Event Archive

7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join actress, filmmaker, and activist Shreya Patel for a deep dive into the intersections of feminist activism, global disparities, and storytelling through film. Known for her humanitarian work, Shreya brings a unique perspective to women’s rights issues across the globe, from human trafficking to mental health advocacy, and shares her journey from modeling to activism after witnessing stark inequalities between Global North and Global South countries. Through her films, she aims to challenge misconceptions and highlight often-overlooked issues, such as the complexities of forced migration and the legal hurdles faced by women and refugees. Expect an inspiring conversation organized by EJAAD Berlin with a Q&A to follow.

Meeting link

W15 Café  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the Aura Club on December 4 for an in-person guest lecture about the neuroscience of mental health and Dr. Elliot Brown’s experience navigating depression.

  Lecture Hall and W15  This semester's Senior Thesis Presentations are taking place from December 3-19. The presentations are an essential step towards graduation for every senior, and they are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. 

Tuesday, Dec 3 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, Lecture Hall
Emma Maar-Mcgilvray, "Finding the Female Flaneur within Berlin's Weimar Republic"

Tuesday, Dec 3 | 1:15pm-1:45pm, Lecture Hall
Wren Gilbraith, "Drag as Dissidence: Berlin's DIY Resistance to Commodified Queerness"
Wednesday, Dec 4 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, Lecture Hall
Jin Karsten, "'Today's Dissonance is the Consonance of Tomorrow': Wassily Kandinksy's Art, Theory and Vision"

Wednesday, Dec 11 | 11:45am-12:15pm, W15 Cafe
Lovis Paul, "Corporate Restructuring and Monopolization: The Impact of Shareholder Value Maximization on Market Competition, Policy and Inequality"

Thursday, Dec 19 | 11:30am-12:30pm, Lecture Hall
Nick Teploukhov, "Representation of Trauma: Narrative Strategies in Jonathan Littell's Inconvenient Place"

W15 Cafe  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Hosted by the feminist collective and the DEI office, this event is about defining and defying dating, gender rules, stereotypes, and more. 

On the agenda, we have some chit-chat, intellectual conversation, and snacks - perfect for taking a break from discussing challenging topics in our usual academic setting. 
Please sign up using this form.

K24 seminar room 11  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
In the aftermath of Word War II, 10 million people were uprooted as a result of nazi persecution. They flocked into displaced persons camps, erected by the newly founded United Nations. Besides physical rehabilitation, psychological rehabilitation became for the first time a concern for humanitarian organization in the camps. In this lecture, we will explore the differing routes differing approaches of psychological rehabilitation took.

Dr. Stella Maria Frei holds a Ph.D. in Modern History from the University of Giessen, an M.A. in History and Eastern European Studies from the University of Hamburg, and a Diploma in American Studies from Smith College. She was a Fellow of the German National Academic Foundation and a Doctoral Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Dr. Frei has taught at the University of Hamburg and the University of Giessen. In addition to her academic work, she has experience as a journalist and in academic public relations. She currently serves as a Senior Project Manager at the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Berlin, where she collaborates with international politicians and experts on addressing global challenges through her work at the Robert Bosch Academy. Her forthcoming publication, Healing Holocaust Survivors: Politics of Psychological Rehabilitation in Postwar Europe, is set to be released by De Gruyter Publishing in 2025.

P24 Conference Room  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Cookies & Conversation is an opportunity for BCB students to come together with university leadership and other campus administrators to talk in small groups about questions, ideas, and concerns. Up to 12 students are invited to join each session, registrations are confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis.

This session will be with Florian Becker and Lauren Gaillard.

Coffee, tea, and sweet treats will be provided.

To RSVP, please email Caitlin Hahn at [email protected] by 8:00 a.m. on December 2, 2024.

W15 Cafe  10:00 am – 11:30 am CET/GMT+1
How should we adapt assignments at Bard College Berlin in response to AI? What are class assignments for? And what do you want to get from them? What should assessment really assess?

In this workshop, we’ll think about the goals of coursework and grading and what ways, if any, they are different in light of advancements in AI. BCB faculty will give short presentations on their goals for assignments. Student-led groups will then develop an AI-aware assignment that reflects the shared values of the group on learning and assessment. We look forward to thinking about what an ethical use of AI would look like from both faculty and student sides.

All members of the BCB community are invited to participate and contribute.

Together with the American University of Bulgaria and other partners, this fall Bard College Berlin hosts the program AI Aware Universities: Empowering University Communities for The Ethical Use of AI. This series of lectures and student-led discussions aims to create a common playbook for developing a strategy for the ethical use of Generative AI in academic spaces.

W15 Cafe  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
In the times of economic precarity in Donetsk, Ukraine, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, three women decide to respond to advertisements posted by foreign men in the newspapers. One of them, Elya, successfully moves to Australia by marrying a man from there. Before her flight to Canberra, the group pinky-promised to reunite soon. Yet, Elya doesn't return until a decade later. This film by a Ukrainian BCB student, Lisa Sokolova, is a conversation with her mom, one of the women. What was it like for Elya to leave everything she loved behind and start a new life in a place she had only seen on maps? Did her dreams of living abroad match the reality? Join for the screening and discussion to find out more about life in Ukraine in the 90's through a personal story of female friendship and migration.

FOCUS student-led event series with the Civic Engagement Office
 

Lecture Hall  3:45 pm – 6:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This lecture, by filmmaker Alon Sahar, explores the way cinema approaches the phenomenon of alienation. Scenes showcasing protagonists' alienation from people and objects have existed since the dawn of cinema. Paradoxically, such depictions tend to evoke in the viewer a feeling which is the opposite of alienation - namely identification and empathy with the alienated protagonist. A well-known example for this is Charlie Chaplin’s struggle against the factory’s production line in Modern Times (1936). But it was only in the postwar period that filmmakers began to use alienation as a central effect. Not unlike the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt in theater, created for the political purpose of undermining capitalist false-consciousness, alienation in modern cinema is often used to highlight the possibility of different modes of thinking and perceiving. This concern with alienation can be seen as a response to the collapse of the imperialistic world-order and to the upheaval in traditional values brought about by the economic boom of the postwar period. Alienation remains a theme in 21st century cinema, despite the gradual decline of arthouse cinema in recent years, for instance in the work of Chantal Akerman and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. By reference to the work of these filmmakers, as well as to the work of Ozu, Antonioni, Kubrick, and Costa, the lecture will delineate three perspectives through which modern cinema has approached the theme of alienation: in its engagement with tensions between rural and urban life; in its investigation of relations between empires and colonies; and in its exploration of the relation between body and soul. 

The lecture is hosted by PL322: The Uncanny, led by Dr. Gilad Nir. In this seminar students explore the aesthetic, psychological and social aspects of the frightening and disorienting experiences to which we are exposed in modernity. 

Alon Sahar is a filmmaker based in Berlin. His works are known for exploring film philosophy, complex narratives, and politics. His short film, Gelem (2014), premiered in Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival and won the special jury prize at the Haifa International Film Festival. His diploma film, OUT (2018), held its world premiere in the Pardi di Domani section at the Locarno Film Festival and won the best short film at Haifa. Scholarly studies of his work were published in magazines like Cultural Treasures, Takriv, and Portfolio. Sahar occasionally publishes socio-political analysis in Der Spiegel, Der Freitag, and The Jerusalem Post. He is currently developing his first feature film.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The final Community Forum of the semester will be hosted by the Studies Committee StuPa representatives. The main focus of the meeting will be the reaccreditation of the HAST program. All are invited to attend.

W15 Café  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This event is part of a Berlin-based project, part of the Wissenschaftsjahr 2024 (Year of Science) initiative by the Federal Ministry for Education Research.

During summer and autumn 2024, Off University carried out artistic collaborative research on the freedom of learning, research, higher education and professional training for New Berliners.

Two groups led by experienced artist-educators, conducted field research on the barriers to access higher education and research in Berlin and documented them in a video and radio play. Join the discussion, learn, watch and hear more about the results of this process!

Please register via email to: [email protected]

Learn more about the project here. Read more about the Wissenschaftsjahr 2024 here.

Off University is a self-organization of politically persecuted scholars that seeks new strategies to uphold academic life and knowledge threatened by anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes. This event on BCB campus is meant to create an opportunity to engage with audiences that have similar concerns and learn how they perceive the situation of freedom of education in Berlin.

Agenda:
1. Arrival, tea & cookies
2. Welcome: presenting Off University and Access to Education initiatives at BCB
3. What we know already from literature: A short introduction on the situation of New Berliners and their freedom of education
4. Radio Play: “The Situation or the Freedom to be Loud” (19 min) – with brief introduction by Anouschka Trocker and Eunike Kramer with Alize, Pelagia, Sana, Zac and visitors of the Long Night of Science
5. Video: “An anonymous Request!” (13 min) – with brief introduction. A collective work by the participants of the Visual Storytelling Workshop
6. Q&A and moderated discussion
7. Wrap up

P24 Seminar Room 5  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This lecture explores the technical foundations of blockchain technology, detailing the core problem it addresses and the innovative solutions it offers. The presentation will also highlight real-world applications, with a focus on its potential relevance to the central banking community.

Part of Prof. Dr. Thomas Eife’s EC275 From Barter to Bitcoin: Philosophy and History of Money course

Daniel Eidan is an Adviser and Solution Architect at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub, where he develops technology solutions for the central banking community, with a particular focus on blockchain and CBDCs. Prior to joining the BIS, he worked at R3 as a lead software engineer and served as both an educator and manager at a leading technical training school. Daniel began his career as a Combat Commander in the Israeli Army and holds an honors degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

SR 8 (P24)  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Modern science is often portrayed as a radical departure from the teaching and methods of Aristotle's natural philosophy. Reexamining the discussion of motion in book VIII of Aristotle's Physics, this talk will argue that Aristotle continues to offer valuable insights into the mechanism of motion. How is motion structured in the physical world, according to Aristotle? How is it articulated? What is the relationship between the motion of a cat getting up from the couch and the motion of the universe? What is the role of experience, induction and reasoning in Aristotle's view of scientific explanation? In other words, how far can we go in explaining the nature and causes of motion in a world that knows neither Newton nor Einstein?

Speaker:
Giulia Clabassi has just earned her PhD in Philosophy from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, with a dissertation on Aristotle’s Physics VIII. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Philosophy from Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy. Giulia works at the intersection of ancient philosophy and contemporary science, focusing on concepts such as Motion, Time, and Entropy. She has presented her research at Princeton University and Université Paris Sorbonne among others, with forthcoming publications in Dialogoi (Ancient Philosophy Journal). She is currently in the process of publishing her doctoral dissertation.

Part of the Fall 2024 Faculty Colloquium series.

W15 Cafe (Waldstraße 15, 13156 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Please join us for a talk by lawyer and legal scholar Prof. David M. Rabban on the meaning and importance of academic freedom and its relationship to freedom of expression in the United States. This talk will be based on Rabban's newly published work Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (2024). Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University and author of Safe Enough Spaces, has called this text “[t]he best kind of scholarship―deeply researched and immensely useful. Wherever you stand on issues of free speech and academic freedom, you will learn from this book.” Political scientist and Open Society University Network Threatened Scholar Integration Initiative Manager Dr. Aysuda Kölemen will serve as respondent to Prof. Rabban before we open to Q&A. The event will be moderated by Associate Dean of the College Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom.

Professor David M. Rabban is the Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail, and Robert Lee Jamail Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas. Professor Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983. He later served as its general counsel and as chair of its committee on academic freedom and tenure. His teaching and research focus on free speech, academic freedom, higher education and the law, and American legal history. He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2016 and of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 2016-17. His most recent book is Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right.

In cooperation with the OSUN Threatened Scholar Integration Initiative.

The Factory (Eichenstraße 43, 13156 Berlin)  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The event is dedicated to the memory of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity of 2014. We invite our campus community to remember, reflect and share their experiences of revolution together on this day. Ongoing struggles in Ukraine and many other places keep reminding us that the struggle for freedom does not end with gaining independence. We will begin with a creative workshop on family history to jumpstart the discussion, followed by a teach-in about the Revolution of Dignity featuring live footage, and then further reflections.

Organized by Mriї Collective

W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstraße 15, 13156 Berlin, Germany)  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Jenny Erpenbeck, renowned German novelist, playwright, and International Booker Prize (2024) winner for her novel Kairos, with her father, acclaimed scientist, novelist and longtime resident of Pankow-Niederschönhausen John Erpenbeck will talk about their respective careers in the GDR and in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about the history of their family, and about how their writing captures recent social changes and universal human issues through storytelling.

Language: German

This talk requires registration. Please register online here.

Part of LitFest 2024 at Bard College Berlin: Polyphony of a Metropolis

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin. She is a novelist, playwright, theatre director, and essayist. Her works include the collections of short stories The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words, the novel Visitation and the plays Katzen haben sieben Leben (Cats Have Seven Lives, 2000) and Leibesübungen für eine Sünderin (Physical Exercises for a Sinner, 2003). She contributed to a biweekly column to the FAZ. She received a host of prestigious literary awards in Germany and abroad. The End of Days won the Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize, representing Erpenbeck for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her acclaimed novel Go, Went, Gone was longlisted for the 2018 International Man Booker Prize, and her latest, Kairos, won the 2024 International Booker Prize. Her works have been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in Berlin.

John Erpenbeck is a prominent German physicist, scholar, and novelist. As a scientist, he is known for his work in the fields of learning theory and knowledge management. As an academic and researcher, he has made significant contributions to the study of competence development, exploring how individuals acquire and apply knowledge. His interdisciplinary approach combines elements of psychology, education, and economics. Erpenbeck has authored numerous publications on these subjects, establishing himself as a leading thinker in the German academic community. He taught at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, and was Professor at Potsdam University. Among his literary works are the novels Der blaue Turm (The Blue Tower, 1980), Gruppentherapie (Group Therapy, 1989), and Aufschwung (Upswing, 1996). He lives in Berlin-Niederschönhausen. 

W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156)  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This event features Bard College Berlin students reading from their works of creative writing, fiction, and poetry.

Part of LitFest 2024

  W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This workshop will bring together various ideas on how to better communication in conflict situations. The workshop consists of verbal input, collaborative reflection, and exercises, most of which rely on concepts and methods from Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and the Betzavta approach of the Adam Institute. Our goal is to engage with the basic concepts underlying meaningful communication around the identification and communication of needs in emotionally laden contexts in order to allow us to pay closer attention to our needs and those of others. The promise of the workshop is not to enable us to single-handedly transform communication and solve interpersonal conflict, but to offer concepts and tools for working together to enable healthier ways of communicating that may facilitate compromises that address everyone’s needs.

Till Luge is a historian of religions who worked on religious encounters in South Asia and Islam in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. He lived, studied and worked in the US, Turkey, India and Germany. He currently works as a teacher of humanist ethics in the German school system.

W15 Cafe (Waldstraße 15, 13156 Berlin)  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Irish novelist Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times (2020) and The Happy Couple (2023), will discuss her writing featuring the experiences, fears, and hopes of the millennial generation through characters who navigate an increasingly technologically connected but politically complex world.

Part of LitFest 2024 at Bard College Berlin

Naoise Dolan is an Irish novelist. She studied English literature in Dublin and Oxford, and taught English in Singapore and Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Exciting Times (2020), was nominated for the Women′s Prize for Fiction und den Dylan Thomas Prize, and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award, and the Dalkey Award (Emerging Writers). Her latest novel, The Happy Couple (2023), has been shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. Naoise Dolan lives in Berlin.

W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156)  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Poet, translator, and linguist Volha Hapeyeva (Belarus), recipient of the prestigious Wortmeldungen Prize 2022 for her essay on poetry and exile, will be in conversation with award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Uljana Wolf (Germany), whose writing oscillates between her native German and several other languages.

Language: German

Part of LitFest 2024 at Bard College Berlin

Volha Hapeyeva is a poet, novelist, essayist, and holds a PhD in linguistics. She was born in Minsk, Belarus, and has lived in exile in Germany since 2020. In her work, she reflects on topics such as origin, identity, and on the experience of violence and the loss of one's own language. Volha Hapeyeva describes herself as a nomad who wanders through languages and countries, times and planets in her writing. In 2019/2020 she was recipient of the Stadtschreiber fellowship in Graz. In 2021/2022 she was a fellow in the Writers-in-Exile programme of the PEN Centre Germany and in 2022 a fellow of the DAAD's Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme 2022. She received the WORTMELDUNGEN Ulrike Crespo Literature Prize for Critical Short Texts in 2022 for her essay ‘Die Verteidigung der Poesie in Zeiten dauernden Exils’. Her most recent publications in German translation include the poetry collection Trapezherz (2023) and the novel Samota. Die Einsamkeit wohnte im Zimmer gegenüber (2024).

Uljana Wolf is a poet, translator, and essayist. In her writing she explores the everchanging space between languages. She teaches at various institutions such as the Pratt Berlin Programme, the Institute for Language Arts in Vienna, and the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. In 2022, she curated the international literature festival Poetica VI in Cologne with the title Sounding Archives - Poetry between Experiment and Document. She has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry since 2017. In 2019, she held the August Wilhelm von Schlegel Visiting Professorship for Poetics of Translation at the Free University of Berlin; in 2024, she will be Thomas Kling Poetry Lecturer at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Her most recent publications include the poetry collection muttertask (2023); the translation of her poetry collection Kochanie, Today I Bought Bread into English by Greg Nissan (2023); and, as a translator, DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi (2023) and Musik für die Toten und Auferstandenen by Valzhyna Mort (in joint translation with Katharina Narbutovic, 2021). Wolf lives and works in Berlin.

W15  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for an Alumni Talk with Pauline Jäckels (AY '21), a political journalist and editor at the German daily newspaper nd. Her recent reportage has focused on the interior-political dimensions of the war in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon in Germany (among other topics). She heads public relations for the Bildungsverein and magazine dis:orient. In the context of her master's degree in ‘Global Diplomacy in the MENA Region’ at SOAS University (London), Jäckels examined the topic of silence and silencing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian narratives as a public diplomacy instrument of the German government. During her talk followed by a Q&A, Pauline will reflect on her post-college trajectory and how liberal arts education prepared her for her current career.

This Alumni Talk takes place in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Agata Lisiak's IS331 Internship Seminar.

W15 Cafe (Waldstraße 15, 13156 Berlin, Germany)  LitFest is a two-day series of readings and author talks celebrating the work of writers working across linguistic and national boundaries. In accordance with its motto, LitFest explores “Berlin - Polyphonie einer Großstadt,” or “Berlin - Polyphony of a Metropolis,” celebrating Berlin's literary diversity by highlighting writers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to create meaningful connections. All events take place at Bard College Berlin (Waldstraße 15, Berlin 13156) and are free and open to the public. Organized and moderated by Dr. Martin Widmann and Prof. Dr. Laura Scuriatti.

Thursday, November 21
18:00-19:00: Poetry Reading & Conversation with Uljana Wolf (Germany) and Volha Hapeyeva (Belarus)
Language: German
Poet, translator, and linguist Volha Hapeyeva, recipient of the prestigious Wortmeldungen Prize 2022 for her essay on poetry and exile, will be in conversation with award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Uljana Wolf, whose writing oscillates between her native German and several other languages.

19:30-20:30: The Happy Couple: Novel Reading & Conversation with Naoise Dolan (Ireland)
Language: English
Irish novelist Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times (2020) and The Happy Couple (2023), will discuss her writing featuring the experiences, fears, and hopes of the millennial generation through characters who navigate an increasingly technologically connected but politically complex world.

Friday, November 22
17:30-18:30: Bard College Berlin Student Reading
Language: English
This event features Bard College Berlin students reading from their works of creative writing, fiction, and poetry.

19:30-21:00: Familienstraße: Novel Reading & Conversation with Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany) and John Erpenbeck (Germany)*
Language: German
Jenny Erpenbeck, renowned German novelist, playwright, and International Booker Prize winner for her novel Kairos, with her father, acclaimed scientist, novelist and longtime resident of Niederschönhausen John Erpenbeck will talk about their respective careers in the GDR and in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about the history of their family, and about how their writing captures recent social changes and universal human issues through storytelling.
*NOTE: This talk requires registration. Please register online here.

W15 Cafe  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Please join us for a presentation and discussion of the award-winning book War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (2024) by author Yael Sternhell (Tel Aviv University/Harvard University), a history of the United States’ greatest archival project and how it has shaped what we know about the Civil War. It was the winner of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records—documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. Yael Sternhell traces these records from their creation during wartime through their deployment in a host of postwar battles, including those between the federal government and Southerners seeking reparations and between veterans blaming each other for defeat.

These documents were eventually published in the most important historical collection ever to have been assembled in the United States: The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Armies. Known as the OR, it is the ultimate source for generations of scholars and writers and ordinary citizens researching the war. By delving into the archive, Sternhell reveals its power to shape myths, hide truths, perpetuate rancor, and foster reconciliation. Far more than a storehouse of papers, the Civil War archive is a major historical actor in its own right.

Please register here.

P24 Seminar room 5  10:30 am – 12:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Guest lecture by Dr. Ciril Bosch-Rosa

This presentation showcases three studies to highlight the versatility of experimental economics. The first study examines asset market experiments and the role cognitive ability plays in them. The second is a survey in collaboration with the Bundesbank. Lastly (if time allows), we will explore how loss contracts affect group work. Together, these studies offer diverse examples of how experimental methodologies can be applied to economic research.

Part of Dr. Israel Waichman's Experimental Economics course.

K24, SR 12  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the Bard Feminist Collective for a commemorative screening of The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo, a powerful documentary on the struggles and courage of women fighting for justice. In honor of the Mexican Day of the Dead, we’ll gather to remember and reflect on the lives of those who have been lost in this struggle. The event will be held on Friday, November 15th, from 7-9 pm in K24, Seminar Room 12.

  W15 Cafe  4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
We are cordially inviting you to the Thesis Gong Ceremony for our Fall 2024 Graduates! The ceremony will take place on Fri. Nov. 15th at 4pm in the W15 Cafe. Light refreshments will be served.

  P24 Seminar Room 8   12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Kyrgyzstan as a landlocked country in Central Asia, has been the focus of foreign aid from various regional powers, including Turkiye and Russia. The aim of this presentation is to comparatively analyze the foreign aid strategies, objectives, and impacts of Turkiye and Russia in Kyrgyzstan, exploring their geopolitical interests and the socioeconomic effects of the assistance. In this vein, the foreign aid strategies of Turkiye and Russia illustrate distinct approaches shaped by their national interests and regional aspirations, even leadership strategies. Turkish aid fosters cultural linguistic, ethnic, and social ties, while Russian assistance reinforces strategic and security priorities as part of the Russkiy Mir narrative.

Speakers: 
Dr. Görkem Atsungur is the Chair and an Associate Professor in the International and Comparative Politics department at the American University of Central Asia. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science, majoring in International Relations and minoring in Nationalism Studies from Central European University (2020, Hungary), a Magister in Political Science: European Politics from Masaryk University (2007, Czech Republic), a Master of Arts in European Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University (2006, Turkey), and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Cyprus International University (2004, Northern Cyprus).  Dr. Atsungur joined AUCA in 2012. With over ten years of teaching experience, he has offered over twenty courses, including the Network and OSUN Online Courses, to deliver up-to-date content and work on students’ critical and professional skills.

Dr. Buğra Güngör is an Assistant Professor in the International and Comparative Politics department at the American University of Central Asia. He holds his Ph.D. in International Relations and Political Science from The Geneva Graduate Institute (2022, Switzerland), a Master of Arts in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from Sabanci University (2016, Turkey), and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with a minor in Political Science from Bilkent University (2014, Turkey). Dr. Güngör joined AUCA in 2023 as the OSUN-CEU Global Teaching Fellow and teaches courses on comparative politics, democracy, and foreign policy analysis in the ICP department.

Online and W15  Student Life invites you to attend our series of programs aimed at supporting students as you make plans for post-graduation life.

Job Seekers Visas and Your Residence Permit after Graduation
Wednesday, 2 October, 5pm-6pm
Online (video call link)
If you’re interested in staying in Germany, there’s no time like the present to be thinking about what comes after your student residence permit! We will discuss the different options including extending the student permit for graduate studies and Amber will do her best to demystify the LEA by sharing tips, tricks, and timelines for navigating the process. 

CV Writing Workshop
Monday, 14 October, 12:30pm
W15 Cafe
Want to brush up your CV or CV writing skills? Unsure about the German expectations for a CV? Don't know where to start or what questions even to ask? The CV Writing Workshop has you covered. We'll be going over the German CV requirements and I'll guide you through how to present your skills professionally, concisely, and relevantly to potential employers. No matter what your prior experience, you will learn how to portray your transferable skills, integrate your soft skills, and brag appropriately about your hard skills within the appropriate framework.

Bureaucracy in Reverse
Wednesday, 13 November, 5pm - 6pm
Online (video call link)
You did it, but now what? Come learn about how to wrap up your time at BCB and transition to your next adventure, be that in Berlin or across the globe. In this session we will cover:  How to wrap up your academic time at BCB What bureaucratic paperwork you need to take care of

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Faculty members are cordially invited to the Fall 2024 Faculty Colloquium series! The colloquium is a multidisciplinary forum for discussing faculty work in various stages of progress, from brainstorming new ideas to already published work. Each session will take place over lunchtime and feature a short presentation followed by a discussion. All talks will take place on Tuesdays at 12:30-1:30pm in Seminar Room 8 (P24).

