News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Michael Sadowski, Bard’s associate dean of the college, has won the top prize in the novel category of the 2024 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for his debut novel, Indiana Queer. The book, which was selected from 188 novels and short story collections, tells the story of a gay Boston-area high school teacher who leaves his comfortable New England bubble to teach in rural Indiana just as the state’s “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” laws are taking effect—and the past relationship that compels him to do it. Set both in the 2020s and the 1980s, Sadowski’s novel depicts the changing face of anti-queerness at two different time periods in the same Midwestern community. The competition is sponsored annually by the Pirate’s Alley Society, Inc., a nonprofit literary and educational organization intended to honor and assist writers, provide high quality literary entertainment for general public readers, and combat illiteracy in the US.

On Monday, October 21, at 4 pm, internationally renowned writer Joyce Carol Oates will give a reading at Bard College in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize, among many other honors. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and the New York Times best seller The Falls.

The reading, which is being presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public. With Morrow, Oates is co-editing Conjunctions:83, Revenants, The Ghost Issue, which will be published in November. Revenants will bring together fiction and poetry on the “unliving-living” by a wide array of esteemed writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Ben Okri, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Patricia Smith, Valerie Martin, Jonathan Carroll, Reggie Oliver, James Morrow, Can Xue, Brian Evenson, Paul Muldoon, and others.

Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics James Romm published a review of Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Muse of History is an academic monograph about the study of ancient Greece that also includes personal stories reflecting on Murray’s long career as a historian. Romm finds that The Muse of History is a record of how we use the idea of ancient Greece as a “hall of mirrors” to understand the modern world, as well as a demonstration of Murray’s important contributions to his field.

Romm admires Murray’s “sleuthing into scholarship’s hidden corners” to create a catalog of overlooked scholars of Greek history; for example, the author’s discovery of an unfinished 1837 manuscript “attest[s] to his tireless, rigorous research.” Collectively, Romm finds that The Muse of History is “a multifaceted book” that “offers something of value to readers, whether they are students of history or, as we all are, its prisoners.”

Participants Include New York Times Bestselling Author Sebastian Junger, Cultural Commentator and Artist Ayishat Akanbi, Turkish-born American Philosopher Seyla Benhabib, Irish Journalist Fintan O’Toole, Arendtian Scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt was suspicious of cosmopolitanism, world government, and the loss of the commonsense connections that are part of living with and amidst one’s tribe. Wary of assimilation and universalism, Arendt understood the need for a tribe, whether that tribe be her “tribe” of good friends or living amongst people with whom one shares cultural and social prejudices. At the same time, Arendt was also deeply suspicious of tribalism in politics. Politics always involves a plurality of peoples. Thus, tribal nationalism—what she called the pseudo-mystical consciousness—is anti-political and leads to political programs aimed at ethnic homogeneity.

Arendt believed that the aspiration of politics is to bind together a plurality of people in ways that do justice to their uniqueness and yet find what is common to them as members of a defined political community. The rise of tribalist and populist political movements today is in part a response to the failure of cosmopolitan rule by elites around the world. As understandable as tribalism may be, the challenge today is to think of new political possibilities that allow for the meaningful commitments of tribal identities while also respecting the fact of human plurality.

Presented by OSUN, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, and Center for Civic Engagement, the Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics” responds to the undeniable fact that tribalism is real, appealing, and dangerous. The conference asks: How can we make a space for tribal loyalty and tribal meaning while simultaneously maintaining our commitment to pluralist politics? The 16th annual Arendt conference will bring notable speakers to Bard College in Annandale to discuss the implications of tribalist politics just weeks before the national US election. 

The two-day conference takes place on Thursday, October 17 and Friday, October 18 in Olin Hall, on Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, New York campus. Register here.

Registration online closes on October 6th. On-site registration will remain open. The conference is free for Hannah Arendt Center members (plus one guest), Bard College students, faculty, and staff, as well as for members of the press. For non-members, the registration fee is $175. The conference can also be attended virtually via the live webcast. All registrants will receive a link to the live webcast.

