Investigative Journalist and Author Suki Kim Named 2023–24 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project named author Suki Kim as the 2023–24 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Established in 2014, the fellowship supports an annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program.
Investigative Journalist and Author Suki Kim Named 2023–24 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project named author Suki Kim as the 2023–24 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Established in 2014, the fellowship supports an annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The fellowship, which was fully endowed in 2022, represents a longstanding commitment by Bard College and the Keith Haring Foundation to support scholarship and creative practices at the intersection of art and activism.
Through her work as a journalist and author, Kim has provided unprecedented insights into one of the world’s most secretive and dangerous dictatorships. Born in South Korea, Kim has been traveling to North Korea since 2002, where she has contributed groundbreaking reporting on the country to publications including the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. In 2011, Kim published the New York Times bestseller, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014), based on her experience living undercover in Pyongyang for six months with the country's future leaders during the final year of Kim Jong-il’s reign. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the PEN Open Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Open Society Foundations fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant, an American Academy Berlin Prize, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship at Harvard University.
“It is an honor to welcome Suki Kim to Bard, where I am sure she will inspire a new generation to act boldly in advancing human rights in their respective fields,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the center for curatorial Studies, Bard College. “As a novelist and significantly as an investigative journalist, her work has led to real change in our world.”
“Suki Kim is at once a courageous risk-taker and a brilliant writer," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project. “That rare combination of political commitment and artistic eloquence is exactly what the Haring Fellowship was created to honor."
Kim’s appointment follows that of Haytham el-Wardany, the 2022-23 Haring Fellow. Additional details on the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism follow below, with more information on previous fellows found at ccs.bard.edu.
About Suki Kim Suki Kim is an investigative journalist, a novelist, and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea.
Kim’s New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive gulag nation during the final year of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Her novel, The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003) was the PEN Open Book Award winner and a PEN Hemingway Prize finalist.
She is currently working on her next nonfiction book The Prince and the Revolutionary: Children of War (W.W. Norton), which was shortlisted for a 2022 Lukas Prize work-in-progress, given by Columbia University School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
Kim’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Her TED Talk on her experiences living undercover in North Korea has drawn millions of viewers. She has appeared in media around the world including CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Kim served as a Ferris Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University in 2017.
About the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College Founded in 1990, CCS Bard is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside an extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art and its social significance.
About the Human Rights Project The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, introduced the first interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. The Project maintains a special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and through teaching, research, and public programs is committed to exploring the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and representational dimensions of human rights discourse. Since 2009, the Human Rights Project has collaborated with CCS Bard on the development of seminars, workshops, research projects, and symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts. While academic in nature, this research and teaching draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving human rights advocates, artists, and curators.
About the Keith Haring Foundation Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes during his life. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and communities impacted by systemic inequity. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.
The Keith Haring Foundation gives grants to not-for-profit entities that engage in charitable and educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of young people, and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection. The Foundation additionally maintains a collection of Haring’s art and archives and funds exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the artist’s work and philosophy. www.haring.com.
In light of the unprecedented hostile takeover of New College of Florida (NCF) and resulting limits on academic expression in Florida, members of the New College community have announced the creation of “Alt New College,” whose mission it is to bring leading thinkers and educators, including former NCF faculty, to teach free and subsidized lectures, tutorials and short courses and for-credit courses to support the academic freedom of students who have been put in the middle of a political crossfire by partisan politicians.
Newly Established Alt New College Network Hosts Online Talk, “The Authoritarian Assault on Gender Studies: A Conversation with Judith Butler and Masha Gessen”
In light of the unprecedented hostile takeover of New College of Florida (NCF) and resulting limits on academic expression in Florida, members of the New College community have announced the creation of “Alt New College,” (https://www.altnewcollege.org/) whose mission it is to bring leading thinkers and educators, including former NCF faculty, to teach free and subsidized lectures, tutorials and short courses and for-credit courses to support the academic freedom of students who have been put in the middle of a political crossfire by partisan politicians.
Alt New College’s inaugural talk, which will be held via webcast on Monday, September 18th at 2:30pm EDT, will be a conversation between Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley whose forthcoming book Who’s Afraid of Gender? will be published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux in early 2024, and Masha Gessen, Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College, on “The Authoritarian Assault on Gender Studies.” The talk will be introduced by former New College Student Senate President and current Hampshire College third-year student Libby Harrity.
The talk is offered for free to the New College community, including current students and faculty and alums, as well as those interested in the fate of academic freedom in Florida. Attendees can register in advance for this webinar at: https://bard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QjtyH6ovTpKlOTAI-W8_0Q
Panelist Masha Gessen said, "It's always an honor and a joy to be in conversation with Judith Butler. On this occasion, the topic and the audience feel momentous: New College Florida is now situated at the frontline of America's autocratic attempt, and gender is at the center of the aspiring autocrats' political agenda."
Former NCF Gender Studies Professor Nick Clarkson said, “Florida has passed a horrifying slate of anti-trans laws in 2023, and New College's new administrators have ensured that New College will no longer be a refuge from state violence. Canceling the Gender Studies Program is an attempt by the trustees to suppress feminist, queer, and trans knowledge. I'm excited to see gender studies teach-ins and events pop up to resist their attempts to silence us."
Alt New College’s initial focus will be on subjects that are under assault in Florida, including race, gender, the scientific method, and academic freedom. Talks will also focus on how young people can be empowered to be civically engaged. Alt New College’s long-term goal is to build an online institute that helps incubate strategies and share resources to help protect other communities facing similar attacks. Its partners include Bard College, PEN America, and the Open Society University Network (OSUN), which has opened its OSUN Online Courses to students and faculty of New College, including many who have chosen to leave the institution.
Alt New College’s Fall Programming includes talks and short courses by: Neil Gaiman on writing; Jonathan Friedman of PEN America on Academic Freedom; Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University on the politics of science; Maya Wiley of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Alvin Starks of the Open Society Foundations on race and political attacks on Critical Race Theory; David Hogg of Leaders We Deserve and co-Founder, March for Our Lives on youth involvement in the political process; New College alum and president of the American University of Bulgaria Margee Ensign (New College ‘73) and OSUN Vice Chancellor Jonathan Becker on the civic role of universities.
Jeremy Young, Freedom to Learn program director at PEN America, said: "The soul of New College is its creativity and openness to free thought and ideas. Alt New College proposes to continue that spirit in its educational programming, at a time when New College itself has fallen under an unprecedented regime of political viewpoint censorship. Even as the New College community works to preserve and defend the institution itself, I applaud this effort to ensure that what is most special about New College survives in some form."
Former Professor Erik Wallenberg who is teaching a short course on the history of movements for social change said: "This new administration is sowing chaos on campus for students, faculty, and staff in their pursuit of turning a beloved college into a conservative Christian outpost. They targeted members of New College who dared to teach the truth about racism, sexism, and inequality in this country and those of us who speak out against this hostile takeover. Interim President Richard Corcoran's refusal to sign my renewal contract was but one assault among many that he continues to undertake as he attempts to fulfill Governor DeSantis' directive to turn New College into the Hillsdale of the south."
Follow on Instagram and X (twitter): @altnewcollege
About the Panelists:
Judith Butler: Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of several books, including Who’s Afraid of Gender? will be published by Farrah Strauss Giroux in early 2024. Other books include: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Is Critique Secular? (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009), Sois Mon Corps (2011), co-authored with Catherine Malabou, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou 2013), Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and a co-edited volume, Vulnerability in Resistance, with Duke University Press (2015), The Force of Nonviolence 2020, and What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022). Their books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages.
Masha Gessen: Masha Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College. They are a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of 11 books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy (Riverhead Books, June 2020); The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, a 2015 account of the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Gessen's journalism has focused on autocracy, LGBTQ issues, and, for the last year and a half, primarily Russia's war in Ukraine. Gessen is the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and Nieman Fellowships, the Hitchens Prize, Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, the Blake-Dodd Prize for Nonfiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking. Gessen, who grew up in Moscow, now lives in New York City.
Bard College Center for Civic Engagement will host a talk via webcast, “Young People Can Change America: Youth Voting and Political Power” on Tuesday, September 19, 12:15–1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4. The talk will feature four young civic engagement leaders who are committed to youth voting and youth participation in the political process and will take place on National Voter Registration Day (September 19). Panelists include David Hogg, Maisie Brown, Brianna Cea, and Evan Malbrough.
Bard Center for Civic Engagement Hosts Online Talk, “Young People Can Change America: Youth Voting and Political Power,” on September 19
Bard College Center for Civic Engagement will host a talk via webcast, “Young People Can Change America: Youth Voting and Political Power” on Tuesday, September 19, 12:15–1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4. The talk will feature four young civic engagement leaders who are committed to youth voting and youth participation in the political process and will take place on National Voter Registration Day (September 19). Pre-register for the event here.
This panel discussion is part of a new collaborative course Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy—codeveloped and taught jointly by faculty from Bard College, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tuskegee University, Prairie View A&M University, and legal experts—that uses the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlawed age-based voter discrimination, as a prism through which to understand the history of voting and disenfranchisement in the United States and the role of college communities in the fight for voting rights.
The class was developed under a broader applied learning research project on voting rights, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that highlights how academic institutions and their leaders can also serve as important civic actors in promoting and defending democratic principles. The four institutions centrally involved in this course and project offer unique insights into the role of colleges in the fight for voting rights, particularly the fight against discrimination based on race and age. Read more about the project here.
Students taking this course will prepare questions for the panelists. The talk is also open to students and faculty of Bard College, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tuskegee University, Prairie View A&M University; Andrew Goodman Foundation student ambassadors, who are situated on more than 80 institutions across the country; as well as students and faculty from New College in Florida through a partnership between the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and Alt-New College. Members of the public may also view the talk.
Professor of Political Studies at Bard and Bard’s Vice President for Academic Affairs, Jonathan Becker, who is the project’s principal investigator, said: “We are thrilled to have students engage with such a diverse group of motivated and engaged youth leaders who will be able to link theories discussed in our class on student voting and engagement to contemporary practice. These young leaders disprove myths of disengaged youth and offer hope for a better future.”
Henry E. Frye Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina A&T State University Dr. Jelani M. Favors said: “College youth have historically played a vital role in shaping and reshaping the political contours of America to be more inclusive and to represent the voices and concerns of all citizens. We are excited to invite some of the nation’s leading youth activists into this critically important and innovative course to help our students understand how we can continue to utilize discourse and dialogue in the ongoing fight to preserve and expand American democracy.”
Executive Director of The Andrew Goodman Foundation Rashawn Davis said: “We are excited that our Andrew Goodman Ambassadors — student civic leaders at college campuses across the country — have the opportunity to hear from these impressive speakers, including our very own Board Director, Evan Malbrough. As a former Ambassador himself, Evan became a poll worker and launched the first totally student-operated on-campus polling place at Georgia State University. His experience as an activist and advocate is nothing short of inspirational, and his participation as a speaker is sure to be instructive.”
Associate Professor of History at Tuskegee University Dr. Lisa Bratton said: “Our students are very excited to learn not only about the 26th Amendment and what it means for them as young people, but also Tuskegee’s role in securing voting rights for African American citizens. They will be engaging with young voting rights activists which we hope will influence their own lifelong activism.”
Yael Bromberg, Esq., a constitutional rights attorney, leading legal scholar of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and lecturer at Rutgers Law School who helped shape the course said: “Brianna, Maisie, Evan, and David are bringing vitality to the promise of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment through their efforts to engage young people into the political process—be it in super-localized efforts in Jackson, Missississippi or Atlanta, Georgia, or in state and federal races and issue campaigns across the nation. Their efforts as democracy practitioners epitomize the lessons that we are exploring through this innovative new course on the historic and contemporary power of youth practitioners in the fight for American democracy.”
Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University, Melanye Price said: “The belief that students don’t care about and are not impacted by the politics of the spaces just outside their dorms has never been true. Prairie View students and the students at the other colleges have been warriors in the fight for fair access to the ballot and this class helps them learn more about their own history and to assess their role in the current voting rights struggle.”
This event is sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Open Society University Network, the Andrew Goodman Foundation, and Alt-New College.
Guest lecturers Kareem Abdulrahman and Bachtyar Ali Hegeman 2015:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Politics has at least two faces in the works of Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. In The Last Pomegranate Tree, for example, a meditation on fatherhood is intertwined with the discovery of increasing corruption in political leadership. Why does salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Given the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan, what is the significance of politics in literature? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, literary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world. Here the expression that the translator is a “traitor” may ring hollow when the translator appears first of all as an activist with loyalties. What then are the politics of translating Kurdish literature in the contemporary world? This event invites conversation and reflection with a novelist and his translator.
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
with speakers June Nemon and leaders from the Stony Run Tenants Union Olin Humanities, Room 1025:10 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This event is part of the Political Organizing Speaker Series, Spring 2023
Thursday, March 16, 2023
with speakers Becky Simonsen and Puya Gerami Olin Humanities, Room 2035:10 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 More information on the work of these speakers can be found here.
This event is part of the Political Organizing Speaker Series, Spring 2023
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Professor J.T. Roane, assistant professor of geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk is drawn from Roane's recently published book, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023). Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane refashioning of intimate spaces to confrontations over the city's social and ecological arrangement, Black communities challenged the imposition of Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.