News from the Division of Languages and Literature

This new series, curated by Bard faculty members Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead, will engage an ongoing discussion with the nation’s leading bloggers in politics, history, art, and culture. Bard professor Francine Prose, who blogs for the New York Review of Books, will speak on March 5. All events take place at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan.

Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. Professor Buruma is an award-winning journalist and writer.

He was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied Chinese literature and Japanese cinema. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career traveling and reporting from all over Asia. Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Corriere della Sera, and NRC Handelsblad. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The China Lover (2008) and Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (2010). He is the 2008 recipient of Holland's prestigious Erasmus Prize, as well as the 2008 winner of Stanford University's Shorenstein Journalism Award. Professor Buruma has been at Bard since 2003.

Washington Post writer Michael Lindgren calls Professor Mendelsohn, "elegant and capacious ... a versatile critic."

Teju Cole, distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents; he was raised in Nigeria and currently lives in Brooklyn. Cole is an author, art historian, and street photographer.

Teju Cole is the author of Open City (Random House, 2011), which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the New York City Book Award, and was shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a novella, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Qarrtsiluni, Chimurenga, New Yorker, Transition, Tin House, and A Public Space, among other publications. He is currently at work on Water Has No Enemy, a nonfiction narrative of Lagos, and on Small Fates. He received his B.A. in studio art and art history from Kalamazoo College in Michigan; his M.A. in African art history from the University of London; and his M.Phil. in 16th-century northern European visual culture from Columbia University, where he is working on his Ph.D. He has taught art history and literature at Hofstra University, New York University, and Columbia University. He has received a Rudolf Wittkower Fellowship and Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation), and has been interviewed for the documentary film, Wole Soyinka: Child of the Forest.

Bard presents its annual Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature, with acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín. Tóibín will speak about his work with Fintan O’Toole, a leading Irish editor, writer, and critic on Thursday, March 7, at 5:30 p.m.

Bard College at Simon's Rock faculty member and poet Peter Filkins examines the relationship of Sylvia Plath's poetry to her life and death.

John Ashbery discusses poetry, surrealism, and the New York School.

On February 20 Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, and Francine Prose will read letters by Gaddis and discuss what he has meant to them as writers and readers, introduced by Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow.