News Archive

Professor of Politics Boris Vormann has contributed an article to the newly published Research Handbook on International Law and Cities (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021).

In his contribution, titled: "Global city networks and the nation-state: rethinking a false tradeoff," Prof. Vormann challenges contemporary discussions which state that city networks have a greater importance for global flows of trade than states, arguing instead that the relationship between city and state is complementary and not a tradeoff.

Access the article on Elgaronline >>
 

Flash fiction pieces created by BCB students as part of the course “Writing African Futures” have been published by the online magazine Warscapes. The course was taught by BCB Associate Dean Prof. Kerry Bystrom and Dr. Aedan Alderson (York University) in the Spring Term of 2021 and brought together BCB students with students pursuing a remote BA through the Borderless Higher Education Program based at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.

Students reflected together with their peers from Dadaab on science fiction as a genre and how it can enable hidden experiences to be seen and different futures to be imagined. Warscapes editor Bhakti Shringarpure and writer Kiprop Kimutai helped students develop future-orientated creative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The project was funded by the OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning initiatives and the Open Society University Network Center for the Human Rights and Arts.

Warscapes is an independent online magazine that provides a lens into current conflict across the world. Read the students’ pieces on the Warscapes website >>
 

BCB Professor of Economics Israel Waichman has published a paper in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. The paper is titled “Challenging conventional wisdom: Experimental evidence on heterogeneity and coordination in avoiding a collective catastrophic event” and co-authored with Till Requate, Markus Karde, and Manfred Milinski.

The paper is motivated by the argument that differences between actors (i.e. countries) in factors such as wealth and potential damage caused by environmental catastrophes represent a major obstacle to a cooperative climate policy.

Prof. Waichman, Prof. Requate, Mr. Karde, and Prof. Milinski conducted an experiment with human participants in a simplified environment to experimentally study the effect of differences in wealth and potential damage from a climate related catastrophe on success in preventing such a catastrophe. The main finding is that heterogenies per se do not necessarily hinder cooperation in preventing a catastrophe.

Read the full paper on Science Direct >>
 

BCB faculty member Dr. Gavin McCrea has released a new novel titled The Sisters Mao. The novel follows the parallel narratives of the wife of Chairman Mao, Jiang Qing, a former actress who is rehearsing a politically motivated ballet and two sisters in London, members of a radical performance collective, planning an attack on a West End theater.

Following on from his debut novel Mrs Engels, a fictional account of the life of Frederick Engel’s wife, The Sisters Mao continues with Dr. McCrea's literary account of the development of communism in the 20th century, whilst also covering the everyday familial struggles of the women at the center of the plot. 

The Sisters Mao is published by Scribe and released on September 9. Dr. McCrea is currently working on a memoir titled Cells about the relationship with his mother, which is set to be released in September 2022.

Further information about The Sisters Mao on the Scribe website >>
Interview with Dr. Gavin McCrea in the Irish Times >>
 

Bard College Berlin welcomes Dr. Maria Anderson-Long who joined the college as Head of Student Life this term.

Student Life complements students' academic experience, aiming to sustain and further develop an open, vibrant, intellectually curious, supportive and diverse community atmosphere. Student Life comprises several areas, including Residential Life & Housing, Orientation, Career Services, Student Organizations and Clubs, Internships, Student Wellness, and more. The Student Life team supports BCB students and foster their growth and independence.

Dr. Maria Anderson-Long received her Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in Higher & Postsecondary Education. She received her Master's in Higher Education Student Affairs from The Ohio State University and her Bachelor’s in Women & Gender Studies and Theater Arts from Clark University. Her primary research interests focus on how higher education responds to societal changes, specifically focusing on the creation of policies that better serve marginalized students. Her dissertation utilized organizational theory to understand institutional responses to normative disruption of the gender binary to better support transgender students. Maria has worked in student life for over a decade, with most of her career focused in residential life, academic advising, and student activities. She has also been an assistant adjunct professor at Teachers College for the last several years teaching courses on student development theories and the history and policies of American higher education.

Further information about the Student Life department on the BCB website >>

Bard College Berlin has collaborated with development and project management firm DBI Projects and New York-based architecture and interiors studio Civilian to develop new student residences. Informed by Berlin’s rich architectural and design history, they help foster student living and learning in the artistic, political, and economic center of Europe. The residences are scheduled to open in September 2021 at the start of the new academic year when students from all over the world will take up residence at Bard College Berlin.
 

Context

Set in the city’s leafy Pankow neighborhood, the former East Berlin embassy district, and arraying 39 apartments that will be home to 120 students, the twin red and gray brick buildings reflect the heterogeneous architectural character of Berlin, and create permeable connections with their surroundings. The buildings delineate the corner lot on which they are erected, forming a spacious patio that serves as an informal community gathering place and providing a gateway between the adjacent Intelligenzberg Park and Bard College Berlin’s campus. Working closely with development manager DBI Projects and their local partner AVP, Civilian has overseen the architecture, interiors, furniture and landscape design for the project together with a team of local professionals.
 

