News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Robert Cioffi, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, recently spoke at an online Open House for the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C., where he is currently a fellow. He led a presentation and discussion on the timely topic of ;“Disease and Social Order: The Plague Narratives of Thucydides and Lucretius,” which was live streamed on YouTube.

For the upcoming summer of 2020 (or 2021, depending on COVID-19), Bard College Classical Studies Major Em Setzer ’22 has been awarded a Digital Humanities Internship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, a research institute for Classics in Washington, D.C. As an intern, Em will reside in D.C. at the Center, and over the course of eight weeks, will work on the Free First Thousand Years of Greek project and on the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri. Congratulations, Em!

History, in one view, “is the record of what people have done: Richard Crookback, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn. The final installment of the ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy is a reminder that a history is not the same as a story. I suspect that Mantel had already said everything she had to say about Thomas Cromwell in the first two books, but felt compelled—by her evident love for the character; perhaps, too, by the appetite of her audience for more—to doggedly follow the historical trail to its conclusion.”

Alejandra Pizarnik was a leading voice in 20th-century Latin American poetry—Octavio Paz described her writing as exuding “a luminous heat that could burn, smelt, or even vaporize its skeptics.” Six volumes of her poetry have been translated into English. The recently issued A Tradition in Rupture (Ugly Duckling Presse), translated by Bard’s Cole Heinowitz, presents Pizarnik’s critical writings in English for the first time.