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Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude to Lead Regenerative Dye Research as Part of Daughters for Earth Grant

As part of one of 26 women-led projects in 17 countries, Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude will participate in a project to regenerate natural fabric dyeing processes with traditional Moroccan weavers as part of a Daughters for Earth grant awarded to Around the World in 80 Fabrics. “These grants, totaling over $600,000, are a part of our mission to deliver critical resources into the hands of the women on the frontlines of climate action,” says Daughters for Earth of this year’s grant winners. Professor Jude will lead microbial dye foraging alongside our natural plant dye research as part of a team that “will bring together traditional weavers, researchers, designers, textile experts, scientists, anthropologists, and businesswomen to create sustainable dyeing processes that Ain Leuh Women's Cooperative can use.” The cooperative, which was founded by local women in the Atlas Mountain region of Morocco, has used traditional weaving techniques to support their families for decades. Today, because of the pressures of demand from global trade, synthetic dyes are used more frequently, produced with chemicals that impact weaver health and the environment. The collaboration between the Ain Leuh Cooperative, Artisan Project, Around the World in 80 Fabrics, the Microbe Institute, and Bard College will help to create “an open-source natural dye, plant, and microbial resource book with a map and dye recipes,” with the goal of improving the health of Ain Leuh weavers and the health of the local ecosystem.
 

Post Date: 01-08-2023

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Peter L’Official Interviews Architect and Writer Sekou Cooke on Hip-Hop as a Blueprint for Architecture

For Architectural Record, Bard Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program Peter L’Official interviews architect and writer Sejou Cooke, who is the curator of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, an exhibition on view at the Museum of Design Atlanta through January 29, 2023. 

In the interview, L’Official quotes from Cooke’s 2021 book Hip-Hop Architecture: “Many have managed to exist simultaneously as successful architects and Black. Few have managed to express their Blackness through their architecture. Within hip-hop culture lies the blueprint for an architecture that is authentically Black with the power to upend the racist structures within the architectural establishment and ignite a new paradigm of creative production.” L’Official references Toni Morrison’s “unapologetic use of codes embedded in Black culture” and “her own struggle for writing that was ‘indisputably black,’” asking Cooke “Does Hip-Hop Architecture also strive for an architecture that is, after Morrison, ‘indisputably black?’”

Post Date: 12-06-2022

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Bard Biologists Elias Dueker, Gabriel Perron, Daniella Azulai ’17, and Mary Reid ’21 Copublish Study on the Impacts of Wastewater Treatment Discharge in Saw Kill River

Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies M. Elias Dueker, Associate Professor of Biology Gabriel G. Perron, and Bard biology graduates Daniella Azulai ’17 and Mary Reid ’21 have copublished a new study, “Bacteria communities and water quality parameters in riverine water and sediments near wastewater discharges,” in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Data. ​​Over five months, they monitored microbial contaminants relating to the treated water outflow of the wastewater treatment plant operated by Bard, which releases into the Saw Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River and also the source of fresh water for the campus. This is the first of many datasets and research papers that they hope to publish on Bard’s water system. Preliminary data analyses provide insight into the impacts of watershed-wide usage of the Saw Kill as both drinking water source and treated sewage receiver. Future use of this dataset will include a focus on endotoxins and antibiotic resistant bacterial genes, water contaminants only now gaining broader attention in water quality and microbiological sciences.

All of the sampling was conducted as a joint Bard Summer Research Institute project between Dueker’s lab and Perron's lab in summer 2015. Lab members included: Marco Spodek ’17, Beckett Lansbury ’16, Yuejiao Wan ’17, Pola Kuhn ’17, Haley Goss-Holmes ’17. Coauthors Azulai and Reid worked on this project both as undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students.

“This project demonstrates the power of community asking scientific questions, and academia–students, faculty, and staff–being able to help answer those questions through careful observational and applied research,” said Dueker. “Our hope is that this database serves as a tool for researchers and communities around the world trying to respond to stewardship challenges in a science-based and community-accessible way.”

Post Date: 10-04-2022

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“What Is a Pond?”: New Study Coauthored by Bard Professor Robyn L. Smyth Featured on ScienceDaily

Nearly everyone can identify a pond, but what, exactly, distinguishes it from a lake or a wetland? Robyn L. Smyth, Bard Center for Environmental Policy faculty member and term associate professor of environmental and urban studies, is coauthor of a new study featured on ScienceDaily that offers the first data-driven, functional definition of a pond and evidence of ponds’ distinct ecological function, which could have broad implications for science and policy.

