News from the Division of Languages and Literature

1974, a new memoir by Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose, was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. The memoir reflects on the shift of America’s identity during that historical year and the events that defined it, such as the Vietnam war, drugs, women’s liberation, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. It also examines Prose’s own relationship with Anthony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. “Throughout 1974, Prose skillfully interweaves the political and the personal elements of this watershed time. Many lesser writers have tried this and failed,” writes Meredith Maran for the Los Angeles Times. “Of the many books I’ve read (and written) on the topic—I lived in parallel to Prose’s 1960s–1970s life—none has matched Prose’s use of the personal to deepen the political and vice versa.” Maran continues, “In this, her first memoir, Prose succeeds where many before her have failed, enlivening—without demonizing or idealizing—the valiant, creative, idealistic movement that almost brought capitalism down.”

Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature at Bard College and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has received three awards in support of his individual professional projects. A 2024 Translator Fellowship, given by the Austrian Society for Literature, awarded Filkins with €1,500 in support of his travel and stay in Vienna, Austria, where he translated letters and manuscripts for his upcoming book, A Biography of Ingeborg Bachmann (1923-1973), while working directly within her archive. He will conduct further research and translation from March 26 to June 23, 2024 in the same archive with an additional €4,500 travel grant from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sport. Finally, a Jentel Artist Residency 2024 will enable Filkins to work on a book-length poem about Claude Monet’s Water Lilies during a three-week residency from August 15 to September 7, 2024.

The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College, now in its third year, welcomes its cohort of five writers, Kay Bell, Theresa Lin, Vivian Rivas, Gwendolyn Shaw, and Dessie Zagorcheva.

The Hurston Fellows are in residence for three weeks from June 2–22. During their residency, fellows are residing on Bard College at Simon’s Rock campus with housing and meals provided. Founded and directed by Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies Donna Ford Grover, the Hurston Fellowship enables writers from all disciplines who have not had the opportunity to develop their scholarship, and supports writers who are currently employed as adjuncts or visiting professors with terminal degrees.

“The Zora Neale Hurston Writing Fellowship at Bard College seeks women who have labored as adjuncts and have not yet published a major work,” said Grover. “Like the program's namesake, the participants are independent scholars and writers without institutional support for their work. The Hurston Fellowship provides these women with the time and space to complete their projects.”

The Hurston Fellowship recognizes the particular challenges that BIPOC women encounter in the academy. Few BIPOC women are tenured or tenure track and most occupy precarious positions at their academic institutions. It is not the aim of the fellowship to increase the number of BIPOC women to the pool of tenure and tenure-track applicants. The program exists to assist these underrepresented voices into the publication of their works. During their residency, each Hurston Fellow spends their time working, writing, and researching independently on dedicated projects.

While in residence as a Hurston Fellow, Kay Bell will work on her poetic memoir, Where the Sun Splits Open, a story of self-discovery and healing after a devastating breakup. In poetry and prose, the book delves into the topic of generational trauma and how it shapes experiences and relationships.
 
Theresa Lin will spend her time during the Hurston Fellowship working on her first novel, which follows the story of a woman named Shau and the significant sacrifices she makes so that she may live on her own terms in 1950s Taiwan. An excerpt of the novel was awarded the De Alba Prize at Columbia University, where Theresa received an MFA.
 
As a Hurston Fellow, Vivian Rivas will be editing and writing her documentary, “Ashley,” which follows Vianney, a 42-year-old woman living in Guatemala City. Because of gang violence in her neighborhood, Vianney enrolled her daughter Ashley in Hogar Seguro, or “Safe Home,” a government-run group home which had promised that each girl would be protected, educated, and sheltered. On March 8, 2017, Ashley and the other girls were tragically killed when a fire broke out, which subsequently revealed the horrific living conditions and sexual abuse the girls experienced at Hogar Seguro, where they were sold to powerful men. In examining the circumstances of Ashley’s death, Rivas uncovers political corruption and highlights the voice of Vianney, who continues to fight for justice for her daughter and all the girls who perished in the fire.

