News from the Division of Languages and Literature

“It’s not that Russians believe that the virus is a hoax; it’s that they lack common ground with one another. . . . There is no public sphere,” Gessen writes in the New Yorker. “If my English-language social-media feed doesn’t make me feel as if I’m going crazy in the same way that the Russian one does, it’s because I’m virtually situated in a little corner of this country that still has a shared, fact-based reality—and, within it, the flickering possibility of coöperation and mutual responsibility.”

The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions75. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected]](12.1.20)
 

Author Akil Kumarasamy has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut story collection, Half Gods, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018). Kumarasamy’s one-semester residency at Bard College is scheduled for the 2021–22 academic year, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Kumarasamy will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River—the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.”

“I’m very excited to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and to be part of the Bard community,” said Kumarasamy. “This has been such a whirlwind of a year, and, during these very uncertain times, I’m grateful for the support and the committee’s belief in my work. Really thrilled by the opportunity.”

Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey and the author of the story collection, Half Gods, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s longstanding position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. 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. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Author Clare Beams for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016).

About the Bard Fiction Prize
The Bard Fiction Prize is awarded to a promising emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to a $30,000 cash award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester, without the expectation that he or she teach traditional courses. The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students. To apply, candidates should write a cover letter explaining the project they plan to work on while at Bard and submit a CV, along with three copies of the published book they feel best represents their work. No manuscripts will be accepted. Applications for the 2022 prize must be received by June 15, 2021. For information about the Bard Fiction Prize, call 845-758-7087, send an e-mail to [email protected], or visit bard.edu/bfp. Applicants may also request information by writing to: Bard Fiction Prize, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.12/1/20
 

“In an expansive and revealing new biography, Sometimes You Have to Lie, Leslie Brody assembles the clues to the personal history that shaped Fitzhugh’s conscience and creative convictions,” writes Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times. “Brody, a biographer and playwright who adapted Harriet the Spy for the stage in 1988, has pored through correspondence, memoirs and court documents, and conducted dozens of interviews to reveal the trail that Fitzhugh left unmarked.”

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“We don’t know how to give and receive,” Seneca writes in the opening statement of De Beneficiis, newly edited and translated by Professor James Romm as How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving (Princeton University Press, 2020). Seneca counsels givers to be anonymous and forget they’ve given, and urges recipients to be grateful and remember. How to Give is the latest entry in a series from Princeton University Press called Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard. 

“The Women’s Strike organizers are thinking well beyond abortion restrictions. They have called together a Consultative Council of experts,” writes Gessen. “[Organizers have] conducted a survey of protesters, identified thirteen topics of greatest concern to them, and created working groups of experts for every one, including abortion rights, education, work and the pandemic, health care, climate change, and the separation of church and state; there is also a group called No Pasarán, which focuses on the ‘defascization of Poland.’”

“When we first heard the news, I couldn’t imagine getting through one day in the house, stuck and anxious without the energy to entertain. Like all of you—all of us—and yet, some of you will come out still married,” writes Sherman, who teaches in the MFA Program at Columbia University. “People say that when the virus ends there will be many divorces. Not yet, as the courts are still closed. All the couples are waiting for the doors to open, and then the numbers will go up. I can’t get my wedding ring off of my finger.”

“I want people always to be thinking that every story that you enjoy, you need to stop and think, why am I enjoying this? What’s happening? What is the writer doing? What is the writer forcing me to look at?” Mendelsohn tells Donahue. “In this book I really want people to think about it, not least by pointing to the fact that amazing coincidences and sort of too-good-to-be-true narratives happen in history, in real life, as well as in stories.”

“When I imagine life without Donald Trump, what I’m picturing is something like the final scene of the disaster film: the zombies have been beaten back, the Martians have returned to their planet, the dinosaurs are extinct once again, the floods have receded, the wildfires safely extinguished. The sun is shining, the sky is clear, the birds—those birds that are left—are sweetly singing. The last living humans find one another, and we know what they are thinking even if they don’t speak. They are thinking: it’s over. We’ve survived. Our country has been restored to us. We can breathe again.”