The conference will also host a special student journalism contest, where young people will have the opportunity to cover the conference and be paid to have their writing, video, interviews, and photos published in the Hannah Arendt Center’s newsletter Amor Mundi.

Conference highlights include:

• Post-Lecture Discussion and Reflection with Sebastian Junger, in which the public may engage directly with the speaker
• “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism in Israel and Palestine,” a breakout session with Shai Lavi and Khaled Furani, two Israeli and Palestinian scholars and friends who will engage in conversation with the public
• “Bloods, Crips, and Overcoming Tribalism in Los Angeles,” a panel discussion with Mandar Apte, Phillip “Rock” Lester, and Gilbert Johnson, moderated by Niobe Way
• “Embodied Connection: Reimagining the Tribe,” a breakout session with Jacob Burda and Magnus Jonas Støre, cofounders of The Blue Initiative which aims to pioneer a novel approach within higher education
• A guided walking tour to visit Hannah Arendt’s grave on Bard College campus and her personal library archives housed at the Stevenson Library with Arendtian scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge and Bard College’s Jana Mader

For the full conference schedule, click here.

Featured speakers include:
Ayishat Akanbi, a fashion stylist and writer based in London who challenges popular ideas by championing understanding, curiosity, and independent thought; Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University and currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University; Sebastian Junger, award-winning journalist, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker, and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Perfect Storm, as well as Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, Freedom, and In My Time of Dying; Joseph O’Neill, distinguished visiting professor of written arts at Bard whose novels include Netherland, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Godwin (2024); Fintan O’Toole, a prize–winning columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of The New York Review of Books; Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a fellow of the British Academy.

Read a full list of speakers with bios here.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College conferences are attended annually by nearly 1000 people and reach an international audience via live webcast. Past speakers have included maverick inventor Ray Kurzweil; whistleblower Edward Snowden; irreverent journalist Christopher Hitchens; businessman Hunter Lewis; authors Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, Masha Gessen, and Claudia Rankine; Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead; and political activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Previous conferences have explored citizenship and disobedience, crises of democracy, the intellectual roots of the economic crisis, the future of humanity in an age increasingly dominated by technology, the crisis in American education, American exceptionalism, democracy under the tyranny of social media, and friendship and politics.

Bard Associate Professor of Literature Marisa Libbon published her review of two books about Jane Austen’s clothes, “Needle and Pen: Dressing is writing or, the clothes in the writer’s closet”, in the latest issue of the European Review of Books. The two books she reviews, the monograph Jane Austen’s Wardrobe by Hilary Davidson and the novella The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, both explore how bespoke clothing can be a mirror of the people it was made for. Beyond just reviewing these works, Libbon presents selections of Austen’s fashion to explore how Austen “shaped her novels and her wardrobe simultaneously.”

Writing about the 1990s (a period when four of Austen’s novels were adapted to film and TV) as the “Age of Austen”, Libbon explains how important Regency-era fashion has been to our understanding of the period and how it has sometimes eclipsed the actual author. Austen’s wardrobe, Libbon argues, is where we can find information we’ve overlooked about Austen’s life. Putting this information beside DeWitt’s novella, she concludes that fashion and the written word both help us remember the past: “the words we use, like the clothes we wear, give us shape.”

Zain Khalid, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, September 23. The reading begins at 6 pm and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. This event is free and open to the public. For more information call 845-758-7087. 

Author Zain Khalid has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his first novel, Brother Alive (Grove Press, 2022). The Bard Fiction Prize committee wrote: “Zain Khalid’s novel Brother Alive is itself alive, made of language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, with at least three valances of narrative draped one on top of another. First is a deeply personal novel about three adopted brothers of mysterious origins growing up in a Staten Island mosque under the care of its eccentric Imam, inhabiting an ordinary world precisely observed and rendered extraordinary with kaleidoscopic language, training its lens on a ride on the back of a motorcycle or a pickup basketball game and turning and turning, changing the patterns of image and sensation, radiating universes of detail. Another is a wild, satirical work of science fiction involving a sinister experimental gas central to the three brothers’ mysteries, which brings them from Staten Island to the Middle East as the book’s politics globalize into ruminations on Islam’s clashes and compacts with the West. And the third is the narrator Youssef’s invisible other “brother” who gives the text its title, the symbiotic shadow-consciousness that lives in his mind and feeds on literature, frequently pointing the reader directly to the author’s influences, as Brother Alive is a novel that knows all literature is about literature, and isn’t afraid to embrace it.”

