News from the Division of Languages and Literature

“The goal of this campaign is not to protect cis-girl athletes as much as it is to make trans athletes disappear,” writes Gessen. “This is a movement to exclude trans girls from community and opportunity. It is a movement driven by panic over the safety of women and children that reproduces earlier panics, like those over the presence of lesbians on women’s sports teams. And, just like earlier panics, this one is based on what passes for common sense but is in fact ignorance and hate.”

PEN America has announced its 2021 career achievement award winners, to be honored at the PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony on April 8 at 7pm ET. This year’s honorees are Bard alumnus Pierre Joris ’69, Anne Carson, Kwame Dawes, Daniel Alexander Jones, and George C. Wolfe. Joris will receive the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, bestowed every three years to a translator whose body of work demonstrates a commitment to excellence. The committee wrote that Joris’s work “has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity.” 

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program profiles Jahari Fraser, a Bard junior and Posse Scholar studying Global and International Studies and Spanish Studies. This semester, Jahari is studying at BGIA and interning at Project CETI, a nonprofit organization and 2020 TED Audacious Project Grant recipient that is applying advanced machine learning and non-invasive robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales. Some of Jahari’s work will be aimed toward Project CETI’s launch in mid-April, including various research projects and contributing to CETI’s overall organizational development.

The Simpson Literary Project announced today that Bard College Writer in Residence Jenny Offill, author of Weather, has been named a finalist for the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Offill and the three other finalists will appear, alongside Joyce Carol Oates, in a live “Meet the Finalists” event on March 30 at 8 p.m. EST. For more information, click here. The recipient of the $50,000 prize is expected to be named in late April.

“[President Biden] has begun his term by using sanctions in much the same way as previous Presidents did: because he has to, and only to the extent that he has to,” writes Gessen in the New Yorker. “Morally, the Biden Administration had to act, because the President ran on the promise of being tough on Russia. More important, he ran on the promise of knowing right from wrong and acting accordingly. But, both morally and legally, Biden is doing little more than the bare minimum.”

“Were this an isolated case, it might be understood differently than what in fact it is: part of a much wider effort of the Polish government and active elements of Polish society to silence the legitimate work of Holocaust scholarship in favor of protecting the supposed interests of the Polish state for which the narrative of Polish innocence during the Holocaust plays an important role. The present case must be seen as part of that larger effort,” write Brent and Grabowski in Tablet. Jonathan Brent is the executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College.