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Professor Karen Barkey Receives Grant to Support Research on Historical Religious Pluralism

Professor Karen Barkey has been awarded a 2024 Expenses Grant from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University in support of her upcoming book project, Successful Religious Pluralism in the Mediterranean: A Comparative-Historical Study. The grant also supports Barkey’s work with a Bard undergraduate who is transcribing, translating, and organizing Greek interviews into English.

Professor Karen Barkey Receives Grant to Support Research on Historical Religious Pluralism

Charles Theodore Kellogg and Bertie K. Hawver Chair of Sociology and Religion Karen Barkey has been awarded a 2024 Expenses Grant from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. This grant was awarded in support of her upcoming book project, Successful Religious Pluralism in the Mediterranean: A Comparative-Historical Study. The grant supports Barkey’s archival trips to religious communities including Marseille Espérance, a faith leaders’ committee in Marseille, France, and the Simon Attias Synagogue and Haim Zafrani Research Center in Essaouira, Morocco. It also supports Barkey’s work with a Bard undergraduate who is transcribing, translating, and organizing Greek interviews into English.

Professor Barkey has taught at Bard since 2021, during which time she was named the 2021-22 Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies from the Institute for Advanced Studies D'aix-Marseille. Her current research explores how religious coexistence, toleration and sharing occurred in different historical sites under Ottoman rule. Previously, she focused on the comparative and historical study of the Ottoman Empire in relation to France and the Russian Empire.

Post Date: 02-17-2025

Bard Professor Peter Klein Receives Fulbright US Scholar Award

Peter Klein, associate professor of sociology and environmental and urban studies at Bard College, has received a 2024 Fulbright US Scholar Program Award for his project “The Favela and the Sea: Fishing, Urbanization, and Environmental (In)Justice in Rio de Janeiro.” The grant, sponsored by the Brazilian government, will support Klein’s work in Brazil for four months starting in August.

Bard Professor Peter Klein Receives Fulbright US Scholar Award

Peter Klein, associate professor of sociology and environmental and urban studies at Bard College, has received a 2024 Fulbright US Scholar Program Award for his project “The Favela and the Sea: Fishing, Urbanization, and Environmental (In)Justice in Rio de Janeiro.” The grant, sponsored by the Brazilian government, will support Klein’s work in Brazil for four months starting in August.

“The mission of the Fulbright Program to increase cross-cultural understanding and develop long-lasting collaborations is central to my work in Brazil, so I'm extremely grateful to be named a Fellow,” said Klein. “The support that the Fulbright Scholar Award provides will allow me to deepen my research, advance my book project, and create new opportunities to work with scholars and community members in the future.”

His project will use archival work, oral histories, interviews, and ethnography to examine the history and contemporary struggles of the fishers of Complexo da Maré, Rio de Janeiro’s largest conglomeration of favelas, which have faced urbanization, militarization, industrialization, and environmental degradation since the mid-20th century. Klein proposes that the ways these fishers have persevered, protested, produced art, and protected their way of life can reveal a great deal about what successive urban and climatic upheavals do to individuals and communities, and how these communities not only survive, but create a constantly changing cultural, social, political, and economic life in response.

Fulbright US Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators, and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in cutting-edge research and expand their professional networks, often continuing research collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions. Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided over 400,000 talented and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists, and professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research abroad. Fulbrighters exchange ideas, build people-to-people connections, and work to address complex global challenges. Notable Fulbrighters include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, 41 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

Post Date: 06-27-2024

Six Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

Six Bard College juniors—Lyra Cauley, David Taylor-Demeter, Lisbet Jackson, Yadriel Lagunes, Angel Ramirez, and Jennifer Woo—have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs.

Six Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad

Six Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. This cohort of Gilman scholars will study or intern in more than 90 countries and represents more than 500 US colleges and universities.

Biology major Yadriel Lagunes ’25, from Clifton, New Jersey, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. At Bard, he serves as a Residential Life Peer Counselor and a supervisor on the Bard EMT Squad. “This scholarship has made studying abroad a possibility for me,” says Lagunes. “I want to center global public health in my future career as a healthcare worker and researcher. Through travel, I hope foster cultural sensitivity and communication skills that are desperately needed in my field. I am so grateful for Gilman scholarship for this opportunity.”

French and Anthropology double major Lyra Cauley ’25, from Blue Hill, Maine, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at the Center for University Programs Abroad (CUPA) in Paris, France via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I would like to thank the Gilman scholarship for giving me financial security and freedom abroad. This scholarship allows me to fully embrace the experience of learning and living abroad with financial worry or strain,” says Cauley.

Biology major Angel Ramirez ’25, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, The Netherlands via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I’m very grateful to be a recipient of the Gilman scholarship,” says Ramirez. “It’s a huge opportunity to be able to pursue my goals within biology for my future in STEM. I’m excited to learn a new language abroad in the Netherlands and experience new cultures without a financial barrier. I proudly come from a family of Mexican immigrants; therefore, I feel empowered that people like me are able to partake in a change as great as this one.”

Spanish and Written Arts joint major Lisbet Jackson ’25, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I am incredibly grateful to the Gilman Scholarship for supporting my semester in Ecuador and ensuring I can commit to developing my Spanish, studying literature, and immersing myself in Ecuadorian culture. Thanks to the Gilman Scholarship I will also be more prepared to pursue a career in multilingual and global education,” says Jackson.

Sociology major Jennifer Woo ’25, from Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded a $3,500 Gilman scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin in Germany for spring 2024. “To be awarded this scholarship means to fully explore and pursue my dream of studying abroad with the freedom of having the financial support I hoped for,” says Woo. “My dad is an artist who has always pushed me to travel and search for culture, the arts, and new experiences, so being able to fulfill this dream while having the resources of education means the world to me.”

German Studies major David Taylor-Demeter ’25, from Budapest, Hungary, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “To combine my studies of German language and literature with a day-to-day experience of Berlin is an invaluable opportunity,” says Taylor-Demeter.

Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 41,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded more than 3,600 Gilman scholarships during the 2022-2023 academic year.
 
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
 
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.

Post Date: 12-15-2023
More Sociology News
  • Can Millennials Afford a House without Family Help? Professor Yuval Elmelech on Marketplace

    Can Millennials Afford a House without Family Help? Professor Yuval Elmelech on Marketplace

    Yuval Elmelech, an associate professor of sociology at Bard College and author of the book Wealth, spoke with Marketplace about the difficulty millennials face in buying a house, especially in cities such as San Francisco and New York where they are being priced out and even forced to relocate. For many who live there, parental wealth has made a big difference. “If parents can help their children buy a home, this means that these children will need to rely less on loans and mortgages,” he said. “Whereas other young couples, individuals who cannot rely on parental resources—and this is the majority of the population—will have to take out higher loans.”
    Read or Listen on Marketplace

    Post Date: 01-10-2023
  • Opinion: Alumna Jennifer H. Madans ’73 Identifies “Weak Link in the Administration’s Data-Driven COVID-19 Response”

    Opinion: Alumna Jennifer H. Madans ’73 Identifies “Weak Link in the Administration’s Data-Driven COVID-19 Response”

    Jennifer H. Madans ’73, former National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) associate director for science and acting director, cowrites an op-ed for The Hill about how a lack of government funding for the NCHS was a “weak link in the administration’s data-driven COVID-19 response.” The NCHS is the Department of Health and Human Services’ equivalent of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. It collects and disseminates core public health information on births, deaths, chronic and acute disease, disability and health care access and utilization. “Just as the timeliness and granularity of employment data, with information by state, if not county, and by sector or product category, help bolster our economy and job growth, more timely and granular health statistics would improve public health.”
     
    Madans asserts: “Had investments been made in maintaining and modernizing the health data infrastructure we would have had information on COVID-related deaths, hospitalizations, ambulatory care visits and symptoms along with information on the impacts of the pandemic on wellbeing. This would have allowed for immediate tracking of the pandemic at its earliest stages and the continuing monitoring of response capabilities as it changed course. Without this investment, the data that were produced were delayed and in many cases they were of limited quality, which hampered our ability to control the pandemic and meet the health and health care needs of the population.”
    Read more on The Hill

    Post Date: 04-26-2022
  • Jomaira Salas Pujols, Alumna of the Posse Foundation, to Join Bard Faculty in Fall 2022

    Jomaira Salas Pujols, Alumna of the Posse Foundation, to Join Bard Faculty in Fall 2022

    Currently completing her doctoral work in sociology at Rutgers University, Jomaira Salas Pujols will join the faculty of the Sociology Program at Bard College in fall 2022. Her work focuses on race, place, education, and Black girlhood, with her doctoral dissertation examining the consequences of movement on Black girls’ perceptions of self, their identities, and their worlds. “I look forward to supporting Posse Scholars as a faculty member at Bard,” Jomaira says, “and to joining an institution that is so deeply committed to the public good.”

