News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Bard alumnus, U.S. Army veteran, and Stars and Stripes reporter J.p. Lawrence ’14 recalls his hurried evacuation from Kabul. “We loaded into Chinooks, forming an aerial bridge of helicopters from the embassy to the city’s airport just a few miles away. As we flew over the capital, I imagined how left behind the city’s people must have felt, to constantly hear the beating rotors of the foreigners leaving as fast as possible.”

"Philosophy and soldiery marched hand in hand among the Greeks," Romm observes, and some of his most compelling writing takes a deep look into attitudes about, and the practice of, homosexuality by the likes of Socrates and Plato, again without resort to easy generalization. Similarly, his examination of the dynamics of age disparity within the couples is consistently revelatory, rather than dismissively judgmental. James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard College.

In the Economist, Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi calls Dante a “poet of crisis,” whose life split in two when he was expelled from Florence. Seven hundred years after Dante’s death, his masterpiece still resonates.

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose remembers her dear friend James Alan McPherson through his work. Last spring, Prose taught a course through the Bard Prison Initiative under challenging pandemic conditions, in which she could only interact with her class on speakerphone. One of her texts was McPherson’s short story “Gold Coast.” Prose writes, “It was the only time that I was glad to be on speakerphone, because each time my students read aloud from ‘Gold Coast,’ I began to cry.”

Francine Prose writes in the Guardian of the striking viral video of a tourist ferry sailing across the water from the raging fire incinerating the Greek island of Evia. “This is what climate apocalypse looks like from the deck of a tourist boat. It’s a vision we need to see, a reminder that the hard work of keeping our planet from becoming hell can’t be put off any longer. We have run out of time. We need to wake up. We need to say it till somebody listens: something has to be done.”