News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Bard Fiction Prize winner Eliza Barry Callahan will give a public reading on campus as part of her ongoing residency at Bard during the fall 2026 semester. Callahan’s reading takes place at 5:30pm on Monday, October 5, in the Reem Kayden Center’s Lászlo Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public. For more information, call 845-758-7087.

Callahan received the Bard Fiction Prize following the publication of her debut novel, The Hearing Test (Catapult Books, 2024). The novel’s narrator, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning with Sudden Deafness, an unexplained condition of hearing loss. “As the unnamed narrator navigates a medical labyrinth hoping to cure her abrupt hearing loss, she thinks: she thinks about sound, she thinks about silence, she thinks about noise, signal, and music, and the ranges between them,” the Bard Fiction Prize committee wrote last year when announcing Callahan’s award. “It is a novel of ideas, in which the ideas are not decorative elements or passengers in the vehicle but the story’s essential characters, the active agents driving the narrative.”

Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, NY. The Hearing Test was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and longlisted for Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her fiction and writing about art have appeared in The Paris Review, Bomb, frieze, and The Drift. Her 20-minute directorial debut, The Non-Actor, premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2025. She was a 2023 New York Foundation of The Arts Fellow and currently teaches a seminar on artist writings and ekphrasis at Columbia University.

Presented each October since 2001, the Bard Fiction Prize continues the college’s longstanding position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Callahan will work on her second novel while at Bard this fall.

The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture has named Laura Y. Chang and Arnold Chavkin Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard Roosevelt Montás as the recipient of the prestigious Hiett Prize. The $100,000 cash prize was established in 2005 to support emerging leaders in the humanities who are actively contributing to ideas around what it means to be human.
 
Montás, a specialist in American literature and culture with a particular interest in American national identity, joined Bard’s faculty in 2025 as part of the Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life. He also teaches in Bard’s literature program. Through his research and teaching, Montás has focused on the importance of liberal education and the future of the humanities. 

“I am deeply honored to receive the Hiett Prize in the Humanities,” says Montás. “I have devoted my career to the conviction that the humanities are not a luxury but the most powerful means we have for cultivating free minds, enlarging our moral imagination, and preparing us for lives of purpose and responsible citizenship.”
 
Programming honoring Montás will take place at Southern Methodist University on October 15–16.
 
The Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Arts and Civic Life is focused on the connection between liberal education and civic life. It hosts discussion-based classes and supports faculty in building general education programs for students in all disciplines.

Bard’s new Chang Chavkin Center was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature profiles Roosevelt Montás, the center’s director and Laura Y. Chang and Arnold Chavkin Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life, and explores his philosophy of a broad, less departmentally siloed form of liberal education. As the former director of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, Montás has an established track record of advocating for a model of undergraduate learning based on foundational texts and discussion-based courses. He teaches in the undergraduate college, leading research into the advancement of liberal education. His focus is on the importance of liberal education and the study of texts with major cultural significance related to fundamental human questions, emphasizing lives of purpose and deep civic engagement.

“Montás may seem like he’s tilting at windmills,” writes Beth McMurtrie, senior writer for the Chronicle. “But a lot of other people and groups are galloping alongside him. They include foundations, longtime champions of Great Books curricula, and the many faculty members who have transformed their classrooms by adopting this approach.”

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