News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Luc Sante is a visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard, teaching in both the Art History and Written Arts programs since 1999. Sante was born in Belgium and emigrated to the United States as a child, living in New York City for many years and attending Columbia University.

He is the author of Folk Photography (2009), Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005 (2007), Walker Evans (2001), The Factory of Facts (1998), Evidence (1992), and Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991). Sante is the coeditor of O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors (1999) and the editor and translator of Novels in Three Lines, by Félix Fénéon (2007). Sante has written introductions to books by Georges Simenon, Emile Zola, A. J. Liebling, Paul Auster, Weegee, Stephen Crane, and Vik Muniz, among others. His essays appear in many publications, including the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of the Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Grammy Award (for album notes).

This summer Arthur Holland Michel '13, a history major, is editing for the Paris Review. At the same time, he is pursuing academic research related to his Senior Project on Peruvian immigration into New York City and New Jersey from the 1960s through the middle 1980s. Learn more about what Bardians are doing over the summer on the Civic Engagement blog.

A married man, a pretty bartender, and a chance encounter—read Professor Paul La Farge's short story "Another Life" in the New Yorker, plus a Q&A with the author.

Jonathan Brent is the Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College. He is also the director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, Bard's partner in the Bard-YIVO Institute for East European Jewish History and Culture.

Brent is the author of Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia (2008), Stalin's Last Crime (2003, named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Financial Times), and Isaac Babel (forthcoming). He is the editor of The Best of TriQuarterly (1982) and A John Cage Reader (1984). Brent has held editorial positions at Yale University Press, Northwestern University Press, FORMATIONS, and TriQuarterly. As executive editor at Yale in 1992, Brent founded the internationally acclaimed Annals of Communism series. He has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Scholar, New Criterion, New Republic, New York Times, Commentary, and many other newspapers and journals. He received the Whiting Foundation Fellowship in 1977. Brent earned his B.A. at Columbia University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has been a member of Bard's faculty since 2004.

Naomi LaChance, editor-in-chief of the school newspaper at Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, plans to major in written arts at Bard. The scholarship she has been awarded is named for Daniel Pearl, the former chief of the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in January 2002 while researching a story on Islamic extremists.

This is an exciting week at the Hannah Arendt Center, which is in the middle of its first annual Arendt Center Working Group Conference. The gathering was conceived to bring together humanities scholars from around the world to read, discuss, and think about one particular book in detail. This year's volume is the recently published Denktagebuch (or "book of thoughts") by Hannah Arendt.

This summer, Martha Orlet '15 and Cassandra Settman '13 are both interning with Independent Thought and Social Action in India (ITSA), an organization started by a BHSEC-Manhattan alumna. ITSA participants run writing workshops for teens. Orlet says "I believe I will gain very unique and precious insight into teaching . . . while gaining knowledge of Indian culture and experience . . . new ways of living, socializing, and learning."