Architecture

Civilian’s design reimagines contemporary communal living in a city that developed the progressive housing estate during the Weimar era. The project draws inspiration from German architect and urban planner Bruno Taut and the Metropolis-era masonry Expressionist architecture of the 1920s which was known for its use of dense color, surface quality of materials, multidisciplinary approach in architecture, interiors, furniture and emphasis on light and air. The buildings are also set in dialogue with the 1970s Neo Bauhaus architecture of the surrounding neighborhood.
 
The lounge and study areas on the ground floor of each building are connected by a landscaped courtyard creating a spatial social hub between the two residences and the recently converted former embassies that are now academic buildings adjacent to the project.
 

Interiors

The layout of the public spaces supports student learning and social exchange by providing a mix of study zones geared toward a range of uses from individual study to group or project-based work. While visually connected through a common material palette, the study lounges are distributed across both buildings. One is convivial in nature and built out with a small coffee bar that accommodates events with cafe seating while the other is introspective and quiet.
 
Mindful of creating a flexible environment for open social exchange, living and learning, Civilian has made a suite of custom furniture that takes inspiration from the pared down utility of 1920s furniture by Dutch designers Gerrit Rietveld and Ko Verzuu, as well as artists Donald Judd and Andrea Zittel. In the private living spaces, multifunctional bedroom furniture made from European birch plywood maximizes storage and comfort, while incorporating high quality materials. The beds contain drawer storage for clothing, a back and armrest to be used as a chair and a pull-out night table with a power source and lockable compartment. Individual mirrors have an adjustable light source and lip to house family photos or postcards. Desks have an additional built-in shelf and a wardrobe provides additional open storage. Each piece of furniture has been CNC cut, flat packed, and can be easily assembled or adapted for future use. Refinished vintage furniture from the 70s and 80s contrasts with the custom millwork and paneling that has been placed throughout the public lounge and cafe spaces.
 
 The buildings were conceived to meet Germany’s progressive energy and sustainability standards, including an innovative a courtyard design that incorporates all rainwater runoff into a series of gardens planted with drought-hardy indigenous perennial plants. For the interiors, a combination of refinished, vintage and custom furniture using minimally processed, sustainably harvested materials were sourced throughout.
 
The new residences provide students with a thoughtfully-designed living and studying environment that has incorporated the rich local history and that will further enhance the shaping and functioning of the close-knit intellectual community that is Bard College Berlin.
 
"By partnering with developers, Bard College Berlin was able to leverage its land assets with private investment to ensure that its growing international student community could continue to reap the benefits of a residential campus that offers students the opportunity to study and live together. Characteristic of a liberal arts education, it is a trait that is rare to find in Europe. The newly constructed student residences will be home to 120 international students who are enrolled in one of the two four-year BA programs that Bard College Berlin offers,” said Florian Becker, Managing Director of Bard College Berlin in Berlin.”
 
“The project shows that functional student housing can tackle sustainability concerns, be aesthetically advanced, and act as a community and social hub all at once. Designed with a nod to both Bauhaus and the "Kreuzberg brick" in their modern facades, these highly energy efficient units aim to honor the past while fully incorporating today's environmental requirements. In a city that is a palimpsest of European history, this is a project truly coming full circle, as former East-German embassies are flanking two brand-new residences that will serve a student community of over sixty nationalities," added Taun Toay, Bard College Berlin’s Managing Director based in Annandale.
 
“Civilian is honored to work with Bard College Berlin on this project, which we hope will serve as a dynamic new gathering place that facilitates the exchange of ideas on campus,” said Civilian’s principal and co-founder Nicko Elliott. “Our goal was to create a range of convivial public lounges across both buildings for both individual study and collaboration while designing flexible private living spaces for maximum comfort and personalization.”
 
“We partnered with Bard College Berlin to develop high-quality yet affordable facilities for the college that address their need for more student housing while creating significant added value through intentional design and thoughtful execution," said Ofer Ohad, Managing Partner at DBI Projects. "We are excited to see students now accessing housing that stimulates learning and socialization and enhances their overall academic experience.”

For further information visit the civilian projects or dbi projects website.

Media Coverage
"Minute On Design," in Monocle >>
"Berlin student housing designed with co-working spaces", in Icon >>
"Apartment interior design: outstanding spaces around the globe", in Wallpaper* >>
"Berlin student residences by Civilian foster wellbeing and togetherness", in Frame >>
"In Berlin, A Student Residence That's Far from Sterile," in Azure >>

BCB Professor of Migration Studies Agata Lisiak is to give a talk at the second Emma Goldman Awards hosted by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna and presented by the FLAX Foundation. Her talk is titled “Recalcitrant: Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, and the Politics of Waywardness.” Prof. Lisiak was previously IWM junior fellow from 2013 to 2014.

The talk will take place on September 2, 2021 at 6:00 pm CEST.