For all the apparent flailing and incompetence of his administration, Trump’s authoritarian aspirations have largely succeeded, says Gessen. “In four years, Trump has created a ‘vertical of vassalage’ that runs from him to Barr to the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and to the courts. Its extension is Fox News, which has served as the fourth branch of Trump’s government. (Fox News has been notably noncompliant with Trump’s election narrative, starting with its early call of Arizona for Joe Biden, which incited the President’s rage.) Trump is trying to use his vertical of vassalage to thwart the electoral system. If he succeeds, his autocratic breakthrough will be complete. If he fails, Trump will leave—reluctantly, petulantly, perhaps after a litigious delay—but much of the vertical that he has put in place will remain.”

“Four days of hearings contained not a single substantive exchange. . . . Barrett surely doesn’t think that her future position on the Supreme Court is a bullshit job; Senate Republicans don’t think that packing the courts with conservatives is bullshit work, either,” writes Gessen. “But, like the people who are rushing her onto the bench, Barrett does seem to believe that the nomination and confirmation process are bullshit—she shares the Trump Republican Party’s contempt for the norms and processes of the government in which she has risen so far, so fast.”

“Mr. Mendelsohn’s eighth full-length work is itself a book that springs from other books, including his own. It is a brief but bountiful mashup of criticism, literary biography, craft essay and personal history. As always, the author’s voice blends authority with considerable warmth and charm, luring readers into his complex intellectual enthusiasms. Mr. Mendelsohn has honed a prose style that is nuanced yet clear, without a hint of pedantry, and one is always glad to learn what he has to teach. Grandeur and intimacy are the poles between which all ambitious writers suspend their work. There is a sense in both the “Odyssey” and in “Mimesis” that their authors are capable of reaching through time to speak companionably to every reader. Mr. Mendelsohn’s books are distinguished by this kind of approachability as well. ... Three Rings, a short but profoundly moving work, clings with tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature.”

“Urban Legends is a parabolic dish microphone pointed at history, collecting the waves that outsiders have bounced off the South Bronx,” writes Sasha Frere-Jones. “The triumph of the book is the first half, where L’Official corrals visual depictions of the South Bronx and builds a lattice of history and shadows. … L’Official examines the work of visual artist Gordon Matta-Clark and photographer Ray Mortenson alongside a huge stash of tax photos taken in the 1980s, and the book blooms. Having synthesized this cohort, L’Official offers us an understanding of ‘the elasticity of both the archive and fine art to represent subjects with occasionally remarkable intricacy.’” 

“Whether paying tribute to the young Patti Smith or imagining the subsequent lives of the original owners of 45s in his collection or recalling the long-gone businesses and denizens of the Lower East Side, he puts the reader right there, seeing what he saw, thinking what he thought,” writes Dmitry Samarov in Vol. 1 Brooklyn. “This new collection, which follows the equally essential Kill All Your Darlings, is a must for anyone curious about art and culture made in this country during the last era when what’s new was gleaned firsthand, in the flesh, rather than passively received by screen.” Read an excerpt from Sante’s new collection in the Paris Review.

“We’d like to believe that suffering instructs and ennobles; that our grief, fear and pain increases our sympathy for the grief, fear and pain of others,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose. “But again, Donald Trump seems to be ineducable, impervious to shame, guilt or any sense of personal responsibility, unaffected by anything except vanity, selfishness and reckless self-regard. Certainly, the experience of having his blood oxygen level drop so low that supplemental oxygen was required must have been alarming, and yet the president continues to believe that bluster is the best medicine.”

“Those who succeeded in screening out Trump’s cacophonous noise and listening to Joe Biden may have noticed a moment that was, to me, a high point of the debate. … It was the moment when Joe Biden (yes, looking directly into the camera) said, “When I hear 200,000 deaths, I think of the empty chairs at dining room tables all across the country, which just months ago were filled by loved ones. It didn’t have to be this bad.” It’s the sort of statement that many of us have been waiting to hear, some genuine acknowledgment of the human costs, the pain of all the death. … How have we learned to settle for being led by a man who would never say this, who has no conception of (or pity for) human grief, loss or love? Or perhaps Trump honestly believes that the mourners at the table will be consoled by the great job that Donald Trump is doing on healthcare.”

