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“I think the whole idea of the special relationship of the Anglo-Saxon peoples was a romantic conceit, cooked up by Churchill, in order to get the Americans to join in the war, without which Germany could not have been defeated,” says Buruma. “I think there is very little of that kind of sentiment left. The war has been over for a long time and Britain’s power has dwindled so much that it’s of low-grade interest to whomever is in power in the U.S.”

On the occasion of Blueprint’s translation into English, Wilk and Enzensberger talk about “how to write Nazi characters who aren’t clichés; about reviving the legacy of overlooked women artists and architects; about why fiction can be truer than reality—and about how our current political debates and challenges are not so far from those of 100 years ago.” Wilk, whose first novel, Oval, was published in 2019, is a contributing editor at e-flux Journal and a 2020 fellow in the Transformations of the Human program at the Berggruen Institute. Enzensberger, a freelance journalist who lives in Berlin, is the founder of the award-winning BLOCK Magazin.

Borderlines contributing editor Simon Conrad speaks with Professor Holt about her book Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel, which reads early Arabic novels of late 19th- and 20th-century Beirut and Cairo as fictions of global finance in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

“Born and bred in the Bronx, this talented scholar/author (an assistant professor of literature at Bard College) deftly and vividly examines the realities and myths of the Bronx’s extremes: civic neglect, crime, and urban decay, even ruin, versus cultural innovation and an outstanding artistic legacy,” writes Mark Favermann.

“Our profoundly serious problems – racism, income inequality, to name just two – will be hard to fix, but it turns out to be horrifyingly easy to worsen them,” writes Prose in The Guardian. “Americans need to rethink the idea – and the fear – of harming and being harmed by neighbors with differently colored skins and differently colored signs in their yards. Republicans and Democrats alike, it’s our civic duty – our moral duty – to resist the violence and the terrifying vision of our country, an image on which their Republicans are basing their hopes for re-election: a nation that needs an iron hand to protect us from one another.”
 

“Whether on reclaimed ledger paper or vintage picture postcards, the images he constructs are something like found details themselves—singular and mysterious, if occasionally a little on the nose,” writes Will Heinrich.

“In interviews with dozens of Black, Latina, and Asian-American women, many of them said Ms. Harris’s story was also their story,” the Times’s authors write. “In Ms. Harris’s life, they recognized both her triumphs and the challenges that come with living in a country wrestling with its history of discrimination.”

“Government-funded thugs, assaulting citizens, still conjure up repellent images of Hitler’s Brownshirts stomping their fellow Germans, and the street kidnapping of civilians has been the hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships,” writes Prose in the Guardian. “Is all that manpower necessary to protect statues? Who knew [the] White House was so invested in art, culture—or American history? These attacks are about exerting power, bullying dissenters, intimidating Americans into giving up their first amendment protections, their constitutional rights.”

Fierce: Essays by and About Dauntless Women, a memoir project devoted to women excluded from conventional narratives of history, is the winner of the inaugural BookLife Prize for Nonfiction. Conceived and edited by Bard alumna Karyn Kloumann ’92, the collection is “more than a celebration of a diverse group of activists, agitators, and iconoclasts whose lives and accomplishments have largely been ignored by history,” writes Anya Yurchyshyn in her critique of the book. “It’s an examination of the systematic oppression that led to this erasure and continues to exclude women to this day.”

“As we learn more about what is happening in Portland—as footage of federal troops waging war on protesters floods social media, and as the President threatens to send his foot soldiers to other large cities—we are watching the perfect and perhaps inevitable combination of a domestic-security superagency and a President who rejects all mechanisms of accountability, including the Senate confirmation process,” writes Gessen in the New Yorker.

Rising junior Maxwell Toth ’22, a joint French and American studies major, has been awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad. Max was awarded $4,000 toward his studies in Paris with the Institute for Field Education, a program that matches undergraduates with international internships aligning with their academic interests.

“I’m really honored to have received the Gilman Scholarship,” says Max. “As someone who’s barely traveled outside their home region of New England, studying abroad has been a dream of mine for quite some time.”

Max had originally planned to study abroad this fall, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic he chose to defer his plans to the spring and return to Annandale instead. This fall, he’s taking “a nice smorgasbord of courses,” ranging from The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Contagion: Rumor, Heresy, Disease, and Financial Panic. Outside the classroom, he’ll continue his work as a Peer Counselor, campus tour guide, and Bard nursery school aide—“You can see I wear many hats on campus!”

“Regardless of how my semester abroad may be altered due to the pandemic, I am very excited,” Max says. “Beyond the City of Light, I really want to hop a train to Salzburg at some point and take the ‘Sound of Music’ tour—provided travel restrictions have loosened up by then!”

This summer, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Learning is making its vast digital collection of food-centric discussions, demonstrations, recipes, interviews and hundreds of archival objects available for free as part of its online course A Seat at the Table: A Journey Into Jewish Food. “Food helps to alleviate some of the anxiety that everyone is feeling in this particularly stressful time we’re in,” says Jonathan Brent, Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College and YIVO Executive Director and CEO. “Food enables us to have that kind of deep experience of memory, sensory pleasure, imagination and knowledge. There’s a great deal of value in studying the history of food. And it’s especially relevant now, when people are locked indoors and searching for things to do.”
 

“Trump comes along and taps into the deep anxieties of people who are truly anxious because they have been economically and socially unstable for more than a generation,” says Gessen in an interview in The Nation. “He taps into that and says, ‘OK, I’ll take you back to an imaginary past.’ There is very little on the other side to counterweigh this emotional appeal. You can’t counterweigh it by saying, ‘I have a good résumé, and I’ll fix things.’”

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose looks at the arrest of CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, who was led away in handcuffs on live television while covering the protests in Minneapolis against the killing of George Floyd. “The mistake was always to think that it can’t happen here, because it can, it has and—unless we remain aware and vocal—it most certainly will again,” writes Prose. Full Story in the Guardian

More from Francine Prose in the Guardian
How Coronavirus Has Infected our Consciousness
“Whether or not we disinfect our money, or the grocery bag, we can’t look at a bill or a paper bag without wondering if we should spray it,” Prose writes. “So the virus has infected our consciousness, regardless of how far we are from a hotspot, how safe or healthy we may feel. It takes time and energy, trying not to think about, or mind how much we have lost.”

“The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 gave, to my mind, a significant push to the irreversible decline in which we now find ourselves—it marked the apotheosis of a persistent strain of magical thinking in American politics. The 1980 election was a choice between a slick and intellectually inert charmer who spewed happy talk, on the one hand, and an unglamorous peanut farmer who wanted to talk about ‘malaise,’ on the other: we chose the happy talk—surprise, surprise—and have been choosing it ever since. Our current political crisis is the reductio ad absurdum of that choice: the fantasy that government is “the problem” and must be dismantled whenever possible (that’s certainly working out right now!), the contempt for institutions, the elevation of ideological fantasy above science and expertise.”

“Few writers have caught the grotesque nature of war better than Malaparte. There is no question that he felt drawn to human depravity as a subject. But he makes no excuses for it. His is a dark vision of humanity. To look away, to him, would have been a sign of weakness.”

Bard College Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah is among the 276 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors who have been elected this year as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Farah joins one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies, whose members include winners of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, Shaw Prizes, MacArthur Fellowships, Guggenheim Fellowships, Grammy Awards, Tony Awards, and Oscars, among others. Founded in 1780, during the American Revolution, by John Adams, John Hancock, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good, the academy is a center for independent policy research and continues to dedicate itself to recognizing excellence and relying on expertise—both of which seem more important than ever. Celebrating its 240th anniversary this year, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected more than 13,500 members have been elected since its founding.

“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said Academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the Academy’s work to advance the public good.”

Nuruddin Farah is a Somali novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature,  “widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel” (New York Times). Educated at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Works include two trilogies, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and several novels, novellas, short stories, plays. In recent years he has been a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Bard College.

PHOTO CAPTION: Bard College Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremy Wilson
About the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”

“While the nation grieves, the US president has spent less than five minutes expressing compassion for those who are suffering,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose. “We can’t help thinking how much less worried we would be if a humane, competent, well-informed adult was making the decisions that affect us all.”