Further details on the IWM website >>

In an article titled “Die Verletzlichsten” (the most woundable) for Zeit Online, BCB Alumna Maheen Atifa (EPST ’19) sheds light on the situation of the Afghan Hazara minority in the context of the recent Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.

Outside of Afghanistan the largest Hazara group can be found in Pakistan, originating from Pakistan herself, Maheen feels a strong affiliation to Afghanistan and the Hazara.

In the article Maheen outlines the history of the Hazara diaspora in Pakistan, discusses the challenges facing them in other countries, and lastly draws attention to the imminent danger facing them due to Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.

Maheen Atif is a 2019 BCB Economics, Politics, and Social Thought graduate. Her thesis titled: “Migration Culture and Survival Memory among the Hazaras of the World” is dedicated to the Hazara people.

Read the full article on Zeit Online >>
 

Dear friends of Bard College Berlin,

We wish to express our deep concern for our Afghan students and their families at Bard College Berlin, Bard College (USA), the American University of Central Asia (AUCA), Bard’s long-time dual-degree partner, and the American University of Afghanistan (AUAf), our partner institution in the Open Society University Network (OSUN).  
 
The leadership of Bard College in New York is now working to find safe havens for students and graduates. President Leon Botstein has offered that Bard would immediately take in as many as 100 students in Annandale, as well as threatened scholars. Vice President Jonathan Becker has arranged for The American University of Central Asia to offer scholarships through OSUN to up to 120 graduates, in addition to its 120 Afghan undergraduates, and a home to another 100+ AUAf students. Several other OSUN partners have stepped forward and offered to take students and faculty through OSUN’s Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative (TSI), of which Bard College Berlin is a member.
 
Bard College Berlin is committed to providing scholarships for Afghan students at risk and to offering these students a personal and academic sanctuary here in Berlin.

While most Afghans are trapped at the moment, we need to be prepared to act as soon as possibilities to leave the country become available. We are urgently inviting donations now so that Afghan students will be able to enroll at our college once pathways are clear. Donations will be matched with funds from the OSUN Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative.
 
Sincerely,

Dr. Florian N. Becker
Managing Director, Bard College Berlin

BCB faculty member and artist John Kleckner will be exhibiting his work in a joint show with Maximilian Arnold at the goeben gallery in Berlin.

Titled Sidesteps: Roughly Edged, this is the first show in which Kleckner and Arnold have exhibited together. The two artists share many formal and conceptual ideas about painting and through the process of selecting works for the exhibition it can be said that they are holding a visual conversation, the topics of which range from formal issues of color, texture, and shape to more conceptual themes, such as: the imprecision of memory, illusionism of surfaces, (dis)locations, interior/exterior, and the joy of ambiguity and not knowing.

The vernissage of Sidesteps: Roughly Edged will be taking place on Friday, July 23, from 6:00 to 10:00pm and is open to the public. The exhibition will be showing a the goeben gallery from July 24 to August 28, 2021.

John Kleckner’s works have been exhibited internationally and can be found in prominent public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Charles Saatchi Collection in London. 

BCB alumna Wafa Mustafa spoke to the Guardian about the disappearance of her father Ali Mustafa, a human rights activist, who was detained by the Syrian Regime in July 2013 and has not been heard from since.

In the interview she reflects on how this family tragedy has affected her activism as well as her personal life. She also speaks about her experiences protesting during the Syrian revolution in 2011 and being detained in a Syrian government prison herself.

Wafa is a 2020 Humanities, Arts, and Social Thought graduate and a former PIESC Program scholar. She is a journalist and activist, who works together with the organization Families for Freedom, campaigning for the freedom of those who have been detained by the Syrian Regime.

Read the full interview on the Guardian website >>
 

BCB Professor of Literature and Film Studies Matthias Hurst has published an essay on renowned German director Wim Wenders and his film Don't Come Knocking (2005) in a new book: Kontinuität im Wandel. Begegnungen mit dem Filmemacher Wim Wenders (München: edition text + kritik, 2021), edited by Jörn Glasenapp.

The essay is called "How The West Was Lost: Don't Come Knocking und der lange Abschied vom Amerikanischen Traum" and explores Wenders's ambivalent relation to, and perception of, the American myth and the American Dream, and the specific presentation of this topic in the Post-Western Don't Come Knocking (2005), co-written by Sam Shepard and starring Shepard, Jessica Lange, Sarah Polley and Tim Roth.

Wenders has been influenced by American pop culture and American movies since his youth ("Is 'America' not an invention of the movies? Would there be the dreaming of America, all over the world, without the  movies?" -- Wim Wenders) and in many of his films we see his critical vision of the American Dream in contrast to social reality in the US. In Don't Come Knocking Shepard plays an aging cowboy actor of trite Western movies who realizes the superficiality and meaninglessness of his hedonistic lifestyle and wants to reconcile with his 'family' that he actually never had. Inspired by classical Western films and road movies, the visual art of Edward Hopper, and a bitter sense of fate and irony, Wenders presents a postmodern meta-Western of a very special kind that shows both his love and his critical, disillusioned stance towards America, and "the Western's double movement of yearning and mourning" (Neil Campbell).

