News from the Division of Languages and Literature

In her essay “Forget Your Darlings,” published in the European Review of Books, Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Literature Program Marisa Libbon explores the ways in which “three recent books about the lives of medieval women—one fictional, the others real—experiment with biographical form, and in doing so, challenge their readers to remember differently.” In her analysis of Charlotte Cooper-Davis’s Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy, Janina Ramirez’s Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, and Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Libbon reveals how the complexity and agency of women’s lives and work during the Middle Ages have been scarcely memorialized or documented—and in some cases, textually erased—since that era. “It’s only in the historical narrative, our memory of the past, that women are absent,” Libbon writes. “Today, and historically, these absences leave room for false narratives to take root about what were and are ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’ roles for women.”

For Sarah Elia ’06, Bard College alumna and an English as a New Language teacher at Saugerties Central School District, using news resources has been an invaluable part of teaching her students about language and culture. For the New York Times, Elia writes about four methods that she has used in her classroom for bringing a global perspective to language studies. Using reporting from the Times, she has had her students give public presentations that draw on varied viewpoints, engage in bilingual discussions of articles, use Venn diagrams to compare cultures, and include news images to illustrate culture-themed art projects. “Presenting their work to audiences throughout the school has boosted my students’ confidence and given them a greater presence in the school community,” Elia writes for the Times. “It also has given listeners the chance to learn from and engage with their international peers in contexts that are connected to the curriculum.”