News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Daniel Drake interviewed Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts Joseph O’Neill for the New York Review of Books, speaking to O’Neill about his assessment of the state of authoritarianism and resistance in the United States. “The end of the rule of law does not mean that we automatically find ourselves in an authoritarian society,” O’Neill said, but cautioned Democrats against being “distracted by the past.” “The (dubious) strategies hatched by their consultants in response to Trump’s win—‘talk about egg prices,’ ‘work with Republicans,’ and so on—make even less sense than usual,” O’Neill said. “New strategies, new faces, and a new level of adversarial exertion will be required.”

Award-winning writer Rick Moody will give a reading on Monday, March 31, at 4 pm in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. The event, which is cosponsored by the literary magazine Conjunctions, will be the final installment in Bradford Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series (ICFRS) and is free and open to the public.

The ICFRS, hosted by Morrow, professor of literature at Bard College and the founder and editor of Conjunctions, has run for over 35 years and welcomed numerous literary luminaries to Bard, such as Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Karen Russell, Jayne Anne Phillips, Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Millhauser, Can Xue, Quincy Troupe, Richard Powers, Sigrid Nunez, Brandon Hobson, Marc Anthony Richardson, and others.

Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, and three works of nonfiction, including an essay collection about music. His most recent novel, Hotels of North America (Bay Back) is told through a sequence of online reviews and in 2015 was named a best book of the year by NPR and the Washington Post. Moody has received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is a prolific contributor to Conjunctions, where he has been published 26 times.

Bard College is pleased to announce that Roosevelt Montás has been appointed as the first John and Margaret Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College, a newly created faculty chair. Beginning in the 2025–26 academic year, Montás will serve with tenure in the Division of Languages and Literature.

At Bard, Montás will teach in the undergraduate college and lead research for the advancement of liberal education. Montás’s research and teaching focus on the importance of liberal education and the study of great books—texts of major cultural significance that grapple with fundamental human questions—to prepare students for lives of purpose and to promote the formation of citizens for a democratic society. At a critical moment in the state and future of higher education and the role it plays in our nation’s democracy, Bard College remains a leader in its commitment to the power of liberal education in civic participation.

“In the face of the disintegration of general education curricula across higher education, Bard has remained committed to small seminars that bring students and teachers together around common readings to discuss fundamental issues facing us as individuals and as a society,” said Montás. “I am thrilled to join Bard’s faculty in this commitment, and to add my efforts to its tradition of bringing this form of education to communities beyond its own campus.”

“We are honored to welcome Professor Roosevelt Montás as a distinguished new member of the Languages and Literature faculty at Bard,” said Dean of the College Deirdre d’Albertis. “As a humanist and fierce champion of general education, he inspires renewed commitment to teaching transformative texts in a time of increasing discord and fragmentation in the academy.”

Montás was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to New York as a teenager, where he attended public schools in Queens, New York. His book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021) reflects on his experiences as a student and then a teacher at Columbia University, explaining how a liberal education transformed his life and why Great Books have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds. He is also author of Becoming America: Four Documents That Shaped a Nation and Why Their Ideas Still Matter (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 2026) and coeditor of The Princeton History of American Political Thought (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 2026). He speaks and writes on the history, place, and future of liberal education and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Point Magazine, The Financial Times, Aeon Magazine, The New York Daily News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The Dispatch, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.

Prior to joining Bard, he has been on faculty at Columbia University as Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English and served as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum from 2008 to 2018, where he taught moral and political philosophy as well as seminars in American political thought in the Center for American Studies. He is currently director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program at Columbia, which introduces high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds to the Western political tradition through the study of primary texts and helps them prepare competitive applications to college.

Montás specializes in antebellum American literature and culture, with a particular interest in American national identity. His doctoral dissertation Rethinking America: Abolitionism and the Antebellum Transformation of the Discourse of National Identity won Columbia University’s 2004 Bancroft Award. In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student and in 2008 he received the Dominican Republic’s National Youth Prize. In 2023, he was conferred the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa by Ursinus College.

This newly endowed faculty chair was made possible through the generosity of the Chang Chavkin Charitable Foundation.

Bard professors Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, and An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, have been announced as newly elected 2025 members of the Academy of Arts and Letters. Mendelsohn and Lê, who are among 24 new members to join the organization in 2025, were elected in recognition of notable achievements in their fields into the departments of Literature and Art, respectively. They will be inducted into Arts and Letters during its annual ceremonial in May, where writer and member Caryl Phillips will deliver the keynote address. Founded in 1898, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Its members distribute over $1.2 million in awards annually, fund concerts and new works of musical theater, donate art to museums across the US, and present exhibitions, talks, and events for the public in New York City.