 

For the spring 2020 publication of Sui Generis, Bard’s student-run translation magazine, Bard Classical Studies senior Kaitlin Karmen submitted translations for the three ancient languages that she studied at Bard: Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. She writes, "For Ancient Greek, I translated a passage from Thucydides's History on the social effects of the plague that afflicted Athens in the fifth century. My Latin submission was a passage from Lucretius's epic poem De Rerum Natura, where the poet seeks to show that the world is mortal. And my Sanskrit translation was of a short section from the Bhagavad-Gita (itself a section of the Mahabharata), which describes Krishna's revealing of his divine form to Arjuna.” ​​​​​​

When the COVID-19 crisis prevented the iconic author Joyce Carol Oates from visiting campus, Professor Bradford Morrow found an alternative: students in his Innovative Contemporary Fiction class would pose their questions to Oates about her writing process and her new collection, Beautiful Days, via email. The result is a probing group interview charged with the gravity of the pandemic. 

Acclaimed Somali writer and Bard professor Nuruddin Farah talks to the Johannesburg Review of Books about family, tradition, and life in exile: “I roamed the world, made the world my small village.”

When you lose your whole world in a moment, where do you turn? Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi will discuss his memoir In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love via Facebook Live on Wednesday, April 22, at 7 pm EDT/GMT-4.

Aven Williams is a sophomore at Bard with a joint major in Literature and Middle Eastern Studies. She is back home in Vermont now, and keeping herself busy with course work, family time, and just reading for pleasure. She finds joy in being together with the whole family, as they work through this hard time as a team. They often play board games or watch movies together—the Lord of the Rings series is a family favorite.

Aven's family loves to come together over a good meal. "My mom is a really good cook," Aven says, "so food is big for us!" The family has been cooking together, including recently homemade pizza, cod and lobster soup, and tofu curry with naan.

The pandemic has brought Aven and her extended family together, as well; they're keeping in touch by blogging about their day-to-day lives. Aven also stays in touch with her host family in Paris, from when she studied abroad during her gap year. This crisis has allowed them to talk more and feel more connected as they all face many of the same challenges. "I feel like we are able to be more empathetic toward each other," Aven says.

Aven tries to incorporate some of her life at Bard into her new routine at home. She is looking forward to joining the new Bard Bookworm Club, which has started meeting online. She misses playing with the Bard Frisbee team but she enlists her family to play in their backyard. 

Aven finds hope and connection in social media. "I can see that everyone is coming together. I've been enjoying online concerts, too." Overall Aven is “proud of how Vermont is handling the crisis” and she loves that she is able to connect with her friends on apps such as House Party, which allows large video calls and the ability to play games together. Aven is not taking her time home for granted and she is grateful to have a loving support system in her family and her Bard community. 
 

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning author Masha Gessen as Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Division of Languages and Literature. Gessen, who joins the faculty in fall 2020, will teach courses through the Written Arts Program that integrate literature, writing, and contemporary culture and politics. “Masha Gessen is one of the most essential voices in our cultural landscape. They bring an invaluable perspective as a writer whose work sits at the intersection of literature and global politics. We are thrilled to welcome them into the Bard community,” says Dinaw Mengestu, professor of written arts and Director of the Written Arts Program.

Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of eleven books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy, which will be published in June. Gessen’s previous book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a Nieman Fellow, and has received an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. Gessen has taught at Amherst College and Oberlin College. They live in New York City.

PHOTO CAPTION: Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning author Masha Gessen to the faculty.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lena Di


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About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 159-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
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Bard College Writer in Residence Valeria Luiselli has been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim fellowship for her work in fiction. Luiselli is among the 175 winners of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 96th competition for the United States and Canada. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3000 applicants. The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the unique characteristics of the fellowship program. 2020 Fellows are drawn from 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 78 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and 2 Canadian provinces.

More than 40 Bard faculty members have received Guggenheim fellowships to date. Previous recipients from Bard College include Mark Danner, Ittai Weinryb, Nancy Shaver, Lothar Osterburg, Peggy Ahwesh, JoAnne Akalaitas, Peter Hutton, Ann Lauterbach, An-My Lê, Norman Manea, Daniel Mendelsohn, Bradford Morrow, Judy Pfaff, Luc Sante, Stephen Shore, Mona Simpson, and Joan Tower.

