News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights Ingrid Becker has been named a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, for the 2025-2026 academic year. This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.

Ingrid Becker’s research bridges poetry and poetics, human rights, and sociology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While at the IAS, she will work on a new research project about the rise of the questionnaire—a sociological technology and ubiquitous mass cultural form—in relation to the shifting status of the question in post-1945 Anglo-American poetry.

Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty include, Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, John von Neumann, Hetty Goldman, George Kennan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The Institute for Advanced Study was established in 1930. Today, research at IAS is conducted across four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science—to push the boundaries of human knowledge.

Among past and present scholars, there have been 37 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 24 of the 28 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.

Olga Voronina, associate professor of Russian at Bard College, has been awarded a Houghton Library Visiting Fellowship for the 2025-26 year. The Fellowship offers graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars the opportunity to pursue research in the library’s holdings, as well as funding to do so. Fellows have access to other Harvard University libraries and the chance to share their research through talks, publications, and public programs.

Voronina was awarded the Rodney G. Dennis Fellowship in the Study of Manuscripts to help her develop her project Vladimir Nabokov: Letters to Family. She is currently finishing her book on the textological challenges and archival discoveries in Nabokov studies, Secret Writing: Nabokov's Archive of Subtexts.

Drawing comparisons to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and the cancellation of the Russian show Куклы (Puppets) in 2002 by Vladimir Putin, M. Gessen, distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, spoke about the power of satire to deflate authoritarian imagery. “That’s the real power of comedians in an autocracy, is that they reduce the tyrant to human size, or even to less than human size,” Gessen says. The speed with which ABC, Nexstar, and Sinclair removed Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the air suggests that “we’re really in a new situation.” “We’re in a situation where network executives are perceiving the presidential administration not as something that they criticize, but as a place from which they take orders, or at least receive signals that should inform their actions.”

The Stevenson Library at Bard College is pleased to present “Rewriting Hisstory,” a conversation between Jonathan Brent, visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard, and author Jeff Kisseloff. They will discuss Kisseloff's new book, Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, about the American government official who was accused of spying for the Soviet Union and whose controversial case became one the most important political trials of the 20th century.

The talk will take place on Monday, September 15 from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm on the first floor of the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library on Bard’s campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The event, which will feature a reception with refreshments and end with a Q&A, is free and open to the public. For more information, call 845-758-6822.

Alger Hiss, a US State Department official and the Secretary-General of the UN's San Francisco Conference, was accused by Whittaker Chambers in 1948 of having been a Communist spy in the 1930s. The statute of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death, and Kisseloff, in his book, brings a new perspective, evidence, and accusations to this historical controversy.

Jeff Kisseloff developed a fascination for the Hiss case as a child when he heard a recording of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In college, Kisseloff contacted Hiss and went to work for him, reading his voluminous FBI file. He later became a newspaper reporter and editor, an author of five books including three oral histories, and has been working full time on Rewriting Hisstory since 1997. Kisseloff is a native New Yorker who now lives in Tucson, with his wife Sue, two dogs, and about 115,000 pages of unredacted FBI files, the result of a successful lawsuit against the Bureau. For more information, visit algerhiss.com, of which Kisseloff is managing editor.

Jonathan Brent, visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College, is a historian, publisher, translator, and writer. For 18 years (1991-2009) he was editorial director at Yale University Press where he established the Annals of Communism series. His books include Stalin’s Last Crime (2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (2008). Brent has translated poems of Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, is currently writing a biographical study of the Russian writer, Isaac Babel, and finishing a novel. In 2009, Brent became executive director and CEO of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he initiated the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project to conserve and digitize all of YIVO’s pre-WWII collections.