News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Bard College’s Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the appointment of Shuangting Xiong as Assistant Professor of Chinese. Xiong’s tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022-2023 academic year. Her research focus is twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture, Chinese cinema, and film and media studies. “I’m very excited to join the community at Bard in the fall, and to explore and settle in the beautiful Hudson Valley area with my dog, a two-year old golden retriever named Mira,” said Xiong.
 
Shuangting Xiong received her PhD in Chinese from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She specializes in twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture, Chinese cinema, and film and media studies. She is particularly interested in the relation between emotion and politics and the mediating role aesthetics plays in it. Her current book-length project examines the evolution of melodramatic narratives of family, kinship, and the Chinese revolution across different media in twentieth-century China. Her work aims to create cross-cultural dialogues, highlighting the vital influences that global circulations of materials and ideas have on aesthetic debates in the Chinese context.

As museums and exhibition spaces make efforts to showcase more diverse artwork and perspectives, in her review of Baseera Khan’s I Am an Archive for Art Papers, Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic, considers the cost for the artist. Noting Khan’s usage of collage and texture, Ramadan calls the exhibition “energetic and ambitious,” with many pieces serving as “a deliberate reflection on capitalist economies of extraction and imperialist trade routes that continually ravage the Middle East and South Asia.” Larger questions arise when it comes to representation and its relation to the labor of artists of color, however. In attempting to to reeducate its audience to “the fundamentals of Islam,” the exhibition “encourag[es] an anthropological approach to the work,” Ramadan writes. “Ultimately, I Am an Archive raises urgent questions about the kind of ‘educational’ labor art institutions expect artists of color to perform in return for their inclusion.”
 
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Five Bard College students have won Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, graduate study, and English teaching assistantships. 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.

Mercer Greenwald ’22, a German Studies major from Williamstown, MA, has won a Fulbright Research and Teaching Assistantship Award in Austria for the 2022–23 academic year. As a Combined Research and Teaching Fulbright Scholar, Greenwald will spend the year immersed in the cultural life of the city of Vienna, where she will teach English and write an independent research project on the topic of “concomitant being” in the work of Austrian writer and thinker Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). Greenwald will begin doctoral study in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in the fall of 2023.

Maya Frieden ’22 (they/them), an art history and visual culture major, has won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to support graduate study in the Netherlands for the 2022–23 academic year. Frieden will spend the year in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures. “I have often questioned the sustainability of the current pace at which the design industry is progressing. Embedded within every designed element--from object design to urban design--are intentions that can be sensed, even subtly, by those encountering them, and they frequently symbolize and materialize exclusionary or prohibitive ideologies,” says Frieden. “The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures, understands the significance of historical, sociological and environmental research within the field of design, training students with the skills to interpret, discuss and interact with the discipline, so that we will be equipped to contribute in quickening the pace. By studying in this Master’s program, I will develop additional strategies for noticing the presence or absence of sensitivity within design, while also improving my capabilities for communicating such analyses, and working with those in positions that influence how our world is designed.”

Paola Luchsinger ’20, a Spanish major from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Greece for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend the year in Athens teaching English elementary through secondary students at Athens College–Hellenic American Educational Foundation. “As an English Teaching Assistant in Greece, I hope to gain an idea of Greek perceptions of American culture while also representing a positive image of the United States. I have chosen Greece as my destination because a year in Greece will give me the opportunity to become fluent in Greek through immersion and improve my knowledge of modern Greek society,” says Luchsinger.

Lance Sum ’21 (BHSEC Manhattan ’19), an anthropology major from Brooklyn, NY, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Taiwan for the 2022–23 academic year. He intended to teach English and participate in intensive outdoor adventures, explore large influential cultural institutions in the major cities of Taiwan, host peer review writing and poetry sessions, and educate his Taiwanese community members about his experience in growing up in New York City. “I think Taiwan could offer me a more magnified perspective of a community who has preserved their own culture through much political and colonial pressure, an experience that would help me develop my cultural understanding for others,” says Sum.

