Assistant Professor of Literature. Alex Benson received both his BA (in Rhetoric) and his PhD (in English) from the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in American literatures, with a focus on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and on questions of language, race, media, disability, and environment. He has published articles and book reviews in the journals Criticism, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, American Literary History Online Review, and – in a recent article on the poet Claude McKay — Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. He often teaches special-topics courses on literature and ethnography, literature and the environment, Native American literature, and Herman Melville. Prof. Benson’s recent cross-listed courses in Experimental Humanities include “Sound in American Literature” and “Introduction to American Studies.” He is a member of the EH Sound Cluster, a multidisciplinary group of Bard faculty with interests in a diverse set of issues (theoretical, social, aesthetic, pedagogical) that fall under the umbrella of “sound.”

Assistant Professor of Music. Dr. Bonus maintains a varied career as musicologist, early-music instrumentalist, composer, and conductor. In recent years, he has presented lectures about musical time, metronome technology, and performance practices at academic conferences across Europe and America. He has performed with Los Angeles Master Chorale; Apollo’s Fire: The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra (baroque trumpet) and Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, whose recording of Psyché by J.-B. Lully on the CPO label was nominated for a Grammy Award. His discography also includes recordings by Centaur Records and Forces of Virtue Records, which he founded in 2003. Forthcoming publications include entries on the metronome, musical clock, and mobile phone for The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, as well as the Handbook of the Metronome for Oxford Music Online. In 2011, The American Council of Learned Societies awarded Alex a selective New Faculty Fellowship. Alexander previously taught at Duke University and Case Western Reserve University, where he received a PhD in Musicology from Case Western Reserve University in 2010. He also holds MM and BM degrees from the Eastman School of Music.

Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts and Acting Director of EH for Fall 2017. B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. Has had work exhibited and screened at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York: Cinema (2010); Performa 09, New York (2009); Images Festival, Toronto (2009); and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2008); among others. Has taught at Princeton University, Parsons The New School for Design, and the New School MA in Media Studies Program. At Bard since 2010.

B.A., Princeton University; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., New York University. Recipient, Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2006), W. B. H. Dowse Fellowship (2003–04), Society of Colonial Wars Fellowship (2003–04, 2004–05). Specialization in early modern Atlantic world history, colonial America, slavery, and empire. At Bard since 2006.

Program Coordinator of Experimental Humanities. Corinna Cape ’15 is the coordinator for Bard’s Program in Written Arts and the Center for Experimental Humanities. As an undergraduate, she joint majored in Human Rights and Written Arts and studied at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program in New York City and the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca in Mexico. She has interned with the Children’s Defense Fund, Human Rights Watch, the Downtown Community Television Center, and Narratively. She previously taught high school in New York City’s District 75 and holds an MS from Pace University’s School of Education. She currently serves as the managing editor of Guernica.

Assistant Professor of Arabic; Director, Middle Eastern Studies. B.A., American University in Cairo; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University. Articles, chapters, and reviews in Arab Studies Journal, Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, others. Founding member and secretary, Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. At Bard since 2010.

Assistant Professor of Historical and Africana Studies. Thompson’s research considers the ways in which photography—as practice and discourse—impacts the construction and operation of bureaucracy in colonial and post-independent Mozambique. As an extension of this study, he teaches classes on the history of the radio in Africa, urbanism, historical photography, liberation struggles, and post-colonial theory. At Bard, he has been involved in efforts to integrate new technologies, like podcasts and online exhibitions, in the teaching of history, and he has also been actively involved in the programmatic efforts of Africana Studies in terms of organizing lecture series and in the re-launch of Bard’s International Human Rights Exchange in Johannesburg, South Africa. He received his Ph.D. in African History from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a B.A. in History and Art History from Williams College.

Associate Professor of History. B.A., Wesleyan University; graduate studies, Humboldt University, Berlin; M.A., D.Phil., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Recipient, Bundeskanzler, DAAD, Charlotte W. Newcombe, and Foreign Language Area Studies (Czech) fellowships. Specialization in modern European intellectual and cultural history and the history of technology. Research interests include history of theoretical biology, systems theory, and “scientific” racism and political history of computing and cybernetics in the two Germanys. Articles in Science in Context, Simmel Studies, and Qui Parle. At Bard since 2001.

Keith O’Hara is an associate professor of computer science and director of the computer science program at Bard College. Since 2009, he has directed the draB lab (distributed robotics @ bard). Research in the draB lab is at the boundary between the real, physical world and the computational world; the works lives at the intersection of intelligent systems, robotics, and interactive software systems research. He has published articles in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Pervasive Computing, ICRA, SIGCSE, and Journal of Computing in Small Colleges. Hailing from South Jersey, Prof. O’Hara earned a B.S. from Rowan University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech where he was an Intel Foundation Fellow and a Presidential Fellow. VIEW MORE “I work on computing systems that interact with the real physical world beyond the traditional desktop interface, for example, thinks like mobile robots and projector-camera systems. Another mission of mine, and why I love teaching at a liberal arts college like Bard, is to help EVERYONE become productive, critical creators using digital technology and not just users or consumer. In addition to our standard introductory CS courses, we have developed a computing component into the Language & Thinking program that has been in place the past three years.” — Keith O’Hara, October 2017

Associate Director of Experimental Humanities. Krista Caballero is an interdisciplinary artist exploring issues of agency, survival, and environmental change in a more-than-human world. Moving freely between traditional and emerging media, her work creates situations for encountering alternative ecological and social landscapes. In 2010 she created Mapping Meaning, an ongoing project that brings together artists, scientists and scholars through experimental workshops, exhibitions, and transdisciplinary research. Caballero received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University and was selected as a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Her work has been presented across the United States as well as internationally in exhibitions and festivals such as the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Dubai, “A New We” at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, “Paradoxes in Video” at Mohsen Gallery in Tehran, and EXTREME. ENVIRONMENTS, RAY2018 in Frankfurt, Germany. www.kristacaballero.com

Associate Professor of Anthropology. B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan. Extensive on-site research in Kathmandu. Awards include Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, NMERTA South Asia Fellowships (2). Author of numerous articles and conference presentations. At Bard since 2001.

Director of Experimental Humanities and Assistant Professor of Literature. Prof. Cecire’s research focuses on recreations of the Middle Ages in twentieth-century and contemporary culture (especially children’s culture), and how medium affects content in various kinds of storytelling. She is also a filmmaker, and her most recent media work includes a trio of documentaries that restage medieval drama for contemporary audiences. For more information on the Early Drama at Oxford project with which she is affiliated, click here. She offers courses on media studies, children’s culture, medieval literature and its reception, and cultural studies at Bard. Recent Experimental Humanities courses include the core course “Intro to Media” and an upper-level course on “Medievalisms” in which students create digital archives and exhibitions around this topic. She received her MSt and DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship, and her BA from the University of Chicago. VIEW MORE  

Assistant Professor of Literature and Medieval Studies. Prof. Libbon received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and also holds an M.Phil. in English Medieval Studies from the University of Oxford, where she was trained in the paleography and codicology of English manuscript books. Professor Libbon specializes in the literatures of medieval England, including Old and Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin.  Her current research, which examines the role medieval manuscript culture played in the popular and institutional mediation of retrospection and collective identity in late-medieval England, received the Medieval Academy of America’s Schallek Fellowship in 2011-2012.  She is a founding member of the Early Middle English Society (EMES), and serves on the Editorial Board of EMES’s Archive of Early Middle English (AEME).In addition to teaching literature and medieval studies at Bard, she is affiliated with Bard’s Experimental Humanities concentration, developing and teaching courses such as “The Book Before Print” for students interested in the convergence of medieval studies and the digital humanities. You can access her current project, the Early Middle English Society’s Archive of Early Middle English, by clicking here.

Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance. In addition to core courses in theater history and performance analysis, Miriam teaches courses on historical and modern drama, and on theater’s relationships with political power, spectatorship, protest and resistance, and changing forms of new and digital media. Her research focuses on contemporary interdisciplinary performance as it intersects with digital culture and the politics of gender. Her book, “Viral Performance: Contagious Theater from Modernism to the Digital Age,” was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is a contributing editor of Theater, where she served as guest co-editor of special issues “Spectatorship in an Age of Surveillance” (2018), “Digital Feelings” (2016), “Digital Dramaturgies” (2012), and “Censorship and Contemporary Theater” (2008). From 2009-2018, she was a theater critic for the Village Voice. Awards received include a Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Research Fellowship, Yale Dissertation Fellowship, and Theater magazine fellowships. At Bard since 2012. B.A., Barnard College; M.F.A., D.F.A., Yale University.

Assistant Professor of Japanese. Dr. Shockey received his Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from Columbia University in June 2012. His dissertation, “Literary Writing, Print Media, and Urban Space in Modern Japan, 1895‐1933” explores the repercussions of the rapid proliferation of mass‐produced typographic media in Japan, with particular attention to the role of mass-market books and magazines in the formation of new discourses on metropolitan life, social thought, and language reform. He holds M.A. degrees in Japanese Literature from Columbia as well as Waseda University in Tokyo, in addition to a B.A. in Asian Languages from Stanford University. His research and teaching interests include the modernist literature and intellectual history of mid 20th‐century Japan, the cultural history of Tokyo, the problems of aesthetics and politics in the literary avant‐garde, and discourses surrounding the rise of new media in modern Japan. He has published in both English and Japanese, most recently contributing to the volume Censorship, Media, and Literary Culture in Japan: From Edo to Postwar (Tokyo: Shin’yôsha).

Assistant Professor of Art History at Bard College, where she teaches architectural history. Her research addresses questions of media, politics, and technology in modern architecture. In my work space and architecture constitute a different way into social, historical, and political questions. “My classes often feature creative assignments and imaginative speculations, promoting a thinking-through-making approach to pedagogy. Experimental Humanities creates a breathing space for teachers to think outside their disciplinary confines and cross-contaminate their skillset with the methods of other fields, often resulting in new and compelling ways to produce knowledge. I can help students develop spatial thinking and address space and the environment, either by studying it (historically and theoretically), or by designing it (architectural projects, creative assignments).” ― Olga Touloumi, October 2017

Professor López-Gay specializes in contemporary Spanish literature, with a strong interest in photography and film, and comparative literature (Iberia, Brazil, France). Her research is concerned with fiction and testimony, translation and cultural studies, the relationship between word and image, theories of the archive, and contemporary life narration. She is the author of numerous articles in journals such as Anales de literatura española contemporánea, Hispania and Romance Notes; has given conference presentations and guest lectures nationally and internationally; and has been awarded research fellowships and grants from the French and Spanish Ministries of Education, the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Camões Institute of Portugal, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her current book project focuses on archive fever and autobiographical writing through traditional and digital media. Before joining the Bard faculty in 2013, she had taught at New York University and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Prof. López-Gay is part of the international research group on autofiction based at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Madrid, Spain. In addition to her teaching and research, she is a member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. Currently, she is the director of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Bard. Ph.D., Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, New York University; joint Ph.D., Comparative Literature and Translation Studies (French and Spanish), University of Paris 7 and Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Associate Professor of Art History. B.F.A., School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University; M.A., Tufts University; Ph.D., Harvard University. Awards and fellowships include Mellon Foundation Fellowship (1996); Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship (1997); Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow (1999); Derek Bok Center, Harvard University, Distinction in Teaching Awards (1999–2002). Visiting instructor, Massachusetts College of Art (2001), Rhode Island School of Design (2001–02), University of Massachusetts (2002), Harvard University (2003). Faculty, Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. At Bard since 2003.

Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. Prof. Bartscherer also teaches in the Philosophy, Classics, and First Year Seminar programs. He works on the intersection of literature and philosophy in the ancient Greek and modern German traditions, focusing on tragic drama, aesthetics, and performance, and writes on technology, new media, contemporary art, and the philosophy of education. He is co-editor of Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts with Roderick Coover and Erotikon: Essays on Eros Ancient and Modern with Shadi Bartsch, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Bartscherer studied at the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the University of Chicago (MA, Ph.D.). He is a research associate on the Équipe Nietzsche at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (Paris) and is on the advisory board of nietzschesource.org. He has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, the University of Heidelberg, and the LMU in Munich. He has received fellowships from the DAAD, and the Woodrow Wilson, Nef, and Earhart foundations, and has taught previously at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature; Director, Human Rights Program. B.A., Amherst College; M. Phil., Ph.D., Yale University. Author, Fables of Responsibility (1997); Mengele’s Skull (with Eyal Weizman, 2012); articles in PMLA, South Atlantic Quarterly, New York Times, Aperture, Cabinet. Coeditor, New Media, Old Media (with Wendy Chun, 2005). Editorial and advisory board member, Journal of Human Rights, Grey Room, Crimes of War Project, Scholars at Risk Network, others. Curator,Antiphotojournalism(with Carles Guerra, 2010–11), Aid and Abet (2011). At Bard since 1999.