    Full Story on possefoundation.org

    Post Date: 12-21-2021
  • How Campus Activist Madeline Firkser ’19 Channeled Her Passions Into a Career

    How Campus Activist Madeline Firkser ’19 Channeled Her Passions Into a Career

    Madeline Firkser’s advice for activists and young job seekers is the same: Participate. Firkser spoke with the Wall Street Journal about how she pivoted after realizing her first job wasn’t a good fit. Firkser is the special projects associate at JustLeadershipUSA, a New York City–based criminal justice reform organization.
    Read More

    Post Date: 07-19-2021
  • Two Bard College Students Win Highly Competitive Gilman Study Abroad Scholarships

    Two Bard College Students Win Highly Competitive Gilman Study Abroad Scholarships

    Bard College students Jourdan Perez ’23 and Tallulah Woitach ’23 have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships from the U.S. Department of State to study abroad. Perez was awarded $4,500 toward his studies at Bard College Berlin in fall 2021, and Woitach was awarded $4,000 toward her studies at the University of Sydney in Spring 2022.

    “It is an unbelievable honor to be selected for such a prestigious award,” said Woitach, a written arts major. “I am so beyond excited to go to Australia to study indigenous culture, with a focus on oral tradition. All too often in western culture, the written word becomes distanced from the deeper ancient energy language is borne out of. I want to learn from those who know how to make words come alive, by connecting to something much greater than ourselves.”

    “I'm very excited to explore Berlin and continue studying German language and culture,” said Perez, a sociology major with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. “I would like to thank Trish Fleming (Bard’s Study Abroad Adviser) for informing me about the Gilman Scholarship, as well as reviewing my application one last time before I submitted.”

    Perez and Woitach were among more than 1,500 U.S. undergraduate students selected to receive Gilman scholarship awards from the March 2021 application deadline. The recipients of this prestigious scholarship are American undergraduate students attending 467 U.S. colleges and represent all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 96 countries through the end of 2022.

    The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program enables students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad, providing them with skills critical to our national security and economic prosperity. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,300 U.S. institutions have sent over 33,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 151 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.” The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

    The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). For more information, visit gilmanscholarship.org.

    About Bard College
    Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
    # # #
    (5/24/21)
     

    Post Date: 05-20-2021
  • Sociologist Karen Barkey Joins Bard Faculty as Charles Theodore Kellogg and Bertie K. Hawver Kellogg Chair of Sociology and Religion

    Sociologist Karen Barkey Joins Bard Faculty as Charles Theodore Kellogg and Bertie K. Hawver Kellogg Chair of Sociology and Religion

    Bard College announces the appointment of Sociologist Karen Barkey to the College faculty as Charles Theodore Kellogg and Bertie K. Hawver Kellogg Chair of Sociology and Religion for the five-year period 2021-2026, beginning fall 2021. Barkey’s research explores the fields of comparative, historical and political sociology and the sociology of religion. Her research areas span from the rise of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires to the end of these empires in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and nation building in their aftermath. She is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity at the Othering & Belonging Institute, the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion, the co-director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

    “We are honored to welcome distinguished scholar Karen Barkey to the Bard faculty as well as the Open Society University Network at a moment when renewed efforts to understand cooperation, coexistence, and inclusion as well as conflict across difference have become increasingly critical,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis.

    Karen Barkey has been engaged in the comparative and historical study of the state, with special focus on its transformation over time. She has focused on state society relations, peasant movements, banditry, opposition and dissent organized around the state. Her main empirical site has been the Ottoman Empire, in comparison with France, the Habsburg, and the Russian Empires. She also pays attention to the Roman and Byzantine worlds as important predecessors of the Ottomans.

    Her work Empire of Difference (Cambridge UP, 2008) is a comparative study of the flexibility and longevity of imperial systems. In different chapters, the book explores the key organizational and state society related dynamics of imperial longevity. This book demonstrates that the flexible techniques by which the Ottomans maintained their legitimacy, the cooperation of their diverse elites both at the center and in the provinces, as well as the control over the economic and human resources were responsible for the longevity of this particular “negotiated empire.” In the process, it explores important issues such as diversity, the role of religion in politics, Islam and the state as well as the manner in which the Sunni-Shi’a divide operated during the tenure of the Ottoman Empire. Such topics are relevant to the contemporary setting and the conflicts we endure today.

    Barkey is now pursing different projects on religion and toleration. She has written on the early centuries of Ottoman state toleration and is now exploring different ways of understanding how religious coexistence, toleration and sharing occurred in different historical sacred sites under Ottoman rule. She published an edited book, Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (with Elazar Barkan) (Columbia UP, 2014) that explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia and Palestine/Israel, all three regions once under Ottoman rule. The book explores the politics and culture of conflict and cooperation over religious sites. It also provides the historical antecedents to help us understand the accommodation and contention around specific sites in the modern period, tracing comparatively areas and regime changes over time. In many places the long history of sharing sacred sites serves as an indicator of the possibilities for pluralism in the context of empire.

    Barkey is one of the curators of the traveling Shared Sacred Sites exhibition. She has worked on the exhibition in the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Photography and the Yeni Cami in Thessaloniki (2017) and the New York exhibition at the NYPL, Morgan Library and Museum and CUNY Graduate Center (2018). She also runs a website on this topic which brings international participants and expertise on many shared sites around the world. She started this project to promote awareness and understanding of coexistence among religions. You can see more on the site: sharedsacredsites.net.

    Barkey was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies at IMéRA, for 2021-2022. IMéRA is the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University, and a member of the French Network of Institutes for Advanced Study. Barkey was born in Istanbul, Turkey. After she graduated from the Lycée Notre Dame de Sion, in Istanbul, she moved to the United States for her college education. She got her BA degree from Bryn Mawr College, an MA degree from The University of Washington, and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

    About Bard College
    Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
    # # #
    (4/09/21)
     

    Post Date: 04-09-2021

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2025

Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Uri Shanas, Associate Professor at University of Haifa-Oranim
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this talk, Prof. Uri Shanas, will introduce the TiME (This is My Earth) initiative. TiME is a non-profit and volunteer-based international conservation organization that works with local communities to acquire and steward biodiversity hotspots around the world. The organization is led by an array of environmental leaders and renowned scientists from around the world. Since 2016, TiME has purchased and protected ten biodiversity hotspots in the upper Amazon, the Caribbean, Colombia, Brazil, Kenya, and Ecuador, protecting a total area of over 15 million square yards. After the talk, Professor Shanas will talk with students about potential involvement in TiME.

This event is sponsored by the Sociology and EUS/ES Programs.


Friday, April 11, 2025 – Saturday, April 12, 2025
Finberg House  The “short 20th century” was marked by totalitarian regimes, which profoundly impacted the society they governed. Such regimes comprehensively and tremendously planned to mobilize masses and gain their consensus through direct control of the lives of individuals and by enforcing collective rituals, myths, and rhetoric. Militarized corporality, high–impact aesthetic symbolism, political liturgy and leaders’ worship are just some of the aspects that typified these regimes’ actions in shaping public space. This led authors, like Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, to use the term “political religion” to indicate the evocative reach of totalitarian regimes' narratives and symbols to create a cultural memory by which masses can envision themselves as a single, cohesive social body. Building cultural memory involved shaping a material and visual culture that evoked the autopoietic national myths and the palingenetic past inspired by the regimes, as in the case of the Roman Empire for the Italian Fascism. In such a way, Fascist, Nazi and Communist regimes actively used architecture as a tool of creating influence in rational and emotional perspective. They shaped the urban and rural architectural landscape according to their conception of history (past, present, and future) and the people as a nation. This included at times the enshrinement of religious architectural and monumental heritage. 

These totalitarian regimes molded their relationship with religious institutions and traditions since their oriented conception of religion. This was discernible, and an extremization of post–Westphalian understanding about religion was based on a dialectical relationship between political power and religious institutions in which the latter are essentially subjugated to the former. However, this did not preclude regimes, such as the fascist one, from establishing agreements and collaborations with religious institutions, nor did it prevent their state secularism from mimetically and selectively embed some religious practices or symbols. In the case of communist and socialist–relative regimes, it could happen that state institutions subjugated religious ones in what we might call the “domestication of religion” which could involve blatant anti–religious conflict, as in the instance of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or even the incorporation of national worship and state ideology into religious organizations. Indeed, it also included the shaping of the architectural religious landscape, which could be subdued to state purpose or even targeted by the anti–religious campaigns as in Albania’s in 1967 when churches and mosques were closed, destroyed or converted to civilian uses. Yet in the case of communist–inspired regimes as much as fascist ones, it would be inaccurate to believe that state institutions were able to totally erase the religious monumental and architectural landscape: both religious authorities and faithful were able to develop practices of negotiation and resistance through re–using and preserving religious spaces. Specific sacred locations were occasionally used to elaborate the cultural memory of religious communities, as happened in Soviet Central Asia. This workshop aims to investigate, according to various epistemological perspectives (historical, anthropological, architectural, archaeological) and through different methodological approaches how totalitarian regimes in the short 20th century shaped the religious monumental and architectural landscape.


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