Bard College Berlin is delighted to announce that Prof. Dr. Gale Raj-Reichert will be joining the faculty as Associate Professor of Politics with a focus on public policy and policy analysis.

Prof. Raj-Reichert joins BCB from the Queen Mary University of London, where she held a lectureship in economic geography. She received her PhD in development studies from the Manchester Global Development Institute.

Prof. Raj-Reichert comes with a research background in labor governance in global production networks, specializing in the Asia Pacific region. In the fall semester, students at BCB will be able to attend her seminar on "Global Public Policies and their Impact on the Global South."

We are looking forward to welcoming Prof. Raj-Reichert on campus!
 

Bard College Berlin is proud to announce that rising fourth-year Economics, Politics, and Social Thought student Sohaib Alzoubi has won a highly competitive Studienstiftung fellowship. Besides having demonstrated excellence in his studies, Sohaib has worked with international NGOs on projects focused on Syria and has contributed to the establishment of a number of Syrian organizations and civil society coalitions.

Bard College Berlin was able to nominate Sohaib through its DAAD sponsored Integra Program that provides support for displaced and international persons in the form of academic workshops and seminars.

The Studienstiftung is one of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious scholarship foundations in Germany that supports young scholars with exceptional talent who can be expected to make a meaningful contribution to society.

As the standard application process is geared towards German speakers, the Studienstiftung initiated a cooperation with the DAAD in 2017, through which Integra course leaders would be able to nominate their students for the selection process, therefore giving those with refugee status a fair chance at winning the coveted fellowship.

Congratulations to Sohaib on this tremendous achievement!

BCB Professor of Politics and Middle Eastern Studies Hanan Toukan discussed her book The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan with other scholars as part of the EUME "Berliner Seminar." The "Berliner Seminar" is hosted by Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME), a multi-disciplinary research program at the Berlin based Forum Transregionale Studien.

The other discussants were Diana Abbani (EUME Fellow of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation 2020/21), Amal Eqeiq (Williams College/EUME Fellow 2029-21), and Zeina Maasri (University of Brighton).
 

BCB faculty member and artist John Kleckner was amongst the recipients of the 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation artist grants.

Through its individual artist grants, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation supports working artists by providing the financial resources to cover expenses, such as: art supplies, studio space, exhibition preparation etc. Since its founding in 1985, the foundation has awarded 5,000 grants, totaling $82 million, to recipients in seventy-eight countries.

John Kleckner’s works have been exhibited internationally and can be found in prominent public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Charles Saatchi Collection in London. Kleckner will be opening the exhibition: Sidesteps: Roughly Edged together with Maximilian Arnold at the goeben gallery in Berlin. The exhibition will be showing from July 24 to August 28, 2021.
 

BCB Professor of Theater and Performance Nina Tecklenburg and BCB faculty member Ramona Mosse are involved in the organization of a day of public online workshops under the title "Staging Viral Theatres."

The event will investigate the changes to theater infrastructures and aesthetics during the pandemic. The three sessions will be an exploration of how the shift to digital forms has affected the notion of liveness, what constitutes participation in the digital sphere, and how the current moment can be creatively documented.

The focus will be on putting specific pandemic projects by Berlin theater institutions and performance makers in dialogue with a series of international guest artists and scholars, in order to capture and compare the forms of attention brought to digital theaters.

Viral Theatres is a practice-based research project and a collaboration between the Freie Universität Berlin, the Humboldt University Berlin, and Bard College Berlin. It is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.


The event wil take place on July 1, 2:00 - 8:00 pm CEST. 
Further information available on the Viral Theatres website >>
 

BCB student residences Henry Koerner Hall have been nominated for a further architectural prize, they are in the running for the DAM Prize awarded by the German Architecture Museum.

The nomination announcement notes how the residences' stacked maisonette apartments seek inspiration from Le Corbusier's “Immeuble Villa.” Despite the functional design, the buildings' apartments are spacious, the large windows and surrounding trees making for a peaceful and pleasant living environment.

Henry Koerner Hall was designed by Rotterdam-based Atelier Kempe Thill, the inauguration took place in May 2019. The residences have previously been nominated for the Architekturpreis Berlin.

Further information on the prize nomination on the DAM website >>
Download brochure on Henry Koerner Hall here >>
 

BCB Professor of Philosophy Katalin Makkai has published a new monograph, Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is widely recognized as a founding document of modern aesthetics, but its legacy has fallen into disrepute. In this book Katalin Makkai calls for the rediscovery of Kant’s aesthetics, showing that its centerpiece, his investigation of the judgment of taste, paints a compelling portrait of our relationships with works of art that we love. At its heart is a scene of aesthetic encounter in which one feels oneself to be “animated”—brought to life—by an object, finding there to be something in one’s experience of it, beyond what there is to know about it, that one wants to explore and articulate. Tracing Kant’s insight that to judge is to reveal one’s sense of what bears judging, and hence of what matters, Makkai situates Kant’s aesthetics within his larger study, begun in the first Critique, of judgment’s fundamental role in the life of the mind.

