News from the Division of Languages and Literature

On Monday, October 5, Bard College will present a talk by financial journalist and editor Carol Loomis to inaugurate the John J. Curran ’75 Lectures in Journalism series. Loomis is the former senior editor-at-large of Fortune magazine, and the coiner of the term “hedge fund.” The editor of Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letter, she has been recognized by the New York Times for her success in battling gender stereotypes within the financial-services industry, having started her career in the 1950s as one of only two female reporters at Fortune. The Reformed Broker calls Loomis “a lion of financial journalism,” while ValueWalk celebrates her as “without doubt, the greatest business writer of all time.”

David Brin has been named the first annual National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow. Brin, an American scientist, award-winning author of science fiction, and leading commentator on the world’s most pressing technological trends, is in residence at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College from Monday, October 5, to Sunday, October 25. As part of Brin’s fellowship, he will mentor selected Bard students on their fiction and nonfiction writing. Brin will also offer a number of lectures and discussions during his residency at Bard. This new annual fellowship has been made possible through an NEH Challenge Grant.

On Thursday, September 24, at 8 p.m., the New York State Writers Institute will celebrate Bard's provocative, innovative literary journal Conjunctions with a reading by Bradford Morrow (Conjunctions editor, Bard literature professor, and Bard Center Fellow) and contributing editors Ann Lauterbach (Bard’s David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature) and Peter Straub. The reading will take place at the Recital Hall at the Performing Arts Center on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, New York.

On Monday, September 28, Bard alumna Allie Cashel ’13 will read from a memoir of her experience with chronic Lyme disease, Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial. The reading is presented by the Written Arts and Biology Programs. A living portrait of chronic Lyme disease and its patients’ struggles for recognition and treatment, Suffering the Silence, originally Allie Cashel’s Senior Project, is now a full-length memoir that details Cashel’s own experience with chronic Lyme and shares the stories of a number of other patients from around the world. Introduced by Mary Caponegro ’78, Bard literature professor, and followed by a Q&A, this event takes place at 7:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

On Tuesday, September 22, at 7 p.m., Norman Rush, the National Book Award winner and author of Whites, Mating, Mortals, and Subtle Bodies, will read from his work at Bard College. "Rush’s characters want to fall in love, to laugh and enjoy themselves. Their quirks, opinions, compulsions . . . keep us engrossed—along with the clarity and precision of Rush's sentences, the freshness of his observations," wrote Francine Prose in her review of Subtle Bodies in The New York Review of Books.

Benjamin Barron '15, who cofounded the new fashion and culture publication ALL-IN with fellow alum Allison Littrell '14, tells us why he's not crazy and why print is more important than ever.

"I had found that birds were the perfect antidote to gloomy thoughts about the passage of time," writes Rogers, "and to the low-level but constant fury about how messed up the world is."