News from the Division of Languages and Literature

A new book by James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and Director of the Classics Program James Romm, Since You're Mortal . . . : Life Lessons From the Lost Greek Plays, was reviewed in the Epoch Times. Romm’s book, which was reviewed earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, translates fragments from ancient Greek literature and sorts them into themes about life lessons on love, politics, and more. These fragments come from the writings of Stobaeus, a fifth-century man who compiled lines from Classical writing to instruct his son; Romm’s translation is the first time they have been translated into English. “There is hardly anything more powerful or more beautiful than a great line,” writes Dustin Bass for the Epoch Times. “Romm’s new book gifts the reader these textual forms in all their beauty and wisdom.”

Romm, whose previous books have been reviewed in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, also recently reviewed Alexander: God, King, Man by Edmund Richardson for the Times Literary Supplement. He teaches in Bard’s Classical Studies Program, which seeks to understand the languages, literatures, histories, and visual and material cultures of the premodern Mediterranean world. The program approaches these ancient societies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including linguistics, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy, while also considering the long and complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome in art, language, politics, and culture from antiquity to the present day.

Bard College’s Division of Languages and Literature is pleased to announce the appointment of Tara Westover as visiting writer in residence. Her appointment begins in the fall 2026 semester.

Westover is an American historian and memoirist. Her first book, Educated, a memoir of her upbringing in rural Idaho, was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, PEN America’s Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted Educated the Nonfiction Book of the same year. “I'm very pleased to be joining the faculty at Bard and am really looking forward to meeting the students,” said Westover.

In 2019, Westover was named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the year. She holds a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 2019 she was the Rosenthal Writer in Residence at Harvard University. In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by former president Joseph Biden.

The work of Bard alumnus Arlo Haskell ’00, executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar, was featured by the New York Times in an article about Key West’s literary history. Key West was once a destination for writers including Ernest Hemingway and Judy Blume. Now, residents of the island are trying to preserve that legacy despite rising home prices. The Key West Literary Seminar recently renovated a house belonging to Elizabeth Bishop, and it now hosts a walking tour and summer writing workshops for high schoolers in order to “incubate future writing talent.” The Seminar aims to “make sure that the literary tradition in Key West is something that’s active and vital and ongoing today, so it’s not just part of the history books,” Haskell told the Times.
The Literature Program at Bard emphasizes cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity, challenging national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.