News Archive

Henry Koerner Hall, the latest addition to the BCB campus that was designed by the Rotterdam-based Atelier Kempe Thill, has been nominated for the Architekturpreis Berlin 2020. The architectural prize is awarded every three years for ambitious and exceptional architectural buildings and spaces honoring creative architecture, technical innovation, and sustainable design in the urban landscape of Berlin.

Assimilating to and expanding the style of the former embassy buildings that mark the majority of the BCB Campus, Henry Koerner Hall is a highly streamlined and standardized building with a generous structure that features two story tall ceilings. The adaptable and open floor plan offers grand views over Waldstraße for students and serves as a space to connect and to think, to cook and to discuss.
 
You can vote here for public choice award that is issued in addition to the jury prize.

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

BCB faculty member Aaron Tugendhaft’s book The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2020. The book unpacks the aftermath of a video that was released by the Islamic State in 2015, showing ISIS members smashing ancient sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum in an effort to cleanse the world of Idolatry.
Tugendhaft discusses in his book the role of images in our life, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet, asking whether there can be any political life without idolatry at all.

In her review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Erin L. Thompson, praises the breadth of Tugendhaft’s analysis that draws on theorists from Max Weber to Plato to the 10^th-century Baghdadi philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi, and points out how timely the topic is: The book “comes at a time when the media is once again flooded with images of destruction of art — this time, of the statues being toppled by protestors around the world.”

Aaron Tugendhaft, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet, University of Chicago Press, 2020 >>

Read Erin L. Thompson's review "Smashing Statues, Building Community" in the Los Angeles Review of Books >>
 

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

BCB Professor of Politics Boris Vormann and Professor of Philosophy Michael Weinman published an edited volume on The Emergence of Illiberalism that examines illiberal and authoritarian trends as a global phenomenon.

Analyzing liberal democracies from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, the first part of the book provides a historical perspective on the roots of illiberal tendencies. In the second part, the contributions discuss in several case studies whether populist movements have a common core or whether they differ from one another in kind.

BCB Professor Ewa Atanassow, Dr. Aysuda Kölemen, and Roger Berkowitz, Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College, contributed with articles on Tocqueville, on Electoral Autocracy in Turkey, and on Technocratic Prejudice, respectively.


The Emergence of Illiberalism. Understanding a Global Phenomenon, edited by Boris Vormann and Michael Weinmal, Routledge, London 2020 >>
 

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