Bard College, which has worked to spread liberal-arts education around the globe, has been designated as an “undesirable” organization by the Russian government, prevented from all activity and operations in the country. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office announced the blacklisting on June 21, saying that Bard’s work “threatens the constitutional order and security of Russia.”
Read Leon Botstein's message to the College community here.

BCB faculty member April Gertler and Adrian Schiesser have co-founded a new exhibition space WIRWIR, situated in the heart of the Neukölln area in Berlin. 

WIRWIR joins the Berlin project space scene in 2021 with the inaugural exhibition series WIR BAUEN EINE NEUE STADT (June 10 - September 10 2021). Taking its title from the eponymous song by the Palais Schaumburg, the exhibition/event series considers how community can be built, supported and understood and examines metaphorical and lyrical ideas of creating a city through the three chapters of the series, titled BUILD, IDENTIFY and ACTIVATE.

WIRWIR is part of DÉRIVE UG, which is an umbrella organization that has hosted a wide variety of projects over the years, such as: SONNTAG, PICTURE BERLIN, DETLEF, and IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS.

Upcoming Events:

BUILD

June 23, 7:00 pm: Soydivision - Jendela Sonorama: Listening session

June 26, 7:00pm: Onur Ceritoğlu - 7m3: Sound performance

June 27, 7:45pm:  Andrew J. Burford - I think I’m done with the kitchen table, baby: Artist walk


Find out more about WIRWIR's upcoming events on their website >>

BCB Professor of Art History Aya Soika is participating in an online panel discussion organized by the Association for Art History.

The event is titled: “Curating Art of Curating Artists, the Thorny Question of an Artists Biography” and will be discussing the question: “How much should an artist’s life be used to frame our understanding and experience of their artwork?” As well as examining the role and responsibilities of the curator in engaging with artist’s biographies in their work.

Further panelists are: Eleanor Nairne: Curator at Barbican Art Gallery, Bernhard Fulda, Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Cambridge University, Oscar Murillo: Turner Prize winning artist, and Louisa Buck: art writer and broadcaster.

The Association for Art History leads the collective effort in the UK to advance the study and practice of art history.
Further information here.

The event will take place on June 22, 2021 at 8:30 pm CEST, further information on the Association for Art History website >>
 

BCB alumnus and former PIESC scholar Ahmad Mobayed helped lead a Q&A with 2019 Nobel Prize Laureate in chemistry Stanley Whittingham as part of the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit: "Our Planet, Our Future" (26- 28 April, 2021).

In his questions Ahmad focused on what role youth and education could play in the transition to renewable energy sources. Further guests on the panel were Nobel Prize Laureate in physics David Gross and Beatie Wolfe, artist and innovator for UN Women.

Originally from Syria, Ahmad completed his Bachelors in Economics, Politics ,and Social Thought at Bard College Berlin in 2019 and is now enrolled in a Masters of Public Policy at the Hertie School in Berlin. During his studies Ahmad has worked for Kiron, an NGO that offers free online learning opportunities to displaced persons and underserved communities. He is co-founder of the Syrian Youth Assembly, who work to empower young people to participate in the peace process in Syria.

Read more about Ahmad's story on the Hertie School website >>
Watch a recording of the Nobel Prize's YouTube channel >>
 

In an event hosted by the international online seminar "Lirica & Teoria", William Franke (Vanderbilt University) will discuss his book Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection (New York, Routledge 2021) with BCB faculty member Francesco Giusti. The event takes place on June 25 at 5:00 pm CEST, online. The opening conversation will be held in Italian, but questions in English or German are welcome. 

The seminar "Lirica & Teoria" is coordinated by Francesco Giusti and Christine Ott (Goethe University Frankfurt). The seminar brings together a group of scholars based in different countries to discuss questions of lyric as well as new approaches to the lyric, with a particular focus on the Italian poetic tradition. On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the seminar will also host events open to the public and related to Dante’s lyric poetry.

Join the event on Zoom >>

BCB faculty member Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson co-edit the recently published volume of essays: The Work of World Literature.

The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the center of debates about world literature

Dr. Giusti contributes the essay: Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature to the volume. The Work of World Literature is published by ICI Berlin Press and is available as an open access download here>>

The theater project Interrobang ( a cooperation between BCB Professor of Theater and Performance Nina Tecklenburg, Till Müller-Klug and Lajos Talamonti) has created a new interactive digital piece for Impulse Theater Festival.

The Impulse-Phone can be accessed through a smart phone or a computer and allows users to navigate through 31 years of archive sound material from the Impulse Theater Festival. The online archive will grow during the course of the festival and can be expanded and shaped by user contributions.

The Impulse-Phone will be available throughout the duration of the Impulse Festival 2021 which runs from June 2 to June.

Last Saturday, on May 22, 2021, Bard College Berlin celebrated the graduating Class of 2020/2021 in an online Commencement ceremony.
This year’s commencement speaker was Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Addressing approaches to issues like climate change, forced migration, and inequality in his commencement speech, Professor Appadurai stressed that learning is a collective endeavor: “…because one joins a conversation between minds, books, works of art and music and literature, which bridges continents, centuries and cultures,” Appadurai said and encouraged graduates: “You are now part of this ceaseless conversation. You will never be alone.”
For a second year in a row, friends and family were invited to join the BCB Community online to honor the achievements of the graduating cohort of OLIve students, Academy Year students, and Bachelor students. While we could not share a physical space to mark the occasion, the virtual gathering drew attendants of all ages from near and far to reminisce about the past four years and cheer graduates on for all their future endeavors. Families had prepared heartfelt video messages, fellow students contributed musical performances, and faculty recollected moments of hard work, joy, and shared learning.

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2020/2021!

BCB alumna Natalia Irina Roman (Visual Arts ’08) has developed and will be moderating a discussion panel as part of the Hertie Summit 2021 online conference.

Titled “Community living projects and the New European Bauhaus: what role will they play in the future?”, the panel will discuss co-housing and communal living projects in Berlin, what role they play in the city society, what participatory structures make new housing projects possible and what cooperation models the city of the future needs.

Guests are Wenke Christoph, State Secretary for Housing of the State of Berlin, Dr. Michael LaFond, expert on communal living communities and Caroline Rosenthal, Consultant for “Mietshäuser Syndikat”. The event will be broadcast live from the Spreefeld Cooperative.

Natalia Irina Roman completed the Visual Arts graduate program at Bard College Berlin (then known as ECLA) in 2008. She now works as a visual artist as well as an art consultant to the Hertie School.

You can register for the Hertie Summit by May 31, 2021 on their website >>
 

BCB alumnus and former PIESC scholar Karam Alhamad has been profiled on the online media outlet Influencive.

The article charts Karam’s career in Syria as a photographer, editor, journalist and activist. After obtaining his Bachelors in Economics, Politics, and Social Thought from Bard College Berlin in 2020, Karam will be completing a Masters in Public Policy at Yale University.

Karam also has a great passion for technology: he is CEO of Ze.Fi, a blockchain-centric media, marketing and education company and recently co-founded Phoenix.io, a blockchain strategy, advisory, solutions and investment collective. He sees great potential in blockchain as a tool in the rebuilding process in Syria: “blockchain might be one of the strongest pillars that helps Syria stand again after we get rid of the dictatorship, decentralization is the answer for all our struggles”.
Read the full article here>>

Bard College Berlin’s Program for International Education and Social Change (PIESC), is a scholarship program for students from areas of crisis and conflict. Find our more on the PIESC webpage>>
 

BCB students are participating in the cross-university campus program PAF Campus run by the Performing Arts Festival Berlin 2021.

PAF Campus during the 2021 Berlin Performing Arts Festival is organized by LAFT – Landesverband freie Darstellende Künste Berlin e. V. in cooperation with Bard College Berlin, the Free University of Berlin, the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin, the Technical University of Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts.

PAF Campus is an innovative format situated between art and education open to students from all participating universities.

Preceding the festival, students attended half-day workshops with artists from the independent performing arts community in order to become acquainted with the working methods of artists from various performative genres. During the festival week the students will attend performances together and reflect artistically upon the productions they have seen.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the festival is planned to take place entirely online, with the option for a hybrid itinerary if realizable.
 

BCB faculty member Joshua Paul has published the article: “'Because for us, as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again': metapolitical whiteness and the normalization of white supremacist discourse in the wake of Trump," in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This article analyzes the resurgence of a mainstream white nationalism following the 2016 presidential election using data drawn from websites, interviews with and publications by the alt-right. Through the concept of metapolitical whiteness, it argues that a new conjuncture of white racial politics has emerged since 2016. This is predicated on the normalization of white supremacist discourse which utilizes novel forms of disseminating its message to a younger demographic. Ultimately, it contends that white supremacist discourse is re-entering mainstream political discourse and popular culture through ironic comedy and differentialist discursive strategies borrowed from the French new right.

Access to the full article on Taylor & Francis Online >>
 

BCB German Studies instructor Andreas Martin Widmann has compiled a forum on contemporary German literature in a global context as guest editor for the journal German Quarterly.

Published in the Winter 2021 issue, the forum brings together exclusively commissioned articles from ten German writers, among them, winner of the Deutscher Buchpreis 2020 Anne Weber, American-born translator and novelist Isabel Fargo Cole, as well as Matthias Nawrat, recent recipient of the EU Prize for Literature, critically acclaimed multilingual poet and essayist Uljana Wolf, and Deutscher Buchpreis 2019 and 2020 nominees Emanuel Maeß and Roman Ehrlich.