Oct. 29th - Michael Saman
W. E. B. Du Bois in Germany: Seeing Blackness in Berlin’s Museums

Nov. 12th - Stephan Müller
Battle of the Sexes? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Gender Differences in Competitiveness and Pay

Nov. 26th - Giulia Clabassi
Kínēsis. The Structure of Motion in Aristotle’s Physics VIII

Dec. 10th - Thomas Eife
US Money Demand from 1867 to 2024

SR 8 (P24)  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This study illustrates the impact of employees’ preferences for competitiveness on gender pay gaps, highlighting differences between variable and base pay as well as variations across countries. Based on survey and human resource data on 6,746 employees from a large multinational firm, our analyses produce three main results: First, we show that competitiveness explains 5.47 percent of the unadjusted and 3.17 percent of the adjusted gender gap in total pay. Second, results reveal that competitiveness contributes more strongly to gender gaps in variable pay than base pay, suggesting that higher managerial discretion in variable pay exacerbates gender biases in favor of more competitive employees. Third, we show that in highly gender-equal countries, competitiveness has a greater effect on pay and gender pay gaps, indicating that competitiveness is used as a differentiator in pay especially when access to social and economic resources is equal.

Speaker:
Stephan Müller holds a PhD in Economics (2015) from the University of Kassel. Before joining Bard College Berlin, he was a post doctoral fellow at the Chair of Microeconomics at the University of Göttingen. His research has been published in a number of journals including: Management Science, Theoretical Economics, Journal of Public Economics, European Economic Review, and Games and Economic Behavior.

Part of the Fall 2024 Faculty Colloquium series.

  W15 Cafe  12:45 pm – 1:45 pm CET/GMT+1
Bring your lunch and gather with interested students, staff and faculty to ask scholar of American politics, Dr. Aysuda Kölemen, questions about the US election and discuss together its global impacts

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Slawistik, Dorotheenstraße 65, Raum 5.57  6:15 pm – 8:15 pm CET/GMT+1
To what extent have national narratives in Russia since the 19th century been constructed from local sources on the one hand, and after pan-European models on the other? To what extent was this dual nature of national reflections, representations, and manifestations intended, originally recognized, and accepted? What were the correlations between the notions of the national, European, global, and modern? How have these correlations changed over time? We will address these questions when (re)considering some cases from the visual, performing arts, and literature of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. We will explore how it was possible to compose a drama from the Russian national past based on a modern Italian opera libretto; to maintain a pan-European perspective in national history and exhibitions of Russian art; to remain a national poet in exile; and, in conclusion, how it has been possible to build an image of Russia that is not opposed to, but integrated with, Western civilization.

Speakers: Maria Chernysheva (BCB, Smolny Beyond Borders), Andrey Shabanov (Berlin-based freelance researcher and curator), Stanislav Savitski (Smolny Beyond Borders, Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen), Ilya Kalinin (Smolny Beyond Borders, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Hosted by Smolny Beyond Borders in collaboration with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for a Focus session where an autistic student shares firsthand insights into life with Autism and ADHD. Learn about the challenges of diagnosis in the Middle East, or general diagnoses challenges, and deepen your understanding of neurodiversity. Whether you're curious or looking to expand your knowledge, this is a great chance to listen, learn, and engage.

This event is part of the BCB Focus student-led event series that explores global issues and their impact on us as members of the BCB community. Focus! is a new student-led talk series in collaboration with the Civic Engagement initiative at BCB that explores global issues on a local scale. We imagine this event series as a space outside of the classroom where we can talk about the politics that concern us, especially the politics that don’t make the headlines of international news, but nevertheless are important and relevant topics to discuss, especially in such an international context like our school!

When it comes to the topic or scope of a Focus, anything goes! Even if you have a half-developed idea, we’re here to brainstorm and help you shape it into a strong presentation for your peers.

Maybe something major is happening in your country that you'd like to explore beyond the headlines. Maybe you want to address a common stereotype or misconception that has never really been true. Or perhaps there’s an issue you’re passionate about and want to bring more attention to. You might even have written a great midterm paper that deserves more than just catching dust on Google Drive or your professor's desk—why not share it with your peers?

We especially encourage you to think of collaborative presentations, where you can work with your friends, flatmates or classmates to examine a topic across different countries and contexts, highlighting how similar issues, patterns, or solutions emerge in different but nevertheless interconnected ways.

Focus! Sign up form

Zentrum Liberale Moderne (Reinhardtstraße 15, 10117 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Bard College Berlin, in cooperation with the Ludwig-Erhard-Forum für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and Zentrum Liberale Moderne cordially invite you to a debate on the past and future of liberalism with Prof. Dr. Alan S. Kahan. Drawing on his recent book, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism (Princeton University Press) which was named among the ‘Best Books of 2023’ by the Financial Times, Professor Kahan will discuss the troubled relationship of liberalism and populism in historical perspective. Beginning his story in the late eighteenth century, and carrying it into the 21st, he will argue that a return to the traditional three pillars of liberalism - freedom, markets, and morals - can help liberals respond to the populist challenge. The event takes place two days ahead of the 35th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and two days after the US elections – events deeply connected to the past and future of liberty. Panelists include: Ewa Atanassow (Bard College Berlin), Stefan Kolev (Ludwig-Erhard-Forum), and Karolina Wigura (Zentrum Liberale Moderne).

Please register here.

Alan S. Kahan is a US-born Professor of British Civilization at the Université Paris-Saclay and a distinguished historian of liberalism. His many books include Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion; Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe; and Aristocratic Liberalism.

Ewa Atanassow is Professor of Politics at Bard College Berlin whose research focuses on the troubled relationship between liberalism and democracy. She is the author of Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours: Sovereignty, Nationalism, Globalization (Princeton University Press, 2022); and the co-editor of When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2023) among others.

Stefan Kolev is the academic director of the Ludwig Erhard Forum for Economy and Society in Berlin and Professor for Political Economy at the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau. Stefan Kolev’s research focuses on the history of economic thought, especially ordoliberalism, Austrian economics and the German Historical School, on constitutional and institutional economics, and on economic sociology, especially Max Weber.

Karolina Wigura is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Liberal Modernity (Berlin) and a board member of the Kultura Liberalna Foundation (Warsaw). She specializes in the political philosophy of the 20th century, history of emotions, and populism. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Guardian. Her recent publications include Posttraumatische Souveränität (Suhrkamp 2023, with Jarosław Kuisz).

In coorperation with Ludwig-Erhard-Forum für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Zentrum Liberale Moderne

  John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Lansstr. 7-9 14195 Berlin, Room 340 or Online  10:00 am – 12:45 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us on November 7, 2024, for "The US Elections: A First Appraisal," a timely debrief conference analyzing the outcomes of the US elections. Co-organized by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies and Bard College Berlin.

The conference will feature two panels: Democracy: Still Under Siege? (10:00-11:15), focusing on domestic political developments, and The Future of the Liberal International Order (11:30-12:45), exploring the global implications of the elections. Experts from leading US and European institutions will participate in-person and online.

Register via [email protected]e for Webex participation.

K24  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The Druze Religion & As-swayda marks the third event of the Human Library project. Each meeting features a different "book"—a real person with a meaningful, lived experience to share. Unlike a traditional library, the "books" in our Human Library are individuals who open up their personal stories for us to engage with, creating deeper connections and promoting understanding.

Our goal is to create space for authentic, human stories—stories that often get lost or overshadowed by the noise of media, stereotypes, and the routine of everyday life. The narratives can explore themes such as identity, immigration, places, culture, and more. The possibilities are endless.

  W15 Café (Waldstr. 15, 13156 Berlin)  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Azerbaijan is about to host COP29, the UN Climate Change Conference, with events in Baku from November 11 to 22. At the same time, the government has intensified its crackdown on government critics, independent groups, environmental activists, and the media, arresting dozens of people on bogus charges. As an oil and gas producing country, Azerbaijan’s hostility towards critics will prevent activists, human rights defenders, and journalists from meaningfully participating in COP29.

Please join us on November 6, from 6 to 7:30pm, to hear from two prominent Azeri human rights lawyers: Emin Aslanov and Nijat Mammadbayli. They will describe the difficult human rights situation in the country today and what this means for democracy in the country, stability in the region, and the urgent need to address the impacts of climate change. Journalist and author Angelina Davydova will discuss the issues and controversies around COP29. Moderated by Arzu Geybullayeva and co-hosted by Araminta.

Nijat Mammadbayli is a human rights lawyer specializing in human rights and international law, with an extensive track record in legal advocacy and strategic litigation. He has successfully represented individuals and organizations in complex cases involving civil liberties, justice reform, and the protection of fundamental rights. Currently based in Berlin, he leads the newly established NGO, Free Voices Collective e.V.

Emin Aslanov is a human rights lawyer specializing in human rights. He has experience in strategic litigation and has represented political cases before local and international courts. He is currently a member of the newly established NGO Free Voices Collective e.V in Berlin.

Angelina Davydova, environmental and climate journalist, fellow with the Institute for Global Reconstitution, environmental projects coordinator with the Dialogue for Understanding e. V, expert with the Ukraine war Environmental Consequences Work Group, co-host of the podcast the Eurasian Climate Brief, observer with the UN climate negotiations (UNFCCC) since 2008.

Lecture Hall, Platanenstraße 98a, 13156 Berlin  12:45 pm – 1:45 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for an in-person info session on "Applying to Graduate Schools in Germany: What are your options and how to boost your chances” presented by Matthew Poet from the Hertie School, one of Europe’s top policy schools (Berlin, Germany).

 

  W15 Cafe  2:00 am – 12:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Polls on the east coast of the US will begin closing in the early morning of November 6 in Berlin. In case you don’t want to be alone as the results start coming in, Student Life will set up a TV screen so that students can watch together. There will be snacks and tea. 

The livestream will be left on until mid-day and all are welcome to gather in the W15 Cafe at any point from early morning to mid-day.

  John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Lansstr. 7-9 14195 Berlin, Room 340  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the panel discussion on the election with professors from the FU and HU. Bring all the questions you may have about the election and what it could mean for our future.

Organized by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies.

W15 Cafe  10:00 am – 3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
On Saturday November 2nd, we will have the opening lectures of the program AI Aware Universities: Empowering University Communities for The Ethical Use of AI.

BCB alumni Khalil Hammod and Professor Hans-Christian von Hermann of the TU Berlin will deliver lectures on the current state of AI in an academic context.
Lectures:
Khalil Hammod: “Generative AI Essentials: Chatbots, Prompts, and Live Demos”
Hans-Christian von Hermann: “Large Language Models as Reading and Writing Machines: Artificial Intelligence Between Language Experiment and Cliché”

This series of lectures and student-led discussions aims to create a common playbook for developing a strategy for the ethical use of Generative AI in academic spaces. All members of the BCB community are invited to participate and contribute their input.

10 AM to 3 PM in the W15 Cafe. Lunch will be provided.

In cooperation with the American University of Bulgaria.

Platanenstraße 98, 13156 Berlin  10:00 am – 6:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This one-day workshop, hosted by the Ukraine students club and Digital Verification Corps at Bard College Berlin in collaboration with OSINT for Ukraine, offers participants the chance to immerse themselves in the growing field of open-source research. The morning session will feature OSINT for Ukraine’s work documenting war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, plus their analysis of disinformation campaigns targeting Europe. Following this, participants will engage in a hands-on skills workshop focused on researching Russian real estate companies that benefit from the sale of occupied land.

In the afternoon, Hesham Moadamani from Bard College Berlin’s Civic Engagement Office will share the open-source techniques he has applied in his research on Syria. He will then lead a workshop on documenting unlawful attacks on healthcare facilities in Lebanon and Yemen.

This event is designed to equip students and human rights practitioners with skills to leverage open-source information for human rights investigations.

Please register here.

AGENDA
10:00 - 10:15: Welcome and introductions

10:15 - 10:55: Presentation 1: OSINT for Ukraine 
30 minute presentation + 10 minute Q&A

11:00 - 11:15 : Introduction of first workshop topic and forming groups
Russian real estate companies in occupied Ukraine 
This workshop will offer hands-on practice for participants in documenting unlawful seizures of private property by an occupying state. Participants will research Russian real estate companies profiting from the annexation of Ukrainian territory, using a combination of techniques, such as social media and archive-based research. 

11:15 - 13:30 : Group sessions 
 
13:30 - 14:30 : Lunch break
 
14:30 - 15:10 : Presentation 2: Hesham Moadamani
30 minute presentation + 10 minute Q&A

15:10 - 15:25 : Introduction of second workshop topic and forming groups
Documenting Human Rights Violations in Armed Conflict: Leveraging Open-Source Intelligence
This workshop explores how open source research can document laws-of-war violations related to the targeting of healthcare facilities.  Participants will learn techniques for finding, collecting, verifying, and presenting digital evidence, such as social media content and satellite imagery, while navigating challenges such as misinformation and bias, as well as self-care when viewing traumatic imagery. We'll cover the role of open source work in journalism, advocacy, and legal proceedings, highlighting key standards such as the Berkeley Protocol.
 
15:25 - 17:30 : Second group sessions
 
17:30 - 18:00 : Wrap-up and closing remarks

Note: Please bring your laptop

  Meet us online!
Online Event  Interested in learning more about Bard College Berlin?
Save the date and join us on November 2 for Virtual Open Day!

You will have the chance to meet current BCB students, and attend informational sessions about our application process, degree programs, student life, campus facilities, and more.

The Factory  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Celebrate Halloween at BCB this year with an open-mic night and costume party. All students are invited to sign up to perform and share their musical talents with their fellow BCB community. There will also be a Halloween costume competition, and a prize will be awarded to the best dressed! You can register to perform using the QR code on the event poster, or by opening this link. Performance registration will also be available the night of, so if you're inspired to perform after seeing others do so, you can register then as well. Even if you're not looking to perform, come enjoy a night full of music and fun Halloween spirit!

W15 Cafe  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Diwali, or the Festival of Lights, is one of the most significant festivals in Hindu culture. It symbolizes the victory of light over darkness and good over evil, and is a time for families and communities to come together in joy and gratitude. Join us for a vibrant Diwali celebration at the W15 Cafe on November 1st, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm! We’ll embrace the spirit of Diwali with delicious food and beautiful lights. Whether you're familiar with the festival or experiencing it for the first time, this is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate and learn more about its traditions.

  Online Event 


Bard College Berlin accepts applications for entry to our BA degree programs and one-year programs in Fall 2025. The Early Action deadline for applying is November 1, 2024, at 23:59 in your time zone. Students who apply by the Early Action deadline can expect to receive their admission and financial aid/scholarship decisions by the end of December.

For more information on eligibility and application requirements, please refer here: How to Apply.

Should you have any questions about your application for admission and/or financial aid at BCB, please do not hesitate to reach out to the BCB Admissions Team at [email protected]. We look forward to receiving your application!

K24, Seminar Room 12  12:35 pm – 1:45 pm CET/GMT+1
The BCB Internship Program gives you the opportunity to gain an off-campus workplace experience in a field that interests you. You can work 10-13 hours per week in an internship while also exploring various questions regarding work in the internship seminar taught by Agata Lisiak and Florian Duijsens. While the majority of internships are unpaid, you can earn academic credits through the internship seminar.

If you are a current or upcoming third-year student and curious about BCB’s Internship Program and the opportunity to gain practical experience alongside your studies while interning for an organization or individual in Berlin, please save the date.

K24, Seminar Room 11  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Are you frightened that Study Abroad will affect your degree progress? Scared about moderating on time? Petrified about which classes to take and how to get them transferred/recognized?

Join us on Halloween to discuss these terrifying topics! The Registrar's Office will guide you through the credit transfer process and advise you about moderation, credit recognition, and more. Bring any questions (or fears!) you might have. 

Petitions are due 6 December 2024 for second years who are interested in going abroad their third year (academic year 2025-26) in fall and/or spring semester. If you started at BCB in the spring semester or are a transfer student, please make sure you are in touch if you will be a third year next academic year (either fall or spring) and would like to go abroad.

W15 Cafe  5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for a Focus session where we will read together personal narratives of people affected by war that don’t reach international headlines. Every number is a story, and we have each other to keep these stories alive, in the midst of all the horror. Participants are welcome to bring their own stories and have dinner together after the event.

Following the conversation round, there will be a community dinner starting 7 pm.

This event is part of the BCB Focus student-led event series that explores global issues and their impact on us as members of the BCB community. Focus! is a new student-led talk series in collaboration with the Civic Engagement initiative at BCB that explores global issues on a local scale. We imagine this event series as a space outside of the classroom where we can talk about the politics that concern us, especially the politics that don’t make the headlines of international news, but nevertheless are important and relevant topics to discuss, especially in such an international context like our school!

When it comes to the topic or scope of a Focus, anything goes! Even if you have a half-developed idea, we’re here to brainstorm and help you shape it into a strong presentation for your peers.

Maybe something major is happening in your country that you'd like to explore beyond the headlines. Maybe you want to address a common stereotype or misconception that has never really been true. Or perhaps there’s an issue you’re passionate about and want to bring more attention to. You might even have written a great midterm paper that deserves more than just catching dust on Google Drive or your professor's desk—why not share it with your peers?

We especially encourage you to think of collaborative presentations, where you can work with your friends, flatmates or classmates to examine a topic across different countries and contexts, highlighting how similar issues, patterns, or solutions emerge in different but nevertheless interconnected ways.

Focus! Sign up form

Lecture Hall  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This special Community Forum is dedicated to current and future campus design plans. BCB's Managing Directors Florian Becker and Taun Toay will provide an update and ask for input on the envisioned Cafeteria and Community Center in particular.

K24, seminar room 12  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This workshop aims to start a conversation about building coping skills when faced with overwhelming social injustice and to share practical strategies and exercises. With BCB’s Aura club, dedicated to mental health questions in the student body, the Civic Engagement team invites you to a workshop that will give concrete steps to recognize and respond to stress and early signs of burnout. Especially when personally affected, but also as persons surrounded by a news cycle of wars, conflict, and catastrophes, or engaged as volunteers and activists, we need to find ways to take care of ourselves and support our friends.

We will talk about the role of self-care in the face of political and social struggle, from elections to protests, from volunteering to activism. We will also address the commodification of self-care. You are invited to join the conversation by sharing your experiences and tips.

Note that none of us organizers are trained mental health workers. We use relevant, tried, and tested resources and exercises throughout the presentation that we are happy to share with anyone interested. Please also refer to BCB’s Health and Counseling Services.

SR 8 (P24)  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
W. E. B. Du Bois’s graduate studies in Berlin in the 1890s were an empowering experience for him not only for the cutting-edge academic training he received and the dramatically different social practices he encountered, but also in light of his keen interest in visual art. In 1926, a politically very changed Du Bois returned to Berlin for the first time in decades, and the same museums that had once represented the heights of European culture to him he now served to offer glimpses into the long-standing presence of Blackness in world culture. Against the biographical backdrop of these two visits in Berlin, this talk reconstructs the available art-historical evidence of his radical pan-Africanist rethinking of world culture.

Speaker:
Michael Saman is a scholar of German intellectual history, and is currently preparing a book on classical German thought in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. In addition to Bard, he has taught for colleges and universities including Dartmouth, NYU, Princeton, UCLA, Brown, and William & Mary. Dr. Saman’s research has appeared in journals such as the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte and the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, and he is co-editor of the Forum “Race, Imperialism, and the Age of Goethe,” which recently appeared in the Goethe Yearbook.

Part of the Fall 2024 Faculty Colloquium series.

Spore Initiative, Hermannstraße 86, 12051 Berlin  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
What does it mean to bring an anticolonial practice to the colonial archive that has been systematically organized under the sign of counter-insurgency? It is this colonial archive that has produced our concepts of ‘art’ and ‘history,’ of what can be admitted into their domain and on what terms, and it is this same archive that anticipates and discredits resistance to colonial power. In other words, art and aesthetics has made colonial violence tenable and sustainable. Can an anticolonial practice reorganize the signs under which the past flows into the future?

Historian Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar will address these questions in her lecture and explore them further in conversation with curator and researcher Abhishek Nilamber before opening the discussion to the audience.

This event is co-organized by Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin), Céline Barry (Technische Universität Berlin), and Pablo Valdivia Orozco (Europa-Universität Viadrina) as part of the “Postcolonial Critiques and Decolonial Perspectives” lecture series, and it is funded by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.

Read more on the Spore Initiative website. 

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is Associate Professor of History at Brown University and works on decolonization, displacement, war, nonviolence, and the visual archive. This talk draws on her forthcoming digital humanities book that intervenes in images of art history and war from the Indo-Afghan borderlands of British India.

Abhishek Nilamber (1987, India) works with projects and products which catalyze democratization of knowledge. He is a researcher and curator with SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and creative consultant at Backyard Civilization, Kochi, India. Nilamber has been working in Berlin since May 2016. His specific interest lies in contemporary community circulation practices in the Global South with audio-visual culture as specificity. One of the forms in which this interest manifests is the research, exhibition and networking project titled United Screens, which inquires into the challenges and opportunities in South-to-South circulation of cinema and video art, decoupled from its dependence on both state and capital-based markets.

  K24  10:00 am – 6:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Like Writing and Thinking, Writing to Learn introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices, but with a particular emphasis on their application to specific subject areas and disciplines. This week-long workshop is multidisciplinary: it will draw on a variety of works that might include historical sources and literary and scientific texts. The workshop focuses on using writing to build an initial understanding of texts—a crucial first step in creating formal essays or reports—and to revise this preliminary thinking as understanding deepens. We will explore how writing-to-learn practices can reshape how we teach and how the academic lecture, collaborative learning practices, and the act of listening can reinforce one another within the classroom.

This workshop is affiliated with OSUN's Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy (CLASP), the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT), Smolny Beyond Borders, and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (FLAS) in Montenegro.

The Swap Shop in the Garden Behind P24  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the BCB Swap Shop for a clothing upcycling workshop! Bring the clothes you never wear and give them a new life, or choose an item of clothing from the Swap Shop to bedazzle, redesign or transform. There will be equipment for upcycling provided!

Online Event  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for an insightful keynote by Pashtana Durrani, founder of LEARN Afghanistan, an NGO focused on providing education to Afghan women and children. Despite the Taliban's return, LEARN Afghanistan continues its mission, operating covertly to deliver digital education in a nation where women face severe restrictions. Pashtana will discuss her personal journey, the current plight of Afghan women, and how NGOs like LEARN are navigating this challenging environment. The Q&A session offers an opportunity to ask questions about her work and how the international community can help.

Click here to attend the event on Zoom.  

P98a Lecture Hall  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Interested to hear from your peers and ask them questions about their study abroad experiences last year? Join us for the Study Abroad Student Panel!

Petitions are due 6 December 2024 for second years who are interested in going abroad their third year (academic year 2025-26) in fall and/or spring semester. If you started at BCB in the spring semester or are a transfer student, please make sure you are in touch if you will be a third year next academic year (either fall or spring) and would like to go abroad.

W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
When thinking about the many connections between music and politics, popular expressions may be what first come to mind. For example, popular music provided much of the youthful soundtrack to the anti-war, civil rights, and social justice movements of the 1960s. In this respect, classical music often seems detached from society, or is beholden to words (as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) or to dramatic plot (as in his opera Fidelio) for political meaning. Classical music is too often mystified, uncritically viewed as autonomous and separate from everyday life. As a result, it has become largely irrelevant, an occasional provocative headline notwithstanding, often dealing with glamorous performers rather than with actual musical works.

This talk considers the issue of politics and classical music since the Enlightenment through a series of examples and case studies, examining works by Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Shostakovich, Copland, and Reich. Christopher Gibbs argues for the considerable benefits of assigning music its proper place within a broader historical, contextual, and humanistic context.

Please register here.

Christopher H. Gibbs is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival, and Executive Editor of The Musical Quarterly. He is the Vice-Chair of the Schubert Research Center, part of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Gibbs edited The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, co-edited Franz Liszt and His World and Franz Schubert and His World, and is the author of The Life of Schubert, which has been translated into six languages. He is the co-author, with Richard Taruskin, of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition. Since 2000 Gibbs has written the program notes for The Philadelphia Orchestra. He is a recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and in 2022 won the Berlin Prize and was the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

  Online Event 


Bard College Berlin accepts applications for transfer to the BA degree programs in Spring 2025. The deadline for applying is October 15, 2024, at 23:59 in your time zone.

Eligible applicants for transfer are students who have completed at least one semester of university by the time of their expected enrollment at BCB. For more information on eligibility and application requirements, please refer to our application requirements for transfer.

Should you have any questions about your application for admission and/or financial aid at BCB, please do not hesitate to reach out to the BCB Admissions Team at [email protected]. We look forward to receiving your application!

  ICI Berlin (Christinenstr. 18/19, Haus 8 10119 Berlin)  10:30 am – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The past decade has seen a troubling turn toward autocracy across wide regions of the globe. What may have once seemed confined to parts of the Global South and the former Communist Bloc is now, through the rise of right-wing populism, markedly visible in Europe and North America as well. Among the first groups to be impacted by autocratic impulses are scientists and scholars — those who are vocationally called to think and question. Cases from Iran to Turkey to Russia, from Hungary to Germany and the United States, demonstrate how often governments, or parties or other social forces struggling to capture governments, believe that thinking creates trouble, and how quickly critical views can be silenced. This may happen through actual repressive force or censorship, policy changes or more informal kinds of pressure. It intersects in often undiagnosed ways with the various economic underpinnings of knowledge production.

Moving beyond humanitarian frames of scholar rescue, this workshop brings together scholars who have been forced to leave their countries of origin as a result of their resistance to the narrowing of space for thought with scholars currently concerned about the fate of academic freedom in their home countries. The participants of the workshop will explore the playbooks through which scholars have been shut out of sanctioned systems of knowledge production in the Global South and the post-Socialist East, along with approaches they developed to fight this attack on thinking and to rebuild spaces for it in exile. They will track political challenges and structural barriers to substantive academic freedom with a focus on the United States and Germany today. And they will think together towards lessons and tactics which may allow academic freedom to be realized from the ground up as what anthropologist Homa Hoodfar (2017) calls a ‘transnational human right’. Are there shared early warning signs of broader strictures on thinking, including targeted attacks on different academic fields or issues? How are repressive policies, laws, and discourses moving iteratively across contexts, and how are they tied to neoliberal imperatives? What successful strategies have been developed to evade or contest these pressures? What theories or paradigms — including new and global understandings of academic freedom itself — might allow us to navigate between contexts, enable meaningful solidarity, and not only secure but also widen the spaces of critical inquiry?

This workshop is organized by Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom and Dr. Aysuda Kölemen for Bard College Berlin and the Open Society University Network Threatened Scholar Integration Initiative, in cooperation with ICI Berlin. 

The event will take place in person by pre-registration only.  All public spaces are full but there are still some remaining seats reserved with priority for BCB faculty and staff.  Faculty and staff members who would like to attend should please contact Kerry Bystrom ([email protected]) and Aysuda Kolemen ([email protected]) directly.

Speakers:
Homa Hoodfar
Tuba İnal-Çekiç
Ilya Kalinin
Teresa Koloma Beck
Thomas Keenan
Pascale Laborier
Jana Lozanowska
Ewa Majewska
Jennifer Ruth
Nahed Samour
Oleksandr Shtokvych
Asli Vatansever
Jessica Young
Tirdad Zolghadr


For more information, please email [email protected] or [email protected]

  K30 garden  1:00 pm – 1:45 pm CET/GMT+1
You are warmly invited to join us on Friday, October 11th, during lunchtime (12:50 PM - 1:45 PM) for a student-organized Vigil in honor of the victims of the ongoing war in the Middle East.

We will come together to mourn and pay respect to those who have lost their lives across Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Innocent civilians have been killed, others displaced and many remain hostage.

This gathering will be an opportunity for us to come together to send a message of unity, solidarity, freedom, and peace and to join the calls to end the war.

The Vigil will take place in the K30 garden starting at 12:50PM, with a few words shared at 1:00 PM. The event will conclude at 1:45 PM.

K24 Garden  12:30 pm – 3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Come help us save the K24 Garden before the cold sets in! We’re having a few events to clean up and replant the K24 garden. We’ll be harvesting strawberries and mint, and tidying up the garden on Friday, October 4, and Wednesday, October 9. The official replanting event will be on Friday, October 11.

If you're not in the Go Green group chat but want to stay updated or join in, feel free to email [email protected]. You can also just drop by the garden on any of these dates to enjoy some time working with nature as a community, and of course, harvest some strawberries!

W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Translations of philosophical texts are often not an easy business. The translator should have a profound knowledge and understanding of the thinker in order to transmit their thoughts properly to the reader. Paul Reitter combines both of these aspects. He is Professor at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University as well as a practicing translator interested in the field of translation studies. Reitter will talk about his New English Edition of Karl Marx’s Capital, providing an overview of how previous English translations responded to some of the main translation challenges the text poses and presenting his own responses in this comparative context.

Please register here.

Reitter’s scholarship focuses primarily on two areas: German-Jewish culture and the history of higher education. Of particular concern in both cases have been the links between intellectual and institutional history, the relationship of cultural crisis and cultural innovation, and the effects of technological change on humanistic culture. A practicing translator, Reitter is also interested in the field of translation studies. He is the author of four books: The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U of Chicago Press, 2008), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton UP, 2012), and Bambi’s Jewish Roots: Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), and, with Chad Wellmon. His current project—coauthored with Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (U of Chicago Press, 2021). Reitter’s articles and essays have appeared in an array of venues, ranging from Representations, American Imago, and Jewish Social Studies to Harper’s Magazine, the TLS, The Nation, the LA Review of Books, Bookforum, and The Hedgehog Review.

Reitter has worked collaboratively on a number of editions, including The Kraus Project (FSG, 2013), with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (New York Review of Books Classics series, 2015), with Chad Wellmon, The Rise of the Research University a Sourcebook (University of Chicago Press, 2017), with Louis Menand and Chad Wellmon, and the volume, for which he served as the translator, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon (Princeton University Press, 2018), with Abraham Socher and Yitzhak Melamed. Together with Chad Wellmon, Reitter organized and annotated new English edition of Max Weber’s famous vocation lectures, published in the New York Review of Books Classics series (2020). With Anthony Grafton, Caroline Winterer, and Wellmon, Reitter is a co-editor of the new book series “Histories of the University” (University of Chicago Press).

Lecture Hall, Platanenstraße 98A, 13156 Berlin  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
In today’s digital age, the rapid advancement of technology and open-source data has transformed how we investigate and engage with human rights issues. The Digital Verification Corps (DVC) was established by Amnesty International in 2016 to tackle three pressing challenges: first, how to engage volunteers meaningfully in the 21st century; second, how to collate and verify the overwhelming amount of digital content that reflects human rights abuses; and third, how to train the next generation of human rights researchers in the necessary tools and skills.

At Bard College Berlin, our DVC unit is dedicated to working on various impactful projects while providing training and innovative methodologies for students interested in this vital field. You don’t need any prior experience in the open-source intelligence (OSINT) research—just a passion for learning and a willingness to try something new. Join us and become part of a global community making real contributions to the protection of human rights!

  Hörsaal 3075, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Hauptgebäude, 2. Obergeschoss, Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin  9:00 am – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This two-day conference (Oct 10-11) is the first annual interdisciplinary conference of the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec).

The world is living through an important moment where a multiple crisis – a "polycrisis" – is taking the form of plural and simultaneous global threats: the rise of aggressive militaristic states and right-wing populist parties, the catastrophic consequences of climate change, and an increasing vulnerability to fatal pandemics. This conference aims to examine the potential of new beginnings arising from the polycrisis. The discussion will take place at the intersection of political theory, the philosophy of nature, and policy analysis. It will focus on the concept of formative powers, particularly in two main areas: political constitutionalism and nature politics. 

‍In the political constitutionalism theme, the conference will explore the topics of constituent power, the challenges to traditional approaches to constitutionalism and constitutions, and the visions for the constitution of democratic polities in new circumstances and beyond the stereotypical liberal-democratic models. These new visions will have to address the crisis in its global and domestic implications. In the nature politics theme, the conference will address the nexus between nature and technology, alternatives to extractivism, and environmental ontologies, while also reflecting on the perspectives of global climate governance in the current polycrisis. 

‍The conference is organized in partnership with the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy (CCRD) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Bard College Berlin.

Please register here.

Speakers: Bara Kolenc (University of Ljubljana), Ewa Atanassow (Bard College Berlin), Alexander Etkind (Central European University), Roberto Nigro (Leuphana University), Regina Kreide (University of Giessen), Gregor Moder (University of Ljubljana), David Dyzenhaus (University of Toronto), Peter Niesen (University of Hamburg), Andreas Kalyvas (New School of Social Research), Artemy Magun (IGRec), Oxana Timofeeva (IGRec), Ian James (Cambridge University)

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This Community Forum is co-hosted by Student Parliament. We invite you to join us and Student Parliament to hear more about their initiatives this semester and to share any ideas that you have.

P98a Lecture Hall  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This session will go over the study abroad petition and application processes, current partner institutions, Erasmus grant funding, an update on post-OSUN and more!

Petitions are due 6 December 2024 for second years who are interested in going abroad their third year (academic year 2025-26) in fall and/or spring semester. If you started at BCB in the spring semester or are a transfer student, please make sure you are in touch if you will be a third year next academic year (either fall or spring) and would like to go abroad.

W15 Cafe  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
What can we learn from queer resistance in Russia? From the oppressive ‘propaganda’ laws to extremism bills, the challenges faced there are spreading globally, even in “democratic” countries that claim otherwise. In such times, international queer solidarity is one of the keys to battling imperialism.

Whether anti-LGBTQ+ laws are already in effect in your country or you’re preparing for similar threats, now is the time to learn with one another. Join us on the 2nd of October at 19:30 to explore how repressions against the queer community have been unfolding in Russia and learn about the practical things activists there do to protect the community.

This event is part of the new BCB Focus student-led event series that explores global issues and their impact on us as members of the BCB community.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Grab your lunch with you and come to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with us!

October 2nd marks Rosh Hashanah which is the new Jewish year! We will celebrate the holiday with the traditional snacks: apples and honey. This holiday is great reason to gather together as a community and learn more about each other’s culture and history!

Konzerthaus Berlin, Werner-Otto Saal (Gendarmenmarkt, 10117 Berlin-Mitte)  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Together with the Curtis Institute of Music, Bard College Berlin is pleased to host Curtis on Tour on October 1, 2024. Please register here.

The Erinys Quartet was formed by an international group of musicians in Finland. With roots in Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Greece, and the United States, these four musicians have found common ground together in Helsinki. The acclaimed Erinys Quartet is the fellowship quartet in residence in the Nina von Maltzahn String Quartet program at Curtis. The emerging professional quartet was formed at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and began its highly anticipated two-year residency at Curtis in the fall of 2023. 

Curtis on Tour is the Nina von Maltzahn global touring initiative of the Curtis Institute of Music. Grounded in the school’s “learn by doing” philosophy, tours feature extraordinary emerging artists alongside celebrated alumni and faculty. In addition to performances, musicians offer master classes, educational programs, and community engagement activities while on tour. Curtis on Tour also manages solo engagements for Curtis artists with professional orchestras and presenters. Since the program was established in 2008, Curtis on Tour ensembles have performed more than 375 concerts in over 100 cities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In Berlin, Curtis on Tour partners with Bard College Berlin to make this unique approach to learning and artistic performance accessible to the public.

Program
Saariaho: Terra Memoria
Mozart: String Quartet No. 22 in B-flat major, K. 589
BREAK
Beethoven: String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat major, Op. 127

In cooperation with the Curtis Institute of Music, Young Euro Classic, and Konzerthaus Berlin.

W15  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
As a poet and typographer, Emet Ezell works with the materiality of language. For Ezell, words and letters are not empty husks of signification; rather, they are charged with historical residue and mystical energy. Ezell conceptualizes their artistic practice as a form of haunting: language is a medium to animate death. In this talk, they will speak about their work and research in Sabile, Latvia, and Lublin, Poland— two sites of ethnic cleansing and Jewish dispossession. What emerges from the festering wound of annihilation? Amidst the weaponization of memory, how do we engage the past without getting stuck?

Emet Ezell is a poet and typographer living in Berlin, Germany. Their work spans themes of devotion, dispossession, ruin, and return. They are the author of the chapbook Between Every Bird, Our Bones (Newfound) and the guidebook to Liberation Tarot (PM Press). Ezell is winner of the 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and a 2024 Literature Stipend from the Berlin Senate.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Attention all US Citizens! You have the right to vote in federal elections, even while living or studying abroad.

Volunteers from VoteFromAbroad.org will be back on campus on 1 October. Voters who have registered already will have received their ballots by then, but voters who aren't yet registered still have time to register and request their ballots!

Please stop by if you have any questions about how to register to vote or return your completed ballot, or have any other questions about participating in US elections.

K30 Lounge  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Los Andes & Kilimanjaro marks the first event of the Human Library project. Each meeting will feature a different "book"—a real person with a meaningful, lived experience to share. Unlike a traditional library, the "books" in our Human Library are individuals who open up their personal stories for us to engage with, creating deeper connections and promoting understanding.

Our goal is to create space for authentic, human stories—stories that often get lost or overshadowed by the noise of media, stereotypes, and the routine of everyday life. The narratives can explore themes such as identity, immigration, places, culture, and more. The possibilities are endless.

  W15 Cafe  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Especially since the massacres of October 7, there has been a renewed focus on how to understand and act against anti-Semitism but also disagreement and confusion about what anti-Semitism actually is. A discussion with Moshe Zimmermann, professor emeritus at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, child of refugees from Germany and expert on the history of anti-Semitism, aims to help create a better understanding of what anti-Semitism is today and what we can usefully do to work against it.

The discussion will be moderated by Professor Kerry Bystrom and is supported by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Moshe Zimmermann, born 1943 in Jerusalem, is emeritus Professor for German History and between 1986 and 2012 served as the Director of the Richard-Koebner-Center for German History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor in Heidelberg, Mainz, Princeton (USA), Köln, Halle, München, Saarbrücken, Kassel, Krakau (Poland), Göttingen. His academic prizes include the Humboldt-Forschungspreis 1993, the Jacob- und Wilhelm-Grimm-Prize of the DAAD 1997, the Dr. Lukas Prize of the Universität Tübingen 2002 and the Lessing-Prize of the Lessing Akademie Wolfenbüttel 2006. He has written many publications in German, English and Hebrew about nationalism, antisemitism, the history of sport, film-history and German-Jewish history. Recent books include Niemals Frieden? (Berlin 2024); Germans against Germans: The Fate of the Jews 1938-1945 (Indiana 2022); Muscular Religion: Sport, Nationalism, Judaism. (Jerusalem 2017); Vom Rhein an den Jordan (Göttingen 2016), and, with Conze, Frei and Hayes, Das Amt und seine Vergangenheit (Munich 2010).

Spok gmbh | Nordendstraße 56, 13156 Berlin  1:00 pm – 4:00 pm CET/GMT+1
We are celebrating 25 years of partnership between Spok and Bard College Berlin! Throughout the years, we have built a culturally diverse, international community, where people have come together through sport, health, and wellness. This event gives us the chance to look back at our partnership, to see the progress in building community together, and to highlight the value of diversity and inclusion through education and sport.

Enjoy food and drinks and join for the race! Register to run or walk 2.5km and compete for a prize! All fitness levels are welcome. The volleyball and badminton courts will also be open to those who would like to enjoy other activities outside of the track.

In case the weather is not in our favor or the event needs to be rescheduled, the date for this is October 11.

Participants who want to attend can register here.

People who would like to volunteer can register to do so here.

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Jägerstraße 22-23, 10117 Berlin, Germany)  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Postwar Germany's memory culture is rightly lauded as a rare example of a country coming to terms with its tainted past. But with increasing frequency and intensity, critics have begun to wonder whether this model has run its course, or at least needs to be updated or reexamined. Post-Soviet Russia, meanwhile, has been marked by the near-total lack of such a culture. The trauma and crimes of the past have purposefully forgotten or actively misremembered--a memory black hole that makes possible authoritarianism at home and war abroad.

Led by Bard College Berlin's writer-in-residence, expert panelists in the politics of memory in Germany and Russia will explore, discuss, and debate how each society has incorporated—or ignored—the injury and convulsions of the past, and how these respective memory cultures weigh on the present day. By placing the two in contrast and dialogue, this event will explore both the possibilities and limits of memory, with urgent lessons for the contemporary moment.

Please register here.

Speakers:
Professor Stefanie Schüler-Springorum is Director of the Berlin-based Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. She previously was the Director of the Institute for the History of German Jews in Hamburg and Chair of the Leo Baeck Institute’s Academic Working Group in Germany. Her work focuses predominantly on German and German-Jewish history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Sergey Bondarenko is a historian and researcher at the Memorial Society. He is the author of the forthcoming book Lost in Memory: Memorial Society and the Battle for the Russian Past.

Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications. He is currently the inaugural writer-in-residence at Bard College Berlin and was previously a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin.

W15  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
For this talk, Dr. Tiara Roxanne will introduce their work on the decolonial gesture, as an embodied action toward decolonization. We will formulate understandings of Roxanne’s work in AI ethics, de/anticolonialism, and Indigenous Feminist theory, addressing how artistic praxis and methodologies engage the decolonial gesture. We might ask: how do we encounter embodied experiences in digital territory, knowledge-making, and cosmological weaving when the body is already a site of border control, quantum-making, and ritual? What are potential embodied encounters and decolonial gestures that aim to dissolve the anaesthetics of colonization off and online?

This event is a collaboration between Clio Nicastro’s LT168 Theories of the Body and Agata Lisiak’s PT160 Transnational Feminism Is for Everybody, and it is funded by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.

Dr. Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. Dr. Roxanne’s work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through an anti-colonial and cyberfeminist lens. As a performance artist and practitioner, they work between the digital and the material using textile. Tiara has presented at Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), among others.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Each month BCB hosts a Community Forum aimed at bringing students, staff, and faculty together to discuss issues and topics important to our community. At the first meeting of the fall semester we will decide on the topics for the academic year. Join us to make sure your voice is heard.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Garden behind P24  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Welcome back to the Swap Shop! We want to open the doors to the little red cabin for you, a place on campus for thrifting and exchanging pretty and useful items that are too good to be thrown away and need a new home! We know you can't wait to take a peek inside. BCB students have been working hard, sorting through and washing the donated clothes, so that you can come by during lunch time on Thursday, September 26, to find a new winter jacket or a nice to item for your room! Besides the opportunity to sift through the Swap Shop, you will get to meet the student initiatives BCB Goes Green and Urban Gardening, to hear about their plans and how you can get involved.

W15 Cafe  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for an inspiring event with EJAAD and Little Sun, two organizations committed to driving positive change. EJAAD creates stable income opportunities for Afghan women through embroidery and art, while Little Sun brings renewable energy to communities in need. Hear from Little Sun representatives as they discuss their initiatives, like the “Community Energy Hub Programme” in Zambia, and their 2022 donation of solar panels to EJAAD to support sustainable initiatives. Explore how business, humanitarian aid, and sustainability intersect, and discover how we can all contribute to making a meaningful impact together.

K24 SR11  3:00 pm – 6:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This two part-workshop takes place on 21 September and 5 October, 3-6 pm.

How can we learn to listen to plants? And what can we learn about life in crisis and regeneration from plants that are notorious as weeds? Plants can be material companions in complex times, addressing both individual and social bodies to support collective struggles and resilience. In this two-part EHCN-funded workshop, we will ask how plants prepare us and help us live in solidarity with a world made up of more than just people. We will make a zine and a salve together. You will be asked to find out about your families’ relationship to a certain plant.

The number of participants is limited so please apply for the workshop at your earliest convenience (latest by midnight 15 September) using this form. You will be notified if you have been accepted and receive further instructions for preparation by 17 September. If you have any questions about the event, please email BCB faculty Agata Lisiak at [email protected].

Speaker:
Siegmar Zacharias was born in Romania and lives in Berlin. She is a performance artist and researcher, a trained death doula, and she studies traditional plant medicine. She works collaboratively at the intersection of art, radical pedagogy, and activism. The work generates performances, immersive installations, encounters, and durational projects that address generative ethical dynamics of transformation. Since 2016 she has been curating "Training for political imaginaries," 24hrs symposia where ecologies of artistic and social practice are shared. Together with Steve Heather, she developed the somacoustic listening sessions WAVES – listening towards social bodies as containers for collective grieving, in which the materiality of sound is explored on an intimate metabolic level. Together with Shelley Etkin, Kitti Zsiga, and women in a post-migrant neighborhood in Neuköln with ancestors from Turkey, Kurdistan, Syria, Iran, Jordan, and Palestine they have developed the SocialBodyApothecary valuing the knowledges and resources stored in our bodies and lands, practicing making medicine together as a decolonial practice of resistance against structural violence.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Are or were you a First Generation College Student? You're invited!

This luncheon is open only to current students, faculty, and staff who are or were First Gen College Students.

The goal is simple: connect with one another and create community among first gen college students and staff and faculty who were first generation. We are excited to get to know this wonderful community within BCB, and we want to invite you all to get to know one another. You add diverse perspectives to our campus and we want to make sure you are heard and feel supported at BCB.

Bring your lunch. Sweets will be provided.

Former First Generation College Students (faculty & staff) as well as current First Generation College Students can sign up here.

Online (Zoom) + SR 4 (P98a)  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
PL 361 "The American Revolution Reconsidered" invites you to two conversations on Monday and Wednesday, September 16 & 18 at 17:30.

The American Declaration of Independence is the world’s first manifesto of equality and human rights that helped define modern politics and chart a new vision of humanity. It is also a people-building document that by proclaiming the North American colonies' separation from the British Empire, and asserting their political identity, set an example for anticolonial movements worldwide.

How does the Declaration reconcile its commitments to universal equality on the one hand and political sovereignty on the other? What is the relevance of these commitments to native peoples and enslaved populations in America and the world at large? How should we understand this document today and what is its place in the practice of liberal education? 
 On Monday, September 16 at 17:30 on zoom, Professor of Government and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College Yannis Evrigenis will lead a discussion about the intellectual foundations of the American Declaration and the meaning of its key concepts.
 On Wednesday, September 18 at 17:30 in seminar room 4 (P98a), literary scholar and intellectual historian Geoffrey Harpham will help us think about the enduring significance of the Declaration and its relevance to the practice of liberal education.Everyone is welcome to attend.

  W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
BCB professors of Politics, Boris Vormann and Berit Ebert, invite you to an info session addressing this month's state elections (Landtagswahlen) in Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg and their relevance for the nationwide election next year, the Election to the 21st German Bundestag on 28 September 2025. You will learn how the state and federal elections in Germany are linked to EU politics and the European Parliament Election earlier this year, as well as to the global political climate. We will also talk about implications for (civil) society and for people living in Germany without German passports.

Boris Vormann is Professor of Politics and Director of the Politics Concentration at BCB. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of comparative political economy and economic geography and focus on the role of the state in globalization and urbanization processes; nations and nationalism; and the crisis of democracy.

Dr. Berit Ebert holds a PhD in Political Science and is member of the faculty at Bard College Berlin. She specializes in European Union law. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of gender equity, democracy, and the rule of law, as well as the judicial reform in Poland, and subnational influence on supranational policymaking.

W15 Café (or the garden behind W15)  12:30 pm – 1:15 pm CET/GMT+1
Are you interested in volunteering on campus in a student-run conversation project that connects BCB students with the Pankow neighborhood? Then join the volunteer info session facilitated by the current project leaders Davit, Alma, and Sabrina!

Please register via email to: [email protected].

About the English Hour:
The English Hour is a student-led civic engagement initiative that was started in 2020. It is a meeting space for people from the Bard College Berlin neighborhood of Pankow to improve their English skills through conversation, build new connections, and bridge gaps between different cultures and world views. The student-organized sessions are held on campus (P24) and at a local community center. There are weekly one-hour-long sessions where Bard College Berlin volunteers and community participants engage in interactive activities and group discussions.

K30 Lounge  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Rebecca Donner, NY Times best-selling author and winner of the Nation Book Critics Award for Biography, will read from her recent and ongoing work on the German Resistance during WWII.

Rebecca Donner is the author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (2022), the biography of her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, a member of the German resistance against the Nazi regime. Her presentation will draw from past and ongoing projects on women in the German resistance.

W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156 Berlin)  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
On September 10, the panel discussion "Making the Petromasculine Dance - Why We Need an Intersectional Perspective on Sustainability Transition" will feature distinguished panelists Cara New Daggett and Kerstin Meissner from the Research Institute For Sustainability – Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS). The discussion will explore queering and intersectional perspectives on culture, power dynamics and (energy) transition within a sustainability framework. The discussion will be moderated by Bard College Berlin faculty member Berit Ebert, whose research focuses on the European Union with a specific lens on the intersection between gender equality, the rule-of-law, and democracy. Please register here.

Cara New Daggett is Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech and a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute For Sustainability – Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), Potsdam, Germany. She researches the politics of energy and the environment, feminist studies of science and technology, and histories of empire. Her research challenges the technocratic approach to energy transition and recognizes how energy upholds dominant cultures and structures of work and power. Her first award-winning book "The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" has been translated into multiple languages. In addition to academic research, Daggett has also enjoyed public-facing writing, podcasting, and engagements with artists and architects around questions of transition - especially how human activities are valued.

Kerstin Meißner works as a scholar, cultural researcher, and social change facilitator and has been a Fellow at the Research Institute For Sustainability – Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS) since June 2023. With a holistic understanding of social change processes that connect body, mind, and emotions, she researches, writes and teaches transdisciplinarily at the intersections of academia, art, culture and activism. In her dissertation "Relational Becoming. Social Belonging as a Process" (transcript, 2019), she explores the relational and dynamic nature of belonging through ficto-analytical writing. Trained as an educational scientist, she has spent the last few years researching and writing about how sounds and sounding provides access to our relational and entangled realities and could help create other futures. Her current research on sustainability and rave and club culture is published as a podcast series called "Shifting Basslines". All of her becoming-with-the-world is driven by the co-creation of resilient and environmentally just webs of human and more-than-human life. Her favorite spaces are forests, dance floors, and libraries.

In cooperation with Research Institute For Sustainability – Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS).

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The Involvement Fair is your chance to meet the student clubs and organizations and find out how to get involved this semester. Several campus resources will also have tables where you can learn more about the services they offer.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

W15 Cafe  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Student Life is here to answer all of your questions about life in Berlin. Stop by for any or all of these short overviews: 5:30-5:45pm: Welcome and Overview 5:45-6:00pm: Bureaucracy in Berlin (Anmeldung, insurances, etc) 6:00-6:10pm: Mental Health Counseling, Accessibility & Accommodations 6:10-6:35pm: Welcome from DEI Office 6:35-6:45pm: Clubs and organizations, campus involvement 6:45-6:55pm: StudierendenWERK 6:55-7:05pm: Study Abroad 7:05-7:20pm: Student jobs, Career Services support
There will be light refreshments and prizes!

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Learning Commons (W16)  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
How can the Learning Commons help you with research, writing, presentations, graduate school applications, or specific courses? Who are the peer tutors this fall? And where can you always get a cup of tea on campus? Join this session to find out what kind of academic support and guidance we can offer you during your time at BCB!

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Berlin Weekend is a longstanding BCB tradition, giving our community the opportunity to welcome and get to know our new students and show them what Berlin has to offer. There are a variety of events taking place over the entire weekend. Be sure to sign up!

Complete list of Berlin Weekend events:

Friday, September 6: Pink Synagogue - Exhibition Tour (12pm)
Meet Avi at 12 pm in front of Wannsee Contemporary, Chausseestr. 46 14109 Berlin-Wannsee (max. 40 people)
You are welcome to join a preview of ‘Pink Synagogue’ - a newly envisioned exhibition and installation relating to Jewish life in Berlin-Wannsee before WW2, while simultaneously creating a contemporary and all inclusive queer artistic space open for all people from all backgrounds, genders, faiths and religions.
Attendance is limited. Please register here to reserve your spot on the tour.

Friday, September 6: Refugee Voices Tours (4pm)
Meet Hesham at 4 pm at the U-Bahn station Mohrenstrasse, at the Wilhelmstrasse exit. The tour will last around 2-2:30 hours and ends at Gendarmenmarkt. Please be aware that these tours are run on a tip basis and the suggested donation is between 10 and 15 euros.
In 2015 an estimated 1 million people arrived in Europe seeking refuge, many of these people came from Syria. The media focuses intensely on the so-called 'refugee crisis' but often fails to mention why people have been forced to flee their countries. This tour, led by a BCB Alumnus, gives you the chance to understand, first-hand, the situation in Syria and why it became too dangerous for many people to stay. By using places of historical significance in Berlin, the walking tour seeks to draw parallels between what has happened in the history of Berlin and what is currently happening in Syria.
Please register for the tour here.

Saturday, September 7: Naturpark Südgelände Walk (3pm)
Meet Geoff on the platform of the S2 train in Südkreuz station at 3 pm on Saturday (max. 20 people)
This walk will be a visit to one of Berlin's most unusual, creatively-designed and fascinating urban spaces. Naturpark Südgelände occupies a site that was once a busy train yard south of Südkreuz station and that has long since fallen out of use. A combination of the gradual encroachment of nature over many decades and the recent, selective intervention of a group of sculptors has created a park that is at once a post-industrial site, a wildlife preserve and a sculpture garden.
Register for the walk here.

Saturday, September 7: Soundwalking in Tempelhofer Feld (4pm)
Meet Francisca at 4 at Blaue Stunde Café (Oderstraße 22, 12051 Berlin)
Join us for a soundwalk at Tempelhofer Feld, inspired by Hildegard Westerkamp's approach to deep listening. As we go through this historical urban space, we’ll tune into the sounds that define the area. This event invites you to connect with the acoustic environment of Tempelhofer Feld through the simple act of listening.
Register here.

Sunday, September 8: Tour of West Berlin, 1968 (12:45pm)
Meet Ina at 12:45pm at W15 Cafe (15 people max)
Join Ina and Revolutionary Tours for a tour of West Berlin in the year 1968. As the year 1968 began, young people in West Berlin went wild. They began demonstrating against the imperialist war in Vietnam, against authoritarian structures at the universities, and against a “Federal Republic” run by former Nazis. All of West Berlin society opposed these “long-haired hooligans.” But this only radicalized them further. Before long, some sections of the movement were throwing Molotov cocktails and building bombs, while others began a “long march through the institutions.” 1968 changed Berlin, Germany, and the world.
Register here.

Sunday, September 8: Guided Tour of Stasi Prison--Berlin Hohenschönhausen Memorial (1:15pm)
Meet Kerry at 1:15 at the guest registration desk at the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Site, Genslerstraße 66, D-13055 Berlin  (max. 10 people)
Please join Kerry Bystrom and students from the LT 314 "Global Cold War Literatures" class on a guided tour of the Stasi Prison at the Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen. The GDR State Security Central Remand Prison was located on this site. Between 1951 and 1989, over 11,000 people were imprisoned here for political reasons. Large parts of the site and the buildings have been preserved and provide an authentic impression of the conditions and everyday life in prison. The tour includes a visit to the grounds of the former detention centre, the cells and the interrogation rooms. It is run by former political prisoners and historians. 
Registration required and is limited to the first 10 sign ups (first come, first served). Sign up here.

Sunday, September 8: Treptow's Soviet War Memorial and Walk through Kreuzberg (2pm)
Meet Aya at 2 pm at S-Bahn Station Treptower Park 
This walk leads us from Treptow S-Train station to the Soviet War Memorial - burial site of 7.000 of around 80.000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin and designed in the late 1940s in Stalinist aesthetics - and from there along the river and past the former wall strip to the Kreuzberg neighborhood around Schlesisches Tor.  
Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Cafeteria Garden  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The Welcome Reception is an opportunity for the BCB community to come together after the first day of classes, welcome our new community members, and reconnect with one another. Join faculty, staff and students to celebrate the start of the semester.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  11:00 am – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the OLs for a hike to Teufelsberg, an abandoned listening station used during the Cold War that is now covered with graffiti. Entrance fee not included. Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  11:00 am – 3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Visit to Futurium and check out Interactive exhibits on vital issues for the future, like climate, housing, food, & technology. Free entry. Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  11:00 am – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the OLs on a trip to Potsdam, a city in Brandenburg. You can explore the Sanssouci Palace grounds, view the amazing architecture, and more! Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  6:00 pm – 12:00 am CET/GMT+1
Visit over 70 of Berlin's museums that stay open until 2am once a year. Tickets will be provided for all L&T students. Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Piano Salon Christophori  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Pianist and BCB faculty Benjamin Hochman joins violinist Usha Kapoor for two concerts at Piano Salon Christophori on August 23 and 26.
The two programs includes the three Schubert Sonatinas alongside Sonatas for violin and piano by Ravel, Debussy, and Faure. Usha Kapoor will also play an Ysaye Sonata for solo violin.

Both conerts begin at 8pm.

Meet at W15 Cafe  11:00 am – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Visit the old airport grounds, which is now a favorite park in Berlin. BYO picnic and blanket. Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  11:00 am – 3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the Orientation Leaders on a walk around Berlin. You will visit all of the key sites, including the Reichstag, the TV Tower, Checkpoint Charlie, Brandenburger Tor, and the Eastside Gallery. Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  11:00 am – 3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Check out several of the English bookstores in Berlin, and learn your way around the city. Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  11:00 am – 3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Explore Mauerpark, a park made from the former part of the Berlin Wall. Every Sunday there is a flea market where you can purchase anything from vintage goods to snacks from around the world. Register here.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Meet at W15 Cafe  9:30 am – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the OLs and the RAs on a walk through the woods to the spectacular Liepnitzsee, one of the hidden gems of the countryside around Berlin.

Part of the Weeks of Welcome event series. Click here to see the full list of WoW events.

Whether you're a new or returning student, Bard College Berlin wants to give you a warm welcome! During Weeks of Welcome, Student Life and other departments are hosting a variety of free events to introduce campus resources, help students connect with one another, and explore Berlin. Events are open to all students. We look forward to seeing you!

Lake Trip - Saturday, August 10
L&T Excursion for First Years: Mauerpark Fleamarket - Sunday, August 11
L&T Excursion for First Years: Walking Tour of Berlin - Saturday, August 17
L&T Excursion for First Years: English Bookstore Tour - Saturday, August 17
L&T Excursion for First Years: Picnic at Tempelhofer Feld - Sunday, August 18
L&T Excursion for First Years: Lange Nacht der Museen - Saturday, August 24
L&T Excursion for First Years: Potsdam Trip - Sunday, August 25
Excursions for Transfer & Exchange Students: Visit to Futurium - Saturday, August 31
Excursions for Transfer & Exchange Students: Hike to Teufelsberg - Sunday, September 1
Welcome Reception - Monday, September 2
Berlin Weekend - September 6-8
Your Life in Berlin: An Evening with Student Life - Monday, September 9
Welcome to the Learning Commons! - Monday, September 9
Involvement Fair - Tuesday, September 10
SLC Community Forum: Topic Setting - Thursday, September 26

K30 Lawn  4:30 pm – 5:30 pm CET/GMT+1
In honor of Berlin Pride Month, join the DEI Office for a BCB Pride Picnic on the lawn behind K30 to celebrate and show your support for the LGBTQIA+ community on our campus, in Berlin, and worldwide. Everyone is welcome! Bring your favorite drink, a snack to share, and a blanket if you'd like. We'll have a fun activity to test your PRIDE knowledge, chill music, and plenty of good vibes. This event is a safe space dedicated to celebrating a beautiful community. Don't forget to bring your pride flags and bright smiles. We hope to see you there! :)

Rain location: W15 Cafe

Four Performances
The Factory  1:00 pm – 3:30 pm CET/GMT+1
We would like to invite you to the final project showings of the students who have participated in this summer’s theater intensive.

1:00 pm - Performances begin at the Factory. There will be 4 pieces with a 5-minute interval in between each.
3:30 pm - Pizza reception at the Cafeteria at Waldstraße 70. Everyone is welcome.
4:30 pm - Feedback session with the students begins at the cafeteria, and again, everyone is welcome to attend.
 
It would be helpful for us to know how many people might attend and how much pizza to order, so if you are interested in coming please RSVP to [email protected].

Pro qm, Almstadtstraße 48, 10119 Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Institute for Global Reconstitution invites the public to discuss three recently published books devoted to the philosophical study of the present.

The present moment, with its acute sense of crisis, allows philosophers to better understand the temporal and historical nature of the global problems such as (objectively) the ecological crisis and (subjectively) the sense of finitude and negativity. Institute for Global Reconstitution invites the public to discuss three recently published books devoted to the philosophical study of the present: Michael Marder's "Contemporanea" and "The Phoenix Complex" and Artemy Magun's "The Temptation of Non-Being: Negativity in Aesthetics". "The Temptation of Non-Being" explores Modernist art in its mixture of emancipatory and apocalyptic moods, "The Phoenix Complex" discusses the nihilist myth of Modernity, and "Contemporanea", a multi-authored philosophical glossary, brings nature and art together into a single constellation of the current instant.

Artemy Magun is IGRec co-founder and executive director, philosopher. Author of two books in English and five in Russian, including Negative Revolution (Bloomsbury 2013), and The Temptation of Non-Being (Bloomsbury 2024), and of many academic articles. Founder and former head of the Stasis Center for Practical Philosophy in St Petersburg. 

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology.

Hertie School Forum (Friedrichstr. 180)  10:00 am – 6:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Get Engaged: Student Action and Youth Leadership conference invites you to meet undergraduate student leaders from across the globe. Join us for an inspiring glimpse into their innovative, community-based projects driving positive change in communities worldwide.

To register for the event, please email Chaya Huber: [email protected]. 

Humboldt University Luisenstraße 56, Room 220  9:00 am – 6:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Over the past decade, there have been a number of impactful constitutional experiments around the world, such as in Chile or Iceland, both in terms of innovative constitutional proposals and in terms of formats of constitution-making. Such experiments are intended to find answers to a number of challenges in constitutional thought. Contemporary constitutional orders are living through difficult times. Oftentimes, they are identified as the reasons for democratic deficit or obstacles to popular sovereignty. Similar concerns arise in the context of supranational constitutional developments, as well as national politics, when existing arrangements are under strain due to democratic backsliding or, conversely, due to demands for greater democratization.

This workshop will address these general issues by discussing the case of Russia. Its Constitution, adopted in the days of a powerful wave of democratization, raised hopes that it would help build a predictable democratic order. The origins of the Constitution in the major political crisis in 1993 have been the subject of much debate. Distorted by the 2020 amendments, it now serves as the legal framework for military aggression and domestic repression. Anticipating political changes in Russia, activists and experts are seeking to formulate alternative visions for a new constitution. However, it is crucial to situate the discussion of the prospective Russian constitutional order within the broader debate about the future of constitutionalism around the world.

The workshop will contribute to a conversation about these fundamental challenges and link them to specific historical developments in Russian constitutionalism, bringing together some of the leading theorists of constitutional and comparative law. Participants will examine alternative constitutional designs and evaluate how they seek to address some of the pressing political concerns. An experimental constitutional draft developed by the Institute for Global Reconstitution will be made available for discussion. ‍

To participate in the workshop, please register on this page in advance. 

Speakers: Evgeny Roshchin (Princeton University/IGRec), Artemy Magun (IGRec), Greg Yudin (Princeton University/IGRec), Caroline von Gall (Goethe University Frankfurt), Peter Safronov (University of Amsterdam), Ekaterina Mishina (Brīvā Universitāte), Tobias Rupprecht (Free University Berlin), Camila Vergara (University of Essex), Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University), Angelika Nußberger (University of Cologne), Silvia von Steinsdorff, Humboldt University Berlin

Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall (Platanenstrasse 24, 13156 Berlin)  9:00 am – 6:00 pm CET/GMT+1
OSINT FOR UKRAINE (OFU) is an independent (non-profit) foundation specializing in the use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and conducting investigations in the sphere of international humanitarian, criminal, and human rights law.

OFU will mark its second anniversary in 2024 and is eager to commemorate the occasion by hosting an engaging event. Our aim is to foster a collaborative environment where experts and enthusiasts can converge to delve into the nuances of OSINT, the impact of mis/disinformation on OSINT, and how to use OSINT to counter disinformation campaigns and influence/narrative operations. In this event, we’ll present the work we’ve done over the past year, while our partner Vitsche shares their perspectives on the topic. First half of the day will consist of 3 presentations, with time after each for question and answer sessions. The second half of the day will be composed of workshops for the participants, led by OFU members.

Register here.

Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum (Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 1/3, 10117 Berlin)  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The war in Ukraine has changed the political and security landscape. Modern political constructs have been developed for peace. Peace is considered normal, and war is an exceptional event. Tragically, this framework fails to explain physical and symbolic violence that has dominated early 21st century. Propaganda has effectively deconstructed the classical idea of casus belli: wars start with no understandable reason, and sometimes they end in a similar way. Revanchist versions of colonialism and imperialism differ from those of the past. Far from repentance or even resentment, revanchist subjectivities do not follow the postcolonial principle ‘never again’. Postimperial rather than postcolonial, these subjectivities identify with the former perpetrators and operate with a very different principle: ‘make it great again’, or rather, ‘let’s repeat it but in a new, better way’.

The talk will be given in the framework of the international conference "Historical Past and Contemporary Propaganda in the Global Context", June 7-8, 2024, presented by Gagarin Center at Bard College, Smolny Beyond Borders Initiative at Bard College Berlin, Center for Comparative Research on Democracy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 

Alexander Etkind is a professor at the Department of International Relations at Central European University, Vienna. He previously taught at the European University Institute at Florence (2013-2022), the University of Cambridge (2004-2013), and the European University at St Petersburg (1999-2004). Alexander defended his PhD in Russian cultural history in Helsinki (1998), and supervised more than 30 PhD students in Europe. His current interests are the political aspects of the Anthropocene, global decarbonization and security in Eastern Europe. In the past, he was also involved in memory studies, European intellectual history, empires and decolonization, and various aspects of Russian history. A Fellow of King’s College Cambridge, Etkind was the Leader of Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia and Ukraine, a European research project (2010-13). He is the author of Eros of the Impossible. The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Westview Press 1996); Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Polity Press 2011); Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press 2013); Roads not Taken. An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt. (Pittsburgh University Press 2017); and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press 2021). Alexander coedited Remembering Katyn (Polity 2012), Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2013) and Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (Routledge 2017). His new book, Russia against Modernity, was released by Polity in April 2023.

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum (Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 1/3 10117 Berlin)  9:00 am – 5:45 pm CET/GMT+1
The international conference "Historical Past and Contemporary Propaganda in the Global Context" will be co-hosted by the Smolny Beyond Borders Initiative at BCB and the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy of Humboldt University on June 7–8, 2024.

The conference aims to explore various aspects of the contemporary practice of memory and propaganda in the global context, encompassing Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Two main questions that will be discussed are: What characteristics, if any, distinguish the politics of propaganda from the politics of history? Which factors beyond political regimes determine how propaganda has been implemented in the past?

The keynote talk, titled "Russia's Casus Belli: Memory Politics or Political Propaganda?" will be presented by Alexander Etkind of Central European University at 5:00pm on June 8.

The conference will take place at the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 1/3, 10117 Berlin). Programming on Friday, June 7 will run from 8:45am-5:45am; and on Saturday, June 8 from 8:45am-6:30pm.

Smolny Beyond Borders is a liberal arts initiative that continues and builds upon the legacy of Smolny College (formerly a joint program of St. Petersburg State University and Bard College), the longest-running dual degree program between any Russian and American institution. It was established in November 2022 by a group of former Smolny College faculty with the support of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and Bard College Berlin (BCB). For nearly a quarter of a century, Smolny College was unprecedented in its support of the liberal arts community in Russia. With Putin’s authoritarian regime targeting progressive educational institutions, many Russian intellectuals, including former Smolny faculty members and students, have been forced to leave Russia. The Gagarin Center for the Study of Civil Society and Human Rights at Bard College allows Russian scholars to continue to pursue research and educational activities focused on contemporary social, economic, and human rights issues. The Center was formerly part of Smolny College. The Center now partners with Smolny Beyond Borders, an educational initiative for faculty and students who left Russia and the surrounding region due to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine and risk of political persecution. Supported by the Andrew Gagarin Trust, the Center continues to support Smolny BB faculty research on vital issues and public programming. For more information visit: https://www.smolny.org

The Center for Comparative Research on Democracy (CCRD) is a research center at the Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The Center is dedicated to promoting a deeper and more nuanced understanding of democracy by bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including political science, sociology, philosophy, and law, to study the complex and multifaced nature of democracy. The Center's research activities include organizing workshops and conferences, fostering international collaborations, and supporting graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. CCRD also engages policy makers and the broader public through its outreach activities, such as public lectures, book events, roundtable discussions. It provides opportunities and platforms for scholars at risk and facilitates the exchange of ideas on academic freedom. It also creates a hub for comparative research on issues of (de-)democratization in Europe and beyond. For more information visit: https://ccrd-berlin.de/

The U.S. Russia Foundation (USRF) is an American non-profit organization founded in 2008 that aims to strengthen relations between the United States and Russia and to promote the development of the private sector in the Russian Federation. The Foundation is the legacy organization of the U.S. Russia Investment Fund (TUSRIF), an organization founded by the U.S. Government under the Support for Eastern European Democracy Act of 1989 and the Freedom Support Act of 1992. USRF works in partnership with the U.S. Government through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). USRF makes grants in three main lanes, Media & Free Enterprise, Rule of Law, and Civil Society & Expertise. For more information visit: https://www.usrf.us

Konzerthaus Berlin (Gendarmenmarkt 2, 10117 Berlin)  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebrations, Bard College Berlin is proud to work together with the Curtis Institute of Music and Konzerthaus Berlin: Renowned Curtis alumni violinist Shanshan Yao (’08), violist Haesue Lee (’21), cellist Jean Kim (’18), and pianist Pallavi Mahidhara (’10) will embark on a tour of Europe in the spring of 2024. This exciting concert features Indian American composer Reena Esmail’s lush, romantic trio for violin, cello, and piano, Saans, inspired by the Franck Violin Sonata, and the wedding of dear friends, alongside Felix Mendelssohn’s first published composition, the charming Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor. The concert concludes with Antonín Dvořák’s ingenious Piano Quartet No. 2 in E flat major, a bold, colorful work of tremendous beauty that flits between dark and light, the elegance of the Viennese classical style, and the folky playfulness of a ländler waltz.

This performance is presented in collaboration with the Curtis Institute of Music.

Register for the concert through this Google Form.

Lecture Hall (Platanenstr. 98a, 13156 Berlin)  6:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us on May 30th at Bard College Berlin's Lecture Hall from 18:30 to 21:30 for the presentation of the Ukrainian Decolonial Glossary. This unique lexicon compiles essential concepts from de- and post-colonial theories that are specifically relevant to Ukraine. Created by Ukrainian researchers, writers, and artists, this resource is designed for those in the cultural sphere and related fields. 

Stay for the public discussion on the current state and future of Ukrainian decolonial thought, art, and culture. This discussion will also explore the relevance of decolonial theory in understanding Russia and the Soviet Union. Participants will critically analyze the concepts of colonialism and coloniality within the Ukrainian context, drawing comparisons with other colonial experiences, such as those in Poland and Latin America.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn about the glossary, connect with others, and engage in meaningful dialogue. We’re excited to see you there!

Pierre Boulez Saal at Barenboim-Said-Akademie (Französische Str. 33D, 10117 Berlin)  7:30 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Jacob Kushner’s highly praised book Look Away  follows Beate Zschäpe and her two accomplices—and occasional lovers—as they became radicalized within Germany’s far-right scene, escaped into hiding, and carried out their terrorist spree. From 2000 to 2011, they embarked on the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Their target: immigrants. Unable to believe that the brutal killings and bombings were the work of white Germans, police blamed—and sometimes framed—immigrants instead. Readers of Kushner’s book meet Gamze Kubaşık, whose family emigrated from Turkey to seek safety, only to find themselves in the terrorists’ sights. It also tracks Katharina König, an Antifa punk who would help expose the National Socialist Underground (NSU) and their accomplices to the world. A masterwork of reporting and storytelling, Look Away reveals how a group of young Germans executed a shocking series of white-supremacist violent acts and how a nation and its government ignored them until it was too late.

Register here. Presented in English. Featuring a musical performance by Barenboim-Said Akademie students Eesa Khoury (Violin) and Kristina Georgieva (Violin).

In cooperation with the Barenboim-Said-Akademie, German-American Fulbright Commission, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and the Max Planck Law Network.

Jacob Kushner is a foreign correspondent who writes magazine and other longform articles from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Economist, National Geographic, The Atavist, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian. He is the author of China’s Congo Plan, which was favorably received by the New York Review of Books. A former American Council on Germany Fellow and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Fellow, he began investigating the NSU as a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin and completed his research as a Max Planck Journalist in Residence in Freiburg and Heidelberg.

Hybrid: Online and Babel Books Berlin (Bernauer Straße 49, 10435 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
It would seem that the idea of the possibility of literary scandal lost its relevance back in the second half of the twentieth century, when traditional norms and taboos began to blur. In the era of postmodernism, it was difficult to imagine trials akin to those of the authors of «The Flowers of Evil» or «Madame Bovary». However, in our time, when autofiction has come to the forefront of cultural life, the possibility of literary scandal is once again attracting attention. The genre, which plays on the boundaries between the fictional and the autobiographical, not only calls into question the authenticity of the story told and undermines the prestige of autobiography, which has traditionally strived for truth, but also raises the issue of the boundaries between one’s own and others’ experiences. Writers of autofiction regularly find themselves at the centre of public scandals, face lawsuits for invading their privacy or deceiving their audiences, while their texts become the subject of litigation and even initiate criminal proceedings. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Camille Laurens, Christine Angot, Vanessa Springora are just some of the names that have found themselves at the centre of scandalous stories. Mixing the factual and the fictional, violating privacy, exploiting other people’s lives, distorting the past, writing about the dead are the main aspects that give autofiction a reputation as a scandalous genre. This lecture will discuss the most famous scandals in the world of autofiction, the ways the authors deal with the boundaries between their own and others’ experiences, and why the idea of a “stolen life” embodied in a literary work becomes one of the pivotal plots of autofiction.

Lecture will be given in Russian. Join online here or in-person at Babel Books Berlin (Bernauer Straße 49, 10435 Berlin).

Larissa Muravieva is a Researcher of Narrative and contemporary French Literature. In 2018-2022 she has taught at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences. At Smolny, she taught courses such as «French Literature and Art of the XXth Century», «Key Texts of French Culture: the XXth Century», «Transmedial Narratology», and others. Laureate of fellowship programs of the Center for Franco-Russian Studies in Moscow and of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. In 2017, 2018, and 2023, she was a visiting researcher in the postdoctoral mobility program at the Center for the Study of Art and Language (EHESS, Paris). Member of the European Narratology Network (ENN) & Société internationale de recherches sur la fiction et la fictionnalité (SIRFF). In Russia she organized a number of conferences and scientific events on the narrative studies: “Transfert narratologique : la Narratologie française en Russie vs. La Narratologie russe en France” (Moscow, 2017), “Narratological readings” (St. Petersburg, 2019), sections “Transmedial Narratology” and “Narrative Practices of Sense-Making” (St. Petersburg, 2020, 2022), etc. She is engaged in research in cognitive and transmedial narratology, autofiction, and contemporary autobiography.

Waldstr. 15  11:00 am CET/GMT+1
Bard College Berlin is delighted to welcome alumni to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of BCB at an Alumni Brunch. Join us to reunite with classmates and faculty, and see what is new on the Bard College Berlin campus. A continental-style brunch will be served. 

Please RSVP by April 5, 2024 here.

The Factory (Eichenstraße 43, 13156 Berlin)  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
"Threads" is an immersive exploration seeking to reflect on the experience of war at a time when most questions still lack answers.

How to protect national identity under threat and not lose our humanity in this struggle? What emotions to mobilize when love cannot unite people, and the word "peace" cannot fit into today's reality? How to turn anger into productive action? Where to draw the line between being a good person and a good citizen?

Audiences will traverse the path from victim and witness to perpetrator, attempting to rediscover the connection with themselves and each other, which has been lost.

Please register via this form.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: war, violence, hate speech

Performers: Liza Mamon Alex Basovska

Music (live): Mykola Lebed

Visuals and design: Anna Zvyagintseva

Ballhaus Pankow (Grabbeallee 53, 13156 Berlin)  11:00 am CET/GMT+1
Bard College Berlin is delighted to welcome you to the graduation celebration of the Class of 2024. The ceremony will take place on Saturday, May 18th at Ballhaus Pankow and will be followed by a reception on campus. Doors open at 10:30am.

Please RSVP by April 5, 2024 here.

The Factory (Eichenstraße 43, 13156 Berlin)  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
All I can talk about is purple flowers. 
Every year, during the week before my birthday, the air changes. The sun gets warmer and there is a smell of blossom everywhere.
During this first week of May, the purple flowers on the tree in the large lawn in front of the dining hall, reach maturity and begin to fall. They leave a round purple aura on the green grass. The purple flowers are the only memory that is not charged with politics, that is not charged with guilt, that is not charged with hiding. A memory that has only sweetness and even pride. The purple flowers are all that remains after cleaning everything that hurts.

Performance by: Omri Rotem and Gali Har-Gil
This performance was created as part of an independent research project at Bard College Berlin.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Nina Tecklenburg

P24 Conference Room (Platanenstr. 24, 13156 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Open Classroom is a student-led initiative held on Tuesdays that allows neighbors to experience university-level courses taught at BCB. The initiative seeks to foster a dialogue between students and the broader Pankow community. This semester, students will share their knowledge from the course Dystopian Fiction, an undergraduate-level course taught at Bard College Berlin.

Dystopian fiction often involves bleak, post-apocalyptic futures scarred by environmental disaster, societal collapse, totalitarian control or technological subjugation. But, more than simply presenting depressing images, dystopian fiction also offers fruitful ground for questioning today’s world and re-envisioning a more just society. Through a mix of novels, films and short stories, we’ll grapple with climate change, artificial intelligence, authoritarianism and migration and explore questions of freedom, belonging, care and how to find hope in the face of overwhelming crisis. A central focus of the course will be investigating what role fiction can play in helping us imagine and shape the future.

Register via [email protected].

Bard College Berlin and Amtshaus Buchholz  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The English Hour is a weekly meeting space for people from our campus neighborhood to improve their English skills through conversation, build new connections, and bridge gaps between different cultures.

English Hour - Tutoring for High School Students: Wednesdays, 18:00-19:00
Location: K30 Lounge (Kuckhoffstr. 30, 13156 Berlin)
Free volunteer-run English tutoring on BCB campus for local high school students on a weekly basis. Register via [email protected].

English Hour - Conversation Round: Wednesdays, 19:00-20:00
Location: P24 Conference Room (Platanenstr. 24, 13156 Berlin)
Open to all who want to practice English through conversation. Register via [email protected].

BCB English Hour @ Amtshaus Buchholz: Tuesdays, 19:00-20:00
Location: NBZ Amtshaus Buchholz (Rosenthaler Weg 32, 13127 Berlin)
Die English Hour wird im Nachbarschaftszentrum Amtshaus Buchholz von internationalen Studentinnen und Studenten des Bard College Berlin angeboten, die zum Teil selbst nur wenig Deutsch sprechen und sich über den Sprachaustausch freuen. Das Angebot ist offen für alle, die Lust haben, ein bisschen auf Englisch ins Gespräch zu kommen und dazuzulernen.
Anmeldung unter: [email protected] oder 030 - 4758 472. Teilnahmegebühr: 1€.

P24 Seminar Room 8 (Platanenstraße 24, 13156)  8:30 am – 5:30 pm CET/GMT+1
LT308: Autofiction is concluding the semester with an all-day symposium. "Autofiction" is one of the most discussed and debated forms of contemporary literature. It mixes autobiographical and fictional events, and in doing so, displaces traditional autobiography and competes with the novel. This symposium brings together an international array of scholars of autofiction and BCB faculty and students. The symposium will consist of three panel sessions and a keynote by Hywel Dix (Bournemouth University, UK).

The keynote, "Autofiction and Cultural Memory," will be delivered by Hywel Dix, Professor of English, Bournemouth University, UK. He has published extensively on the relationship between literature, culture and political change in contemporary Britain, most notably in Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain (2010), After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (Second Edition, 2013) and Multicultural Narratives: Traces and Perspectives, co-edited with Mustafa Kirca (2018). His wider research interests include modern and contemporary literature, critical cultural theory, authorial careers and autofiction. His monograph about literary careers entitled The Late-Career Novelist was published in 2017 and an edited collection of essays on Autofiction in English was published in 2018. He has recently completed a study entitled Autofiction and Cultural Memory.

Speakers will include Michal Mrugalski (Tübigen), Laura Scuriatti (BCB), Catherine Toal (BCB), James Harker (BCB), Hywel Dix (Bournemouth University), Patricia López-Gay (Bard, NY), Larissa Muraveva (BCB), and BCB student participants.

Schedule:
Coffee (8:30-9:15)

Welcome (9:15-9:30)
Greeting and Opening Remarks, Larissa Muraveva

Panel 1 (9:30-11:00): Origins and Influences
Killer Autofiction: Terrorists as Belletrists and Vice Versa in the Romanov Empire - Michał Mrugalski, Universität Tübingen
Life-Writing between History, Fiction and Science: André Maurois' Aspects of Biography (1928) - Laura Scuriatti, Bard College Berlin
Fragments and Remnants: Renata Adler’s Speedboat and its Structural Legacy on Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation - Mica Toscano, BA student, Bard College Berlin

Panel 2 (11:15-12:45): Photography, Film, and Autofiction
Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun and the Phenomenology of Trauma - Helena Gąsiejewska, BA student University College Amsterdam
“Death to the (Female) Author?” From Photography to Life Writing: Realism and the Political Turn of Autofiction - Patricia López-Gay, Bard College, NY
Photography and Affect in the Autobiographical Novels of Annie Ernaux and Maria Stepanova - Larissa Muraveva, Bard College Berlin 

Keynote (2:30-3:30)
Autofiction and Cultural Memory - Hywel Dix, Bournemouth University, UK

Panel 3 (3:45-5:15): Intermedial Forms
The Pleasure of Writing: Autofiction as a Meta-Medium - Sophie Foley, BA student, Bard (NY)
Rogue Biographers: Autofiction as Destroyer of Film in the Movies of Justine Triet - Catherine Toal, Bard College Berlin
Unseen Art in Autofiction - James Harker, Bard College Berlin

Closing Remarks (5:15-5:30)

P24 SR8  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
A brilliant figure of the Florentine Renaissance, Machiavelli has gone down the centuries as the epitome of manipulation and the ruthless pursuit of power. He is also celebrated as the founder of political realism and the scientific approach to politics. Hosted by the PL 215 “Machiavelli's Arts” and HI 125 “Russian History through Photographs,” this event will explore the affinities and divergences between Machiavelli's teaching and the revolutionary vision of Lenin and Stalin. Tracing Machiavelli's influences on the Soviet founders' conception of power and on their practical efforts to construct an unprecedented social and political order – the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” – we’ll seek to probe the relationship between modern ethics and revolutionary politics. Reception will follow.

Presenters: 

The students of PL 215 “Machiavelli's Arts”: Diana Kimak (Ukraine), Isabel Cama (Brasil/USA), Mishel Jovanovska (North Macedonia), Owen Burk (USA), Theresa Steinbeis (Germany)      

Lev Danilkin is a Ukraine-born writer and literary critic. He graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University in 1996. He is the author of four biographical books, a book of short stories and three books of literary criticism about contemporary Russian literature. His book Lenin has won the 1st prize of the Big Book Literary Award (2017) and shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize.  

Denis Skopin earned a PhD summa cum laude in Philosophy from Paris 8 University. He taught at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg University before joining Smolny Beyond Borders. His research and teaching interests range across photography studies, political philosophy and history, with focus on photographic practices and circulation of photographs under dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. He is the author of three monographs, most recently of Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia: Defacing the Enemy (London, Routledge, 2022).  

Moderator: 
Ewa Atanassow is Professor of Politics at Bard College Berlin. She is the author of Tocqueville's Dilemmas and Ours: Sovereignty, Nationalism, Globalization (Princeton University Press, 2022) and coeditor of When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2023). 

BCB Factory (Eichenstraße 43, 13156 Berlin)  5:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
BCB’s celebrated end-of-the-semester arts tradition returns: Open Studios & Performance Factory. All are welcome to this 3-night event on the evenings of May 6, 7, 8 as visual and performing arts students showcase their work at Monopol (Provinzstraße 44, 13409 Berlin); at Ballhaus Ost (Pappelallee 15, 10437 Berlin); and at the BCB Factory (Eichenstraße 43, 13156 Berlin).

Open Studios and Performance Factory on Wednesday, May 8 consists of exhibitions and performances by students from the following classes:
FA106 Beginners Black and White Photography: The Slow Photo
FA107 Ceramics
FA108 Beginners in Digital Photography: your own point of view
FA110 Beginning Sculpture
FA188 The Art of Making Videos
FA250 Immersive Spatial Experiences
FA260 Dance Out. (DO) liberation, possession and film
FA289 Practice-based Sound Studies
FA290 Touch Screen: Contemporary Moving Image Practices
FA298 Virtual Reality Showcase
TH305 SENSE: Staging a Theater Production
FA308 Advanced Photography: Finding the Stories
FA325 The Photo Zine: A Subversive Phenomenon
FM335 Seeing Voices and Queering Film: dis/embodied voicing and the moving image

Ballhaus Ost (Pappelallee 15, 10437 Berlin)  8:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Curtain up: BCB at Ballhaus Ost! Final performance showcase of Nina Tecklenburg’s class TH315 Making Theater in Berlin: A Collaboration with Ballhaus Ost.Based on the knowledge and skills that the students gained from professional theater and performance artists, curators and theater technicians at Ballhaus Ost, the students devised their own performance projects in the second half of the semester. Three short pieces will be presented on the stage of Ballhaus Ost on May 7 at 8pm. Come along, laugh and cry, and stay for drinks and Karaoke!Performances devised and performed by: Zabihullah Akbar, Alice Drozhzhina, Lily Ellerbrock, Fiona Galinsky, Aria Hadziosmanovic, Slater Hanna, Jeongin Kim, Sonya Konovalova, Yensen LeBeau, Yelizaveta Mamon, Silviya Mamporia, Katya Mastyukova, Sanskriti Shrestha, Nora Stone Roig.Special thanks to the amazing Ballhaus Ost team, especially to Anne Brammen, Daniel Schrader, Tina Pfurr, Björn Stegmann, Pilar Falco, Gilda Coustier, and Fabian Eichner. We also would like to thank the inspiring artists we worked with during the semester: Salma Said, Miriam Coretta Schulte, Franziska Winkler, Vera Moré, Max Reiniger, Sophie Blomen and Carolina Brinkmann.Part of BCB’s celebrated end-of-the-semester arts tradition: Open Studios & Performance Factory. All are welcome to this 3-night event on the evenings of May 6, 7, 8 as visual and performing arts students showcase their work at Monopol (Provinzstraße 44, 13409 Berlin); at Ballhaus Ost (Pappelallee 15, 10437 Berlin); and at the BCB Factory (Eichenstraße 43, 13156 Berlin).

Lindleystraße 15, 60314 Frankfurt am Main  7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
For many years, Nathan Thrall's writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been bracing, enlightening, and urgent—not to mention essential. His reporting and analysis have penetrated deeply into the histories and psyches of both peoples, while not shying away from the complicated reality on the ground, where Thrall has extensive sources and contacts.

The Financial Times called Thrall “one of the best-informed and most trenchant observers of the conflict," while Time declared him “an American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom.” In 2023, Thrall published A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was immediately the subject of laudatory reviews and made several end-of- year best book lists. (“A powerful evocation of a two-tiered society," The New Yorker wrote: “A vital, important book," declared the Washington Post.)

In conversation with Joshua Yaffa, a writer for The New Yorker, Thrall will share his expertise on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a time of heightened violence and suffering, relaying both the searing personal stories he has collected and also his insight into the larger dynamics at play in the region. The conversation will be frank and provocative, but, like Thrall's writings, rigorously fact-based and rooted in a deep knowledge of history and politics. This is a rare opportunity to see a writer of Thrall's caliber hold forth on some of the most pressing questions of the day in a live setting.

This event will be held at medico international e.V. (Lindleystraße 15, 60314 Frankfurt am Main). Please RSVP through this Google Form. 

Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was named a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist, The New Republic, and the Financial Times, and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His previous book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, was published in 2017. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College.

Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications. He is currently the inaugural writer-in-residence at Bard College Berlin and was previously a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin.

Jägerstraße 54, 10117 Berlin  7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
For many years, Nathan Thrall's writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been bracing, enlightening, and urgent—not to mention essential. His reporting and analysis have penetrated deeply into the histories and psyches of both peoples, while not shying away from the complicated reality on the ground, where Thrall has extensive sources and contacts.

The Financial Times called Thrall “one of the best-informed and most trenchant observers of the conflict," while Time declared him “an American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom.” In 2023, Thrall published A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was immediately the subject of laudatory reviews and made several end-of- year best book lists. (“A powerful evocation of a two-tiered society," The New Yorker wrote: “A vital, important book," declared the Washington Post.)

In conversation with Joshua Yaffa, a writer for The New Yorker, Thrall will share his expertise on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a time of heightened violence and suffering, relaying both the searing personal stories he has collected and also his insight into the larger dynamics at play in the region. The conversation will be frank and provocative, but, like Thrall's writings, rigorously fact-based and rooted in a deep knowledge of history and politics. This is a rare opportunity to see a writer of Thrall's caliber hold forth on some of the most pressing questions of the day in a live setting.

This event will be held off-campus at Jägerstraße 54, 10117 Berlin. Please RSVP through this Google Form.

Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was named a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist, The New Republic, and the Financial Times, and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His previous book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, was published in 2017. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College.

Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications. He is currently the inaugural writer-in-residence at Bard College Berlin and was previously a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin.

Monopol (Provinzstraße 44, 13409 Berlin)  5:30 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
We are experiencing first-hand that unfreedom and complicity with injustice not only prevail in dictatorships but also affect democracies. Hanah Arendt conceputalized the loss of freedom as a loss of the world: when the spaces for collective action become ever narrower and people withdraw into the private. "In history, the times are frequent when the space of the public sphere darkens and the existence of the world becomes so questionable that people demand no more from politics than that it takes due account of their vital interests and private liberty." A historical response to political oppression and dehumanization has always been solidarity: equality in shared suffering, "brotherhood/sisterhood". But Hannah Arendt, with Lessing, was interested in a different kind of response: friendship. Friendship, when it is understood as a conversation, as a shared participation in the world, is lived plurality, and in friendship, even under oppressive conditions, space for the public and for politics emerges again.

Our exhibition and discussion event deals with the political potentials, contexts, and ambivalences of friendship. In order to regain the world in and through our relationships, we need - again following Hannah Arendt - a constant and free movement of thought: constant learning and unlearning, even in contradictions. The exhibition shows our students' artistic and research-based appraoches to friendship in dark times. We will hear from the writer Priya Basil, the artist Yehudit Yinhar, and the curator Daria Prydybailo about how politics and friendship are connected for them. And we will discuss, in a "fishbowl" format, political learning and unlearning processes that we have taken on for friendships or through friendships. 

The exhibition event is taking place as part of an Open Society University Network (OSUN) course and includes works from our partner classes at Universidad dee los Andes/Bogota and Witwatersrand University/Johannesburg as well as works from guest students.

There will be drinks and Afghan Burgers from the Afghanistan Awareness Initiative. 

This event is taking place during BCB's Open Studios at Monopol.

Monopol (Provinzstraße 44, 13409 Berlin)  5:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
BCB’s celebrated end-of-the-semester arts tradition returns: Open Studios & Performance Factory. All are welcome to this 3-night event on the evenings of May 6, 7, 8 as visual and performing arts students showcase their work at Monopol (Provinzstraße 44, 13409 Berlin); at Ballhaus Ost (Pappelallee 15, 10437 Berlin); and at the BCB Factory (Eichenstraße 43, 13156 Berlin).

Open Studios at Monopol on Monday, May 6 is an exhibition of visual art featuring student artworks from the following classes:
FA103 Found Fragments and Layered Lines: mixed-media techniques for drawing and collage
FA112 Marble Stone Sculpture
FA113 Introduction to Glass Making
FA215 Painting and Beyond
FA317 Advanced Painting: Illusionistic Surfaces
FA318 Advanced Painting: Color in Practice
HI255 Research-Creation: Developing Artistic Responses to the History of Exile and of Friendship in Dark Times

At 6:00pm, the students in the glass blowing course (FA113 Introduction to Glass Making) will be offering a demonstration.

Pomodoro Power Two: 25-Minute Study Sessions
Monday, May 6 | 4:00pm-7:00pm
Learning Commons
Our Pomodoro Technique study session for a structured approach to focused studying. Tutors will guide 25-minute intense study intervals, followed by 5 minute breaks with snacks and hot drinks. After 4 rounds, take a longer break with some laid-back board games.

Lawn Games & Pet Day
Tuesday, May 7 | 12:30pm - 2:00pm
KW Lawn (rain location: W15 Cafe)
Join us on the lawn between K30 and W15 for light snacks, fun lawn games and some time with BCB’s furry, four-legged friends!

Late Night Study Breakfast
Wednesday, May 8 | 6:00pm-7:00pm
W15 Cafe
Kick off completion week with a dinner of breakfast! Student Life Staff will be here to serve you stacks of pancakes and hot beverages.

Wein Salon (Schreinerstraße 59, Friedrichshain, 10247 Berlin)  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
It is a tradition that the writers in Clare Wigfall's fiction writing workshop give a much-anticipated reading of their work as the finale of their course. Once again, they are returning to the charming Wein Salon in Friedrichshain. Please join us for a cozy and intimate (but also a little bit riotous, let's be frank) evening of beautiful and surprising stories and words written by Clare's advanced students. All BCB students, alumni, friends, and faculty members are warmly welcome.  

Writers presenting: Severin Birchak, Alma Dasberg, Helena Gąsiejewska, Yensen LeBeau, Alice Quinn, Matthew Shareshian, Nick Teploukhov, Olivia Thayer, Tay Mitchell

W15 Café  7:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Members of “DerDieDas Haus” and the BCB German Program will host an “Offenes Haus” with snacks and drinks.

The “DerDieDas Haus” is a living and learning community at BCB with a special focus on German language and culture. Students with an interest in exploring German in their daily lives share a designated floor in one of our residence halls. They use German amongst each other during the week and engage in extracurricular activities in the city. To find out more about how the projects works, how to apply for a place etc., please join us on Thursday, May 2, at 7:00pm in the Café at W15.

Application deadline for citizens and residents of EU/EEA and Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, UK, US
Online Event 


Bard College Berlin accepts applications for entry to the BA and Academy Year programs in Fall 2024. The final deadline for applying is May 1, at 23:59 in your time zone.

Eligible applicants are citizens and residents of the EU and EEA, as well as Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, UK, US. For more information on eligibility and application requirements, please refer to How to Apply.

Should you have any questions about your application for admission and/or financial aid at BCB, please do not hesitate to reach out to the BCB Admissions Team at [email protected]. We look forward to receiving your application!

K24, seminar room 11  4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1
Four young activists of the Pankow team (Kiezteam Pankow) and the international workgroup (Right to the City, R2C) of Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen will give a talk as part of the course Civic Engagement and Engaged Research: Berlin Lab.

Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE for short) is a citizens' initiative in Berlin that has been active since 2018 and achieved a successful referendum on the expropriation and socialization of private housing companies in September 2021, receiving at least 175,000 of the 170,000 required signatures in its second phase. While the referendum was a huge success and made headlines, it has not been implemented as it was not legally binding (Beschluss-Volksentscheid). In September 2023, the initiative announced that it would put its goal of socializing housing to the vote again with a binding statutory referendum.

You are invited to join the talk and learn about the history and current state of DW Enteignen, what makes a referendum successful, and how the initiative is organized Berlin-wide and in Pankow.

Please register via email to: engagement @berlin.bard.edu.

P24 Seminar Room 5  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Dr. Moses März introduces participants to experimental cartography as an artistic research method of translating different kinds of texts (academic, literary, encyclopedic) into lines, images, and quotations. The method combines elements of the visual arts, science, geography, social activism and storytelling to share knowledge in an intuitively accessible and inclusionary manner.

In preparation for the workshop, participants are invited to bring along a text or reading notes they would like to turn into a map. Please bring your own pencils and erasers. 

Online (Zoom)  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This guest lecture by Sonia E. Sultan, Professor of Biology at Wesleyan University, will take place online over Zoom.

Darwin's idea of Natural Selection explained how small, heritable differences between individual animals and plants would cause adaptive change in their features over time. In the 20th century, this idea was joined to simple Mendelian genetics in a Neo-Darwinian approach that redefined evolution as change in gene frequencies. Although this gene-centric approach remains dominant, new insights to the responsive flexibility of living systems are calling it into question.

View the readings for the lecture here.

Sonia Sultan is Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science at Wesleyan University, where she is on the Biology Faculty and affiliated with the Environmental Studies Program. Sultan’s research examines the interplay between genetic and environmental influences on plant development and the evolutionary implications of this complex interplay. She holds a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University and a PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University.

W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstraße 15, 13156 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This event at Bard College Berlin will bring together prominent journalists, sociologists, and academics who have spent their careers tracking developments in Russian politics and society. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the many convulsions that have resulted, have made this work exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Conducting interviews or field research is extraordinarily fraught. But monitoring events and developments from abroad contains no less difficulties. Led in discussion by BCB's writer-in-residence, expert panelists will discuss the adjustments in their work and share their adaptations and methodologies. What is difficult to understand without being on the ground? But at the same time, what is impossible to measure from inside Russia? What should we admit we don't and can't know? The evening promises an open, enlightening, and educational conversation for all those interested in following and making sense of events in Russia and their relevance for Western societies.

Register here.

Valerie Hopkins is an international correspondent for The New York Times, covering the war in Ukraine, as well as Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. She covered the Balkans and eastern Europe for a decade, most recently for the Financial Times, before moving to Moscow to join The New York Times. She is a 2022 recipient of Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence and the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) Distinguished Fellow Award.

Svetlana Erpyleva is a researcher with the Public Sociology Laboratory and a post-doctoral researcher at the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen. Her articles have been published in American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Childhood, Current Sociology, Journal of Youth Studies, Sociological Forums, and a number of Russian and international academic journals and media. Currently, she coordinates a large-scale research project on how Russians perceive the war in Ukraine.

Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. He is also the author of "Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia," which won the Orwell Prize in 2021. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications. He is currently the inaugural writer-in-residence at Bard College Berlin and was previously a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin.

  Online (Zoom)  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join via Zoom here

ABOUT THE LECTURER:
Ajna Jusić has long been a prominent activist and advocate for gender equality, fighting against sexism and sexual violence. As president of the “Forgotten Children of War (Zaboravljena djeca rata)” organization, which fights for the acknowledgment and legal status of children born as the result of wartime rape, Ajna is a tireless advocate for these children to be granted full rights as Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) citizens. Thanks to Ajna’s efforts, the Law on the Protection of Civilian Victims of War in the Federation of BiH was adopted in August 2023. The law redresses decades of marginalization and provides these children with increased access to educational opportunities and the labor market, as well as social protections and psychological support. Ajna and her colleagues were instrumental in advocating for adopting similar legislation in Brčko District. 

Ajna’s activism is not limited to the rights and dignity of children born of war in BiH. Ajna’s organization works to eliminate domestic and gender-based violence in BiH and the use of rape as a tool of war around the world. In an effort to enact global change, Ajna and her organization have worked with a diverse range of victims of wartime rape, including survivors of World War II, wars in Guatemala and Uganda, and, most recently, Ukraine.

In March 2024, Dr. Jill Biden, First Lady of the United States, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored Ajna Jusić at the 18th annual International Women of Courage Awards ceremony at the White House.

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
The personal experiences of children born of war reflect the political and social structure during peacetime, which often exacerbates existing trauma through patriarchal oppressive tools. The stories of children born of war help us confront both our past and ourselves and motivate us to build a better and safer future through dialogue. The concept of converting individual or collective trauma into an activist-participatory movement necessitates adherence to the principle of dialogue at every level. The fundamental shift lies in establishing a secure environment where young people can foster trust in a society that often complicates their lives, rendering them despondent due to trauma and ethnically manipulative political contexts. From such transformation emerges the readiness of young individuals to collectively address broader audiences, thereby motivating society to engage in dialogue concerning their stories and ideas. 

Through the lecture, Ajna aims to provide students the opportunity to scrutinize their own roles and potential discriminatory practices that may further exacerbate the already difficult battle against injustice.

Spore Initiative (Hermannstr 86, 12051 Berlin)  In January, the International Court of Justice called “for the prevention of genocidal acts in Gaza” by Israel and overwhelmingly found it is "plausible" that Israel is indeed committing acts that violate the Convention on the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. And yet, German policy arguably criminalizes voices that refuse to be part of an intellectual machinery that enables the atrocities taking place in the name of national “Staatsraison”. 

This event is organized by a group of faculty and students at Bard College Berlin (BCB) and the University of the Arts (UdK). ​​It offers a forum for views on wars unfolding in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere, and brings together voices of students, scholars, writers, artists and activists who work in solidarity with Palestinian, Jewish and other minoritized groups across Germany. It also aims to think forward - towards new possibilities for collective resistance against policing and censorship.

Our event kicks off with an online lecture by Rashid Al Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, in conversation with independent journalist Hanno Hauenstein. This occasion celebrates the upcoming German translation of Khalidi’s The 100 Years’ War on Palestine. Over the following two days, students, activists, scholars and artists will partake in discussions around the themes of student activism, international solidarity, the politics of memory and more.

Friday, 26 April
18:00 Doors open
18:30 Keynote Speech Rashid Khalidi (on zoom)
respondent: Hanno Hauenstein

Saturday, 27 April
16:00-18:00 Workshop: The News we Want - speculative writing as media resistance
Hosted by Gruppe Wissenslücke.

