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The talk focused on some of Anton Chekhov's early short stories, which Peter Constantine has just recently translated for the first time into English. Mr. Constantine emphasized the almost postmodern features of Chekhov's style throughout these early prose works - characterized by a variety of experiments with literary forms and voices - as well as the new perspective this body of work casts onto the Russian author. The presentation was followed by an animated Q&A session with the audience, during which Peter Constantine discussed the difficulties of translating from 19th century Russian, his experience with translations from other languages, the relationship between the translator and the author, the direction of the translation industry today and technical issues regarding translations. Peter Constantine is an award-winning literary translator and editor. His recent translations include Sophocles's Theban Trilogy, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, and works by Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Voltaire. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010. A Guggenheim Fellow, Constantine was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann. In 1999 he was awarded the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories. In 2002, Constantine's translation of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel, received a Koret Jewish Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. His translation of the modern Greek poet Stylianos Harkianakis's poetry book Mother received the 2004/2005 Hellenic Association of Translators of Literature Prize. In 2007 Constantine was the recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Benjamin Lebert's novel The Bird is a Raven. His translation of The Essential Writings of Machiavelli was a finalist for the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.

Meta: Type(s): Guest Speaker,Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The volume was edited by R. Gefter Wondrich, P. Quazzolo and A. Zoppellari, and was published by EUT (Edizioni Università di Trieste - Trieste University Press) both in print and as an open source document (available here). Prof. Scuriatti's chapter is titled Sea changes: the Sea, Art and Storytelling in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Isak Dinesen's Tempests and Marina Warner's Indigo and offers a reading of the The Tempest's marine environment in the context of other Shakespearean plays as well as the new geopolitical paradigms that emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. The analysis then focuses on two contemporary rewritings of Shakespeare's text - Isak Dinesen's Tempests and Marina Warner's Indigo.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The symposium „Aufbruch in die Farbe – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und das Neue Malen am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts" (Breaking Into Colour: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the "New Painting" at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century) dealt with questions of painting technique in the oeuvre of German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. This interdisciplinary gathering of scholars from various fields - specialists on Kirchner and "Brücke" as well as conservators and experts in technical art history and the scientific analysis of paintings – took place at the Stuttgart Academy of Art and Design. The conference of 160 participants was organised by Heide Skowranek and Christoph Krekel as part of their research project "No one else has these colours": The Painting Technique of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, conducted in collaboration with the Stuttgart Academy, the Doerner Institute in Munich, the Kirchner Museum in Davos, and the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich. The project is funded with the help of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Key questions concerning Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's artistic theory and painterly practice were discussed with a focus on his choice and understanding of his materials, highlighting his attempts at artistic renewal through experiments with techniques and paint materials. Aya Soika's opening lecture was titled The Originality of the Brücke. Soika dealt with questions of originality and collaboration, with a focus on the "Brücke" paintings of the year 1910, highlighting their innovative artistic enterprise at this moment, which was shaped by close artistic collaboration. This body of work, which was characterised by a sublation of authorship, should be considered one of the key features in assessing Brücke's modernism. This is in spite of the fact that, later on, many of the works of this year may have struck them as incompatible with ideals of autonomy and individuality, and were discarded or used as back canvases for new compositions. Soika's discussion of controversial restorations and recent forgeries illustrated the relevance of art-historical and ethical questions for the field of technical art history and vice versa. Her lecture not only touched upon numerous aspects which were to be taken up and elaborated in the course of the symposium, but also stressed the overall importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in the handling and examination of Expressionist art works.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The conference aimed to provide a better understanding of the causes of financial instability and its implications for the global economy. The speakers addressed topics like the challenge to global growth affected by the eurozone debt crisis; the impact of the credit crunch on economic and financial markets; the larger implications of government deficits and the debt crisis for U.S., European, and Asian economic policy; and central bank independence and financial reform. The conference was organized by the Levy Economics Institute and ECLA of Bard with support from the Ford Foundation, The German Marshall Fund of the United States, and Deutsche Bank AG. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986 through the generous support of the late Bard College trustee Leon Levy, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization. The Institute is independent of any political or other affiliation, and encourages diversity of opinion in the examination of economic policy issues while striving to transform ideological arguments into informed debate. ECLA of Bard is a liberal arts university offering an innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum with a global sensibility. Students come to Berlin from 30 countries in order to study with our international faculty. The curriculum focuses on value studies, in which the norms and ideals we live by, and the scholarly attention they inspire, come together in integrated programs. Small seminars and tutorials encourage lively and thoughtful dialogue. The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has worked with courageous people on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) is a non-partisan American public policy and grantmaking institution dedicated to promoting greater cooperation and understanding between the United States and Europe. Audio podcasts, session transcripts and the conference schedule are available here. Photos from the conference are available here.