Valeria Luiselli is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) and Faces in the Crowd (2013), and the books of essays Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017). Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf), won the 2020 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the American Academy for Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and the Folio Prize. It was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the NBCC award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Luiselli received the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature, and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her literary work has been translated to over 20 languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's. Luiselli has worked as a volunteer translator in the Federal Immigration court, translating testimonies of asylum-seeking undocumented minors, and conducted creative writing workshops in a detention center for undocumented minors. She has taught at Bard College since 2019 and is working on a sound piece about violence against land and bodies in the borderlands.
About the Guggenheim Fellowship Program
Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted more than $360 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Awards, and other important, internationally recognized honors. The Guggenheim Fellowship program remains a significant source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. New and continuing donations from friends, Trustees, former Fellows, and other foundations have ensured that the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will be able to continue its historic mission. The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation is once again underwriting the Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, and a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music is supporting supplemental grants for composers. For more information on the Fellows and their projects, please visit the Foundation’s website at www.gf.org.

Meet the Data-Sitters Club, a group of scholars who’ve come together to do computational text analysis of the enormously popular children’s book series The Baby-Sitters Club from the 1980s and ’90s, about a group of middle school girls in a fictional suburban Connecticut town who formed a successful babysitting business. Cecire, director of Bard’s Center for Experimental Humanities and a children’s literature specialist, is interested in models of American girlhood in the books and how they connect to models of womanhood. “I find it especially interesting that they start a company together,” says Cecire. “What does it mean to have a group of friends who are organized around a business, a business that has such gendered implications?”

Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature, has won a 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. The prizes encourage and support emerging to midcareer immigrant artists and scientists who have demonstrated exceptional achievements early in their careers. The Creative Promise Prizes are awarded annually in biomedical science and in a rotating category of the arts—this year’s was literature. Three winners are selected in each category through an application process juried by panels of experts in each field. The Creative Promise Prizewinners each receive a $50,000 cash award and are honored at an awards ceremony in New York City. Luiselli was recognized for her “intelligent fiction and nonfiction” that interrogates the U.S. immigration system.

President Trump and some of his allies have made a point of calling the coronavirus a “Chinese virus,” the “Wuhan virus,” or, simply, a “foreign virus”—a type of rhetoric that taps into ancient and primitive fears, writes Professor Buruma. “A leader who applies chauvinism and prejudice to a frightening disease is not best equipped to deal with a pandemic. Nationalism should have no place in medical discourse. And medical language should never be applied to politics. Coronavirus isn’t Chinese or foreign; it is global. Blaming alien forces, whether in the name of God, or science or simple prejudice, is bound to make things a great deal worse.”

Robert Cioffi, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, recently spoke at an online Open House for the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C., where he is currently a fellow. He led a presentation and discussion on the timely topic of ;“Disease and Social Order: The Plague Narratives of Thucydides and Lucretius,” which was live streamed on YouTube.

For the upcoming summer of 2020 (or 2021, depending on COVID-19), Bard College Classical Studies Major Em Setzer ’22 has been awarded a Digital Humanities Internship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, a research institute for Classics in Washington, D.C. As an intern, Em will reside in D.C. at the Center, and over the course of eight weeks, will work on the Free First Thousand Years of Greek project and on the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri. Congratulations, Em!

History, in one view, “is the record of what people have done: Richard Crookback, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn. The final installment of the ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy is a reminder that a history is not the same as a story. I suspect that Mantel had already said everything she had to say about Thomas Cromwell in the first two books, but felt compelled—by her evident love for the character; perhaps, too, by the appetite of her audience for more—to doggedly follow the historical trail to its conclusion.”

Alejandra Pizarnik was a leading voice in 20th-century Latin American poetry—Octavio Paz described her writing as exuding “a luminous heat that could burn, smelt, or even vaporize its skeptics.” Six volumes of her poetry have been translated into English. The recently issued A Tradition in Rupture (Ugly Duckling Presse), translated by Bard’s Cole Heinowitz, presents Pizarnik’s critical writings in English for the first time.

On Monday, March 2, 2020, Berlin Prize–winning author Carole Maso will read from her work at Bard College. Known for her experimental, poetic, and fragmentary narratives, “Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried away with her, far beyond the usual limits of the novel,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Maso will be introduced by Bard literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented by Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. 
 

“Much of the feminist dystopian fiction published over the last few years takes place in the future, in worlds uncomfortably similar to our own. The Illness Lesson, however, proves that books can fit squarely within that genre even when set in the past — in this case, small-town Massachusetts in 1871. Think ‘City Upon a Hill’ ideals and ‘The Scarlet Letter’-style misogyny and you’ll have a pretty good idea of this sly debut novel, which scarily hints that, since the 19th century, perhaps not a whole lot has changed.… Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections” (Siobhan Jones, New York Times).

Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, February 24. This event is free and open to the public. The reading begins at 7 p.m. and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium.

Using Orwell’s Down and Out to Understand and Write Histories of Homelessness Then and Now 

Bard College presents its annual Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature, with Nick Crowson, Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The lecture takes place in the Lásló Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium (Room 103) of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation on Tuesday, February 18, at 4:45 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
 
What does George Orwell's classic account of homeless living in London during the interwar years offer the historian? Where should we locate this semi-fictionalised account in the tradition of the incognito social investigator? Professor Crowson's lecture will address these questions and ask how Orwell helps us understand the physical manifestations of homelessness in modern Britain. In doing so, he shows how historians can play a crucial role in facilitating better, historically-informed public discourse around homelessness.

Nick Crowson holds the Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The author and editor of many books, including Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–40; Britain and Europe: A Political History since 1918; and A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945, he is writing a new history of homelessness in modern Britain seeking to integrate the lived experience with the policy responses. His research is widely used by a range of policy and cultural organisations, including Crisis, Shelter, the Museum of Homelessness and the Cardboard Citizens Theatre Company.

This annual lecture forms part of the endowment of the Chair in British History and Literature that was established in 2010 to commemorate Eugene Meyer (1875–1959)—the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first President of the World Bank. The endowment has given Bard the opportunity to extend its commitment to teaching and research in modern British studies. Professor Richard Aldous holds the Eugene Meyer Chair.

Photo courtesy Peter Berthoud.

The fallen executive committed a cardinal, culturally unacceptable sin: hubris.

Justus Rosenberg, Bard Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature and Visiting Professor of Literature, has penned a new memoir, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground (William Morrow, 2020).

Bard’s Clemente Course in the Humanities in Kingston, New York, kicks off its spring session this week at the Kingston Library. Marina van Zuylen, Bard faculty member and Clemente Course director, talks about the nationwide Clemente Course, and how the program connects to Bard’s mission to make college education more inclusive and accessible. The spring 2020 Kingston Clemente Course begins on Thursday, February 6 and takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. There is no tuition, and the program includes free childcare and transportation. Students earn 6 Bard College credits upon completion. Prospective students are encouraged to come to the open house to preview the program on Tuesday, February 4, 6:00 to 8:00 pm, or simply attend the first class on Thursday. Marina van Zuylen is a professor of French and comparative literature at Bard, director of the French Studies Program, and national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities.
 

Assistant Professor of Literature Daniel Williams reviews Anna Kornbluh’s The Order of Forms. “Kornbluh anchors her brilliant and challenging book in the 19th-century realist novel but goes well beyond those confines to argue forcefully for the political dynamism and durability of forms and formalisms in our time,” he writes.
 

Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, February 24. This event is free and open to the public. The reading begins at 7 p.m. and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. For more information call 845-758-7087.

Beams received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016). Her newest book, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday 2020), will be released on February 11. Beams’ residency at Bard College is for the fall 2020 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The nine stories in Clare Beams’ debut collection of fiction, We Show What We Have Learned, range from factual, historical settings and characters to eerily fantastical ones, displaying a startling depth and an epic scale of imagination. While the characters, and the situations they find themselves in, are sometimes surreal, their psychologies are always absolutely real—fully, compassionately drawn. Every one of these stories has a world and a lifetime behind it, and every one is a compelling, disquieting, and immensely pleasurable journey, reverie, and dream for its reader. Clare Beams is a subtle, quiet master of short fiction, who writes in beautiful and exquisitely crafted prose.”

“I am so much more grateful to Bard and to the Bard Fiction Prize committee than I can possibly say for this recognition of my work and for this gift—one of the best gifts anyone could give me, as a writer who’s also a parent of young children—of time. To join this list of winners, so many who are heroes and heroines of mine, is an honor, and to join the inspiring Bard community is a thrill. I can’t wait to meet the students and faculty and work on my third book, a new novel, in their midst,” says Beams.

Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Illness Lesson, will be published by Doubleday in February of 2020. Her fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Greg Jackson for his short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).

Valeria Luiselli, the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College, was honored with the 2020 American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her novel Lost Children Archive. Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.

The Paris Review Foundation has announced the appointment of Mona Simpson as the magazine’s new publisher. Simpson, a Guggenheim Fellow and NEA Award–winning author of six novels, began her involvement with the Paris Review as a work-study student in Columbia’s MFA program. She has served on the staff as a senior editor in the past, and has been a member of the board of directors and the editorial committee since 2014.

Artist and author Jibade-Khalil Huffman talks about his multimedia works and his interdisciplinary experience at Bard as he prepares for You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, his upcoming solo exhibition at the Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles. “At his essence, Huffman is a collector of digital and tangible objects, giving birth to different representation of collage in video, photography, and installation,” writes Marcel Alcalá.

Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, was announced to the longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, for his collection Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. The award carries a prize of $10,000. 

Distinguished Writer in Residence Dawn Lundy Martin is among the judges for the PEN Open Book Award. Bard alumnus Pierre Joris ’69 is one of the judges of the Award for Poetry in Translation.

Bard’s Maria Sachiko Cecire talks to Slate about children’s fantasy literature, looking at the way 20th-century authors of what she calls the “Oxford School” used the genre “as a means to preserve a sense of magic inside a modern world they saw as increasingly hostile to belief.”

Associate Professor of Literature Maria Cecire talks with fellow Rhodes Scholars Jean Balchin and Yan Chen about her new book, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century. The trio discusses what makes fantasy literature magical, why parts of it are culturally inflected, and what we can do to reimagine its future. Cecire also discusses her work as the director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College.

Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse and Writer in Residence Francine Prose were in conversation at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library on the evening of Monday, December 16. The event celebrated Marcuse’s new book Fruitless, Fallen, and Woven, published by Radius Books. This stunning three-volume set traces the arc of 14 years of Marcuse’s work, from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, immersive photographs of Fallen and Woven. Her work features elaborate tableaux of flora and fauna suggestive of the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock and the symbolism of medieval tapestries. She discussed the creative process with Francine Prose, award-winning writer and best-selling author of more than 20 works of fiction.

The Out100 Journalist of the Year talks to the founder of #MeToo, Tarana Burke, about his new book Catch and Kill, and the very real dangers of telling the truth.

Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies Features New Work from Brian Evenson, Joyce Carol Oates, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim

To be mindful of the planet we call home is to be aware that our natural world is suffering. Its oceans are rising up, as if in protest. Its populations of birds and fish, of mammals and reptiles, are, many of them, in steep and steady decline. Forests, coral reefs, habitats of every sort of life form, from tree frogs to butterfly fish, from elephants to bees, are profoundly afflicted. Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—gathers writings that examine and lament the plight of our planet, while also celebrating its grand sublimity, its peerless beauty, and its indispensability. Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Earth Elegies features an exclusive interview with Underland author Robert Macfarlane, conducted by Diane Ackerman; a new translation of Sabine Schiffner poems; as well as new work from Brian Evenson, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Joyce Carol Oates, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim.
The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions73. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

 

Professor Luzzi participated in the November 16 roundtable “Emergence of Empathy: Encountering the Other through Fiction” at the Helix Center in New York City, which draws together leaders from different spheres of knowledge in the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology for interdisciplinary roundtables.