News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Emily Schmall ’05, who reports on Sri Lanka for the New York Times, discusses the country’s recent protests and presidential resignation with her colleague German Lopez for the Times’ Morning Newsletter. Schmall talks about the conditions leading up to the civil uprising in Colombo, how it began, and how unexpectedly nonviolent and orderly the protestors and activists were. “After about 24 hours, a gleefulness overtook the place, and some people swam in the president’s pool. They had done it: They had forced this extremely powerful president–who was accused of war crimes, who was feared–to leave his own home and even the country. But they did it peacefully, without taking up arms,” said Schmall.

Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College, has won a Rabkin Prize of $50,000 for his work in visual art journalism. L’Official is one of eight visual art journalists to receive a Rabkin Prize from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Jurors for this sixth cycle of awards were: Eric Gibson (Arts in Review editor of the Wall Street Journal), Sasha Anawalt (Professor Emerita of Journalism at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism), and Paul Schmelzer (Founder of The Ostracon: Dispatches from Beyond Contemporary Art’s Center).

“I am humbled to be recognized among such a brilliant group of fellow recipients by the Rabkin Foundation. Thank you to the jurors, the anonymous nominators, the Rabkin Trustees, and—most especially—to all the editors and writers and readers who make the work of arts criticism both possible and worthwhile,” said L’Official.

Peter L’Official (he/him) is a writer, arts critic, and teacher of literature and American studies from The Bronx, NY. He is an associate professor in literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he teaches courses in African American literature and culture, twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, and on how the visual arts intersect with literature, place, and architecture. He is also the project coordinator for “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck,” a grant supported by the Mellon Foundation “Humanities for All Times” Initiative. 

L'Official is the author of Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, published by Harvard University Press in 2020. His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Village Voice, and other publications, and he is on the editorial board of The European Review of Books. He has written catalogue essays for exhibitions by artists such as Carl Craig and Becky Suss, and his next book project will explore the intersections of literature, architecture, and Blackness in America. L’Official has a B.A. in English from Williams College, and an M.A. in Journalism from New York University’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. He received his Ph.D. in American studies from Harvard University, and was formerly a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University in 2014-15. 

Now in its sixth cycle, the Rabkin Prize started in 2017. To date, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has given a total of $2,775,000 to individual art writers. The award program is by nomination only. A distinguished group of 16 nominators, working in the visual arts in all parts of the country, provided the list of potential winners. The nominators were asked to identify, “The essential visual art journalist working in your part of the country.” Candidates for the award submitted two recent published articles and a brief curriculum vita. Writers can be re-nominated and are eligible until they win a Rabkin Prize. This is an annual program and a central initiative of the foundation.

This cycle’s other winning journalists include: Shana Nys Dambrot (Los Angeles); Bryn Evans (Decatur, Georgia); Joe Fyfe (New York City); Stacy Pratt (Tulsa); Darryl F. Ratcliff, II (Dallas); Jeanne Claire van Ryzin (Austin); Margo Vansynghel (Seattle). 

“How can we find such camaraderie in the very thing that so often slights us?” asks Joe Vallese ’04 MAT ’05, editor of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, calls the anthology “full of surprises.” Comprised of 25 essays on horror from contemporary queer authors, including 2018 Bard Fiction Prize winner Carmen Maria Machado, “the pieces are a brilliant display of expert criticism, wry humor, and original thinking.” Awarding it a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly says “there’s not a weak piece in the pack.” It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror will be published October 4, 2022, by Feminist Press and is available for preorder now.

“Sophocles had no trouble with structure,” writes Mary Norris for the New Yorker, struggling to find a way into her own tale. Taking a page from the late John Bennet, her friend and longtime editor for the New Yorker, Norris started at the beginning, telling the story of her trip to see Antigone with Bennet before his recent death. The Senior Project of Francis Karagodins ’22, Antigone, based on an original translation by Karagodins, was staged outdoors at Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, the sculpture park and museum created by the late Bard professor and alumnus Harvey Fite ’30. “The setting was evocative: birdsong and scudding clouds at twilight, with the mountains for a backdrop,” Norris writes. While Bennet was studied in the play, Norris found herself more unfamiliar, and as such found Tiresias’s entrance to be the play’s most startling development. “While the other performers all seemed afraid of stumbling on the paving stones (Fite actually died of a fall in his own quarry), Tiresias alone, blind and urgent, had a motive to place each foot squarely on the earth.” Shortly after the two saw Antigone, Bennet was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “Two weeks later, on July 9, he died, at home,” Norris writes, “releasing a great commingling of sadness and gratitude among family and friends, our lives graven where his plow had gone.”