Bard alumna Emily Schmall ’05 is the newest New York Times staff correspondent, and she will be based in New Delhi. She studied Spanish and literature at Bard College, where she cofounded La Voz with Mariel Fiori ’05 as a student project. Emily went on to receive a master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s business and economics reporting program. She gained experience as a stringer for the Times in Argentina, notably covering the historic selection of Pope Francis, after which she worked with the Associated Press in Fort Worth and later New Delhi.

Phuc Tran’s first book, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, was published by Flatiron Books in April 2020. It is, in Tran’s words, “a memoir about growing up in a rural Pennsylvania town as a nerdy, Asian punk rocker who would eventually become a Latin-teaching tattooer.”

Conjunctions, the celebrated literary magazine published by Bard College, has been awarded a 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. Since 2018, a total of 13 literary magazines have won this prize for excellence in publishing, advocacy for writers, and a unique contribution to the strength of the overall literary community. Conjunctions has propelled literature forward for four decades by publishing groundbreaking fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction that marry visionary imagination with formally innovative execution. Each issue illuminates a complex theme—such as exile, desire, the body, or climate change—in a book-length format that gives space to long-form work and a multitude of perspectives. From its home in Bard College, Conjunctions and its founding editor, Bradford Morrow, have earned recognition for uplifting both new writers and contemporary masters who challenge convention.

“Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world,” the Whiting judges commented. “Its longevity is a testament to its cultural staying power. Organized around a unifying idea, each issue stitches together work by storytellers and scholars to create a fluid and expansive survey of our most pressing human concerns.”

“The 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize could not have come at a more significant time for Conjunctions, which will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary in the coming year,” said Bradford Morrow, Editor of Conjunctions and professor of literature at Bard. “The pandemic has inflicted unprecedented challenges on all of us, including literary journals and writers, and thanks to the Whiting Foundation, Conjunctions will be able to continue publishing both our print and online journals without interruption. This grant will enable us to broaden and deepen our ongoing search for innovative poetry, fiction, essays, and multi-genre works by those who write fearlessly, and greatly strengthen our outreach to those who, as we at Conjunctions like to say, read dangerously.”

Morrow gave special thanks to those who supported Conjunctions’ Whiting application. “I want to take the opportunity also to express my gratitude to our former managing editor, Nicole Nyhan, for all her hard work on the application to the Whiting Foundation,” he said. “And to the three writers who shall remain unnamed, my thanks for graciously writing letters of support on our behalf.”

The Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes were launched in 2018 to acknowledge, reward, and encourage the publications that are actively nurturing the writers who tell us, through their art, what is important. The purpose of the prizes is first and foremost to recognize excellence, and also to help outstanding magazines reach new audiences, find new sources of revenue, and travel the path to sustainability and growth. The matching grants in years two and three are intended to give these publications enough runway to make serious progress toward achieving these goals. For more information about the Whiting Foundation, visit whiting.org.

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions74. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected].]
 

“At a national level, we’ve been acting for so many years as if what we were doing would never have consequences, in our political lives, in our attitude toward the environment, race, everything, and now it’s exploding all simultaneously, and that is sort of Sophoclean,” Professor Mendelsohn tells the Quarantine Tapes podcast with Paul Holdengraber. “This is what tragedy is interested in. It’s interested the return of everything that you thought you could evade, and, for that reason, I think, so to speak, we’re in a very Greek moment, or one that the Greeks would have understood.”

“I think the whole idea of the special relationship of the Anglo-Saxon peoples was a romantic conceit, cooked up by Churchill, in order to get the Americans to join in the war, without which Germany could not have been defeated,” says Buruma. “I think there is very little of that kind of sentiment left. The war has been over for a long time and Britain’s power has dwindled so much that it’s of low-grade interest to whomever is in power in the U.S.”

On the occasion of Blueprint’s translation into English, Wilk and Enzensberger talk about “how to write Nazi characters who aren’t clichés; about reviving the legacy of overlooked women artists and architects; about why fiction can be truer than reality—and about how our current political debates and challenges are not so far from those of 100 years ago.” Wilk, whose first novel, Oval, was published in 2019, is a contributing editor at e-flux Journal and a 2020 fellow in the Transformations of the Human program at the Berggruen Institute. Enzensberger, a freelance journalist who lives in Berlin, is the founder of the award-winning BLOCK Magazin.

Borderlines contributing editor Simon Conrad speaks with Professor Holt about her book Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel, which reads early Arabic novels of late 19th- and 20th-century Beirut and Cairo as fictions of global finance in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

“Born and bred in the Bronx, this talented scholar/author (an assistant professor of literature at Bard College) deftly and vividly examines the realities and myths of the Bronx’s extremes: civic neglect, crime, and urban decay, even ruin, versus cultural innovation and an outstanding artistic legacy,” writes Mark Favermann.

“Our profoundly serious problems – racism, income inequality, to name just two – will be hard to fix, but it turns out to be horrifyingly easy to worsen them,” writes Prose in The Guardian. “Americans need to rethink the idea – and the fear – of harming and being harmed by neighbors with differently colored skins and differently colored signs in their yards. Republicans and Democrats alike, it’s our civic duty – our moral duty – to resist the violence and the terrifying vision of our country, an image on which their Republicans are basing their hopes for re-election: a nation that needs an iron hand to protect us from one another.”
 

“Whether on reclaimed ledger paper or vintage picture postcards, the images he constructs are something like found details themselves—singular and mysterious, if occasionally a little on the nose,” writes Will Heinrich.

“In interviews with dozens of Black, Latina, and Asian-American women, many of them said Ms. Harris’s story was also their story,” the Times’s authors write. “In Ms. Harris’s life, they recognized both her triumphs and the challenges that come with living in a country wrestling with its history of discrimination.”

“Government-funded thugs, assaulting citizens, still conjure up repellent images of Hitler’s Brownshirts stomping their fellow Germans, and the street kidnapping of civilians has been the hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships,” writes Prose in the Guardian. “Is all that manpower necessary to protect statues? Who knew [the] White House was so invested in art, culture—or American history? These attacks are about exerting power, bullying dissenters, intimidating Americans into giving up their first amendment protections, their constitutional rights.”

Fierce: Essays by and About Dauntless Women, a memoir project devoted to women excluded from conventional narratives of history, is the winner of the inaugural BookLife Prize for Nonfiction. Conceived and edited by Bard alumna Karyn Kloumann ’92, the collection is “more than a celebration of a diverse group of activists, agitators, and iconoclasts whose lives and accomplishments have largely been ignored by history,” writes Anya Yurchyshyn in her critique of the book. “It’s an examination of the systematic oppression that led to this erasure and continues to exclude women to this day.”

“As we learn more about what is happening in Portland—as footage of federal troops waging war on protesters floods social media, and as the President threatens to send his foot soldiers to other large cities—we are watching the perfect and perhaps inevitable combination of a domestic-security superagency and a President who rejects all mechanisms of accountability, including the Senate confirmation process,” writes Gessen in the New Yorker.

Rising junior Maxwell Toth ’22, a joint French and American studies major, has been awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad. Max was awarded $4,000 toward his studies in Paris with the Institute for Field Education, a program that matches undergraduates with international internships aligning with their academic interests.

“I’m really honored to have received the Gilman Scholarship,” says Max. “As someone who’s barely traveled outside their home region of New England, studying abroad has been a dream of mine for quite some time.”

Max had originally planned to study abroad this fall, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic he chose to defer his plans to the spring and return to Annandale instead. This fall, he’s taking “a nice smorgasbord of courses,” ranging from The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Contagion: Rumor, Heresy, Disease, and Financial Panic. Outside the classroom, he’ll continue his work as a Peer Counselor, campus tour guide, and Bard nursery school aide—“You can see I wear many hats on campus!”

“Regardless of how my semester abroad may be altered due to the pandemic, I am very excited,” Max says. “Beyond the City of Light, I really want to hop a train to Salzburg at some point and take the ‘Sound of Music’ tour—provided travel restrictions have loosened up by then!”

This summer, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Learning is making its vast digital collection of food-centric discussions, demonstrations, recipes, interviews and hundreds of archival objects available for free as part of its online course A Seat at the Table: A Journey Into Jewish Food. “Food helps to alleviate some of the anxiety that everyone is feeling in this particularly stressful time we’re in,” says Jonathan Brent, Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College and YIVO Executive Director and CEO. “Food enables us to have that kind of deep experience of memory, sensory pleasure, imagination and knowledge. There’s a great deal of value in studying the history of food. And it’s especially relevant now, when people are locked indoors and searching for things to do.”
 