Understudied and largely left out of federal and state monitoring and protection programs, ponds are often poorly distinguished from lakes or wetlands. This neglect has implications for the accuracy of climate modeling, as ponds are high emitters of greenhouse gases, and their contribution to the global carbon budget is uncertain. In their study, coauthors wanted to evaluate how scientists and policymakers define ponds and examine whether ponds are functionally distinct from lakes and wetlands. Their findings conclude: Ponds are small and shallow waterbodies, with a maximum surface area of five hectares, a maximum depth of 5 meters and less than 30% emergent vegetation.

Post Date: 08-30-2022

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Bard Professor Peter L’Official Wins Rabkin Prize for Visual Art Journalism

Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College, has won a Rabkin Prize of $50,000 for his work in visual art journalism. L’Official is one of eight visual art journalists to receive a Rabkin Prize from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Jurors for this sixth cycle of awards were: Eric Gibson (Arts in Review editor of the Wall Street Journal), Sasha Anawalt (Professor Emerita of Journalism at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism), and Paul Schmelzer (Founder of The Ostracon: Dispatches from Beyond Contemporary Art’s Center).

“I am humbled to be recognized among such a brilliant group of fellow recipients by the Rabkin Foundation. Thank you to the jurors, the anonymous nominators, the Rabkin Trustees, and—most especially—to all the editors and writers and readers who make the work of arts criticism both possible and worthwhile,” said L’Official.

Peter L’Official (he/him) is a writer, arts critic, and teacher of literature and American studies from The Bronx, NY. He is an associate professor in literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he teaches courses in African American literature and culture, twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, and on how the visual arts intersect with literature, place, and architecture. He is also the project coordinator for “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck,” a grant supported by the Mellon Foundation “Humanities for All Times” Initiative. 

L'Official is the author of Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, published by Harvard University Press in 2020. His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Village Voice, and other publications, and he is on the editorial board of The European Review of Books. He has written catalogue essays for exhibitions by artists such as Carl Craig and Becky Suss, and his next book project will explore the intersections of literature, architecture, and Blackness in America. L’Official has a B.A. in English from Williams College, and an M.A. in Journalism from New York University’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. He received his Ph.D. in American studies from Harvard University, and was formerly a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University in 2014-15. 

Now in its sixth cycle, the Rabkin Prize started in 2017. To date, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has given a total of $2,775,000 to individual art writers. The award program is by nomination only. A distinguished group of 16 nominators, working in the visual arts in all parts of the country, provided the list of potential winners. The nominators were asked to identify, “The essential visual art journalist working in your part of the country.” Candidates for the award submitted two recent published articles and a brief curriculum vita. Writers can be re-nominated and are eligible until they win a Rabkin Prize. This is an annual program and a central initiative of the foundation.

This cycle’s other winning journalists include: Shana Nys Dambrot (Los Angeles); Bryn Evans (Decatur, Georgia); Joe Fyfe (New York City); Stacy Pratt (Tulsa); Darryl F. Ratcliff, II (Dallas); Jeanne Claire van Ryzin (Austin); Margo Vansynghel (Seattle). 

Post Date: 07-19-2022

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Professor Gidon Eshel Rejects the Inevitability of Famine in Our Present Moment, Offering Alternatives in Bloomberg

As the world contends with a looming famine crisis, Gidon Eshel, research professor of Environmental and Urban Studies, rejects the narrative of inevitability, offering pragmatic solutions to save millions from going hungry. In the short term, the global livestock feed stockpile of “over 250 million tons of wheat, barley, oats, and other cereals” could be redirected to “lifesaving human food,” Eshel writes for Bloomberg. Long term, reductions in the consumption of beef could accomplish similar ends toward more efficient utilization of wheat and grains. Regardless, famine is not a foregone conclusion, Eshel argues, but rather one that the world, collectively, is choosing. “If, as predicted, millions will soon go hungry, it will not be a ‘Putin famine’ but a readily preventable famine of choice, arising because the people and leaders of wealthy nations have decided that preventing it is too inconvenient,” he concludes.

Post Date: 05-17-2022