In 1996, Hudson served as political director of the New York state Democratic Party and helped lead the union's campaigns in support of Jesse Jackson's presidential efforts in New York and the successful New York City mayoral campaign of David Dinkins. He played an instrumental role in the election of H. Carl McCall, the first African American controller in New York state.  VIEW MORE >>

Eva Illouz

Eva Illouz is Directrice d’Etudes at the EHESS. Her research interests include sociology of culture, sociology of emotions, sociology of capitalism, and the effect of consumerism and mass media on emotional patterns. Illouz is the author of 15 books translated in 25 languages. These books deal with diverse topics as romantic love, culture, capitalism and the crystallization of the psychological culture during the 20th century, the industry of happiness, and the impact of modernity on emotions. She is the recipient of numerous international awards for her work.

Mie Inouye

Mie Inouye is an Assistant Professor of political theory at Bard. Her scholarship investigates the ways that institutions shape people’s understandings of themselves and the social world and the practices that allow oppressed people to develop and exercise agency. She writes about organizing, labor, social movements, and religion in academic and popular venues including The American Political Science Review, Jacobin Magazine, The Forge, The Political Theology Network, and Boston Review.

Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University with a specialization in political theory. Her research and teaching interests include, among other things, democratic theory, political epistemology, and the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence. She is also a fellow at the Ethics in AI Institute at the University of Oxford, and an advisor to the Democratic Inputs to AIprogram at OpenAI. She served on the Governance Committee of the most recent French Citizens’ Convention and is currently undertaking work supported by Schmidt Futures through the AI2050 program. 

In her new book, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (Penguin Random House, 2026), Landemore asks and answers a radical question: What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people—under the right conditions—could govern much better?

Amber Lapp

Amber Lapp is a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a contributing editor at Comment magazine, an advisor at American Compass, and co-investigator of a qualitative research inquiry into how working-class young adults form relationships and families. She and her husband David live in southwestern Ohio with their six children. She is also a member of Braver Angels, the nation’s largest grassroots organization working to bridge the partisan divide, and is passionate about finding ways for ordinary Americans to participate in public life. Her writing has appeared in National Review, First Things, USA Today, The Federalist, The American Conservative, Comment Magazine, and The Atlantic. She has a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) from The King’s College in New York City.

David Lapp

David Lapp is a co-founder of Braver Angels, the nation's largest grassroots organization working to bridge the partisan divide. Before that, David spent several years with his wife, Amber Lapp, as a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, interviewing working-class Ohioans about their life experiences and families. David lives with his wife Amber and six children in South Lebanon, Ohio.

Philip Lindsay

Philip Lindsay is the Director of the Democracy Innovation Hub at the Hannah Arendt Center. Over the past four years, he has hosted several national gatherings and trainings for elected officials and public servants to learn how to run citizens’ assemblies. These trainings, at Bard and in New York City, led to the first major use of sortition in NYC, and catalyzed a major citywide assembly in Ft. Collins, Colorado. He also organizes trainings with educators on how to bring deliberative democracy into the classroom, and hosts the Democracy Innovation Academy monthly online webinar series, which is free and open to the public.

Ian Marcus Corbin

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.

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

George Packer

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

Jim Robb

Jim Robb is Vice President of Alliances at NumbersUSA, the nation’s largest-member immigration organization. NumbersUSA advocates for a modernized immigration system that combines secure borders and enforcement of immigration laws with legal immigration levels that better serve America’s workers and long-term national interests.

Jim helped found NumbersUSA 30 years ago and pioneered its web-based grassroots advocacy tools, which supporters have used to send more than 50 million messages to Congress. His work has focused on immigration policy, public opinion, and the changing political attitudes of Hispanic Americans.

In 2022, Jim authored Political Migrants: Hispanic Voters on the Move, one of the first books to document and analyze the movement of Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party.

A frequent speaker on immigration policy, this Spring/Summer Jim has appeared at Stanford University’s Stanford Political Union and the University of California, Irvine. He serves on the leadership team of the Braver Angels Citizens Commission on Immigration, where he regularly appears alongside Diego Sánchez to model constructive dialogue across differing perspectives. Together they co-chaired June’s Braver Angels National Convention in Philadelphia, and spoke at the Understory Conference at Washington National Cathedral.

Diego Sánchez

Diego Sánchez is Vice President of Policy and Strategy at the Presidents’ Alliance, where he leads the organization’s policy team and legislative and administrative agenda. An immigration lawyer and policy strategist with over 15 years of experience, he works at the intersection of higher education, immigration policy, and government relations, helping college and university leaders navigate policy developments affecting students, campuses, and communities. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at Cornell University’s Center on Global Democracy.

Before joining the Presidents’ Alliance, Diego directed the federal immigration portfolio at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Across his career, he has led policy strategy, coalition engagement, and advocacy at the local, state, and national levels. His areas of expertise include higher education and immigration policy, tuition equity and college access for immigrant students and Dreamers, and engagement with policymakers, campus leaders, and cross-sector partners.

Diego serves on the Leadership Team of Braver Angels’ Citizens Commission on Immigration, an initiative dedicated to identifying durable areas of common ground on immigration policy and advancing civil discourse across political differences. He holds a J.D. and bachelor’s degrees in psychology and philosophy from St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida. His commitment to expanding educational opportunity for immigrant students is deeply personal, shaped by his own experience as an undocumented college student and former DACA recipient.

Damon Silvers

Damon Silvers is Visiting Professor of Practice at University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose,
a Senior Advisor to the AFL-CIO, the U.S. trade union confederation, and to the American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO's largest affiliated union.  He is also Senior Counsel to the Jubilee Network, a coalition of religious labor and civil society organizations working to reform the international financial system.  Mr. Silvers was formerly the Policy Director and Special Counsel of the AFL-CIO, where he oversaw the public policy work of the US trade union movement and helped found the labor movement's Capital Stewardship Program. Professor Silvers has served in a number of positions related to economic and financial market policy in the U.S., including leading the Biden-Harris Transition Team's work on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, serving as Deputy Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the U.S. bank bailout, and as a longtime member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Investor Advisory Committee.  Mr Silvers is an attorney with degrees from Harvard College, Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, and studied history at Kings College, Cambridge.

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.

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.

Zephyr Teachout

Zephyr Teachout is a Professor at Law at Fordham Law School where she focuses on the intersection of corporate power and political power. She teaches corporations, election law, antitrust, and prosecuting white collar crime. Her most recent book, Break 'em Up (2020), makes a case for reimagining the relationship between democracy and antimonopoly law. Her prior book, Corruption in America (2014), argued that the American constitutional system has an embedded anti-corruption principle that has been discarded by the modern Court. Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, New York Review of Books, Washington Post, The Nation and The New Republic. In 2021, she took a leave to work as Special Advisor and Senior Counsel for Economic Justice at the New York Attorney General's Office. Before Law School, Zephyr Teachout had a career as a digital consultant and nonprofit entrepreneur, and represented clients on death row in North Carolina. She was a Law Clerk to then-Chief Judge Edward R. Becker., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Jana Tirey

Jana Tirey 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 is the author of several fiction and nonfiction books, including Walk Her Way New York City (2025) and a monograph on the literary history of the Hudson River and the Rhine. Her writing and translations have appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung, DIE ZEIT, and brand eins. More about her work can be found at janamarlene.com.

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. She is a member of the board at the Hannah Arendt Center.

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 >>

Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams was born in Wales, and studied theology at Cambridge and completed his doctoral work at Oxford on Russian religious thought. After some years in university teaching and pastoral work, Williams became Bishop of Monmouth in Wales in 1992, Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, Master of Magdalene College, 2013-2020. He is author of many books on theology, philosophy and culture, most recently, Solidarity: the Work of Recognition, and a short discussion of the debate on physician-assisted dying ('Do We Have the Right to Die?'), which he co-authored with Brenda Hale (formerly of the Supreme Court in the UK). Also several collections of poetry, and translations of poetry from Welsh, German, and Russian.

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.

Daniel Wortel-London

Daniel Wortel-London is a historian of American politics and associate fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center. He is the author of The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 (University of Chicago Press, 2025), which traces how an impoverished vision of economic growth came to dominate New York City's public life — with devastating consequences for its ethical and communal life.  Beyond academic publishing, Wortel-London has brought historical analysis to bear on contemporary debates through writing in The Nation, Jacobin, Boston Review, Plough, and Inequality.org. His public-facing work explores the ethical prerequisites of just economies, the economic prerequisites of flourishing communities, and the strategies needed to secure both in the modern world. 

REGISTER

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

We recommend booking your accommodations as soon as possible. We do not offer housing options on campus. Look for hotel options on your favorite travel site like Hotels.com, Orbitz, and Travelocity. There are several Air BnB options in the nearby towns: Kingston, 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.

Dining

If you ordered lunch with your registration, your lunch ticket(s) will be available for pick up upon your arrival at the Registration Table in the Olin Atrium. 
 
If you did not pre-order a lunch, there are options at the Bard College dining hall within walking distance of Olin Hall, as well as nearby restaurants in Red Hook, Tivoli, Rhinebeck, and Germantown. A quick Google search will help you find nearby restaurant websites for hours, locations, and reservations.

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.