Bard IWT Staff

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Erica Kaufman

(B.A., Douglass College, Rutgers University; M.F.A., The New School, Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center) is the Director of the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking and Visiting Assistant Professor of Literacy Education. She has taught in the English Department at Baruch College, worked with the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, and served as a Curriculum Specialist for the Holocaust Educators Network. She has been a visiting writer and visiting professor at Naropa University and Parsons the New School for Design. Her publications include the full-length poetry collections INSTANT CLASSIC (Roof Books 2013) and censory impulse (Factory School 2009). Kaufman is the co-editor of Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974 (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2014) and of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Venn Diagram, 2009). Prose and critical work can be found in: Jacket2, Open Space/SFMOMA and in The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations (ed. Mark Silverberg, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Additional critical work is forthcoming in the MLA Guide to Teaching Gertrude Stein (eds. L. Esdale and D. Mix). Kaufman also co-coordinates the Teacher Resource Center for the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry MOOC in collaboration with the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Current research interests include: Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines; the interstices between contemporary poetics and Composition & Rhetoric; feminism and the epic poem; and intergenerational Holocaust Studies.

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William Dixon

William Dixon is the Director of the Language and Thinking Program and helps to promote a broader understanding of its intellectual and creative work throughout the Bard network and internationally. He has taught in the program since 2010 and holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He was an Academic Fellow for Political Studies at the Bard Prison Initiative from 2012-16. He was also a 2010-11 Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. He has taught political theory, comparative politics, and political economy at Johns Hopkins, Bard College, and Oberlin College. His research interests include contemporary political theory, ancient political thought, philosophies of nature, cosmopolitanism, and prudential theories of democracy. Some of the political thinkers who interest him most include Aeschylus, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. He is currently working on a project on democracy, capitalist globalization, and global warming.

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Celia Bland

Celia Bland, IWT Associate Director, leads IWT workshops nationally and internationally.  She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Cherokee Road Kill, illustrated by Kyoko Miyabe (2018).  She is co-editor of a collection of critical essays about the poetry of Jane Cooper, A Radiance of Attention (U. of Michigan 2019).  Her essay on teaching poetry, "Dialogic Poetry," appeared in Reflecting Pool: Poets on the Creative Process (SUNY 2018).

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Michelle Hoffman

Michelle Hoffman (B.Sc., Concordia University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Toronto) is the Assistant Director of IWT and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, where she teaches courses in history and philosophy of science and in the First-Year Seminar program. Michelle's area of focus at IWT is writing to learn in STEM disciplines. Previously, she has taught at the American University of Central Asia, Bard's partner in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, as well as in Bard's Language and Thinking Program and the Bard Prison Initiative. Her research focuses on the history of psychology and education. She has a particular interest in transfer of training, a body of experimental research that examines whether learning skills acquired in one area readily transfer to other domains—a question that strikes at the core of teachers’ work.

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Olesia Guran

(B.S., University at Buffalo) As the Business Coordinator, manages all financial and budgetary matters of the Institute for Writing and Thinking.

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Molly Livingston

Molly Livingston graduated from Bard College in 2015 with a degree in Written Arts. As an undergraduate, she worked as Administrative Assistant at the Institute for Writing and Thinking from early 2012 until her graduation in 2015. She lived in New York (Chelsea, Park Slope, Bushwick, and Bed-Stuy), and for three years managed the finances and office administration for The Paris Review Foundation. Returning to IWT as Program Administrator in January 2019, Molly now handles the logistics for all of IWT's workshops and conferences.

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Laura Gust

Laura Gust (B.A., Empire State College; M.A., New York University) is the Senior Program Associate of the Language & Thinking Program, and is responsible for coordinating the logistical needs of the L&T summer program, and digitizing the IWT archives. As a visual cultural historian, Laura has presented papers at several academic conferences, including the 2018 Fashion, Costume and Visual Culture international conference, where she spoke on the topic of the the white nightgown trope's evolution in popular visual culture. Her research interests primarily concentrate on the dialogue between popular print, literature and fashion. Before working for L&T at Bard College, Laura was a freelance fashion archivist for the PVH archive in NY, a contract costume mounter for the National Museum for Women in the Arts Rodarte retrospective exhibition, and a part-time retail manager of the Tea Shop of Woodstock.