News from the Division of Languages and Literature

What place do the humanities have in a global economy increasingly focused on educating a work force for business, finance, and technology? Bard leaders weighed in with the New Indian Express. "Without humanities, social sciences and arts," says Bard IILE Director Susan Gillespie, "we won’t have just and liveable societies or even prosperous economies." Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz adds that teaching the humanities is about "transmitting a tradition of meaning and substance, texts and ideas that can inspire young people to care more for the common world they share than for their parochial or personal interests."

On December 10 at 5 p.m., Paris Review editor Lorin Stein will give a talk at Bard on publishing careers and the literary life, followed by a panel of alumni/ae guests who are recent graduates of the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard.

Author Brian Conn has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2013. Conn will be awarded $30,000 and will join Bard as writer in residence next semester. He won the prize for his debut novel, The Fixed Stars, a work of experimental science fiction that our judges call "wondrous."

On Monday, November 5, highly acclaimed science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany will read from his most recent novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, at Bard College. The New York Times Book Review called Delany “the most interesting writer of science fiction writing in English today.”

Ann Lauterbach, esteemed poet and the Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, has been named the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poet by the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago. From October 16 to 18, Lauterbach will be a distinguished guest to the university, where she will work with students and present the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading and Lecture.

Yannick Murphy, author of Here They Come; Signed, Mata Hari; and other books, will read from her most recent novel, The Call, at Bard College on Monday, October 1. Dave Eggers has called Murphy “one of our most daring and original writers” and “an exquisitely attuned observer of human behavior.”

Bard honors preeminent poet, alumnus, and former Bard faculty member Anthony Hecht ’44 with renowned scholar Daniel Albright delivering the fourth biennial Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities, October 1–4.

The November issue of Bard's literary magazine Conjunctions is in production, featuring work by Robert Coover, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, Jonathan Lethem, and China Miéville, among many others. Click below to hear Bard writer in residence Edie Meidav read from her new story, "Dogs of Cuba: The Buddha of the Vedado," appearing in the new issue.

Bard author Teju Cole enjoys a unique residency in London. Click here to listen to him read the essay he wrote that week, or click here to read it in the New Yorker, or below to read his residency diary in the Financial Times.

Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman will give a reading of a new, not yet published short story Wednesday, September 5 in the Fisher Center, before the Amanda Palmer concert. Tickets to the reading are free, but seating is on a first come, first served basis.

Looking for a summer project? Today the Hannah Arendt Center announced the 2012 Thinking Challenge: "Does the President Matter?" Create a blog post, video, or multimedia piece and enter to win cash prizes and a place at their fall conference.

Bard author and Achebe Center director Binyavanga Wainaina's memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place has been shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

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."

Mesmerists and hoarders. Conspiracy theorists and martyrs. Fetishists and addicts. Saints and sinners. Riveted explores the idea of obsession, the world of fixation, the idée fixe.

“I always find it momentarily surprising that literary nonfiction is treated as something new and strange. I guess I tend to imagine fiction and nonfiction as fraternal twins, born almost at the same instant, apparently distinct but each unimaginable without the other. They perform complementary functions, and fact and invention each require the existence of the other, perhaps off to the side and perhaps not, to achieve their particular credibility.”

An excerpt from faculty member and author Norman Manea's novel The Black Envelope is now available on the Yale Books blog.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. An award-winning writer and critic and author of the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, he was born on Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton.

Since 1991, when he began publishing, his essays and reviews have appeared in many publications, most frequently in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He has also been the weekly book critic for New York and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and is presently a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. The Lost, published by HarperCollins in 2006, won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors, and has been published in more than 15 languages. Other books include a memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), a New York Times Notable Book of the year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a collection of his reviews, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2008), a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and an acclaimed two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), also a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Mendelsohn’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and two Mellon Foundation awards. In 2012 he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008 Daniel Mendelsohn was named by the Economist as one of the best critics writing in the English language.

Before his father Jay's death, Bard classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn retraced with him the path of Odysseus' Mediterranean journey.