Gwendolyn Shaw’s project while in residence, Amassing and Assembling: Maya Deren and Joseph Cornell, will compare the practices of these two artists. Cornell experimented with film and found objects through a practice of collecting that was akin to fieldwork. Deren experimented with film form and its exhibition, seeding American avant-garde cinema, and developing her interest in film and dance into a multimedia project. To explore the personal and enigmatic works of both artists, Gwendolyn turns to the concept of autoethnography, a reflexive ethnographic practice that simultaneously describes and analyzes personal experience and cultural meaning. 

Dessie Zagorcheva will be working on her book, Kremlin’s Corrosive Capital: How Russia’s Sharp Power Undermines Democracy in Bulgaria and Hungary. She uses insights from the growing literature on “sharp power” and strategic corruption in order to explain how leading authoritarian powers like Russia are undermining democracy and the rule of law within the EU and NATO. In this project, Dessi distinguishes between “sharp power” (as defined by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig, 2017) and other types of power in order to show how the Kremlin seeks to pierce and penetrate the political and informational environment of the target states with a goal of destabilizing, dividing and subverting democratic states. 

Bard College is pleased to announce that Writer in Residence Mona Simpson and Visiting Professor of the Humanities Adam Shatz have each been awarded the 2024–25 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Chosen by an independent selection committee, the 2024–25 class of Berlin Prize fellows includes 24 US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition. The annually awarded Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the Academy’s public program.

During the fall 2024 Berlin Prize fellowship, Bard Writer in Residence Mona Simpson will be working on a novel, tentatively titled “The Great Man, So-Called,” a novel centered on two women in the life of the iconic American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt: his wife, Eleanor, from whom he was deeply estranged, and Francis Perkins, his secretary of labor, and the first woman to ever hold that post. The only American president to serve more than two terms, and a man whose disability was carefully kept from the American public, Roosevelt relied on these women as he devoted his energies during his first two terms on lifting the American economy out of a debilitating depression and during his third and fourth to the growing involvement with the war. Simpson became fascinated with these two women while studying letters written by domestic workers (who were not covered by the New Deal’s protections) for her novel My Hollywood, about Los Angeles nannies. Simpson’s most recent novel, Commitment (2023) was chosen as a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times.

During the spring 2025 Berlin Prize fellowship, Bard Visiting Professor of the Humanities Adam Shatz will work on his book project “Worlds They Have Not Told You Of: Adventures in Creative Music,” a sweeping chronicle of the post-war Black music avant-garde that combines history, criticism, and biographical portraiture to trace the musical routes of sonic exploration and creative self-determination from bebop to free jazz to the present day. Additionally, Shatz has received two other fellowships in support of his work. He has been awarded a 2023–24 Visiting Fellowship at the American Library of Paris, in Paris, France, for June 2024. He also won a 2024 Visiting Fellowship at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, also known as the Institute of Human Sciences, in Vienna, Austria, where he will be in residence from September through October 2024. His latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Franz Fanon, was recently included in the New York Times’s The Best Books of the Year (So Far) and reviewed in The New York Review.

Joseph O'Neill, distinguished visiting professor of written arts at Bard College, was profiled in the New York Times Book Review. His new novel Godwin, a tale of family and migration, is an international adventure story in which O’Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual. The Times writes that his “sharp and slippery new novel” also showcases the tendency of his fiction to incorporate his real-world interests in unexpected ways; in Godwin, that turns out to be soccer. “I have spent years of my life playing or watching or dreaming about ball games,” O’Neill told the Times. “I’m also an intuitive, somewhat dreamy writer. So sports seep into, and sometimes saturate, my fiction. Many writers are like that—we have arbitrary, pre-creative obsessions that emerge as our subject matter, whether we like it or not. I’m stuck with sports.”