Jordan Donohue ’22, a historical studies major, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Brazil for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend in the year teaching English and deepening her knowledge around music and farming. Continuing her past work with Indigenous groups internationally, she plans to engage with and learn from the Indigenous populations of Brazil. Additionally, Jordan has studied Portuguese for seven years and will utilize her time as a Fulbright scholar to advance her fluency and prepare for further academic research on the language and culture of Brazil.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded three Bard faculty members 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu and Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock Peter Filkins have been named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows. Incoming Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Humanities Thomas Chatterton Williams, who will begin teaching at the College in spring 2023, has also been selected.  Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 2,500 applicants, Mengestu, Filkins, and Williams were among a diverse group of 180 exceptional artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2022 Fellowship. Mengestu was awarded a Fellowship for his work in fiction, Filkins for his work in biography, and Williams for his work in general nonfiction.

“We are proud of and grateful for Bard’s 2022 Fellows, who represent an astonishing range of achievement,” said Bard Dean of the College Deirdre d’Albertis. “Living and learning alongside colleagues who have been recognized this year–and in the past–by the Guggenheim Foundation inspires us all to celebrate the vital work of artists, writers, and scholars in our community.”

“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”

In all, 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 81 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 33 to 75. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism.

Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2022 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names(Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. In its cover page review of All Our Names, the New York Times Book Review said “You can’t turn the pages fast enough, and when you’re done, your first impulse is to go back to the beginning and start over . . . While questions of race, ethnicity, and point of origin do crop up repeatedly in Mengestu’s fiction, they are merely his raw materials, the fuel with which he so artfully—but never didactically—kindles disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place, and human connection.” BA, Georgetown University; MFA, Columbia University. At Bard since 2016.

Peter Filkins teaches courses in translation at Bard College, and also creative writing and literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he is Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature. Filkins has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to the International Research Center for Culture Studies in Vienna for Spring 2023. He has published five books of poetry, Water / Music (2021), The View We’re Granted (2012), Augustine’s Vision (2010), After Homer(2002), and What She Knew (1998). He is also the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken(2006), as well as her novels, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann (1999). In addition, he has translated H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey (2008), Panorama (2011), and The Wall (2014), and has published a biography, H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (2019). Co-winner of the 2013 Sheila Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, he has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, from the American Academy in Berlin, and from the Fulbright Commission of Austria. He has been awarded the Stover Prize in Poetry from Southwest Review, the New American Press Chapbook Award, as well as fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay, and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv – Marbach. Previously he was the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association and received a Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian government, as well as serving as Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. BA, Williams College; MFA, Columbia University. At Bard since 2007.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a columnist at Harper’s, a 2019 New America Fellow and a visiting fellow at AEI. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. He  joins Bard as a Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Humanities beginning in Spring 2023.

After coauthoring Flavors of Oakland at 17, it might have seemed inevitable that Bard alum Elazar Sontag would end up as the restaurant editor for a major publication. But according to Sontag, who worked for years in the food industry, that hasn’t always been the plan. “I didn’t work in restaurants because I thought it would make me a better food writer,” Sontag said in an interview with the Oaklandside. “I worked in restaurants because I truly believed that I was going to become a restaurant cook and eventually a chef.” Several experiences led Sontag to a different path, however, who noted that “kitchens are complicated places to be queer.” Now, in his new role as restaurant editor for Bon Appétit, Sontag will continue writing about queer food culture. “So much of what I love to cover as a writer and editor is about these queer restaurant spaces,” he says. “It feels like such a gift that I get to tell the stories and celebrate these spaces that when I was a teen, I didn’t even know that existed.”
 
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Sandra Cisneros to Read at Bard on Wednesday, April 6

The Big Read Hudson Valley kicks off this week with a reading from Sandra Cisneros, author of the 2022 Big Read book selection, The House on Mango Street, at the Fisher Center on Wednesday, April 6. Livestreaming of this event is made possible by Radio Kingston.

Cisneros’s novel “is just as relevant now as it was when first published in 1984,” writes Emma Cariello for Chronogram. “It follows Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Latina girl coming of age in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. The book explores immigration, displacement, and what home means.” 

“Thinking about the influx of residents that this area has seen during the pandemic, and people being displaced due to gentrification, it’s a perfect fit for this community,” says Karen Unger, Associate Vice President of the Office of Institutional Support at Bard College. Unger thinks everyone in the Hudson Valley would benefit from reading The House on Mango Street, and so does the National Endowment for the Arts. Bard has received a $19,985 grant from the NEA to support the series. Events take place April 6–30 with reading groups, performances, workshops, and special events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. The Big Read Hudson Valley is a collaboration between Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine.