The Ralph Ellison Center fosters an ecosystem of artists and intellectuals. These include two Senior Fellows from the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Trust who, along with the Center Director, serve on the Center’s Advisory Board. Ellison Faculty Fellows and Affiliate Faculty, Staff, and Researchers contribute to the life and culture of the Center by pursuing research on the figure of Ellison himself, the virtues that the Center promotes, and/or supporting programming at the Center—providing greater opportunities for student engagement, scholarly exploration, and artistic celebration. The Center also supports an annual cohort of Student Fellows who are active participants in and beneficiaries of the Center’s activities. Student fellows will receive a stipend to help facilitate Center events, and will be core members of the salon series, taking advantage of the perpetual interplay of artists and intellectuals engaging through the Center.
Leadership
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Nicholas Alton LewisDirectorNicholas Alton Lewis
DirectorNicholas Alton Lewis is the director of the Ralph Ellison Center at Bard College. He also serves as associate vice president for academic initiatives and associate dean of the college where he pursues grant-funded initiatives to affirmatively cultivate and promote the academic and intellectual culture of the College. Nicholas teaches on the faculty of the Bard Conservatory of Music, the First-Year Seminar, and the Language and Thinking program.
For more than 30 years, Nicholas has also maintained an active career as musical performer, composer, and educator. He is the clarinetist and co-founder of the BLAK-New Blues Ensemble, co-founded with composer-pianist Anthony Kelley and based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Mr. Lewis is also the former bass clarinetist of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra and principal clarinetist of the Williamsburg Symphony, positions he held for 18 and 12 years respectively. He has performed with the Akron, Pittsburgh, Virginia, and Westmorland Symphonies, Baltimore Opera Orchestra, and with the Brevard, Gateways, Sphinx, and Pittsburgh New Music festival Orchestras. -
Carina KohnOperations CoordinatorCarina Kohn
Operations CoordinatorCarina Kohn is a multi-genre writer, editor, and musician from New York. She received an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University and a BA in English at SUNY New Paltz, where she researched the connections between material culture and the Soviet-Jewish diaspora.
Carina supports the Ellison Center as the Operations Coordinator. She is interested in exploring the connection between real and fictional objects in the life and work of Ralph and Fanny Ellison, and is eager to travel to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC to participate in the Archive Digitization Project, where she will assist in the preservation of Ellison’s material legacy.
Carina is the co-founder and poetry editor of Moonlighting by Lit Pub, which aims to shine a light on writers who have to wear many different hats to support their art. In 2023, she was an artist-in-residence at the Watermill Center, and in 2022 a top prize recipient from the Money for Women in Fiction: Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her work can be found in the Incognito Press, the Brooklyn Rail, Chronogram, and elsewhere.
Senior Fellows
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Donn ZaretskyDonn Zaretsky
Donn Zaretsky is a New York-based attorney specializing in art law and a partner at Silberman Zaretsky PC. He advises artists, artist estates, and foundations on matters involving art, intellectual property, charitable organizations, and legacy planning. A graduate of Yale Law School, he previously taught art law at NYU School of Law and has written for the Art Newspaper and Art & Auction. Zaretsky has long worked with the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust and helped guide the transition of its literary and intellectual-property legacy to Bard College. He is a Senior Fellow of the Ralph Ellison Center at Bard.
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John F. CallahanJohn F. Callahan
John F. Callahan is a scholar, editor, novelist, and teacher whose name has become inseparable from the legacy of Ralph Ellison.
A native of New Haven, Connecticut, John earned his MA and PhD from the University of Illinois. As a graduate student researching the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a literary tangent led him along a different path, toward the work of Ralph Ellison. He taught in the English department at Lewis & Clark College from 1967 to 2015, serving as the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities.
John first met Ralph Ellison in 1978, and what began as a formal encounter blossomed into a lifelong friendship built on mutual respect. Following Ellison’s death in 1994, his widow, Fanny McConnell Ellison, named John as Literary Executor to the Ralph Ellison Estate. The charge was formidable: more than 2,000 pages of manuscripts and fragments on typewritten pages and handwritten scraps, along with computer discs holding the unfinished novel Ellison had worked on for four decades or more.
Over the following decades, John brought that archive to readers. He edited The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories, and Trading Twelves: the selected letters of Ellison and Albert Murray. He served as primary editor of Ellison’s posthumous novel Juneteenth (1999), and as co-editor of the complete manuscript Three Days Before the Shooting, published in 2010. Along with Marc C. Conner, John co-edited The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, a 1,060-page collection spanning six decades, drawing admiring reviews in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.
John's own writing reflects a lifelong engagement with voice, race, and American identity. His books include In the African-American Grain and the novel A Man You Could Love. He has also worked on a second novel, The Learning Room. In 2015, he donated his papers to the Lewis & Clark Archives, where the collection, including his notes, drafts, and correspondences as Ellison’s literary executor, is open for research.
Faculty Fellows
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Angelica SanchezAngelica Sanchez
Angelica Sanchez is a composer, pianist, improviser, and educator whose music moves fluidly between structure, spontaneity, and collective exploration. Described as an artist who “seeks out the lyrical heartbeat within any avant-garde storm,” she creates music that balances structural clarity with spontaneity, deep listening, and collective interaction. Her work is grounded in the belief that composition can remain fluid, shaped and transformed through the individuality and imagination of the musicians performing it. Sanchez is Associate Professor of Music/Jazz Studies at Bard College and also participates in the Bard Prison Initiative.
Since moving to New York from Arizona in 1995, Sanchez has developed a distinctive voice within contemporary jazz and creative music. She has collaborated with artists including Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Motian, Richard Davis, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, and Marilyn Crispell, performing and recording throughout North America and Europe. She leads several critically acclaimed ensembles ranging from intimate duos and trios to her large ensemble, the Angelica Sanchez Nonet.
Her nonet recording “Nighttime Creatures” was selected as one of DownBeat’s Best Recordings of 2023. “Sparkle Beings,” her trio recording with Michael Formanek and Billy Hart, was named one of The New York Times’s Top Ten Jazz Recordings of 2022, while her duo recording with Marilyn Crispell, “How to Turn the Moon,” was included in NPR’s Top 50 Recordings of 2020. Her debut solo recording, “A Little House,” was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition. Her work has received international recognition from The New York Times, DownBeat, JazzTimes, Jazzwise, London Jazz News, and other publications.
As a Ralph Ellison Faculty Fellow, Sanchez plans to engage with Ellison’s works as a source for new music, creative inquiry, and community. She is particularly interested in how Ellison drew on musical forms, rhythm, and improvisation to shape his writing, and how those structures might be translated back into musical form. Through composition, improvisation, and collaboration, she hopes to explore the relationship between literary and musical form while creating opportunities for dialogue and shared discovery across disciplines and communities. -
Peter KleinPeter Klein
Peter Klein is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard. His teaching and research focus on urban studies, environmental sociology, globalization and development, and political sociology. He is engaged in research and community-based projects in both the United States and Brazil.
Peter's research in Brazil examines public participation, urban and environmental change, and collective action in both Amazonia and Rio de Janeiro. His book manuscript, Flooded: Development, Democracy, and Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam (Rutgers University Press, 2022), provides an ethnographic account of the societal effects of the state’s attempt to mitigate the negative impacts of one of the world’s largest hydroelectric facilities. Peter continues to carry out research in the Brazilian Amazon, and his work extends to Rio de Janeiro. Currently, he is using ethnography, archival work, interviews, oral histories, and participatory action methods to explore the history and contemporary struggles of the fishers of Complexo da Maré, the largest conglomeration of favelas in Rio. He also engages with scholars, activists, and artists based in both Brazil and the Global North, in efforts to reframe stigmatized understandings of Rio’s favelas, carry out research on environmental inequality, democratize academia, and rethink how knowledge is produced.
Peter has also engaged in teaching- and community-based participatory research in the United States on civic participation, environmental inequality, and housing insecurity. He cares deeply about student engagement in the world beyond the classroom, so that they can see the value of the ideas they learn in courses and apply them to civic and political work that matters to them.
Peter has previously worked with the Ellison Center on a grant-funded initiative to examine how members of the Bard community understand “character” and the current role of character education in both curricular and co-curricular contexts. As a faculty fellow, he will continue this work by implementing a college-wide survey and conducting semi-structured interviews with students, staff, and faculty. He will use the results from this research to contribute to initiatives that support the development of students’ character, virtue, and purpose. -
Peter L’OfficialPeter L’Official
Peter L’Official is an associate professor of literature and director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard. He is the author of Urban Legends: the South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, published by Harvard University Press (2020). His next project explores intersections of literature, architecture, and Blackness in America. He is a 2022 recipient of the Rabkin Prize for visual arts journalism, and a 2026 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. His work at the Ellison Center will concern Ellison's time at Bard, as well as Ellison's thinking and writing about Harlem, New York.
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Sara J. WinstonSara J. Winston
Sara J. Winston is a photographer and writer based in New York’s Hudson Valley. She produces photographs for books and exhibitions, writes creative-nonfiction, and makes hybrid image-text photobooks to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on her body, mind, family, and memory.
Sara will promote student engagement with Ellison's photographic work, both on campus at the Center, as well as through research visits to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, to examine his original negatives. Additionally, she will collaborate to digitize further material, enabling a broader selection of Ellison's work to be printed and displayed at Bard Campus's Ellison Center.
Sara is Associate Director and Artist in Residence of the Photography Program at Bard College; chair of the Penumbra Foundation/Image Threads Long Term Photobook Program; and a contributing writer at Collector Daily. She has received numerous awards and honors, including recent grants from Arts Mid-Hudson of New York and The Puffin Foundation.
She is the author of several books, among them: Too Visceral to be Intelligent (self-published, 2026), Sugar Honey Iced Tea (For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025), Foibles & Avoidance (National Monument Press, 2024), A Lick and a Promise (Candor Arts, 2017), and Homesick (Zatara Press, 2015). Sara has two forthcoming books: An Unfixed Pilgrimage, co-authored with Jared Ragland, to be published in the fall of 2026 by Composite Press, an imprint of the University of Oregon; and Infusion, to be published by Saint Lucy Books in the spring of 2027. In 2023, her long-term project about multiple sclerosis care was adapted and published as an op-ed in the New York Times, titled ‘My Body is a Clock’: The Private Life of Chronic Care.
Affiliate Faculty
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Folarin AjibadeFolarin Ajibade
Folarin Ajibade is a historian of everyday life in Africa and the African diaspora. He writes and teaches about urban belonging, mass/popular culture, and increasingly, the cultural and organizational politics of black internationalist movements. He is particularly interested in Ralph Ellison's time in and writings on Harlem, the one-time transnational Black mecca.
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Jana V. SchmidtJana V. Schmidt
Jana V. Schmidt (PhD Comparative Literature) is Assistant Professor of German Studies and writes about German and American, transatlantic and exilic literatures. Her work combines interest in the forms of exile with an orientation toward contemporary literary theory on both sides of the Atlantic. She first came to Bard as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center where she also served as Director of Academic Programs from 2022-23.
Jana has held fellowships at the German Literature Archive, the German Historical Institute, DC, and Fordham University/New York Public Library. Her first book, Hannah Arendt und die Folgen (Metzler, 2018), sounds the echo of Hannah Arendt’s thought in the work of a variety of postwar thinkers, artists, and activists. Her writing has been published in publications such as Philosophy Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Journal of Narrative Theory, and German Quarterly. At present, she is completing a monograph on the encounter of German-speaking exiles with African American thinkers and politics from the 1940s onward. Hoping to contribute to both the Center's digitization project and to dialogue with emerging Ellison scholars, Jana is also looking forward to diving into the archive to explore Ellison’s thinking on history and the alternate temporality of “men out of time.”
Affiliate Staff
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David FergusonDavid Ferguson
David Ferguson (he/him) previously worked at five institutions and interned at four others in student affairs, supporting residential life, religious life, fraternity and sorority life, and student activities. He completed a master of divinity at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, a master of arts in higher education administration at Ball State University, and a bachelor of arts in theology at Wheaton College, IL. David studied abroad in Israel and has interests in education, religion, architecture, politics, and the arts. As a student he was involved in student government, musical performance, publications, and athletics. In his personal time he enjoys visiting colleges and has been to over 450 campuses.
David serves as Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Student Activities and the Campus Centers at Bard College. He directly supervises the Office of Student Activities and indirectly the Office of Residence Life and Housing. He has responsibility for a large portion of campus life and the oversight of 160 student organizations, weekly and signature events, 10 student managed spaces, the Bertelsmann Campus Center, the Campus Center North, and Residence Life. David advises the Bard Student Government (BSG) and the Student Resource Group (SRG), helps manage conduct concerns, coordinates the three week matriculation experience for incoming students, and serves on a variety of college committees. -
Heather TopcikHeather Topcik
Heather Topcik is Dean and Director of Libraries at Bard College. Since earning dual master’s degrees in library science and art history from Pratt Institute in 2000, she has explored and advanced the role of libraries as centers of academic, artistic, and civic life. Her work focuses on engaging diverse communities in the generative practice of research and on creating meaningful connections between people and collections. She is delighted to serve as a Staff Fellow of the Ralph Ellison Center, where she will contribute to expanding access to and engagement with Ellison’s archival legacy and its potential to inspire new creative scholarship.
Affiliate Research
Faculty
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Arghawan BaniArghawan Bani
Arghawan Bani ’26 is a recent Bard graduate with a B.A. in Economics and Psychology. She served as part of the inaugural cohort of Ralph Ellison Center student fellows, researching Ellison's early literary work and designing student engagement programming centered on building community of care and connection, including co-organizing the monthly First Friday Social and leading a card-writing event for seniors.
Arghawan's interest in Ellison stems from his attentiveness to the complexity of human beings and his ability to write about it with an engagement of all the senses, a quality that makes his work feel timeless and classic, inviting every reader to find something to relate to and learn from. His essay, Living with Music, remains one of her favorites.
As an Affiliate Researcher, she will study Ellison's work during his employment with the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project from 1938 to 1942, when he sought out everyday people's stories on the streets of Harlem. This research will culminate in an essay on the art of storytelling, tentatively titled, In Search of Stories in the Streets of Harlem, exploring how every person we pass by carries a story, and how lived experience itself is a form of historical documentation, adding to the variety of ways human lives have been lived and told. -
Benji de la PiedraBenji de la Piedra
Benji de la Piedra is an independent humanities practitioner in his hometown of Washington DC. At Columbia University, both his undergraduate thesis in American Studies and master’s thesis in Oral History centered on Book One of Three Days Before the Shooting. He has presented papers on Ellison at numerous conferences, including the American Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, the Western Literature Association, the Ellison Centennial Symposium at Lewis & Clark College, and the Ellison International Symposium at Oxford University, the last of which led to an article published in Literature of the Americas’ special issue on Ellison in 2018. At Paul Devlin’s invitation, Benji authored Ralph Ellison In Context’s chapter on the Hickman Novel’s critical reception. Benji’s research deals broadly with the portion of Ellison’s literary biography that conditions the compositional history of the Hickman Novel, especially Book One, and gets into Ellison’s Rome period; his composition of Tell It Like It Is, Baby; his deep interest in shamanism, heroism, and First Americans; and the many rich relationships, both interpersonal and intertextual, that contribute to Ellison’s critique of Whiteness in American public narrative.
Student Fellows
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Bee HitzBee Hitz
Bee Hitz ’27 is a senior in the Art History and Visual Arts Department at Bard College, with a concentration in the written arts, whose focuses include; archives, surrealism, and poetry. As a member of the inaugural cohort of Ralph Ellison student fellows, Bee is passionate about working with archivation data, research, and access to the information, as well as the musical history of Ellison. When they are not at the Center, they can be found reading, singing in the Bard College Choir, and doing research for the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive on Bard Campus.
Bee was involved in the first iteration of the Ralph Ellison Black Aesthetics Common Course at Bard College in the Fall of 2024, which gave them their first exposure to Ralph and Fanny Ellison in a broader context beyond writing. They are thrilled to continue their learning, and continue to help other students connect with the incredible material culture that has been kept alive by the Ralph Ellison Archive. They hope to help the Ralph Ellison Center continue to grow and blossom, as they move into their first full year on Bard campus. -
Emerson EmbreyEmerson Embrey
Emerson Embrey ’27 is a senior at Bard College studying Politics with a focus in International Relations. As an inaugural Student Fellow at the Ralph Ellison Center, Emerson has been involved in the Center’s development from an early stage, contributing to its emerging public identity through branding, communications strategy, digital media, and student outreach. Beyond the Ralph Ellison Center, Emerson is involved in Bard Student Government as Chair of the Student Judiciary Board and Constitutional Court and serves as a manager for Bard Women’s Basketball.
Emerson’s work with the Center has included helping shape its emerging visual and public identity. developing and refining promotional materials, contributing copy and messaging for events and initiatives, researching social media strategy and comparable institutions, and supporting planning for the Center’s website and digital presence. Emerson has also worked on outreach materials, bookmark and print projects, merchandise research, event promotion, and broader questions of how the Center presents itself consistently across platforms and audiences. This work has included collaboration with Center staff, student fellows, and Bard’s communications team as the Center develops its public-facing presence.
Going forward, Emerson hopes to continue working at the intersection of communications, programming, and student engagement. In particular, Emerson is interested in helping build a thoughtful and recognizable voice for the Center across its website and social platforms, developing accessible ways to communicate its ideas and programming, and creating opportunities for students to see the Center as a place for intellectual exchange, creative collaboration, and meaningful participation in the life of the College.
