News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Five Bard College students won prestigious Fulbright Awards for individually designed study/research projects or English Teaching Assistant Programs. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top-producing institution.

Marion Adams ’19, a German studies and philosophy major, won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Austria. She will teach English and study how Jewish museums there negotiate their country’s role in commemorating traditional and stimulating contemporary Austrian-Jewish culture. Alexa Frank ’15, who graduated with a dual degree in film and Asian studies, won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to pursue her graduate studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. Economics and human rights major Sofia Hardt ’18 won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Argentina, where she will conduct a study of labor market choices and incentives in relation to Argentina’s Universal Child Allowance. Tonery Rogers ’19 is an alternate for a Fulbright Award to Morocco.

Asian studies majors Corrina Gross ’19 and Kerri Anne Bigornia ’19 both won Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Awards to Taiwan, where they will teach English to primary and middle school students. Olivia Donahue ’19 has been awarded a Fulbright to Germany, where she will spend next year teaching English.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide. Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, and teachers. Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, actor John Lithgow, composer Philip Glass, opera singer Renee Fleming, and economist Joseph Stiglitz are among notable former grantees.
 

On Tuesday, April 23, American Book Award–winning author Valeria Luiselli will read from her work at Bard College. “The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli’s hands—electric, elastic, alluring, new. . . . She is a superb chronicler,” writes the New York Times. Luiselli, who was recently appointed as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard, will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow and Director of Bard’s Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu. The reading, presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 6:00 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. Books by Luiselli will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and has lived in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, India, Spain, France, and New York City. She is the author of a book of essays, Papeles falsos/Sidewalks (2012, 2014) and the internationally acclaimed novel Los ingravidos/Faces in the Crowd (2013, 2014), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2014, she won the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize, an annual award honoring young and promising fiction writers. Her novel La historia de mis dientes/The Story of My Teeth (2013, 2015) 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 the Year. Her recent book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions won the 2018 American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Luiselli received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. Her latest novel, Lost Children Archive (2019), which was written in English, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, please call 845-758-7054, email [email protected], or visit conjunctions.com.

Further Reading

Valeria Luiselli Assays the Death of the Pioneer Myth in Lost Children Archive (Atlantic)

Valeria Luiselli, At Home in Two Worlds (New York Times)

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive Confronts the Complexities of Writing About the Border Crisis (New Yorker)
 

On Tuesday, April 23, American Book Award–winning author Valeria Luiselli will read from her work at Bard College. “The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli’s hands—electric, elastic, alluring, new. . . . She is a superb chronicler,” writes the New York Times. Luiselli, who was recently appointed as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard, will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow and Written Arts Program Director Dinaw Mengestu.

Bard alumna, literature major, and technology reporter Natalia Drozdiak cowrote the story for Bloomerg on the first image of a black hole, a “huge breakthrough for humanity.”

Robert Cioffi, assistant professor of classics, has been awarded two fellowships from Harvard University for work on his scholarly monograph, Narrating the Marvelous: The Greek Novel and the Ancient Ethnographic Imagination. One, from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, provides funding for an additional semester of research leave. In addition, he has been named a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., where he will be in residence for the spring semester of 2020.
 

Celia Bland, writer and associate director of the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, discusses the evolution of her writing, the prevalence and influence of motherhood and her Cherokee heritage, and her collaboration with artist Dianne Kornberg.