News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Julia Bloch has been selected as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, which recognize LGBT writing. Bloch, a poet and faculty member in the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching program, was nominated for her book Letters to Kelly Clarkson.

This new series, curated by Bard faculty members Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead, will engage an ongoing discussion with the nation’s leading bloggers in politics, history, art, and culture. Bard professor Francine Prose, who blogs for the New York Review of Books, will speak on March 5. All events take place at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan.

Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. Professor Buruma is an award-winning journalist and writer.

He was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied Chinese literature and Japanese cinema. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career traveling and reporting from all over Asia. Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Corriere della Sera, and NRC Handelsblad. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The China Lover (2008) and Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (2010). He is the 2008 recipient of Holland's prestigious Erasmus Prize, as well as the 2008 winner of Stanford University's Shorenstein Journalism Award. Professor Buruma has been at Bard since 2003.

Washington Post writer Michael Lindgren calls Professor Mendelsohn, "elegant and capacious ... a versatile critic."

Teju Cole, distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents; he was raised in Nigeria and currently lives in Brooklyn. Cole is an author, art historian, and street photographer.

Teju Cole is the author of Open City (Random House, 2011), which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the New York City Book Award, and was shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a novella, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Qarrtsiluni, Chimurenga, New Yorker, Transition, Tin House, and A Public Space, among other publications. He is currently at work on Water Has No Enemy, a nonfiction narrative of Lagos, and on Small Fates. He received his B.A. in studio art and art history from Kalamazoo College in Michigan; his M.A. in African art history from the University of London; and his M.Phil. in 16th-century northern European visual culture from Columbia University, where he is working on his Ph.D. He has taught art history and literature at Hofstra University, New York University, and Columbia University. He has received a Rudolf Wittkower Fellowship and Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation), and has been interviewed for the documentary film, Wole Soyinka: Child of the Forest.

Bard presents its annual Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature, with acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín. Tóibín will speak about his work with Fintan O’Toole, a leading Irish editor, writer, and critic on Thursday, March 7, at 5:30 p.m.

Bard College at Simon's Rock faculty member and poet Peter Filkins examines the relationship of Sylvia Plath's poetry to her life and death.

John Ashbery discusses poetry, surrealism, and the New York School.

On February 20 Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, and Francine Prose will read letters by Gaddis and discuss what he has meant to them as writers and readers, introduced by Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow.

Daniel Mendelsohn, award-winning author, critic, and Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College since 2006, has been named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism for his most recent book, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture.

This April, Bard College is launching a yearlong 10th anniversary celebration of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts with a month of music, theater, and dance. Highlights include an all-Wagner concert performed by the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO); a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 performed by members of the ASO and the Bard Conservatory Orchestra; a production of Euripides’ The Bacchae; comic works by Jack Ferver and QWAN Company; Sō Percussion’s Student Concert; the 2013 Bard Faculty Dance Concert; and an evening with author Neil Gaiman and singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer.

Gilles Peress, Bard College visiting professor of human rights and photography and internationally renowned photojournalist, is exhibiting work in Art or Evidence: The Power of Photojournalism, on view from January 3 through March 10 at the Mandeville Gallery, Union College in Schenectady, New York.

Devotees of American Public Media’s Marketplace will be pleased to know that the show’s Africa correspondent is Bard’s very own Gretchen Wilson ’97. During the last eight years, Wilson has established herself as a political reporter who tackles serious labor, economic, and social justice issues.

What does it mean to be human? How can we consider freedom and constraint in the year 2013? Bard's Center for Civic Engagement invites students from the Bard network of institutions to examine these questions in a written essay or multimedia piece for its annual contest. The deadline for submission is March 1, 2013.

What place do the humanities have in a global economy increasingly focused on educating a work force for business, finance, and technology? Bard leaders weighed in with the New Indian Express. "Without humanities, social sciences and arts," says Bard IILE Director Susan Gillespie, "we won’t have just and liveable societies or even prosperous economies." Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz adds that teaching the humanities is about "transmitting a tradition of meaning and substance, texts and ideas that can inspire young people to care more for the common world they share than for their parochial or personal interests."

On December 10 at 5 p.m., Paris Review editor Lorin Stein will give a talk at Bard on publishing careers and the literary life, followed by a panel of alumni/ae guests who are recent graduates of the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard.

Author Brian Conn has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2013. Conn will be awarded $30,000 and will join Bard as writer in residence next semester. He won the prize for his debut novel, The Fixed Stars, a work of experimental science fiction that our judges call "wondrous."

On Monday, November 5, highly acclaimed science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany will read from his most recent novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, at Bard College. The New York Times Book Review called Delany “the most interesting writer of science fiction writing in English today.”

Ann Lauterbach, esteemed poet and the Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, has been named the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poet by the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago. From October 16 to 18, Lauterbach will be a distinguished guest to the university, where she will work with students and present the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading and Lecture.

Yannick Murphy, author of Here They Come; Signed, Mata Hari; and other books, will read from her most recent novel, The Call, at Bard College on Monday, October 1. Dave Eggers has called Murphy “one of our most daring and original writers” and “an exquisitely attuned observer of human behavior.”

Bard honors preeminent poet, alumnus, and former Bard faculty member Anthony Hecht ’44 with renowned scholar Daniel Albright delivering the fourth biennial Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities, October 1–4.

The November issue of Bard's literary magazine Conjunctions is in production, featuring work by Robert Coover, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, Jonathan Lethem, and China Miéville, among many others. Click below to hear Bard writer in residence Edie Meidav read from her new story, "Dogs of Cuba: The Buddha of the Vedado," appearing in the new issue.

Bard author Teju Cole enjoys a unique residency in London. Click here to listen to him read the essay he wrote that week, or click here to read it in the New Yorker, or below to read his residency diary in the Financial Times.

Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman will give a reading of a new, not yet published short story Wednesday, September 5 in the Fisher Center, before the Amanda Palmer concert. Tickets to the reading are free, but seating is on a first come, first served basis.