In their contributions, the authors reflect on their own aesthetics in relation to experiences of writing in German in a globalized literary sphere and marketplace. Widmann’s own essay “Global schreiben: Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur und ein Sense of Planet” contextualizes voices and positions within the global literature paradigm, the rise of English, and links forms of storytelling aimed at multinational audiences to the possibility of a new ecological awareness through writing.

You can access all articles on Wiley Online>>

The theater project Interrobang (a cooperation between BCB Professor of Theater and Performance Nina Tecklenburg, Till Müller-Klug and Lajos Talamonti) showed their interactive livestream Familiodrome at the Internationales Figurenfestival Erlangen and WUK Verein zur Schaffung offener Kultur- und Werkstättenhäuseron, Vienna on May 14 and 15 and their interactive digital game Soulmachine at FFT (Forum Freies Theater), Düsseldorf from May 5 to 8, 2021.

Familiodrome is inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education and explores the greater fundamental questions of humanity and empowerment behind our ideas on education. During the live stream Interrobang raises a child together with the online-audience, who have the option to intervene, vote to influence the development of the child, ensuring a different outcome for every performance.

Soulmachine is a mobile interactive game in which six passengers steer a specially adapted people carrier through an artificial intelligence program on a tablet. The computer creates the journey based on the collective decisions and behavior of the passengers taking them on an allegorical life journey, from childhood to old age. The Soulmachine’s next stop will be the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in fall 2021.
 

BCB Professor of Politics Boris Vormann appeared as a guest on the Heidelberg Center for American Studies’ podcast Quo Vadis USA?

In the episode “Zwischenbilanz Biden – Ist der Interventionsstaat zurück?“ ( Assessing Biden – Has the interventionist state returned?) Boris Vormann looks back on President Biden’s first 100 days in office as well as his ambitious future plans to invest large sums in infrastructure, the employment sector and housing whilst also funding subsidies for childcare, paid parental leave and expanding the care sector.

Quo Vadis USA? is a bi-weekly podcast produced by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies touching on topics surrounding American society, politics, culture, economy and science. Listen to the episode featuring Boris Vormann on the Heidelberg Center for American Studies website >>

BCB Professor of Politics and Middle Eastern Studies Hanan Toukan has published a new book: The Politcs of Art, Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2021).

In The Politics of Art Hanan Toukan offers a look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. Hanan Toukan outlines the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives, and reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counterhegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In so doing, Toukan proposes not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art.

BCB Professor of Economics Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg and former BCB Professor of Economics Martin Binder have written a chapter in Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics (Springer, 2021).

“Self-Employment and Subjective Well-Being” discusses the evidence and explanations as to why self-employment is positively associated with job satisfaction, despite often going hand in hand with longer hours, less pay and more stress.

German news outlet taz reported on BCB Faculty Aaron Tugendhaft’s talk at the Einstein Forum on April 20, 2021, in which he spoke about his book The Idols for ISIS, from Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

In the talk Dr. Tugendhaft focused on the key point of his book: that through the destruction of ancient artifacts at the Mosul Museum in 2015, the so-called Islamic State were not just fulfilling their mission to cleanse the world of idolatry but creating new images with which to spread their ideas online.

Read more on the taz >>
Watch the talk on YouTube >>
 

BCB Professor of Literature and Film Studies Matthias Hurst has published an essay on the Horror Homeroom website as part of a special edition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the classic British Folk Horror film The Blood on Satan's Claws (1971).

In his essay "The Judge With no Name and Rebels Without a Cause? Uncanny Evil in The Blood on Satan's Claws" Professor Hurst offers sociological and psychoanalytical interpretations of the film that is about "a cult of young people involved in wicked games, sexual frenzy and sacrificial rituals" in the English countryside of the early eighteenth century.

Read the article on Horror Homeroom >>

Bard College Berlin is proud to announce that third-year student Noor Ender (BCB ’22) has won the competitive fellowship by Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

The Studienstiftung is one of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious scholarship foundations in Germany that supports young scholars with exceptional talent who can be expected to make a meaningful contribution to society. Noor was first nominated by the College and then passed through several rounds of a very competitive selection process.

“As a non-native German speaker, the application process was rather distressing,” Noor said. “But the support of my peers encouraged me to persevere through the uncomfortable and daunting parts of the process.“

Noor is a third-year Literature and Rhetoric student in the HAST program, who joined BCB in 2018. “I came to BCB because of its wonderful interdisciplinary, highly communicative, and deeply enriching approach to education.” In her free time, Noor likes to write, interweaving her wide range of interests from opera, literature and philosophy, to quantum physics.

Congratulations, Noor!

The Journal of the German Association for American Studies has published an open-access special issue: "Common Grounds? American Democracy after Trump" guest-edited by BCB Professor of Politics Boris Vormann.

The issue brings together over forty renowned scholars, writers, and poets from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency in a wide variety of contexts. BCB faculty is strongly represented: Aysuda Kölemen discusses the power of the left wing discourse in the Democratic Party in "No, Your Other Left! The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party;"  John von Bergen proposes a radical restructuring of the Democratic Party in "74 Million Questions;"  and Michael Weinman negotiates the relationship between US memorials and American exceptionalism in "Twilight of American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpisms." 