“I’m honored and grateful to be the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. I’ve long admired the prize’s previous winners, luminaries, really, and am stunned to be joining their ranks,” said Khalid. “To work on my novel alongside Bard’s brilliant literary community is a truly awesome endowment.” 

Zain Khalid is an American writer and novelist, originally from New York. His debut novel, Brother Alive, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Peter Filkins, Bard College visiting professor of literature and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund the writing of his upcoming book, Sibyl and Siren: A Life of Ingeborg Bachmann, which is a biography of Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). Filkins previously received a 2022–23 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2023 Fulbright Fellowship, and a 2024 Translator Fellowship, given by the Austrian Society for Literature, as well as a travel grant from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sport, in support of his travel and stay in Vienna, Austria, where he researched his book project, translating letters and manuscripts while working directly within Bachmann’s archive.

Poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann remains an iconic figure in postwar German literature. With the blessing of her heirs to write her biography, Filkins has completed much of the necessary research for his book—including translating excerpts from personal correspondence, manuscripts, acceptance speeches, essays, poems, stories, librettos, novels, and critical commentary from scholars—as well as studying historical documents, reviews, and memoirs from family members. During his NEH grant period, Filkins will focus on writing this biography. This book will expand the understanding of an important writer outside of her native language and culture, and place biography in the service of literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, and the humanities.

“It’s very pleasing to have such support for the extended period of writing necessary to complete this book. It also goes a long way to bringing more attention to Bachmann's work and introducing it to a larger American audience,” said Filkins.

Ingeborg Bachmann remains Austria’s most celebrated writer of the postwar era, as well as a pioneer of second-wave feminism. Her unblinking examination of fascism’s poisonous, yet subtle effect on language and gender relations informs her poems, essays, stories, and novels. Though she died tragically in a fire at age 47, she remained an important influence on writers such as Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, and Thomas Bernhard. The critical reception of her work has also been enhanced through its translation into English, with Filkins having translated her complete poems, Darkness Spoken.

Filkins’s NEH Public Scholars Award is one of 25 in that category, and part of $37.5 million in NEH grants for 240 humanities projects across the country, announced in the third and last round of NEH funding for fiscal year 2024. The grants will support vital humanities education, research, preservation, and public programs. These peer-reviewed grants were awarded in addition to $65 million in annual operating support provided to the national network of state and jurisdictional humanities councils.

“From exhibitions, books, and documentaries about our past, to research centers to help us meet the challenges of the future, these 240 new humanities projects contribute to our greater understanding of the human endeavor and add to our nation’s wealth of educational and cultural resources,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “We look forward to the exciting range of products, discoveries, tools, and programs these grants will generate at institutions and in communities across the United States.”

Francine Prose, distinguished writer in residence at Bard and author of 12 novels, contributed an essay on the literature of the 2000s to the Washington Post’s ongoing series celebrating the 75th anniversary of the National Book Awards. Prose, who was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000, frames the 2000s as a decade when authors reflected the anxiety of current events in their work. Although writers are not reporters, she writes, “even if they don’t address the current moment in their work, they live inside that time.”

Prose’s list begins with writing about those current events, juxtaposing the 9/11 Commision Report at the beginning of the decade with Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin near the end of it. She also overviews nonfiction, poetry, and short stories, with special focus on the poetry of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Donald Justice, and Kevin Young. Writing about her time serving as a judge for the award in 2007, she notes that the books honored that year—including Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork—“intensely reflected the preoccupations of that time but also raised questions that remain essential—and unanswered—to this day.”