News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Why read? Joseph Luzzi, professor of comparative literature at Bard, talks about the importance of the written word in an era of mass media and mobile technology.

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning Mexican author Valeria Luiselli as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature. Luiselli, who joins the faculty this spring as a research associate, will begin teaching courses at Bard in the fall 2019 semester.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and currently lives in New York City. She is the author of a book of essays, Papeles falsos (Sidewalks), and the internationally acclaimed novel Los ingravidos (Faces in the Crowd), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2014, she was named one of the 5 under 35 by the National Book Foundation, an annual award honoring young and promising fiction writers. Her novel La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Impac Prize 2017; and was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015.

Her recent book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli’s books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker, among others. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her new novel, Lost Children Archive, which was written in English, will be published by Knopf in February 2019.
 

Thomas Wild of Bard College and Barbara Hahn of Vanderbilt University, editors of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works, Critical Edition, discuss the series. (In German)

Mengestu, chair of the Bard Written Arts Program, was asked to select his favorite work by a black female American. His choice: Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Bard IWT associate director Bland “turns her unflinching gaze upon the place of her childhood and adolescence, a native Cherokee homeland on the forested western edge of North Carolina.”