In the form of short contributions (essays, poems, and interviews), the volume probes how the Trump Presidency has crystallized histories of injustice and inequality that still characterize the current state of U.S. democracy.

They tackle questions such as: How do enslavement and settler colonialism continue to impact the democratic order? In what ways can the master narrative of American liberal democracy be reconceptualized along intersecting lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ecology? How does the outcome of the 2020 elections change domestic and international political agendas? Can a new, more equitable social contract be negotiated and a “common ground” be recovered and re-invented—and at what cost? 

Read the full issue at the Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg>>

BCB Professor of Art and Society Dorothea von Hantelmann commented on the growing popularity of immersive art installations in the Economist.

According to Dr. von Hantelmann the trend is a sign of “the shift from object to experience”, which results from the excess of material goods in western society, as well has a younger generation with a different aesthetic and way of thinking: “a new kind of thinking which one might call ecological thinking, which is to think in connections, in relations”.

Read the full article on the Economist >>
 

Every year the initiative Zürich liest ein Buch (Zurich reads a book) encourages the people of Zurich to engage in a shared reading experience. This year's book: Während wir feiern (While We are Celebrating) by Ulrike Ulrich, takes inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s classic Mrs. Dalloway, whilst tackling the politics of migration and asylum against a contemporary European backdrop.

BCB Professor for Comparative Literature Laura Scuriatti will be speaking to Ulrike Ulrich on the parallels of her book to Mrs Dalloway on Tuesday, April 27, at 8pm.

Registration details on the initiative's website>>
 

German news outlet Tagesspiegel spoke to BCB faculty member Aysuda Kölemen on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Philipp-Schwartz-Initiative.

The Philipp-Schwartz-Initiative was founded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in cooperation with the German Foreign Office in 2015 with the aim to assist academics facing persecution in their home countries, by enabling them to continue their research in Germany.

Dr. Kölemen is one of the 175 academics to receive a fellowship, allowing her to continue her university career at Bard College Berlin after she was let go from the Altinbas University in Istanbul for signing a peace declaration criticizing Erdogan’s attacks on Kurdish settlements.

Today aside from her teaching duties, Dr. Kölemen coordinates the newly launched Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative. The initiative is funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and provides scholars that are threatened by persecution in their home countries with fellowship at OSUN institutions, thus widening the global support network for academics at risk. The program offers 25 fellowships in Europe but also other countries such as Columbia, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan and Bangladesh, hence also creating positions open to non English and German speaking academics.

BCB Professor of Theater and Performance Nina Tecklenburg together with Mario Simon (Akademie für Theater und Digitalität) will be hosting a workshop on the dramaturgical and technical questions of hybrid theater productions.

The closure of theaters in the wake of the pandemic has prompted theater and performance makers to experiment with new theatrical formats, one of which is currently practised under the label of "Hybridtheater" (hybrid theater) and combines digital and analog elements.

The workshop focuses on such formats in relation to dramaturgical and technical questions: How does the dramaturgy change when switching to digital? How do you address the audience, which is partly sitting in the room and partly watching via live stream? How do you get both together, or has it long since become irrelevant that there are multiple dramaturgies and events happening simultaneously?
What possibilities does hybrid theater offer for questioning traditional theater, social interaction, and political implications of digital culture?

The participation slots are fully booked but the workshop can be watched live on the website Nachtkritik >>
 

BCB faculty member Aaron Tugendhaft will discuss his book The Idols of ISIS. From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) with BCB Professor of Politics Boris Vormann in an online event in cooperation with the Einstein Forum.

The book discusses the destruction inflicted by the Islamic State on the artifacts of Iraq’s Mosul Museum, unpacking three key political facets of the event: idolatry as a political charge, the museum as an institution that produces political meaning, and the internet as a space for both image circulation and algorithmically governed iconoclasm.

Drawing connections across the millennia, with discussions ranging from Assyrian palace reliefs, to medieval Islamic philosophy, to first-person shooter video games, the book investigates the perennial impulse to destroy images and the concomitant practice of producing images that depict that destruction.

The Idols of Isis compels readers to reconsider the political power of images from multiple perspectives and ask whether political life is possible without idolatry.

Register for the event on the Einstein Forum website >>
 

The theater project Interrobang ( a cooperation between BCB Professor of Theater and Performance Nina Tecklenburg, Till Müller-Klug and Lajos Talamonti) has created a new digital performance piece.

The Müller-Phone brings the legendary GDR poet, writer, essayist and theater director Heiner Müller back to life. Through the analysis, sound montage and digitalization of the extensive Müller audio material Interrobang, have created an artificial Müller intelligence who the audience can phone up from a virtual telephone box.

Callers can decide on a topic by selecting a key and then listen to Müller’s comments on a wide variety of topics from social inequality to the current theater landscape.

Callers can reach Heiner Müller on the Müller-Phone website until April 30 >>