Sunday, 28 April
10:00-11:30 Provincializing Germany and the Politics of Memory
Sarah El Bulbeisi, Dani Gal, Sami Khatib
11:45-13:15 Witnessing Atrocities: the Example of Sudan and other Case Studies
online/offline solidarity group
14:00-15:30 Where is the 5th International?: Creating Space for Resistance in the Midst of Atrocity
Student Contributions

The event is organized by Marion Detjen, Aysuda Kölemen, Hanan Toukan, and Tirdad Zolghadr

Lecture Hall  7:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
It has become commonplace to observe that we live in dark times. With the proliferation of irredentist wars, ethno-nationist patterns of organizing violence, and the revenant racial logics by which risk and protection are distributed, it seems we are living through a kind of Gramscian interregnum, redolent of the “morbid symptoms” of his time. But when did this crisis really begin? Like with all caesuras, the focus on the spectacular symptoms occludes the continuities by which historical techniques of governance are adapted to new conditions of social domination. Rather than understanding our historical moment as the breakdown of prevailing orders, and hence a return to violence, this talk will propose that what marks our time is an experimentation with the organization and localization of violence in the everyday.

Thinking with Sudan and Gaza as two places where the moral and ontological status extraordinary violence remains hotly debated, this talk proposes a larger set of questions about what it means that over the last decades, we have seen what Manuel Schwab calls the “enclosure of the everyday” by various globally distributed economies, from humanitarian assistance, which will be my main topic, to communications platforms, remittance networks, and payment spaces. As civil infrastructures that sustain pedestrian practices, these have not traditionally been seen as the focal point for understanding how violence is organized. Nevertheless, the talk will propose that the “enclosure of the everyday,” which entails significant and intimate-yet-speechless entanglement with the lives of others, constitutes a central driver of the “new new wars,” even as they descend into extraordinary depths of annihilating force. With an eye towards debates unfolding in Germany today, it will be shown that public memory must also be seen as one of these infrastructures.

Please register for the lecture through this Google form.

Manuel Schwab is a writer and professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. Working at the nexus between Economic and Political Anthropology, his work is concerned with valorization and securitization and their relation to humanitarian practice and the logics of military force. Drawing from seemingly unrelated social fields like public memory, practices of care, and accusations of supernatural force, he is interested in how these come to shape temporal and ethical imaginaries. He has worked in Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Germany, and the US. In addition to his work on value in the Sudanese context, he is in the early stages of a new research undertaking on the relationship between extractive economies and the new politics of “post-humanitarian” crisis management. Manuel’s work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In addition to his academic research, Manuel is finishing a Manuscript of speculative fiction in with an artist from Guinea, where he works at the nexus between experimental ethnography and fiction proper. The work began when he was a Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude 2019-2020.

Ulme35 (Ulmenallee 35, 14050 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Fighting Russian crimes and propaganda in Germany: What can Ukrainian and Syrian diasporas learn from each other?

This event is a panel talk between journalist Kristin Helberg, BCB alum Ameenah Sawwan, and Mariia Borysenko (NGO “Vitsche”); moderated by BCB student Yelizaveta Mamon. It will take place at Ulme35 (Ulmenallee 35, 14050 Berlin) in Westend.

The talk will focus on the parallels in Russia's warfare and propaganda in Syria and Ukraine, and what the civil societies of both diasporas can learn from each other. Civil society in diaspora has been organizing itself, documenting the crimes, and countering the propaganda. There are lessons to learn how to organize and create publicity, and what campaign strategies are helpful to denounce these crimes and achieve their criminal prosecution, in front of international courts as well as national courts on the grounds of the principle of universal jurisdiction.. In the past decade, both of the diasporas have become powerful engines for political and social justice, organizing themselves to document Russian crimes, undermine disinformation, and amplify their voices in the German informational landscape. In this Real Talk we will discuss Ukrainian and Syrian diaspora experiences, case studies and effective campaign strategies to denounce these crimes, raise public awareness and achieve their criminal prosecution.

No registration necessary.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Meet us in the W15 Cafe to hear the story of Passover and then join us for a scavenger hunt in the garden (including a prize for the winner!). Passover snacks will be served.

W15 Cafe  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This study explores the socio-demographic factors driving migration within the Kyrgyz Republic. The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered significant outward migration, raising concerns about its impact on the country's economic and national security. Dr. Meerim Djakypova from the American University of Central Asia delves into this critical issue, analyzing the link between unemployment, poverty, and social vulnerability with migration patterns.

By employing a comparative approach, Dr. Djakypova examines migration trends in the Kyrgyz Republic compared to other countries. This analysis informs the development of policy recommendations for effective migration management. Additionally, the presentation explores the potential demographic consequences, such as a gender imbalance and workforce decline, resulting from uncontrolled migration.

To register, send an email to [email protected]

Meerim A. Djakypova is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at the American University of Central Asia. She holds a PhD in Economics and Management of the National Economy, Bishkek, KR and a Master of Arts in Management from Webster University in Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on migration patterns and their impact on the Kyrgyz Republic's economy and social development. Dr. Djakypova has published research on migration, economic security, and poverty in Central Asia, and is a frequent speaker on migration issues in Kyrgyzstan and the region. She is a passionate advocate for evidence-based policymaking and her research has helped to inform policy debates on migration in Kyrgyzstan.

P24 Seminar Room 8  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Imperialism is back in our everyday vocabulary to describe Russian expansionism. Yet the theoretical contours of the term imperialism are notoriously hard to pin down and its analytical added value is often disputed. The term exists as a descriptor of government action to qualify Russia or the US as ‘imperialist’ states. It also denotes the structural logic of capitalism on the world scale which tends towards war, value extraction and the bifurcation of the world into core and peripheries.

In this paper, Prof. Dr. Kai Koddenbrock investigates this dual meaning of imperialism with a view to Germany’s history, policy, and political economy. He suggests a contemporary analysis of imperialism focusing on domestic state-capital relations, military violence, and the extraction of value from the Global South. Applying this troika of imperialism to German state-capital relations, the paper focuses on its corporate giants Volkswagen and BASF, recent shifts in security and economic policy as well as the quest for mineral supplies from the Global South and argue that Germany can be – with some qualifications - called an imperialist state. In conclusion the paper shows that imperialism as an analytical term allows to go beyond the overly generic term of capitalism and is uniquely placed to make sense of a more openly violent world engulfed in war and crisis.

This presentation is part of the Faculty Colloquium Series.

Kai Koddenbrock is a professor of political economy at Bard College Berlin. He is working on economic sovereignty and self-determination in the Global South and particularly on the role of the international monetary system and global and domestic financial markets in helping and constraining this quest. Located at the intersections of international relations and international political economy, he also works on geopolitics and geoeconomics and the new scramble for rare earths.

He co-founded with Ndongo Sylla and Maha ben Gadha the African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty conferences, which have been held in Tunis and Dakar in 2019 and 2022. He leads the Politics of Money Network with Benjamin Braun, funded by the German Research Council, and heads a research group at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth.

Kai has held academic positions at several German universities, worked for the United Nations in NYC, the World Food Programme in Rome, and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Sciences Po, University of Sussex, as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies and the École des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris.

He has contributed essays to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and to Jacobin and Soziopolis among others. His most recent academic articles are: "Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South" and "International financial subordination: a critical research agenda." He has recently edited Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance (Routledge), with Benjamin Braun, and African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in the 21st Century (Pluto Press), with Maha ben Gadha, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Fadhel Kaboub, and Ines Mahmood. His latest monograph was The practice of humanitarian intervention: Aid workers, agencies and institutions in the DR Congo (Routledge, 2015).

Kai tweets @kaikodden and his publications can be accessed through Google Scholar and on this PDF.

P24, Seminar Room 5  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Thinking of studying abroad in the Netherlands? Come meet colleagues from University College Utrecht, learn about academics, student life, and what awaits you during a study abroad semester. Faculty and staff are also welcome to join to learn more about the academic offerings at our Erasmus partner university, UCU.

BCB Factory (Eichenstrasse 43, 13156 Berlin)  5:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
We cordially invite you to the public exhibition of art works from this year’s graduating cohort.

The exhibition shows the outcomes of a two semester long creative research that students conducted as part of their senior thesis projects; it includes painting, film, theater and performance art, installation, video art, and creative writing.

Please join us and celebrate this special occasion!

Works by Fiona French, Gracie Kuppenbender, Hang Nguyen, Jiayao Gao, Kaitlyn Woodburn, Katie Lyle, Lena Brun, Selo Uğuzeş, Wanda Alvesová, Yensen LeBeau and Zoé Whiteman.

The exhibition opens at 5pm. Participatory performance by Wanda Alvesová at 6:30pm. Film screening by Yensen LeBeau at 8:00pm.

Lecture by Matthew Longo
P98a Lecture Hall (Platanenstraße 98a, 13156 Berlin)  7:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic—it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West.

Drawing on dozens of original interviews—including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary—Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls?

Register for the event through this Google Form.

Matthew Longo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. He is the author of two books: The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain (W. W. Norton, 2023) and The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen After 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

This semester's Senior Thesis Presentations are taking place from April 22 to May 10. The presentations are an essential step towards graduation for every senior, and they are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. 

Monday, April 22 | 12:45pm-1:15pm, Lecture Hall
Sarah Wolbach, "The New Marriage Plot: Sally Rooney and the Legacy of Jane Austen"

Monday, April 29 | 11:30am-12:00pm, P24 SR 8
Camila Rosales, "Reconceiving Spaces of Consumption: A Look into Interactions in a Berlin Mall"

Monday, April 29 | 11:30am-12:00pm, Lecture Hall
Ana Mihajlovska, "Empty Shelves: Causes of the Toilet Paper Shortage During the Covid-19 Crisis in the U.S."

Monday, April 29 | 12:00pm-12:30pm, P24 SR 8
Tay Mitchell, "Multiculturalism and the Promotion of Yiddishism through Labour Unions: An Archival Research"

Monday, April 29 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, Lecture Hall
Olivia Thayer, "Structures of Change: The Breaking of Binaries in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook"

Monday, April 29 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P24 SR 8
Renata Álvarez León, "Reclaiming the Capital: Women's Reappropriation of Urban Public Spaces in Mexico City"

Monday, April 29 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, P24 SR 8
Carla Schwingler, "(In)Accessible Education: A Case Study of Bard College Berlin"

Monday, April 29 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, Lecture Hall
Jasmine Ahmed, "Making Waves in the Pacific: Examining the Reasons behind the Chinese Naval Build Up; and the Potential US response"

Monday, April 29 | 1:30pm-2:00pm, Lecture Hall
Aisha Khurram, "Education as a Lifeline; The Imperative of Including Education as a Humanitarian Response in Afghanistan"

Monday, April 29 | 2:00pm-2:30pm, Lecture Hall
Ayman Ndam Njoya, "Navigating Modernity: Assessing the Leverage of Traditional Authorities within a Republic and Decentralized Territorial Collectivities "

Monday, April 29 | 2:30pm-3:00pm, Lecture Hall
Sultana Taib, "The Socio-Economic Implications of Policy Reforms in Higher Education: A Case of the UK"

Tuesday, April 30 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, Lecture Hall
Mouadh Elarbi, "Microfinance in North Africa: Learning from Past Failures"

Tuesday, April 30 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, Lecture Hall
Anđela Despotović, "In Search of a Mother’s Tongue: Dinçer Güçyeter’s Unser Deutschlandmärchen as a Writing in 'Postmonolingual' Condition"

Thursday, May 2 | 11:30am-12:00pm, W70 SR 10
Eve Sanchez, "A Critical Inquiry into Israel’s Mobilization of Happiness Discourse to Stimulate Normalization of Occupation: Exploring the Relationship Between Governments and National Happiness"

Thursday, May 2 | 11:30am-12:00pm, W15 Cafe
Elma Talić, "Where Did The Enemy Go? Performing LAIBACH In Post-Ideological Era"

Thursday, May 2 | 12:00pm-12:30pm, W70 SR 10
Milica Vučić, "Democracy in Crisis: a Historical Analysis from the Time of Kemalist Reforms to the AKP and How Secularism Became the Defining Force of Turkish Politics"

Thursday, May 2 | 12:00pm-12:30pm, W15 Cafe
Wanda Alvesová, "Staging Authenticity: An Exploration of ‘Real People’ in She She Pop’s Theatre"

Thursday, May 2 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P24 SR 2
Lara Habboub, "The Algorithmic Oracle: Decoding the Human-Machine Feedback Loop of Value Capture"

Thursday, May 2 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P24 SR8
Andrea Kalife de la Garza, "A Symbolic Disorder: Language & Addiction"

Tuesday, May 2 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, K24 SR 11
Andrej Jovičić, "Jugonostalgija: The Response to the Aftermath of Genocidal and Economic Violence in Post-Conflict and Post-Transition Bosnia and Herzegovina"

Thursday, May 2 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, K24 SR 11
Salma Barakat, "Settler Colonialism in Kashmir and Palestine: Exploring Themes of Ecocide, Memoricide, and Spaciocide"

Thursday, May 2 | 1:30pm-2:00pm, P24 SR 8
Jacob Horack, "Artificial Cognition: An Ethics of the Creation of Minds"

Friday, May 3 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, Lecture Hall
Maia Angela Villarica, "Democracy and Disinformation: Addressing the Problem of Post-Truth in Social Media"

Friday, May 3 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, Lecture Hall
Harri Thomas, "Peace After Parapolitics: The Red Right Hand of Liberal Democracy and its Challenges for Peacebuilding"

Friday, May 3 | 1:30pm-2:00pm, Lecture Hall
Isabel Castro Dominguez, "Safeguarding Indigenous Cultural Heritage in the Face of Land Grabbing in the Colombian Amazon"

Monday, May 6 | 11:30am-12:00pm, Lecture Hall
Hang Nguyen, "Echoed Narratives: Transnational and Transgenerational Memories of Former Vietnamese Contract Workers in Germany"

Monday, May 6 | 12:00pm-12:30pm, Lecture Hall
Julia Mazal, "Redefining 'Arte Popular' in Mexico. Past and Present"

Monday, May 6 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P98 SR 2
Selo Uğuzeş, "Aesthetics, Politics, and Life: Autonomous Zones as Places of Cultural Production"

Monday, May 6 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P24 SR 8
Lilith Gao, "Limits of Universality: Reassessing Xu Bing's Language Experiments"

Monday, May 6 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, Lecture Hall
Ibrar Mirzai, "Energy, Infrastructure, and Sustainability, Mapping Ukraine's Post-War Reconstruction with EU Alignment"

Monday, May 6 | 1:00-1:30pm, P24 SR 8
Zoe Whiteman, "Metamorphic Digestion: The Aesthetic’s of Fear in La Casa Lobo"

Monday, May 6 | 1:30pm-2:00pm, Lecture Hall
Kai Bradley-Gutiérrez de Terán, "Consitutional Barriers: Evaluating the Efficiency of the German Constitution in Safeguarding Against Fascist Resurgence"

Tuesday, May 7 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, K24 SR11
Rylee Mora, "Historical Narratives of Artificial Intelligence and their Ethical Implications"

Tuesday, May 7 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P98 SR 1
Abdullah Zahidi, "The European Union's Regulatory Framework for Crypto-Assets: The Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation"

Tuesday, May 7 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P98 SR 2
Yensen LeBeau, "The Cost of Being Known: How Overexposure to Media Online Leads to Apathetic and Extreme Identity"

Tuesday, May 7 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, K24 SR 12
Héctor Miró Beltrán, "Byung-Chul Han’s Catalunya: An Understanding of the Catalan Independence Movement through Han's Psychopolitics"

Tuesday, May 7 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, P98 SR 2
Izzy Monroe, "The Subject of Accountability: Bridging Critical Theory and Transformative Justice Practice"

Tuesday, May 7 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, K24 SR 11
Maria Castillo Gomez, "Under the Banner of Peace and Friendship: Latin American Intellectuals Interpreting Soviet Cultural Diplomacy at the 1957 Moscow World Youth Festival"

Tuesday, May 7 | 1:00pm, 1:30pm, P24 SR 8
Leonie Hüppe, "More-than-Human Storytelling and Interspecies Communication in Richard Powers' The Overstory"

Tuesday, May 7 | 1:30pm-2:00pm, K24 SR 11
Gracie Kuppenbender, "Embracing Modernity: An Exploration of Young Indigenous Artists' Search for Cultural Preservation"

Tuesday, May 7 | 3:45pm-4:15pm, K24 SR 12
Grace Klein, "Unveiling the Layers: Deconstructing Ethnic and Racial Hierarchies in Zionist Thought"

Wednesday, May 8 | 10:00am-10:30am, Lecture Hall
Imogen Hilton-Barber, "Russia's Invasion of Ukraine and South Africa's 'Neutrality'"

Wednesday, May 8 | 10:00am-10:30am, W15 Cafe
Katie Lyle, "The Connection Between Death and Nightmare in the Art of Bosch and Redon"

Wednesday, May 8 | 10:30am-11:00am, W15 Cafe
Kaitlyn Woodburn, "Colonizing The Stars: Space Age Aesthetics and High Frontier Visions of Utopia"

Wednesday, May 8 | 11:00am-11:30am, W15 Cafe
Elena Eßer, "Examining The Difference Between Counterterrorism Policies In Right-Wing Extremism And Islamic Extremism - A Case Study Of Germany"

Wednesday, May 8 | 11:00am-11:30am, P24 SR 8
Lena Brun, "Stories for a Better World: The Interaction Between Jewish Storytelling and Speculative Fiction"

Wednesday, May 8 | 11:30am-12:00pm, W15 Cafe
Júlia Tamási, "From 'Existing Socialism' to Existing Capitalism - What Can we Learn from Hungary's Transition"

Wednesday, May 8 | 12:00pm-12:30pm, P24 SR 8
Lily Ellerbrock, "Soft Facts of Education: A Student's Guide to Creativity"

Wednesday, May 8 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, P24 SR 8
Fiona French, "Empowered Mothering: Painterly Expressions of Motherhood in Contemporary Art"

Wednesday, May 8 | 12:30pm-1:00pm, K24 SR 11
Christin Alhalabi, "Peddling, Assimilation and Racial Democracy, Levantine Arab Memory in Rio de Janeiro"

Wednesday, May 8 | 1:00pm-1:30pm, Lecture Hall
Drinlon Madani, "The Different Effects of Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation on Employees' Job Engagement and Satisfaction"

Wednesday, May 8 | 2:30pm-3:00pm, P98 SR 2
Jasmin Rossi, "Policy Analysis of the Government Subsidized Psychotherapy in Finland - Who is Eligible and Why?"

Friday, May 10 | 9:15am-09:45am, P98 SR 2
Bianca Hopkins

Friday, May 10 | 9:45am-10:15am, P98 SR 2
Deborah Cesar Oliveira, "To What Extent do Different Countries' Data Regulations Limit Interpol's Role in Combating Cross-Border Financial Crimes? A Case Study on the United States"

Friday, May 10 | 1:15pm-1:45pm, P98 SR 2
Attila Noyan, "Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (2001-2021) and the Hazara Genocide"

Friday, May 10 | 2:00pm-2:30pm, P98 SR 2
Frances Grimm, "From the Mine Wars to a Just Transition: A Marxist Analysis of the UMWA"

Online
Daria Khomiakova, "The Arctic - A Political Struggle for Sustainable Development"

Bard College Berlin, Kuckhoff Str. 24  2:00 pm – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
On behalf of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) we warmly invite you to a hands-on workshop titled: Open Soil Research. This workshop is about experimental learning, muddy hands, and curious minds! Far more than just the dirt under our feet, soil is a truly complex and dynamic ecosystem. It is a constantly changing mix of minerals, living organisms, decaying organic matter, air, and water. It is the living skin of our planet, allowing new forms of life to come into being.

Guided by workshop facilitators Antonia von Schöning (HU Berlin) and Julian Chollet (mikroBIOMIK Society), the participants will collect samples and – using binocular and transmitted light microscopes – observe tiny creatures as they turn organic waste into fertile soil. Together, we will explore questions such as: Who lives in our soil? What infrastructures permeate the underground? How do organic, technical, and human beings co-exist and form complex soil ecologies?

Important Notes:
The number of participants is limited, so please sign up for the workshop using this Google Form. If you have any questions about the event, please email BCB faculty Janina Schabig at [email protected].

We hope to see many of you there!
Agata Lisiak & Janina Schabig
EHCN representatives at BCB

10:00 am – 4:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This event is for admitted students only.

Congratulations on your admission!

We're delighted to invite you to get to know Bard College Berlin on Admitted Students Day. Join us for a day on our campus where you can meet fellow admitted students, attend a seminar with our professors, meet our staff, and hear from our current students about life as a Bard Berliner.

Register now through your applicant portal to decide which seminar you'll attend and begin planning your trip to Berlin! 
 

Kuckhoffstr. 24 (K24), seminar room 11  4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1
Sandy Kaltenborn, housing activist and co-founder of the rent and urban policy initiative Kotti & Co, will give a talk as part of the course Civic Engagement and Engaged Research: Berlin Lab.

Starting in 2012, the tenant’s initiative Kotti & Co turned a summer street fair into a permanent protest camp at Kottbusser Tor (Kotti) in Berlin Kreuzberg. Their protest hut, called Gecekondu, became a central platform to render tenants’ concerns visible and to make the struggle of many accessible and concrete. At the initiative's core were demands that opposed an infinite raise in rent for privately owned subsidized housing declared in 2011. Kotti & Co was impactful in shifting media attention and academic research to the structural problem of social housing and the city’s increasingly pressing housing question, and, most importantly, putting it back onto Berlin’s political agenda. On 17 September 2021, after 10 years of hard, passionate work, the great demand for the (re)communalization of houses was met by the state-owned housing associations, a total of 14,500 apartments around Kotti and in the rest of Berlin. Sandy Kaltenborn will talk about urban policy and neighborhood mobilization since 1990, and the beginning of a housing movement.

Please register via email to Faiza Lynar: [email protected]

Sandy Kaltenborn, actually Alexander Sandy Paul Omar Abdullah Kaltenborn, is a communication designer and runs the design studio image-shift, which operates in social, cultural, artistic, as well as political and urban contexts. Kaltenborn has been living in Berlin since 1990, is co-founder of the rent and urban policy initiative Kotti & Co, and has been actively engaged in socio-political matters for many years. Currently, he teaches as a visiting professor at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle.

Lecture Hall  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The lecture offers an insight into the work of “Freunde des Syrischen Volks e.V.” (FdSV), a non-profit organization founded in Berlin in 2014 aiming at bringing accountability and transitional justice to the victims of the Syrian Civil War. FdSV engages in projects that empower Syrian communities and give them agency in the field of legal development and accountability for core crimes committed during the Syrian conflict. In recent years, FdSV contributed to the arrest and conviction of over a dozen perpetrators in EU countries.

Dr. Usahma Felix Darrah is the managing director of FdSV. He studied political economy, public law and Islamic Studies in Damascus and Heidelberg before working as a lecturer and speech writer for over 10 years. He’s been a consultant in Berlin since 2013.

Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall (Platanenstr 98a, 13156 Berlin)  3:30 pm – 5:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The initiative Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen convinced almost 60% of Berliners to vote for the socialization of large profit-oriented real estate companies. At its peak, thousands were active in the referendum. There is still an active neighborhood team in almost every Berlin district. How does the initiative organize the involvement of so many activists? What is the relationship with local tenants' initiatives that are active around specific problems in their houses and estates? And what role does the concept of "organizing" play in this?

These questions will be discussed by Kalle Kunkel, who is active in the AG Starthilfe of Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen.

K24, SR11  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The BCB Internship Program gives you the opportunity to gain an off-campus workplace experience in a field that interests you. You can work 10-13h/week in an internship while also exploring various questions regarding work in the internship seminar taught by Agata Lisiak and Florian Duijsens. Most internships are generally unpaid, but you can earn academic credits through the internship seminar.

If you are a current or upcoming third-year student and curious about BCB’s Internship Program and the opportunity to gain practical experience alongside your studies while interning for an organization/individual in Berlin, please save the date.

7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This online lecture by Maria Avxentevskaya will take place over Zoom.

Early modern medical theories and practices transitioned from perusing ancient texts to processing observations. Keen attention to the human body and its mechanics, standardized training for physicians and midwives, as well as various popular healing methods, created a rich palette of medical knowledge and experience. Many practitioners addressed female health and encouraged women to learn more about their bodies. However, women were mostly limited to practicing medicine within the household. We will discuss the promises and pitfalls of early medicine for women as part of gender relations in science.

View the two readings for the lecture here and here.

Maria Avxentevskaya specializes in the premodern history of science and medicine and the longue durée history of scientific communication, including humanism, semiotics, translation, rhetoric, and networking. Her research has been supported by the Max Planck Society, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the Warburg Institute. Maria is currently working on the monograph Rhetoric and Persuasion in Early Modern English Science. Her publications include the forthcoming volume Signs and Signification in a Global Comparative Perspective, co-edited with Glenn W. Most (Brill, 2024) and Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation, co-edited with Katja Krause and Dror Weil (Routledge, 2022). Maria has taught science communication, early modern science, and knowledge in translation at Bard College Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Sydney. Her science journalism pieces have been republished by the Independent and Scientific American. 

Online (Zoom)  7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
On behalf of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) we would like to share a new exciting opportunity: research stipends for BCB students pursuing independent experimental humanities projects in the summer of 2024. 

We welcome applications from students who answer "yes" to any of the following questions: Are you already working on an experimental humanities project that could benefit from additional financial support?  Are you hoping to start an independent experimental humanities research project this summer? Maybe one that could develop into a creative component?  Have you been inspired by EHCN activities on campus and talking to friends about starting a new experimental humanities initiative? This offer is directed at current first-, second-, and third-year BCB students who will be returning to campus after the summer break. Please kindly note that we have a limited number of stipends to award.

Students can apply via this form and are welcome to attend a Zoom info session on 15 April, 7pm at this link.

The application deadline is 30 April. 

Hybrid (Zoom and K24 SR11)  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This is a hybrid lecture by Nikolay Koposov open to the public. Register to watch via Zoom here. The in-person location is K24 seminar room 11 (Kuckhoffstraße 24, 13156 Berlin).

Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a joint venture between Bard College (New York) and Saint Petersburg State University, was founded in 1998. It developed from the faculty seminar “Critique of Social Sciences,” which started its work a year earlier. The goal of the seminar was to explore the role of social sciences as the basis of the then-dominant democratic ideology. Liberal education looked at that time as a critical aspect of Russia’s (and, more broadly, Eastern Europe’s) transition to democracy and as a possible solution to the problems created by the social sciences’ increasing specialization and their declining ideological effectiveness in the changing world.

Since then, Russia has become a dictatorship and has declared war on democracy domestically and internationally. Smolny has survived primarily as several projects in exile. The development of liberal education in some other East European countries (most notably, Hungary) has also been obstructed by the rise of right-wing populism and the emergence of neo-authoritarian regimes. However, the road to unfreedom has been largely paved by the internal evolution of democratic ideology, social sciences, and liberal education. The paper will discuss this evolution using the example of historiography, which, in recent decades, has become increasingly dependent on memory and identity politics promoted by both anti-globalist ethno-populist groups on the right and the anti-discrimination minority movements on the left.

Nikolay Koposov is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice at the School of History and Sociology and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA). Previously, he worked at Johns Hopkins University, Emory University, Helsinki University, and École des hautes études en sciences sociales. In 1998-2009, he was Founding Dean of Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a joint venture of Saint-Petersburg State University and Bard College (New York). His academic interests include modern European intellectual history, post-Soviet Russia, historiography, historical memory, and comparative politics of the past. He has authored six books, including Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and De l’imagination historique (Éditions de l’ÉHÉSS, 2009). He has also edited several collective volumes and translations.

Part of the Life After BCB event series
Lecture Hall, Platanenstraße 98A, 13156 Berlin  10:00 am – 11:00 am CET/GMT+1
Whether you are graduating this semester or are still in the midst of your studies, come find out more about what BCB Career Services has to offer!

Together with the Senior Research Colloquium we will learn about the BCB Career website with a monthly Career Newsletter, a Resource Guide, and CV & cover letter templates. You will also find out more about our personalized career counseling; post-grad options in Berlin, Germany and abroad; deadlines for MA & PhD applications; tips on how to overcome networking anxiety, and much more.

This event is part of Student Life's Preparing for Life After BCB event series.

The Factory  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Hear ye, hear ye! The Open Mic Night is back for the last time this year, and for the last time with Yensen LeBeau as the host. Finishing up the thesis is hard work, and given that the due date is at 3pm on April 12th too, we want to honor the graduates for all their hard work with a spot on the throne. Gowns, crowns, and capes welcome and encouraged. Anyone is allowed to perform - bring a talent, song, reading, stand-up routine, or anything else that you'd like!

If you would like to perform, you can sign up to do so through this form, as well as in-person night of.

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
48 Hours of BCB is a film challenge in which students must make teams and will have 48 hours to create a short film.Your team will have only 48h to write, shoot, and edit a short movie. On Friday, April 12th team representatives will gather in the lecture hall for the opening ceremony and receive a random genre and a topic. Then 48h begin: create your movies throughout the weekend and submit on Sunday night. Next week our jury will be rating the films and winners get prizes. The closing ceremony is the following Friday (April 19th, 18:00-21:00).

Register here.

Organized by students Anna Shafranska and Maya Ponomarenko.
 

K30 Study Room  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Last month, a fire broke out in the refugee camp of Tegel, where Ukrainians, who have fled after the Russian invasion, were staying. As a result of fire, many private belongings, from clothes to essential documents, burned down. BCB's Ï Club (Ukrainian Club) wishes to raise funds to cover the costs of translators and document restoration, without which it is impossible to do anything.

The Ï Club will be selling some delicious goods and pastries, so come by and help raise awareness and provide support.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The Student Life Committee and the DEI Office invite you to a Community Forum to discuss accessibility-related issues at BCB and to learn more about the process for receiving disability-related accommodations.

Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall (Platanenstr. 98A, 13156)  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The BCB chapter of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network together with BCB courses 'Game changers in 20th and 21st century Art,' 'Introduction to Critical and Cultural Theory,' and 'The Art of Making Videos' has the pleasure to invite you to a film screening and artist talk with Berlin-based filmmaker Maya Schweizer.

Maya Schweizer's cinematic works revolve around questions of history, identity, and memory. Urban spaces as interfaces of individual and collective modes of action are often the starting point of her observation. In her perception of these places and spaces, she uncovers social realities, inscribed narratives, and overlapping histories. 

Maya will show three of her short films: A Tall Tale (16'30''), Voices and Shells (18'20''), and L’étoile de mer (The Starfish) (11'). The screening will be accompanied by a Q&A with the artist moderated by BCB faculty Clio Nicastro, Dorothea von Hantelmann, and Janina Schabig.

All participants are warmly invited to a reception with wine and snacks following the event.

P24 Seminar Room 8  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Aiming to remedy the lacuna in the interdisciplinary mobility and migration literature, the main objective of the present research project is to examine Central Asian migrant women in Berlin through their commuting experience on public transport. Dr. Cholpon Turdalieva aims to address several issues and questions: To what extent is Central Asian women's integration in the host city influenced by daily commuting on different modes of public transit? How are women's employment, studying, income, and kinship networks realized or imposed in Germany's ethnocultural communities and other diverse multiethnic groups?

Following these questions, Turdalieva's research will be geared to produce academic and practical insights into the intersection of gendered mobility, migration, and public transit. We argue that Central Asian women migrants realize their socio-economic, educational, professional, and other personal and public goals in Germany by navigating their mobility, presumably through public transit transport. In this vein, we may think that automobility technologies, particularly the well-developed public transit in Berlin, empower Central-Asian migrant women by allowing them to move through different public spaces and traverse physical and social boundaries with greater ease and practice.

Cholpon Turdalieva is a Professor in Anthropology Program at American University of Central Asia. In 2004-05, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington; in 2004-2008, she became an OSI Fellow and researched the Western travel literature about Central Asia. During 2016-2012, she was a recipient of the Volkswagen Foundation grant and defended her PhD dissertation at Humboldt University. Currently, she is doing her research on “Gendered Mobilities of Central Asian Females in Germany through the Perspectives of Public Transport”. This research is supported by the OSUN Sabbatical Fellowship Program.

This presentation is part of the Faculty Colloquium Series.

Online (Zoom)  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This lecture by the Head of the Witness Support Office at the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina will take place on April 8th at 5:30pm.

Students, faculty, and alumni are welcome to join this online lecture organized within Prof. Dr. Ajla Škrbić's course 'Sexual Violence, Gender and War'. Zoom link (Meeting ID: 838 975 1341).

Sexual violence is one of the most serious violations of human rights, often resulting in lasting psychological and social consequences not only for the surviving victim but also for those close to them and their entire community. Testimonies from victims frequently trigger a resurgence of symptoms, irrespective of one's inherent coping mechanisms. The re-emergence of these symptoms during testimony can be as vivid and distressing as immediately after the assault itself. Consequently, comprehensive support from all actors involved in criminal proceedings remains crucial.

In this lecture, Ms. Alma Taso Deljković will share her insights into working with survivors of wartime sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing upon experiences from the Bosnian judicial system, we can glean insights into the daily challenges faced by witness support officers. Navigating the psychological aftermath of trauma, maintaining a professional yet empathetic approach towards victims and witnesses, and possessing a nuanced understanding of the legal procedures all intersect in this context. By delving into these experiences, students and other audiences will gain valuable insights that can deepen their understanding of this critical issue.

Alma Taso Deljković is the Head of the Witness Support Office of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and has been working with witnesses/victims since 2005. In addition to providing direct support to witnesses at the Court, she strongly advocates for the development and promotion of the witness support system in the judiciary in Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond. She promotes the rights of witnesses/victims and improves dialogue and communication with local communities regarding the needs and rights of witnesses/victims. In her daily work as a psychologist and trained trauma and family counselor, she uses her knowledge and skills to help witnesses navigate the process of testifying as painlessly as possible for their psychophysical state. Taso Deljković has been an educator for many years and is the author of several professional and scientific articles in the field of psychology, support, and protection of witnesses and victims. From 2015 to 2018, she served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Fund for Victims at the International Criminal Court for Bosnia and Herzegovina. She also acts as an independent expert on issues of support and protection of witnesses and victims in criminal processes and beyond. Taso Deljković is a PhD candidate in the field of psychology at the University of Sarajevo and an international justice affiliate fellow of Georgetown Law University, Washington. She lives and works in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bard College Berlin, W15 Cafe (Waldstr. 15, Berlin 13156)  7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for an Alumni Talk with Dr. Denise Kripper (AY ‘09), a translation studies scholar, literary translator, and Bard College Berlin/ECLA alumna. As an associate professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College in Chicago, USA, and the translation editor at Latin American Literature Today, Denise will share insights into her remarkable journey, emphasizing the impact of her experiences at BCB/ECLA on her career. The event will close with a Q&A, where she will provide insights about building a career in academia and valuable perspectives on navigating the world post-graduation. Facilitated by Prof. Dr. Matthias Hurst and Dr. David Hayes.

Please register for the discussion through this Google Form.

Part of the Life After BCB event series
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm CET/GMT+1
You did it, but now what? Come learn about how to wrap up your time at BCB and transition to your next adventure, be that in Berlin or across the globe.

In this session we will cover: How to wrap up your academic time at BCB What bureaucratic paperwork you need to take care of Job seekers visa and residence permit questions
This event is part of Student Life's Preparing for Life After BCB event series.

Student Life invites you to attend our series of programs aimed at supporting students as you make plans for post-graduation life. 

Alumni Career Talk: Aurora Energy Research with Lucari Jordan (Spring '21)
Date: Tuesday, March 5
Time: 11:45am-12:45pm
Location: Lecture Hall
Join us for an Alumni Talk with Lucari Jordan '21, an EPST graduate from New Mexico, who started their career in the energy and economics sector in Berlin with the goal of eventually working at the intersection of the power industry and regulatory institutions. Lucari will share their experience at their current company, Aurora Energy Research, with BCB students: what they have found helpful for entry into the Berlin job market, and what they have found to be the most important qualities of a company in the early stages of building a career. We will also hear more about Aurora's Graduate Analyst Program, a traineeship which lasts 18-21 months, and allows you to get a perspective of the three main departments of the company (Advisory, Commercial, and Research) by completing a rotation working in each.

Bureaucracy in Reverse: Residence Permits, Health Insurance, Paperwork, and More!
Date: Wednesday, April 3
Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm
Location: Online
You did it, but now what? Come learn about how to wrap up your time at BCB and transition to your next adventure, be that in Berlin or across the globe. In this session we will cover: How to wrap up your academic time at BCB What bureaucratic paperwork you need to take care of Job seekers visa and residence permit questions
BCB Career Services Workshop for Graduating Students
Date: Monday, April 15
Time: 10:00am-11:30am
Location: Lecture Hall
Whether you are graduating this semester or are still in the midst of your studies, come find out more about what BCB Career Services has to offer! Together with the Senior Research Colloquium we will learn about the BCB Career website with a monthly Career Newsletter, a Resource Guide, and CV & cover letter templates. You will also find out more about our personalized career counseling; post-grad options in Berlin, Germany and abroad; deadlines for MA & PhD applications; tips on how to overcome networking anxiety, and much more.

  K24, Seminar Room 11  3:45 pm – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
As a part of the Civic Engagement Network Course, and the Climate Teach-In, the BCB community will gather to watch the end product of a year-long project of Abdullah Naseer's: a documentary short film, titled Silent Storm, which touches upon the intersection between mental health and climate disaster in Pakistan.

KulturMarktHalle (Hanns-Eisler-Straße 93, 10409 Berlin)  7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
What does it mean to be a global citizen? This question has gained increasing salience as the world has become more globalized. With globalization, new problems surface that cut across national borders and fall outside the jurisdiction of individual nation-states. The event encourages a discussion to critically examine the concept of global citizenship, to investigates how the idea might work in practice, and how it is linked to human rights.

BCB professor Dr. Nassim Abi Ghanem has been invited to speak at the neighborhood center KulturMarktHalle in Prenzlauerberg alongside Blaise Baneh Mbuh, founder of Bamenda Film School in Cameroon. Nassim Abi Ghanem's research focus is on peace and conflict, non-state actors’ involvement in international politics, conflict management and peacebuilding, and social network theory. He recently taught the OSUN Network Collaborative Course Global Citizenship.

To register for the event, email [email protected].

This event is part of the 2024 Pankow Weeks against Racism (Wochen gegen Rassismus) event program.
For more info:
https://www.pankow-gegen-rassismus.de/woche-1-2/programm-2024
https://www.kulturmarkthalle.berlin/erdenbewohner-innen-festival-2023-24
https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/education/courses/network-collaborative-courses/global-citizenship

K24 SR11  4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Renée Eloundou will give a talk as part of the course Civic Engagement and Engaged Research: Berlin Lab. Please register via email to [email protected].

The association Decolonize Berlin e.V. is committed to the critical examination of the history and present of colonialism and racism, to the recognition and reappraisal of colonial injustice, and to decolonization throughout society. In 2019, the association emerged from a civil society network of Black, diasporic, postcolonial, and development groups in Berlin. This alliance continues their work and is supported by the commitment of more than 100 individuals. Renée Eloundou will give us a glimpse into the work of office.

Renée Eloundou heads the Coordination Office for a city-wide concept to come to terms with Berlin's colonial past. As part of the association Decolonize Berlin and in cooperation with civil society organizations, administration and politics, the coordination office develops a concept for a comprehensive social confrontation with the colonial past and its effects on today's society.

This event is part of the Pankow Weeks Against Racism.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The DEI Office welcomes you to attend this Community Forum focused on discussing cultural and religious diversity and what it means to you and to our community, both at BCB and in Berlin.

Online (Zoom)  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
In this talk Prof. Christopher Lynch will present the core findings of his new book Machiavelli on War (Cornell University Press, 2023). The talk draws out the implications of Machiavelli’s assertion that a prince should make the art of war his exclusive concern. To understand this assertion, readers must consider the possibility that Machiavelli has in mind both actual physical warfare and intellectual or philosophical warfare, with the result that his thought must be regarded as even more philosophically radical than is generally believed.
Zoom link.

Register here.

Christopher Lynch is Professor of Political Science at Missouri State University and head of the Department of Political Science. He has served as a senior adviser at the US State Department. He is the editor and translator of Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli and the coeditor of Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought.

Bard College Berlin (Lecture Hall), Platanenstr. 98A, 13156 Berlin  7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
American democracy takes off with the profoundly ambiguous phrase "We the people . . . " But who are "the people?" A motley collection of individuals, micro-communities, and macro-communities? Or a unified entity, national (das Volk), religious, or otherwise? Though it’s easy to define the word democracy as the power of the people, the definition doesn’t get us very far. The fragility of the democratic idea has much to do with the insecurity of democratic experience.

In this lecture, Michael Steinberg will argue, first, that democracy needs to be defined and historicized according to the principle of plurality and, second, that participation in a polity defined by plurality can be understood as a function of affect as well as contract—the affective dimension of what Avishai Margalit has called "thin relations." Third, where there is affect there is also the unconscious. Democratic affect needs to be understood, with the help of insights from psychoanalysis, to allow enough room for the unconscious and its manifestations, including the arts.

Register for the lecture here.

Michael P. Steinberg is the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, and Professor of Music and German Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. From 2016 to 2018 he served as president of the American Academy in Berlin. At Brown he served as the founding director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities (2005-2015) and as Vice Provost for the Arts (2015-16). He was member of the Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers ad Institutes (CHCI) between 2006 and 2016 and serves as a board member of Bard College Berlin as well as the Barenboim-Said Foundation USA. His books include The Afterlife of Moses: Exile, Democracy, Renewal (Stanford, 2022), The Trouble with Wagner (Chicago, 2018) as well as the edited volume Makers of Jewish Modernity (Princeton, 2016; winner of the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction); Listening to Reason: Culture, Music, and Subjectivity in 19th - Century Music (Princeton, 2004), and The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Cornell, 2000), of which the German edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele; Anton Pustet Verlag, 2000) won Austria's Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001.

Educated at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, he has been a visiting professor at these two schools as well as at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and National Tsing-hua University in Taiwan. He was a member of the Cornell University Department of History between 1988 and 2005; a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin in 2003 and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2015-16. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Between 2009 and 2013 he served as dramaturg on a co-production of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at the Berlin State Opera and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. He was curator of the exhibition “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling” at the German Historical Museum in Berlin (April – September 2022).

P24 Seminar Room 8  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This presentation will feature recent paintings and drawings from two series that have emerged in John Kleckner's Berlin studio since the COVID-19 pandemic. One is a group of blurred landscapes with meticulously rendered sticks and colorful shapes floating in the foreground; the other is a series of stippled, ink self-portraits framed by flora and fungi. John Kleckner will trace the development of these artworks, exploring their themes of nature, solitude, mimesis, fragmentation, juxtaposition, and the passing of time. The audience will gain an understanding of John Kleckner's artistic practice as it has evolved over 20 years, leading up to pieces currently in progress. The actual art objects will be on display for close examination and critique.

John Kleckner is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, and collage and a professor of Studio Arts, Painting, & Drawing at Bard College Berlin. John is known for making finely detailed paintings, drawings, and collages that use mimesis, fragmentation, juxtaposition, synecdoche, and stylistic clashing to explore ideas and feelings about nature, resilience, solitude, perception, and balance. He has exhibited his artwork professionally since 2003, presenting 11 solo exhibitions at galleries in Athens, Berlin, Los Angeles, Milan, Paris, Palermo, and Stockholm. His works are featured in prominent collections including, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Magasin 3 Konsthalle in Stockholm, Deste Foundation in Athens, the Miettinen Collection in Berlin, and the Saatchi Collection in London. He has exhibited in institutions such as the Athens Biennial in Greece, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Castrum Peregrini in Amsterdam, CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain in Bordeaux, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Lissone, Kunstraum Innsbruck, the Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, the Riso Museo d’Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia in Palermo, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2021 he received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant, and in 2022 was among 3 finalists for the 26th Wilhelm Morgner Prize for painting in Soest, Germany. John has been teaching at Bard College Berlin since 2013.

This presentation is part of the Faculty Colloquium Series.

2:00 pm – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
All members of the BCB community are invited to join the BCB Badminton Club's Spring Tournament at SPOK. Come together as students, faculty, and staff for an afternoon of friendly competition, sportsmanship, and camaraderie. Whether you're a seasoned badminton player or a beginner looking for some fun, we encourage everyone to join us. Type: Doubles (regardless of gender).
The deadline for registration is March 14, 2024, so be sure to secure your spot early. Register here.

W15 Cafe  5:45 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Get together for the BCB community Iftar. Join as we welcome the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. There will be a short talk on the significance of Ramadan followed by food being served. We hope to see you there!

W16 Learning Commons  4:30 pm – 5:30 pm CET/GMT+1
A workshop dedicated to understand the stages of writing and the importance of the generative stage for writing. The focus will be to generate a topic and/or possible main ideas and establish potential connections for midterm essays and assignments.

W16, Learning Commons  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
"Abendbrot" is your chance to improve your German skills in a fun and casual setting. If you are hesitant to speak the language or just want to practice in a relaxed environment, this is the place to be. We meet every other Wednesday of the month at 7:30pm, and you are welcome to join us anytime. At Abendbrot, we play games, enjoy a meal together, and simply hang out. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner or more advanced in German; everyone is welcome. Come along, make mistakes, and improve your German with a friendly group of language enthusiasts.

Bard College Berlin W15 Cafe (Waldstraße 15, 13156 Berlin)  12:00 pm – 2:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join BCB's Office of Civic Engagement to get a taste of home from the Neukölln-based association Give Something Back to Berlin at the Bard College Berlin campus. This event is part of the 2024 Pankow Weeks Against Racism program. View the rest of BCB's Pankow Weeks Against Racism events here.

The event centers the role that food plays in creating a sense of home and belonging. We will talk about how sharing food builds communities and how food can be a part of building more inclusive societies. We will also introduce both the Open Kitchen, a shared cooking project run by the association Give Something Back to Berlin, as well as The Feast, a cookbook featuring stories and recipes of Berlin’s migrant communities and showcasing ways to become involved in the Open Kitchen. View a selection from The Feast here.

Everyone is invited to bring a cup, and a taste of their own favorite food.

Give Something Back to Berlin (GSBTB) empowers newly arrived and long-established Berliners through volunteering, education and a social network. Together with their community of migrants, refugees and locals, GSBTB promotes social cohesion, solidarity, and belonging by encouraging people from different backgrounds to co-create and learn together. Their work goes beyond the currently prevalent models of "integration" and enables people to develop their potential and get connected. It is about changing Berlin's cultural and social life together.

K24, Seminar Room 11  4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Ahmad Denno is a BCB alum who pursued studies in Economics, Politics, and Social Thought at Bard College Berlin from 2018 to 2022. He is a Syrian refugee turned German citizen, arriving in Germany in December 2014 and gaining citizenship in March 2022 on the grounds of demonstrating exemplary integration. Since his arrival in Berlin, he's been an active volunteer with various social NGOs, initially stemming from his experience in a refugee camp. Notably, he spearheaded a political campaign in 2021, translating German election information into five languages to empower German citizens with a migration background.

In 2016, Denno co-founded the neighborhood center KulturMarktHalle e.V. to bridge cultural gaps between locals and migrants in Prenzlauer Berg, Pankow district. Simultaneously, he established Eed Be Eed e.V., fostering support for Arab/Syrian refugees in Germany through a free newspaper, workshops, and initiating the first Arabic Arts and Culture Festival in Berlin in 2017 to respond to the dearth of Arabic language offers.

Ahmad Denno´s visit is an opportunity to meet a multifaceted advocate for cultural exchange and political engagement in Germany, to get tips about how to navigate German bureaucracy, to become socially engaged and connected in Berlin, found your own association, or apply for public funding. Please register via email to: [email protected].

This event is part of the Pankow Weeks Against Racism series.

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
From the many great ideas and candid thoughts that are shared in the SLC Community Forums, we have a responsibility as a larger community to turn those ideas into action. We can do so by brainstorming plans, identifying who can help us achieve these goals, and then carrying out the change over time. If you would like to take part, please come join the DEI Circle in the W15 Cafe from 1-2pm. ALL are encouraged to come.

Tuesday, March 12: Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation

Tuesday, March 26: Cultural and Religious Diversity

Tuesday, April 16: Accessibility & Accommodations

Date TBD: Socio-Economic Challenges & Equitable Scholarship Opportunities

Bard College Berlin is participating in this year's Pankow Weeks Against Racism with four events on- and off-campus.

Tuesday, March 12, 4:00pm-5:00pm. On-campus, K24 Seminar Room 11.
Cultural and Political Engagement in Berlin with BCB Alum Ahmad Denno

Wednesday, March 13, 12:00pm-2:30pm. On-campus, W15 Cafe.
Taste of Home: Public Reading and Discussion about Cooking and Belonging

Thursday, March 21, 4:00pm-5:00pm. On-campus, K24 Seminar Room 11.
Talk with Renée Eloundou: How to Decolonize Berlin in 2024

Thursday, March 21.7:00pm. Off-campus, KulturMarktHalle e.V. (Hanns-Eisler-Straße 93, 10409 Berlin).
Discussion Salon: Global Citizens and Human Rights with Dr. Nassim Abi Ghanem and Blaise Baneh Mbuh

W15 Cafe  2:00 pm – 3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This event explores the fascinating world of stories and tales. It aims to differentiate between the two, highlighting their unique characteristics and impacts. Participants will learn about the structure and elements of a story - a narrative that can be either fiction or nonfiction, encompassing characters, setting, and plot. The session will also delve into the realm of tales, emphasizing their traditional and often fantastical nature, and their role in passing down morals and lessons through generations. The event promises an insightful journey into the ways these narratives shape culture and contribute to the civilized world and modern humanity. Language of the event will be in Persian!
Organized by Dr. Ahmad Khosrawi.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the DEI Office to engage in an open dialogue about gender identity and sexual orientation. We will discuss resources that BCB offers as well as Berlin-based organizations and initiatives that you can explore. We will also share events happening in Berlin for International Women’s Day (8 March).

Lecture Hall  7:00 pm – 10:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Film screening and discussion organized by BCB student Ana Helena Mancilla Anguiano with special guest Carlos Pérez Osorio, Emmy-Nominated Mexican documentarist.

The session will start with a small introduction to the situation in Mexico and why it is important to draw international attention to the victims and not the perpetrators (Narcos). We will also explain Mexican feminism and 9th of March “A Day without Women” meaning, origin, and relevance in Mexico. Renata (4th year student at BCB) is doing her thesis on this topic so she will also share a few words (approximately 35 min).

