Classical Studies

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Two Bard Students and One Alum Receive Full Scholarships to Study Classics at University of Colorado Boulder

Two Bard College seniors, Celeste Connell ’26 and Peter Fields ’26, and Bard alum Coulson Matto ’25, have received full scholarships to the Classics graduate program at University of Colorado Boulder. All three scholarships include full tuition, as well as stipends for teaching assistantships. “As well as being academically successful, all three have been fantastic student leaders in the Classics program,” said Lauren Curtis, associate professor of Classics at Bard. “Between them they have worked as tutors, organized program events, participated in faculty searches, and more. I couldn't imagine better ambassadors for Bard.” 

Connell’s area of interest lies in ancient literature's portrayals of social interaction, particularly in subjects like friendship, performance, education, exile, and alienation, with a focus on connecting Greco-Roman literature with other literary traditions. “Fully funded MA programs in the humanities are incredibly rare. Especially at a time like this, when many programs are drastically cutting funding due to federal pressure, I'm grateful beyond words to study at the exceptional program offered by CU Boulder, where Classics is thriving,” said Connell. 

Fields’ historical work on the notion of “Romanness” takes him into modern European intellectual history. He is pursuing his masters in Classics in the Latin language track, but is interested in studying ancient ethnography and the Roman imperial period. “I’m grateful to all of Bard’s Classics faculty for getting me to where I am today and excited to continue studying what I am so passionate about,” said Fields. 

Matto, who currently works as a Latin teacher in New York City, focuses on ancient gender and sexuality studies, and looks forward to learning more archaeology-influenced methodology at Boulder to inform the strong literary training received from Bard. “It's deeply meaningful to me to be accepted into this program,” said Matto. “Last year I also attempted to go through the graduate school admissions process, but hit a number of roadblocks because of federal budget cuts and program closures. It is immensely satisfying—and exciting!—to see two years of work pay off. I'm also very grateful to all of my advisors at Bard who helped me work within these circumstances and truly put so much effort into my success.” 

Bard’s Classical Studies Program seeks to understand the languages, literatures, histories, and visual and material cultures of the premodern Mediterranean world. The program approaches these ancient societies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including linguistics, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy, while also considering the long and complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome in art, language, politics, and culture from antiquity to the present day.

Post Date: 05-05-2026

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2026 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Bard Faculty Members

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships to Bard College faculty members Jacqueline Goss, professor of film and electronic arts, and Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, Goss and Luzzi were awarded in recognition of their career achievement and exceptional promise. Guggenheim fellowships were also awarded to James Hoff, Steve Reinke, and Kenneth Tam, who will teach this upcoming summer at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”

Goss’s fellowship will support the development of an experimental narrative film project that engages with larger questions of artistic life, visibility, and the uneven recognition of artists and artistic forms, explored within the social and cultural landscape of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During Luzzi’s fellowship year, he will work on The Lives of Beatrice: The Muse Who Made Us Modern, a book of narrative nonfiction that traces the remarkable afterlife of Dante's great muse, Beatrice Portinari, across seven centuries of art, literature, and culture. Beginning with a biography of Beatrice as a historical woman in late thirteenth-century Florence, the book follows her transformation into one of the most frequently reimagined figures in the Western imagination, from Petrarch and Cervantes to the Pre-Raphaelites and into contemporary pop culture. Ultimately, Luzzi’s project asks what each era's reinvention of Beatrice reveals, not only about the woman herself, but about the cultures that have continually returned to her.

Goss, Luzzi, Hoff, Reinke, and Tam are among 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines appointed to the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Since its inception, the foundation has granted nearly $450 million in Fellowships to over 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.

Jacqueline Goss is an experimental filmmaker whose work examines the human impulse to quantify and control even the most ineffable experiences and environments. Using diverse methods and tools, her work explores the ways vanity, fear, loneliness and desire seep into scientific experimentation, language, mapping, and political systems. Her projects include an animated documentary on the effects of biometric surveillance on migrants’ senses of self (Stranger Comes To Town), a film enacting the quotidian gestures of a weather observer on the windiest mountain in the world (The Observers), and a theoretical musical about Wilhelm Reich (OR119). Over the last 25 years, these works and others have shown at film festivals worldwide including the London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, and Faculdade de Belas Artes. Goss’s moving image work has also screened at art centers, galleries, and museums including MOMA, the Natural History Museum in New York, Eyebeam Atelier, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Center for the Arts, Pacific Film Archive, Kunsthall Aarhus, UnionDocs, Microscope Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Arsenal, Piano Nobile, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Her films, videos, and animations have been covered in various journals and newspapers including The Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Chicago Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Four Columns, Film Comment, BOMB, Art Forum, Cinemascope, Sage Journals, and Millenium Film Journal.

Joseph Luzzi received his PhD from Yale University. He is the author of nine books, including his recent The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood (Norton, 2025), one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025. His other books include Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (Norton, 2022), a New Yorker Best Books of 2022 selection and shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; and My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, amongst others. Luzzi’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TLS, Bookforum, and American Scholar, among others, and his scholarly writing has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, Raritan, Italica, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.

Post Date: 04-28-2026