News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Bard’s new Chang Chavkin Center was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature profiles Roosevelt Montás, the center’s director and Laura Y. Chang and Arnold Chavkin Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life, and explores his philosophy of a broad, less departmentally siloed form of liberal education. As the former director of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, Montás has an established track record of advocating for a model of undergraduate learning based on foundational texts and discussion-based courses. He teaches in the undergraduate college, leading research into the advancement of liberal education. His focus is on the importance of liberal education and the study of texts with major cultural significance related to fundamental human questions, emphasizing lives of purpose and deep civic engagement.

“Montás may seem like he’s tilting at windmills,” writes Beth McMurtrie, senior writer for the Chronicle. “But a lot of other people and groups are galloping alongside him. They include foundations, longtime champions of Great Books curricula, and the many faculty members who have transformed their classrooms by adopting this approach.”

Montás teaches in the Literature Program at Bard, which emphasizes cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity, challenging national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
 

A new book by James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and Director of the Classics Program James Romm, Since You're Mortal . . . : Life Lessons From the Lost Greek Plays, was reviewed in the Epoch Times. Romm’s book, which was reviewed earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, translates fragments from ancient Greek literature and sorts them into themes about life lessons on love, politics, and more. These fragments come from the writings of Stobaeus, a fifth-century man who compiled lines from Classical writing to instruct his son; Romm’s translation is the first time they have been translated into English. “There is hardly anything more powerful or more beautiful than a great line,” writes Dustin Bass for the Epoch Times. “Romm’s new book gifts the reader these textual forms in all their beauty and wisdom.”

Romm, whose previous books have been reviewed in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, also recently reviewed Alexander: God, King, Man by Edmund Richardson for the Times Literary Supplement. He teaches in Bard’s Classical Studies Program, which 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.

Bard College’s Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the appointment of Tara Westover as visiting writer in residence. Her appointment begins in the fall 2026 semester.

Westover is an American historian and memoirist. Her first book, Educated, a memoir of her upbringing in rural Idaho, was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, PEN America’s Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted Educated the Nonfiction Book of the same year. “I'm very pleased to be joining the faculty at Bard and am really looking forward to meeting the students,” said Westover.

In 2019, Westover was named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the year. She holds a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 2019 she was the Rosenthal Writer in Residence at Harvard University. In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by former president Joseph Biden.

The work of Bard alumnus Arlo Haskell ’00, executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar, was featured by the New York Times in an article about Key West’s literary history. Key West was once a destination for writers including Ernest Hemingway and Judy Blume. Now, residents of the island are trying to preserve that legacy despite rising home prices. The Key West Literary Seminar recently renovated a house belonging to Elizabeth Bishop, and it now hosts a walking tour and summer writing workshops for high schoolers in order to “incubate future writing talent.” The Seminar aims to “make sure that the literary tradition in Key West is something that’s active and vital and ongoing today, so it’s not just part of the history books,” Haskell told the Times.
The Literature Program at Bard emphasizes cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity, challenging national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.

Professor of Literature Hua Hsu published an article in the New Yorker titled “The Curious Career of ‘the American Dream,’” examining the origins of the famous phrase first popularized by historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. Invoking a wide range of artists, journalists, historians, and other leading American thinkers alongside polling and reporting, Hsu explores how the meaning of the American Dream has evolved alongside shifting economic, social, and racial reality in the United States. Hsu concludes with a visit to the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream in Washington, DC, just down the road from a heavily fortified White House, and conversations with his students about the country’s future.

“Despite America’s wealth and relative stability, numerous metrics suggest a country in distress, lagging behind other affluent nations in everything from life expectancy to results on surveys of global happiness and well-being,” writes Hsu. “Earning a college degree or owning a home was once not just a status marker but an investment that promised material returns. Today, people amass unmanageable debt simply to keep faith with a story that feels increasingly detached from their reality.”

Hsu teaches in the Literature Program at Bard, which emphasizes cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity, challenging national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
 

Peter L'Official, associate professor of literature and director of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, has been awarded a 2026 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The grant will support his project, Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black’s Black Arts Movement, which uses biography as a method to explore how an unsung Black American architect, W. Joseph Black, navigated the structural impediments that even today confront American architects identifying as Black. The project draws on archival architectural and literary sources to reconstruct not only a life, but the broad, interdisciplinary scope of Black’s unrealized works, which included transformative design plans for Harlem as well as field-altering historical texts chronicling the history of Black builders in America, and which reveal Black’s work as an unacknowledged architectural arm of the multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts bestows project-based grants to support the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States. Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way. 
 

Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship for 2026-27. Xie’s fellowship in the category of Poetry, conferred by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, is one of 14 fellowships awarded by the foundation this year, which support independent creative and scholarly work on major projects by early mid-career individuals who have demonstrated potential to be future leaders in their fields.

During her fellowship, Xie will receive $40,000 in unrestricted funds to devote her time to researching, developing, and writing her third poetry collection, Dead Time, which delves into forms of directionless time, or time untroubled by plot and by imperatives of action. Xie is the author of two other collections of poetry. Eye Level (2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. The Rupture Tense (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Xie has also been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.

The Howard Foundation is an independent agency administered at Brown University. Established in 1954, it awards annual, unrestricted fellowships to promising individuals in selected artistic and academic fields. Past fellows have authored bestsellers, directed Oscar nominated feature-length films, and earned some of the world’s most prestigious honors including Pulitzer Prizes, the Rome Prize, and the Whiting Award. For more information, visit howard-foundation.brown.edu.

Four Bard College graduates have won 2026–27 Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, English teaching assistantships, and the pursuit of a master’s degree. The Fulbright program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Danika Dortch ’26, a Literature major at the College and a French Horn Performance major at the Bard Conservatory, will conduct an independent project on the composer Leoš Janácek and his influence on the writer Milan Kundera.  She will reside in Brno, Czech Republic, and conduct archival research on Janácek, Kundera, and Moravian folk music in order to examine their influence on Czech national identity.

Peter Fields ’26, a Classical Studies major who has served as a Latin and Greek tutor at Bard, has been awarded an English Teaching Assistantship to Romania. While at Bard, he participated in an archaeological dig of an ancient Roman villa in Transylvania, an experience which sparked his interest in Romania and its culture, both ancient and modern.

Annaliese Simons ’26, a Written Arts major, was awarded a Fulbright study-research grant to pursue a master's degree in public policy, with a focus on disability studies, at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Annaliese has been captain of the Bard Debate Team, as well as copresident of the Bard Disabled Students Association. They aspire to a career in disability advocacy.

Shosha Wheeler ’26, a Mathematical Sciences major, has been awarded the Fulbright Austria Community-Combined Award.  For her project, Shosha plans to lead math-based community project for immigrant youth in Vienna, while also taking courses in mathematics at Universität Wien. At Bard, Shosha has served as a math tutor and volunteer for MAGPIES, the math outreach program for girls.

Bridget White ’25, an Anthropology and German Studies double major, has been awarded an English Teaching Assistantship to Germany. While at Bard, Bridget was codirector of EMS and sang in the Georgian Choir.  

Lindsey Jordan ’24, a written arts and German Studies major, has received an English Teaching Assistantship to Germany.  At Bard, Jordan worked on the Conjunctions literary magazine and studied abroad in Berlin. Jordan is currently teaching English in Spain.