The Division of Languages and Literature offers majors in the areas of literature; written arts; and foreign languages, cultures, and literatures. All students in the division are encouraged to study languages other than English; foreign language instruction currently offered includes American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, and ancient Greek and Latin. Interdisciplinary majors are also offered in Asian studies, classical studies, French studies, German studies, Italian studies, Middle Eastern studies, Russian and Eurasian studies, and Spanish studies (see Interdivisional Programs and Concentrations).
Photo by Karl Rabe
Our Programs
The Division of Languages and Literature includes the following academic programs:
Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures
Literature
Written Arts
Matthew Mutter, Division Chair; Associate Professor of Literature
Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures
Literature
Written Arts
Matthew Mutter, Division Chair; Associate Professor of Literature
Coursework and Requirements
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Bard Translation and
Translatability Initiative
BTTI encourages curricular initiatives that promote translation, particularly from a multicultural or multidisciplinary perspective, and aims to bring together scholars, teachers, writers, and artists from the United States and other countries. BTTI also works with Bard faculty members to elicit new interdisciplinary insights, develop new curricula, strengthen communication, and stimulate experimentation among the College’s four divisions and across its network of international liberal arts and graduate studies programs. Among other events throughout the academic year, BTTI hosts an annual translation symposium at Bard.
Languages and Literature News and Events
Featured News
Five Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad
Ezra Calderon ’25, Adelaide Driver ’26, Dashely Julia ’26, Nyla Lawrence ’26, and Brenda Lopez ’26, have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State.
Five Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad
Clockwise from top left: Bard College Gilman Scholars Brenda Lopez ’26, Dashely Julia ’26, Adelaide Driver ’26, Nyla Lawrence ’26, Ezra Calderon ’25.
Bard College Mathematics and Italian Studies double major Ezra Calderon ’25, from Harlem, New York, has been awarded a Gilman Scholarship to study at the University of Trento in Italy via exchange, for the spring semester 2025. “This scholarship provides an exciting opportunity to improve my language skills and conduct research while abroad for my Senior Project in Italian Studies,” says Calderon.
Bard College Studio Art major Adelaide Driver ’26, from Taos, New Mexico, has been awarded a $4000 Gilman Scholarship to study at Kyoto Seika University in Japan, for the spring semester 2025. “Receiving this scholarship means the world to me. I have always wanted to study abroad, but money was a concern. This scholarship provides the opportunity to study what I love in an incredible place. I am so grateful,” says Driver. She serves as a peer counselor at Bard and will be studying illustration at Kyoto Seika.
Bard College junior Dashely Julia ’26, who is jointly majoring in Architecture and Art History with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian studies, has been awarded a $3000 Gilman Scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin in Germany, for the spring semester 2025. “Winning the Gilman Scholarship holds profound significance for me. It represents the opportunity to engage with diverse cultures and gain new perspectives that will enrich my understanding of art history and architecture. As someone deeply passionate about exploring how cultural and historical contexts shape artistic and architectural practices, studying abroad is more than an academic pursuit—it is a lifelong dream come true,” says Julia, who is a Posse Puerto Rico Scholar and lead peer mentor for the Office of Equity and Inclusion at Bard.
Bard College Computer Science major Nyla Lawrence ’26, from Atlanta, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship to study at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan via exchange, for the spring semester 2025. “My grandmother told me this quote from Derek Bok: ‘If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.’ There is always something to be ignorant about but, I am happy the Gilman Scholarship provides others and myself the ability to learn more about the world while also studying. Studying abroad not only allows for broader education opportunities, but also life lessons and responsibility before exiting college, which I am really excited for,” says Lawrence, who will be learning Mandarin, her third language after English and German, to better communicate and traverse the land. Lawrence is currently one of three captains of the Bard women’s volleyball team and the Katherine Lynne Mester Memorial Scholar in Humanities for the 2024–2025 academic year at Bard.
Bard College Psychology major Brenda Lopez ’26, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Kyung Hee University in Seoul via exchange, for the spring semester 2025. “I couldn’t be more grateful, and I can’t wait to see how this scholarship helps me when spending my time in Korea,” says Lopez. At Bard, Lopez is part of the Trustee Leader Scholar Project Nicaragua Education Initiative and a clubhead for the K-DIARY club on campus.
The Department of State awarded the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to approximately 1,600 American undergraduate students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, in this fall 2024 cycle. All scholarship recipients are US undergraduate students with established high financial need as federal Pell Grant recipients. On average, 65 percent of Gilman recipients are from rural areas and small towns across the United States, and half are first-generation college or university students.
Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 44,000 Gilman scholars have studied or interned in more than 170 countries around the globe. Supported by the US Congress, the Gilman Scholarship is an initiative of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and is aided in its implementation by the Institute of International Education. To learn more about the Gilman Scholarship and its recipients, including this newest cohort, visit gilmanscholarship.org.
Post Date: 01-07-2025
Recent News
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Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us Named One of Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024
Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us Named One of Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024
The latest book by Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College, has been featured on a list of art that inspired former president Barack Obama in 2024. Mengestu’s novel, Someone Like Us, tells the story of the son of Ethiopian immigrants who seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home. In exploring this history, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around his father’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them.Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program.
Post Date: 01-06-2025
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Adhaar Noor Desai Receives Modern Language Association Prize
Adhaar Noor Desai Receives Modern Language Association Prize
Adhaar Noor Desai, associate professor of English at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for First Book for Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition, published by Cornell University Press. The MLA Prize for a First Book was established in 1993 and is awarded annually for the first book-length publication by a member of the association that is a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography. “In addition to its masterful and original treatment of English Renaissance poetry, Blotted Lines engages expertly with modern approaches in writing studies, offering a unique combination of two fields that Desai shows to be surprisingly complementary,” the MLA committee writes about Desai’s book. “This beautifully written, tremendously researched book raises important questions and offers a timely and thoughtful celebration of the art of composition (and discomposition).”Adhaar Noor Desai, associate professor of English at Bard College.
Post Date: 12-17-2024
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Bard College Student Jessica Zoll ’26 Receives Fund for Education Abroad Spring 2025 Scholarship
Bard College Student Jessica Zoll ’26 Receives Fund for Education Abroad Spring 2025 Scholarship
Jessica Zoll ’26, a Bard College student majoring in literature, has received a scholarship from Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) for the spring 2025 semester. Zoll is one of 71 undergraduates from around the country selected by 92 volunteer reviewers, and with FEA’s Education in Ireland Access Partner Scholarship, she will attend University College Cork in Ireland.Jessica Zoll ’26.
“As a first-generation college student and American, I never imagined that studying abroad or earning a scholarship to cover my entire €7,400 tuition would be within reach, but that changed when I came to Bard,” said Zoll. “My support system here is incredible, and it's through this community that I’ve been introduced to opportunities that align not only with my academic goals, but also with my personal interests. I study Victorian literature, but didn't think studying in a place so rich in 19th-century history was feasible. Through the Fund for Education Abroad's Inclusive Ireland Access Partner Scholarship, I’ve been awarded the chance to study at University College Cork—the city is steeped in Victorian history, and the courses are too! I feel incredibly fortunate and excited for this next step in my academic journey. This really feels like a win for not just me, but for my entire family.”
The Fund for Education Abroad provides scholarships and ongoing support to students with financial need who are underrepresented among the US study-abroad population. Of the 71 scholars awarded this application cycle, 93% identify as students of color; 28% identify as LGBTQ+; 23% identify as male, 70% as female, and 7% as genderfluid or nonbinary. Characteristic of FEA scholars, 94% are first-generation college students, 30% are current or former community college students, and 37% have never left the United States. Currently studying in universities and colleges in 27 states, the new FEA Scholars will attend programs in over 25 countries across five continents.
Since its inception in 2010, FEA has awarded over $3.7 million in scholarships to 1186 undergraduates, and supports students before, during, and after their study abroad experience with scholarships and programming.
“We are honored to have the support of so many who are striving to make study abroad more accessible,” said FEA Program Manager Joelle Leinbach. “As we look ahead to 2025, FEA will continue to put access and equity first as we consider further improvements to our application process and expand our ranks of volunteer reviewers.”
Post Date: 12-17-2024
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Marina van Zuylen On Teaching Baudelaire
Marina van Zuylen On Teaching Baudelaire
Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard, appeared in a session hosted by the Teagle Foundation as part of a workshop series on methods to strengthen general education. Van Zuylen speaks about how she has taught Charles Baudelaire’s “The Bad Glazier” throughout the years, and how those teaching approaches have shifted as the needs of her students have changed over the past 20 years. “This is a wonderful text because it introduces us to so many questions,” said van Zuylen. “For me this text was a perfect example of art as an escape… It’s an escape because, it’s also a text about maybe the quality of desire, the quality of when we act for reasons that we don’t ourselves understand and this is something that is so exciting about literature. Only in literature, maybe, can we get this sense that characters act in a way that is forbidden in real life.”Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard.
Post Date: 12-16-2024
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Bard College and Six Faculty Awarded New York State Council on the Arts Grants
Bard College and Six Faculty Awarded New York State Council on the Arts Grants
Six Bard College faculty members have been named as recipients of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for 2025. NYSCA Support for Organizations grants were awarded to Erika Switzer, assistant professor of music and director of the Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship at Bard, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, and Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard. Additionally, Bard College received a Support for Organizations Award for 2025 in the amount of $40,000. NYSCA Support for Artist grants were awarded to DN Bashir, assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard, and Ann Lauterbach, professor of languages and literature.The NYSCA grants are intended to increase access to arts funding and recognize the substantial economic and social impact of New York state’s arts and culture sector.Clockwise from top left: Erika Switzer, Suzanne Kite, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, DN Bashir, Sarah Hennies, and Ann Lauterbach.
Erika Switzer and Lucy Fitz Gibbon will receive a grant in support of operational expenses and projects at Sparks & Wiry Cries, an organization, cofounded by Switzer and where Fitz Gibbon serves as managing editor, that curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars with innovative initiatives. These projects will include the upcoming Brooklyn premieres of Meltdown, a dramatic work for mezzo and piano trio which engages the layered stories and science of climate change through the lens of a female glaciologist, and Skymother, which weaves together the family history of composer Timothy Long (Choctaw, Muscogee Creek) with the Haudenosaunee creation story, Sky Woman.
Sarah Hennies, along with her duo partner, Tristan Kasten-Krause, a bassist and composer, will receive the grant for their new work Saccades for double bass and percussion at the Wassaic Project, an artist-run nonprofit contemporary art gallery, artist residency, and art education center. The piece is to be performed in total darkness with a single candle flame.
Suzanne Kite will receive a grant for the proposed project, Owáǧo Uŋkíhaŋblapi (We Dream a Score), her first full orchestral work for her organizational partner, the American Composers Orchestra (ACO). The piece continues Kite’s exploration of individual, collective, and societal dreaming practices, using an Indigenous AI framework. NYSCA funding supports the development of an AI app in collaboration with the Brooklyn-based design firm School. Members of the ACO and the public will submit their dreams to the app, which transforms language into Lakȟóta Visual Language symbols.
DN Bashir’s Hollow House, sponsored by JACK Arts Incorporated, follows a group of New York residents meeting at a farm-to-table restaurant in an old house in the Hudson Valley. Inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, it explores unspoken power dynamics and “the systems that hold us captive.”
Ann Lauterbach will be awarded a grant in support of her project called “The Meanwhile: Linear Ruptures and Simultaneous Narratives,” which will have a performance and possible exhibition at the Flowchart Foundation.
Post Date: 12-10-2024
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Joseph Luzzi's Translation of Dante's Vita Nuova Reviewed in Open Letters Review
Joseph Luzzi's Translation of Dante's Vita Nuova Reviewed in Open Letters Review
Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature Joseph Luzzi’s translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova was reviewed by Steve Donoghue for the Open Letters Review. The new translation was published on December 3 by W.W. Norton’s imprint Liveright. Donoghue’s short review focuses on how Luzzi adapts Dante’s sometimes mystifying prose work. Donoghue notes that translators of the Vita Nuova have been surprised and “slightly taunted” by the work, and that “Luzzi aims for clarity without slavish stylistic imitation, [likening] his translation process to laying a transparent film over Dante’s text.” Luzzi’s “leaner” translation, he writes, is one reason readers can appreciate his updated, more modern version.Joseph Luzzi. Photo by Helena Baillie
Luzzi has taught at Bard since 2002, and his previous book Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance was named one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022.
Post Date: 12-02-2024
Upcoming Events
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2/12Wednesday5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Olin Humanities, Room 102
Mystical Martyrs and Hidden Remains: Puerto Rico's Turbulent 1950s
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 | 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 | Olin Humanities, Room 102Dr. Juan Diego Mariátegui
Puerto Rico emerged from the 1950s transformed. By 1952, governor Luis Muñoz Marín inaugurated the Free Associated State, a new legal status that ostensibly ended Puerto Rico’s colonial subordination as a “non-incorporated territory” of the United States. Another key development in these heady years was the Korean War (1950-1953), in which 61,000 Puerto Rican soldiers participated. This conflict was crucial because it allowed Muñoz Marín to present Puerto Rico as an exemplary defender of capitalist democracy and thereby discursively support its colonial relationship with the United States. But there is a parallel war that occurred in this period: the armed insurrection known as the Jayuya Uprising that Pedro Albizu Campos and the pro-independence Nationalist Party launched as a response to the Free Associated State. This talk centers on two opposed visions of war, a nationalist one and a neo-imperialist one. Through the speeches of governor Luis Muñoz Marín, poems by the Nationalist mystic Francisco Matos Paoli, and a short story by pro-independence author José Luis González, I explore how literary representations of these armed conflicts formed different anti-colonialist cultural and political subjectivities at a time when the island’s commitment to the U.S. was enshrined.
Juan Diego Mariátegui is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh University. Prior to that he received a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago as well as a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies from Brown University. His teaching and research focus on modern Puerto Rican and Cuban literature, particularly the way literary representations of space explore the relationship between man and the natural world, the cultural dimensions of colonialism, and the tensions between citizenship and diaspora. Contact: Patricia López-Gay
E-mail: [email protected]
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2/17Monday5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Olin Humanities, Room 102
Poetics of Maroonage: Posthuman Spaces in Hispanophone Caribbean Poetry
Monday, February 17, 2025 | 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 | Olin Humanities, Room 102Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa
This presentation will discuss twenty-first century poetry by two Afro-Hispanophone Caribbean poets, Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico and Soleida Ríos from Cuba, to underline how their poetry imagines futures under threatening circumstances such as forced displacement and anti-blackness. How does the longue durée of Black resistance influence twenty-first-century poetics?
Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa will present her research, which takes place through an interdisciplinary approach in between history and poetics and in dialogue with scholars interested in how lyric language is historically inflicted and intertwined with social justice and Blackness. The intertwining of imagery of long-lasting Black resistance and the emotional and political dimensions of the posthuman lyric subject ensures the poetics of maroonage exposes transhistorical genealogies of hope. Contact: Patricia López-Gay
E-mail: [email protected]