Program:
Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de Fuego) - 2021
By: Tatiana Huezo 
Duration: 1h 50m
Description of the movie: https://www.viennale.at/de/film/noche-de-fuego 
Pause to debrief and talk about the movie along with clarifications regarding the movie. (10 min)
Brief context (5 min)
The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo (Las tres muertes de Marisela Escobedo) - 2020
By: Carlos Pérez Osorio
Duration: 1h 49m
Description of the documentary: https://anyoneschild.org/2020/11/las-tres-muertes-de-marisela-escobedo-review/ 
Interview with Carlos Pérez Osorio (40 min approx)
Concluding thoughts (10 min)

Part of the Life After BCB event series
Lecture Hall, Platanenstraße 98A, 13156 Berlin  11:45 am – 12:45 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for an Alumni Talk with Lucari Jordan '21, an EPST graduate from New Mexico, who started their career in the energy and economics sector in Berlin with the goal of eventually working at the intersection of the power industry and regulatory institutions. Lucari will share their experience at their current company, Aurora Energy Research, with BCB students: what they have found helpful for entry into the Berlin job market, and what they have found to be the most important qualities of a company in the early stages of building a career. We will also hear more about Aurora's Graduate Analyst Program, a traineeship which lasts 18-21 months, and allows you to get a perspective of the three main departments of the company (Advisory, Commercial, Customer Success and Research) by completing a rotation working in each.

K24, Seminar Room 11  2:00 pm – 5:00 pm CET/GMT+1
On March 2, from 2-5pm, the BCB chapter of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) will host a workshop in K24 titled How (Not) to Report About Africa and Asia led by Dominique Haensell and Charlotte Ming.

As racist biases and colonial tropes about non-western countries and communities continue to persist in everyday media coverage across the global north, this workshop offers an opportunity to identify and dissect clichés and stereotypical narratives and examine the concept of “journalistic neutrality.” Through collective critique and creative reimagining participants will engage in a hands-on experience to develop more inclusive narratives and images. Working with examples from major English and German print media, the workshop aims to empower participants from diverse backgrounds to understand media stereotypes and play an active role in reshaping media discourse and promoting responsible representation.

Important note: Registration is required for this event. The number of participants is limited so please apply at your earliest convenience (latest by the 22nd of February) using this Google Form.
You will be notified if you have been accepted and receive further instructions for preparation by the 24th of February.

Dominique Haensell is a Berlin-based writer, translator, and editor. Born in the UK and raised in Germany, she studied English Philology, Comp Lit, and Critical Theory at the FU Berlin and King’s College London. In 2019, she completed a PhD at the JFKI’s Graduate School of North American Studies and her award-winning monograph Making Black History: Diasporic Fiction in the Moment of Afropolitanism was published in 2021. Dominique is co-editor-in-chief of Germany’s foremost feminist magazine, Missy (on sabbatical), and is currently working on a hybrid memoir about Afro-German identity, British colonialism, and her family’s relationship to German colonial Africa (The White Rasta, forthcoming with Luchterhand). She has been on the jury of various literary awards, regularly moderates literary panels, and is a member of different research groups such as Women of Color Resist and the African Atlantic Research Group (AARG).

Charlotte Ming is a journalist and visual editor based in Berlin. Her work focuses on underreported and nuanced stories on the themes of culture, history, and migration. She has been published in TIME, National Geographic, die Taz, and Atlas Obscura, among others. She is a recipient of the Robert Bosch Crossing Borders grant and the Kim Wall Memorial Fund for her research and writing on the legacy of German colonialism in China. Ming is a co-founder of Far & Near, a newsletter highlighting human-centric coverage of China by Chinese visual journalists and artists. Before moving to Berlin, she worked as a journalist and photo editor at TIME and Getty Images in New York. In 2023, she completed the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and graduated from Columbia University - Graduate School of Journalism with a Master of Science in 2014.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
All members of the BCB community are invited to join the Student Life Committee and the DEI Office to discuss how we as a community want to share space, ideas, different points of view, and concerns in ways that allow us to feel heard, safe, and respected.

P24 Seminar Room 8  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
By connecting Multilevel Governance Theory (MLG) with Hannah Arendt’s concept of civil disobedience, this lecture by Dr. Berit Ebert elaborates on the access of the gender equality concerns in Poland to the institutionalized policy-making realm of the European Union (EU). Whereas the 2023 Polish parliamentary elections are often depicted as a great success for women’s and LGBTQIA+, it will be shown that translatability of gender topics to the EU via subnational channels is quantitatively and qualitatively deficient. A variety of access configurations depend on the impact of gender roles in national contexts and lead to different legitimacy constellations across EU Member States.

Dr. Berit Ebert specializes in European Union law with a focus on gender equality. She received her master’s (2006) and doctoral degrees (2012) in political science from Aachen University, and a master’s degree in European studies (2007) from Vienna University. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of gender equity, democracy, and the rule of law, as well as the judicial reform in Poland, and subnational influence on supranational policymaking. She is the author of Wie Europa Zeus bändigte. Transnationalität im Gleichstellungsrecht der Europäischen Union (Equality and Gender in the Jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. An Analysis Considering Contemporary Theories of Justice) (Tectum/Nomos, 2021), which elaborates on the impact of EU citizens on the development of the Union’s gender equality framework. Her articles appeared in the Open Gender Journal, Democracy SOS, and The Berlin Journal. Recent articles are “The Power of One Woman: The Progress of Gender Equality in the European Union” (2023) and “Gender Equality und Rechtsstaatlichkeit in der EU. Die polnische Justizreform” (2022).

Berit Ebert is also the Director of Public Programs and Strategic Initiatives at Bard College Berlin. Prior, she served as Vice President of Programs at the American Academy in Berlin, where she oversaw the institution’s academic and public programming. She was affiliated with the UNESCO in South Africa and the Committee for Foreign Affairs at the Deutsche Bundestag.

This lecture is part of the Faculty Colloquium Series.

The Factory  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the Ukrainian Club of BCB for a film screening and exhibition in the Factory. February 24th, 2024 will mark 2 years of the Russian full-scale invasion, 10 years of the war, and 300 years of colonial violence on Ukraine. The Ukrainian Club invites you to grieve together, support one another, and resist against terror in our troubling times.

20 Days in Mariupol is an Oscar-nominated documentary about the horrors of war and the will to live. As the Russian invasion begins, a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue their work documenting the war's atrocities.

"Unissued Diplomas" is an exhibition dedicated to Ukrainian students who were killed in the war and never got a chance to graduate. They used to spend their days in study halls. They had favorite classes and those they dreaded weekly, but after February 24, 2022 classrooms turned into bomb shelters and battlefields. The exhibition will be displayed from the February 23rd until the March 8th in the Factory.

P98a 0.09 (Geoff Lehman's office)  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Of all Biblical motifs, the story of David is not only a favored subject of Florentine art but, in a way, its very emblem. Why? What made the figure of David so resonant that it was cast in bronze and carved in words as well as stone over and over again? How was David's story retold and interpreted, and what were its aesthetic, political, and religious ramifications?

Beginning with the Biblical text, in this special seminar we shall analyze three iconic takes on David – by Machiavelli, Donatello, and Michelangelo -- and probe their significance for Renaissance Florence. By exploring the vision of modernity elaborated in these works, we shall pose larger questions about the relationship between artworks and their context, and reflect both on the art of politics and the politics of art.

Please register for the seminar here.

Participants can read a selection from The David Story by Robert Alter prior to the event.

Learning Commons (W16, top floor)  12:45 pm – 1:45 pm CET/GMT+1
When it comes to doing complex, large tasks, do you struggle with maintaining focus?

Join us for this practical, short, hands-on workshop designed to set you up for success this semester. There will be a short presentation and then time to implement some of the tools we discuss. Bring your personal device and join us in the Learning Commons!

Part of the Set Your Semester Up for Success workshop series.

Lecture Hall P98a  12:30 pm – 1:50 pm CET/GMT+1
Legal scholar Dr. Nahed Samour will discuss the ICJ’s decision on provisional measures in the South Africa case against Israel for genocide, its consequences and implications, and the current legal discourse surrounding the decision on Palestine and international law, with special reference to Germany's position. The talk will be moderated by Dr. Marion Detjen.

Dr. Nahed Samour is Research Associate at Radboud University, Nijmegen in the Race-Religion-Constellations research project. She studied Law and Islamic Studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, School of Orient and African Studies London, Humboldt University Berlin, Harvard University, and Damascus University. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study. She has taught as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy from 2014-2018. From 2019-2022, she was Core Emerging Investigator at the Integrative Research Institute Law & Society, Humboldt University Berlin. She is member of the Arab German Young Academy and co-editor of the book Arab Berlin (transkript 2023).

In cooperation with the Mellon funded Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education

W15 Cafe  12:20 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The news industry has been in decline for decades, but the latest round of layoffs, closures of foreign news bureaus worldwide, and increased hostility against journalists leave little room for optimism for the young generation considering their chances entering this field. “How do you become a foreign correspondent?” became a question with seemingly no satisfying and universally applicable answer. This shift isn't due to a lack of talent among aspiring journalists, but rather to the features of the world that have changed and the opportunities that were unique to a specific era of the past.

Journalist Joshua Yaffa, in conversation with a BCB student, Jakub Laichter, discusses strategies for the new generation to enter this ever-diminishing field, drawing on their own experiences and reporting from Ukraine. No registration required.

Joshua Yaffa, a correspondent for The New Yorker and the writer-in-residence at Bard College Berlin, has spent a career reporting and writing on Russia and Ukraine.
Jakub Laichter, a BCB student and a freelance photojournalist focusing on Eastern Europe, has been covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2019.

Learning Commons (W16, top floor)  Do you often struggle with managing your calendar and all the different competing assignment deadlines? Do you feel forever behind with your email? When it comes to doing complex, large tasks, do you struggle with maintaining focus?

Join us for three practical, short, hands-on workshops designed to set you up for success this semester. At each workshop there will be a short presentation and then time to implement some of the tools we discuss. Bring your personal device and join us in the Learning Commons!

Using Google Calendar + Google Tasks to Manage Deadlines
Thursday, 8 February from 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

Making Your Gmail Your Friend
Thursday, 15 February from 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

Maintaining Focus in a Distracting World
Thursday, 22 February from 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

P24 SR8  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
This research from an interdisciplinary perspective, presented by Jana Lozanoska, focuses on international criminal law and the visual art exhibition “Radiography” by artist Henry Lewis and forensics. It discusses the nature of X-rays images as evidence and conceptualizes the term ‘contemporary forensics’ deployed during international criminal investigations of mass crimes by focusing on the standards for admission/authentication and probative value of this type of evidence in the International Criminal Court, in particular for the Lubanga case involving the recruitment of child soldiers. The research critically engages with novel approaches of (re)construction of evidence. It distinguishes between forensic radiology and forensic odontology and its interactions with forensic anthropology in examining the interrelationship between X-ray images and regular photographs. Finally, it examines the theoretical writings of the media and culture studies theorist Vilém Flusser proposing phenomenological aesthetics of X-rays as publicity on the one hand and confidentiality on the other as tension that stems out of forums, courts, or arts exhibitions.

Jana Lozanoska teaches human rights and international law at Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Science, where she has headed the human rights and international law program since 2019. Her research interests are in the fields of technology, justice, spatiality and temporality, memory, evidence, and visuality. She has published several contributions in this respect. Lozanoska has written extensively across the Macedonian public sphere on issues of reconciliation, justice, and technology. She has contributed to and edited the volume Name Issue Revisited, Anthology of Academic Articles (MIC, 2013) collection of contributions from domestic and international authors across disciplines. Lozanoska has published a novel Living Room (ILIILI, 2015), which ran for best novel prize and entered the semifinal, and two poetry books. Her creative work deals with the interrelationship between memory, body, identity, photography, and painting.

This presentation is part of the Faculty Colloquium Series.

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
All are invited to this semester’s faculty colloquium. The colloquium is a multidisciplinary forum for discussing faculty work in various stages of progress, from brainstorming new ideas to already published work. Each session will take place over lunchtime and feature a variety of formats tailored to the presenter's preferences and objectives. Formats will include a short presentation and discussion of a pre-circulated paper, or a longer (20-30 min) presentation, followed by a discussion. All talks will take place from 12:30 to 1:30pm in P24 Seminar Room 8
 
Wednesday, February 21 – Jana Lozanoska, Assistant Professor at Al-Quds Bard College
“X-Rays Seeing the Invisible”
This research from an interdisciplinary perspective focuses on international criminal law and the visual art exhibition “Radiography” by artist Henry Lewis and forensics. It discusses the nature of X-rays images as evidence and conceptualizes the term ‘contemporary forensics’ deployed during international criminal investigations of mass crimes by focusing on the standards for admission/authentication and probative value of this type of evidence in the International Criminal Court, in particular for the Lubanga case involving the recruitment of child soldiers. The research critically engages with novel approaches of (re)construction of evidence. It distinguishes between forensic radiology and forensic odontology and its interactions with forensic anthropology in examining the interrelationship between X-ray images and regular photographs. Finally, it examines the theoretical writings of the media and culture studies theorist Vilém Flusser proposing phenomenological aesthetics of X-rays as publicity on the one hand and confidentiality on the other as tension that stems out of forums, courts, or arts exhibitions.
 
Wednesday, February 28 – Berit Ebert
“EU Multilevel Governance and the Disobedient Gender Movement in Poland” 
By connecting Multilevel Governance Theory (MLG) with Hannah Arendt’s concept of civil disobedience, this lecture elaborates on the access of the gender equality concerns in Poland to the institutionalized policy-making realm of the European Union (EU). Whereas the 2023
Polish parliamentary elections are often depicted as a great success for women’s and LGBTQIA+, it will be shown that translatability of gender topics to the EU via subnational channels are quantitatively and qualitatively deficient. A variety of access configurations depend on the impact of gender roles in national contexts and lead to different legitimacy constellations across EU Member States.

Wednesday, March 20 – John Kleckner
“Stick Paintings & Foliate Heads: Recent Artworks by John Kleckner”
This presentation will feature recent paintings and drawings from two series that have emerged in my Berlin studio since the COVID-19 pandemic. One is a group of blurred landscapes with meticulously rendered sticks and colorful shapes floating in the foreground; the other is a series of stippled, ink self-portraits framed by flora and fungi. I will trace the development of these artworks, exploring their themes of nature, solitude, mimesis, fragmentation, juxtaposition, and the passing of time. The audience will gain an understanding of my artistic practice as it has evolved over 20 years, leading up to pieces currently in progress. The actual art objects will be on display for close examination and critique.
 
Wednesday April 10 – Cholpon Turdalieva, Professor at American University of Central Asia
"Gendered Mobilities of Central Asian Migrants in Germany through the Perspectives of Public Transport"
Aiming to remedy the lacuna in the interdisciplinary mobility and migration literature, the main objective of the present research project is to examine Central Asian migrant women in Berlin through their commuting experience on public transport. I aim to address several issues and questions as the following. To what extent is Central Asian women's integration in the host city influenced by daily commuting on different modes of public transit? How are women's employment, studying, income, and kinship networks realized or imposed in Germany's ethnocultural communities and other diverse multiethnic groups? Following these questions, my research will be geared to produce academic and practical insights into the intersection of gendered mobility, migration, and public transit. We argue that Central Asian women migrants realize their socio-economic, educational, professional, and other personal and public goals in Germany by navigating their mobility, presumably through public transit transport. In this vein, we may think that automobility technologies, particularly the well-developed public transit in Berlin, empower Central-Asian migrant women by allowing them to move through different public spaces and traverse physical and social boundaries with greater ease and practice.

Wednesday April 24 – Kai Koddenbrock
“Walking a Fine Line: Germany and the Question of Imperialism”
Imperialism is back in our everyday vocabulary to describe Russian expansionism. Yet the theoretical contours of the term imperialism are notoriously hard to pin down and its analytical added value is often disputed. The term exists as a descriptor of government action to qualify Russia or the US as ‘imperialist’ states. It also denotes the structural logic of capitalism on the world scale which tends towards war, value extraction and the bifurcation of the world into core and peripheries. In this paper, I investigate this dual meaning of imperialism with a view to Germany’s history, policy, and political economy. I suggest a contemporary analysis of imperialism focusing on domestic state-capital relations, military violence, and the extraction of value from the Global South. Applying this troika of imperialism to German state-capital relations, the paper focuses on its corporate giants Volkswagen and BASF, recent shifts in security and economic policy as well as the quest for mineral supplies from the Global South and argue that Germany can be – with some qualifications – called an imperialist state. In conclusion the paper shows that imperialism as an analytical term allows to go beyond the overly generic term of capitalism and is uniquely placed to make sense of a more openly violent world engulfed in war and crisis.

P98a Lecture Hall  5:30 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the Ukrainian student community at BCB for a special event featuring the screening of the movie ADA followed by a talk with director Alina Matochkina. ADA is a movie about two artists Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko, who were erased from the history of art due to oppressive Soviet politics. Their most important project, The Wall of Memory, was cemented. It is a movie about love, resistance, and memory. After the movie there will be a discussion about decolonization and destroyed cultural sites. 

Alina Matochkina is a prominent director. Her film ADA was presented during numerous film festivals in Ukraine and abroad.

This film screening is part of the event series "Stories of Resistance": Ukrainian cultural, activist, and commemoration events dedicated to the second anniversary of Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine and 10 years of war. 

Lecture Hall  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Guest lecture by Dr. Aaron Tugendhaft. To register, email [email protected].

In 1194, the Egyptian philosopher and rabbinical authority Musa ibn Maymun (aka Maimonides, Rambam) responded to a series of queries by the Jewish community of southern France concerning the efficacy of astrology. This lecture will explore the religious and political dimensions of ibn Maymun's response within the context of how the nature of the cosmos, and the astral sciences---both astronomy and astrology--- were conceptualized in the medieval Islamic world.

Participants can read Maimonides' Letter on Astrology (1194) prior to the event.

Dr. Aaron Tugendhaft is a fellow of Bard's Hannah Arendt center. His main areas of interest are political philosophy, art history, and the history of religions. His book The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. He taught at Bard College Berlin between 2018 and 2021.

Learning Commons (W16, top floor)  12:45 pm – 1:45 pm CET/GMT+1
Do you feel forever behind with your email?

Join us for this practical, short, hands-on workshop designed to set you up for success this semester. There will be a short presentation and then time to implement some of the tools we discuss. Bring your personal device and join us in the Learning Commons!

Part of the Set Your Semester Up for Success workshop series.

Learning Commons (W16, top floor)  Do you often struggle with managing your calendar and all the different competing assignment deadlines? Do you feel forever behind with your email? When it comes to doing complex, large tasks, do you struggle with maintaining focus?

Join us for three practical, short, hands-on workshops designed to set you up for success this semester. At each workshop there will be a short presentation and then time to implement some of the tools we discuss. Bring your personal device and join us in the Learning Commons!

Using Google Calendar + Google Tasks to Manage Deadlines
Thursday, 8 February from 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

Making Your Gmail Your Friend
Thursday, 15 February from 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

Maintaining Focus in a Distracting World
Thursday, 22 February from 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

Learning Commons (W16)  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This two-part workshop offers the opportunity to work with renowned journalist Joshua Yaffa on crafting non-fiction prose. Like academic writing, essay-writing for journals and magazines requires precision, evidence, and a sharp argument, but in other ways, the approach to writing is distinct. In the second of the two-part workshop series, participants will have the chance to revise pieces intended for a broad readership. The workshop will take place in the Learning Commons (W16). Space is limited to 15 participants.

Session 1 is on Wednesday, 14 February, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Session 2 is on Wednesday, 21 February, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Register here.

Lecture Hall  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This lecture by Roger Berkowitz offers an account of Hannah Arendt’s thinking about friendship especially as it connects to her thinking about politics. Friendship, according to Arendt, involves intimate conversations between two people who share their views and differences, creating a common world. Arendt distinguishes friendship from love, emphasizing its respect for personal boundaries and thus respect for the friend in their uniqueness and difference. Friendship, in her view, humanizes the world by allowing individuals to engage in meaningful dialogue despite their differences. Arendt believes that friendships can bridge gaps in political discourse and unite people while respecting their diverse opinions. The lecture explores the role of friendship in Arendt's political thinking, its limitations in cases of extreme wrongdoing, and its relevance in today's political conversations.

Register for the event here.

Roger Berkowitz is the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center as well as professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College. Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, editor of Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition (2022), coeditor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the Arendt Center weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi. His writings have appeared in numerous venues such as The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Paris Review online. In 2019, Berkowitz received the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Bremen, Germany.

Learning Commons (W16, top floor)  12:45 pm – 1:45 pm CET/GMT+1
Do you often struggle with managing your calendar and all the different competing assignment deadlines?

Join us for this practical, short, hands-on workshop designed to set you up for success this semester. There will be a short presentation and then time to implement some of the tools we discuss. Bring your personal device and join us in the Learning Commons!

Part of the Set Your Semester Up for Success workshop series.

W16  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The Involvement Fair is your chance to meet the student clubs and organizations and find out how to get involved this semester. Several campus resources will also have tables where you can learn more about the services they offer.

Humboldtforum (Schlossplatz 10178 Berlin)  12:30 pm – 3:30 pm CET/GMT+1
We are going to visit the Humboldtforum: A new center for culture, art, education and research housed in the renovated Berlin Palace in the heart of the city. Besides looking at some of the new exhibitions on Asian culture we will also attend a guided English tour about the handling of objects from German colonies titled: "Empty showcases?"  

To sign up, email [email protected] 

Meeting Location: Ticket office at Humboldtforum (Schlossplatz 10178 Berlin) 

Note: Bring your student ID/transportation pass along. The Humboldtforum is located within a short walking distance from the last station of the M1 tram.

Part of Berlin Weekend.

12:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Named among the best street food in Berlin by Exberliner, we’ll travel from campus to this Berlin staple. Once you’ve got your kebap in hand, check out nearby attractions like Victoria Park, Tempelhofer Feld, or wander around Kreuzberg. 

Meeting Point: W15 Cafe

Part of Berlin Weekend.

3:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Join Muhammed Sayed for a sunset hike to the Drachenburg Viewpoint, from which you can see all of Berlin and the surrounding areas. At 53 meters high, it is perfect to get an expansive view of all of Berlin. Bring a blanket and enjoy watching the sun set over Berlin, and watching the moon rise all in one go. After that, join us to have a lovely late dinner in one of the many amazing restaurants Berlin has to offer!  

Meeting Point: W15 Cafe

Part of Berlin Weekend.

2:00 pm – 3:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join us for a guided tour of the exhibition on 'Black Resistance and Global Anti-Colonialism in Berlin, 1919-1933' at Villa Oppenheim in Charlottenburg. The tour is offered in collaboration with the course 'Civic Engagement and Engaged Research: Berlin Lab' that focuses on current community issues in Berlin, including efforts to address the city’s colonial past. Berlin became a post-colonial metropolis in a largely colonial world: Migrants from former African colonies – which Germany had to renounce – remained in the city.
Berlin attracted actors from African, Asian, and Arabic regions. They formed anti-colonial alliances, demanded independence for their countries of origin, and resisted  against racism. The anti-colonial Berlin unfolded in the political forcefield of the Weimar Republic, the end of the monarchy and colonial rule, the ascent of communist internationalism and the rise of  the National Socialists. It caused frictions and was anchored in  everyday urban life, but its effect as a global movement reached far beyond the city.

Participants are asked to register via email to: [email protected]  

Meeting Point: Villa Oppenheim - Museum
Charlottenburg Wilmersdorf
Schloßstraße 55, 14059 Berlin

Part of Berlin Weekend.

Please join us for the Spring 2024 Berlin Weekend from February 3-4! Berlin Weekend is a collection of free or low cost activities hosted by students, staff, and faculty that offer the entire BCB community a chance to explore Berlin and attend unique events.

Complete list of Berlin Weekend events:
Saturday, February 3, 2:00pm-3:30pm - Guided Tour: Black Resistance and Global Anti-Colonialism in Berlin, 1919-1933 (Exhibition at Villa Oppenheim)
Saturday, February 3, 3:00pm - Drachenburg Sunset Hike
Sunday, February 4, 12:00pm - Mustafa’s Gemuse Kebap
Sunday, February 4, 12:30pm-3:30pm - Visit to the Humboldtforum

Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98A, 13156 Berlin  7:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
The United States is facing a fateful election and it looks very much like the same two old men, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, will compete again. According to recent studies, the overall public mood in the US is bad. Young Americans, in particular, are frustrated about the lack of reforms and how power is generally organized in the country. While trust in the political system is in ever graver decline, we have seen a revival of the labor movement in the last few years. Grassroots unions are taking on companies like Starbucks and Amazon; established unions like the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers won significant gains in recent strikes. Journalist Lukas Hermsmeier discusses both developments, growing political apathy and union revitalization, and explains what political actors, the Democratic Party in particular, could learn from the labor world.

Register for the lecture and Q&A with Lukas Hermsmeier with this Google Form. A reception will follow the event.

Lukas Hermsmeier is an independent journalist from Berlin based in New York. He writes for publications such as Zeit Online, Die Wochenzeitung, and The New York Times about politics and culture. His first book Uprising – America's New Left (Klett-Cotta, 2022) is about the resurgence of the US left since Occupy Wall Street.

W15 Cafe  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The Welcome Reception is an opportunity for the BCB community to come together after the first day of classes, welcome our new community members, and reconnect with one another. Join faculty, staff, and students to celebrate the start of the semester.

Meet us online!
Online Event  2:00 pm – 7:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Interested in learning more about Bard College Berlin? Save the date and join us on January 20 for Virtual Open Day!

You will have the chance to join a conversation with current students, and attend informational sessions about our degree programs, student life, campus facilities, and more.

View the program and register for the Virtual Open Day sessions at this link.