Meta: Type(s): General,Berlin,Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

New York, a sunny spring day in a community garden not far from Zuccotti Park. Gunfire crackles in the distance. A young woman has collapsed on the sidewalk, bleeding as she clutches her rifle to her breast and struggles to deliver a final message to her fellow communards. They gather around her, crouching behind wooden barricades as the sounds of gunfire grow louder. A tense dialogue transpires between four New Yorkers, dressed more-or-less in 19th century French garb and all bearing hand-painted name shields that hang from their necks. "Papa" is a large black man. "Francois Fauvre" looks like a clean-cut college guy. A curly-haired teenager hides behind an overturned table. "Pierre Langevin" is a typical middle-aged New York man with heavy Brooklyn accent and spectacles. "Genevieve Gericault" with a convincing French accent. Before they have time to enjoy the imaginary thin soup delivered in a cardboard kettle by a rotund mother figure, gunfire erupts, the red banner is waved one last time, and the scene ends with all but one actor lying dead in the park. Artist Zoe Beloff first conceived of the performance, film, and installation "The Days of the Commune" after discovering a Bertolt Brecht play of the same name, which is based on the events of the 1871 Paris Commune. Seizing upon similarities between the 19th-century French citizens' democratic movement and that of Occupy Wall Street, she decided to re-stage the play within the physical space of the Occupy movement, using volunteer actors both professional and amateur. In her own words, Beloff seeks to create "conduits between past and future, reanimating history so it can speak again in a new way." "The play invites us to imagine what would happen if a new kind of people's democracy took over a city today. How could it survive against the forces of Global Capital? How should it respond to armed attack? These questions are relevant today... He [Brecht] doesn't provide answers. Instead he invites each of us to think for ourselves." On November 23, Beloff, a Scottish-born, New York-based artist, presented "Days of the Commune" at ECLA of Bard, alongside another of her recent works, "The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society". Beloff is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been shown around the world, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the 2009 Athens Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is currently Professor of Media Studies and Art at Queens College CUNY. Beloff thinks of "The Days of the Commune" and "The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society" as involving "Utopian Societies made up of ordinary working people who wanted to change their lives." While both are are typical of Beloff's recontextualization of historical narrative through various visual media, "The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society" is a project that also reflects her particular approach to media archaeology: by using archaic visual media and sound processes such as 16mm film, 3D slides, and 78rpm records, and often layering them on top of one another through analog projection or digital editing to create assemblages, Beloff creates works that critique contemporary media culture through the use of its own history of mechanical reproduction. In the case of "The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society," which, the artist says, "might best be described as an urban myth," the centerpiece of the project is a series of quasi-fictive dreams, ostensibly recreated by amateur filmmakers between the years 1926-1972. As Beloff explains, "each year the Society held a competition in which members re-enacted their dreams on film. These films can be thought of as a record of the hopes, fears and fantasies of a changing cross section of those that made up the fabric of Coney Island, from immigrant Jews and Italians to wealthy bohemians to young gay men exploring their sexuality in the 1960's."

Meta: Type(s): Guest Speaker,Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

A podcast of the lecture is available here: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/11/frank-ruda-fighting-irresolution-or-how-to-act-as-if-one-were-not-free/

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The Programme is "a series of small-group discussions designed to draw attention to issues of national importance" for "a small invited audience of leaders and interested parties from the cultural, political and economic and educational sectors, drawn from Ireland and overseas." The topic of the consultation was: Models of Citizenship, Ireland and Germany.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The ECLA of Bard Ensemble Hobby Singers, who have been singing as a group only since September 2012, together with their director, Yvonne Frazier (a member of Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte since 2005), offered a workshop and two mini presentations, which provided the singers with an opportunity to sing and present fun, easy listening music together for the first time. As part of their interactive demonstration, the choir sought to show how the voice as an instrument is supported by the body and how closely related the spoken voice is to the sung voice. The workshop was followed by a presentation of songs from the Classical, Folk, Pop, Spirituals and Gospel venues.

Meta: Type(s): Featured | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The papers presented at the conference explored the theme of the Cosmopolitan Metropolis, encompassing issues of ethnic and social diversity and economic and cultural globalism. Agata Lisiak was invited to serve as a chair and discussant on a panel titled "Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Urban Identity Formation in Eastern European Cities, 1900 to the present." The panelists analyzed the city's role as urban crucible from the perspective of turn-of-the-century Budapest (Alexander Vari, Marywood University), interwar Kraków (Patrice M. Dabrowski, Harvard University), and socialist/post-socialist Sarajevo (Emily Gunzburger Makas, University of North Carolina at Charlotte). Special attention was paid to the interaction between cosmopolitan and nationalist ideas, plans, and representations as well as their impact on urban identity formation. Read more about the conference here.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |