News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Professor of Literature Hua Hsu published an article in the New Yorker titled “The Curious Career of ‘the American Dream,’” examining the origins of the famous phrase first popularized by historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. Invoking a wide range of artists, journalists, historians, and other leading American thinkers alongside polling and reporting, Hsu explores how the meaning of the American Dream has evolved alongside shifting economic, social, and racial reality in the United States. Hsu concludes with a visit to the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream in Washington, DC, just down the road from a heavily fortified White House, and conversations with his students about the country’s future.

“Despite America’s wealth and relative stability, numerous metrics suggest a country in distress, lagging behind other affluent nations in everything from life expectancy to results on surveys of global happiness and well-being,” writes Hsu. “Earning a college degree or owning a home was once not just a status marker but an investment that promised material returns. Today, people amass unmanageable debt simply to keep faith with a story that feels increasingly detached from their reality.”

Hsu teaches in the Literature Program at Bard, which emphasizes cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity, challenging national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
 

Peter L'Official, associate professor of literature and director of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, has been awarded a 2026 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The grant will support his project, Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black’s Black Arts Movement, which uses biography as a method to explore how an unsung Black American architect, W. Joseph Black, navigated the structural impediments that even today confront American architects identifying as Black. The project draws on archival architectural and literary sources to reconstruct not only a life, but the broad, interdisciplinary scope of Black’s unrealized works, which included transformative design plans for Harlem as well as field-altering historical texts chronicling the history of Black builders in America, and which reveal Black’s work as an unacknowledged architectural arm of the multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts bestows project-based grants to support the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States. Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way. 
 

Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship for 2026-27. Xie’s fellowship in the category of Poetry, conferred by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, is one of 14 fellowships awarded by the foundation this year, which support independent creative and scholarly work on major projects by early mid-career individuals who have demonstrated potential to be future leaders in their fields.

During her fellowship, Xie will receive $40,000 in unrestricted funds to devote her time to researching, developing, and writing her third poetry collection, Dead Time, which delves into forms of directionless time, or time untroubled by plot and by imperatives of action. Xie is the author of two other collections of poetry. Eye Level (2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. The Rupture Tense (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Xie has also been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.

The Howard Foundation is an independent agency administered at Brown University. Established in 1954, it awards annual, unrestricted fellowships to promising individuals in selected artistic and academic fields. Past fellows have authored bestsellers, directed Oscar nominated feature-length films, and earned some of the world’s most prestigious honors including Pulitzer Prizes, the Rome Prize, and the Whiting Award. For more information, visit howard-foundation.brown.edu.