“Trump comes along and taps into the deep anxieties of people who are truly anxious because they have been economically and socially unstable for more than a generation,” says Gessen in an interview in The Nation. “He taps into that and says, ‘OK, I’ll take you back to an imaginary past.’ There is very little on the other side to counterweigh this emotional appeal. You can’t counterweigh it by saying, ‘I have a good résumé, and I’ll fix things.’”

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose looks at the arrest of CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, who was led away in handcuffs on live television while covering the protests in Minneapolis against the killing of George Floyd. “The mistake was always to think that it can’t happen here, because it can, it has and—unless we remain aware and vocal—it most certainly will again,” writes Prose. Full Story in the Guardian

More from Francine Prose in the Guardian
How Coronavirus Has Infected our Consciousness
“Whether or not we disinfect our money, or the grocery bag, we can’t look at a bill or a paper bag without wondering if we should spray it,” Prose writes. “So the virus has infected our consciousness, regardless of how far we are from a hotspot, how safe or healthy we may feel. It takes time and energy, trying not to think about, or mind how much we have lost.”

“The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 gave, to my mind, a significant push to the irreversible decline in which we now find ourselves—it marked the apotheosis of a persistent strain of magical thinking in American politics. The 1980 election was a choice between a slick and intellectually inert charmer who spewed happy talk, on the one hand, and an unglamorous peanut farmer who wanted to talk about ‘malaise,’ on the other: we chose the happy talk—surprise, surprise—and have been choosing it ever since. Our current political crisis is the reductio ad absurdum of that choice: the fantasy that government is “the problem” and must be dismantled whenever possible (that’s certainly working out right now!), the contempt for institutions, the elevation of ideological fantasy above science and expertise.”

“Few writers have caught the grotesque nature of war better than Malaparte. There is no question that he felt drawn to human depravity as a subject. But he makes no excuses for it. His is a dark vision of humanity. To look away, to him, would have been a sign of weakness.”

Bard College Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah is among the 276 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors who have been elected this year as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Farah joins one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies, whose members include winners of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, Shaw Prizes, MacArthur Fellowships, Guggenheim Fellowships, Grammy Awards, Tony Awards, and Oscars, among others. Founded in 1780, during the American Revolution, by John Adams, John Hancock, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good, the academy is a center for independent policy research and continues to dedicate itself to recognizing excellence and relying on expertise—both of which seem more important than ever. Celebrating its 240th anniversary this year, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected more than 13,500 members have been elected since its founding.

“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said Academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the Academy’s work to advance the public good.”

Nuruddin Farah is a Somali novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature,  “widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel” (New York Times). Educated at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Works include two trilogies, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and several novels, novellas, short stories, plays. In recent years he has been a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Bard College.

PHOTO CAPTION: Bard College Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremy Wilson
About the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”

“While the nation grieves, the US president has spent less than five minutes expressing compassion for those who are suffering,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose. “We can’t help thinking how much less worried we would be if a humane, competent, well-informed adult was making the decisions that affect us all.”

 

For the spring 2020 publication of Sui Generis, Bard’s student-run translation magazine, Bard Classical Studies senior Kaitlin Karmen submitted translations for the three ancient languages that she studied at Bard: Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. She writes, "For Ancient Greek, I translated a passage from Thucydides's History on the social effects of the plague that afflicted Athens in the fifth century. My Latin submission was a passage from Lucretius's epic poem De Rerum Natura, where the poet seeks to show that the world is mortal. And my Sanskrit translation was of a short section from the Bhagavad-Gita (itself a section of the Mahabharata), which describes Krishna's revealing of his divine form to Arjuna.” ​​​​​​

When the COVID-19 crisis prevented the iconic author Joyce Carol Oates from visiting campus, Professor Bradford Morrow found an alternative: students in his Innovative Contemporary Fiction class would pose their questions to Oates about her writing process and her new collection, Beautiful Days, via email. The result is a probing group interview charged with the gravity of the pandemic. 

When you lose your whole world in a moment, where do you turn? Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi will discuss his memoir In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love via Facebook Live on Wednesday, April 22, at 7 pm EDT/GMT-4.

Acclaimed Somali writer and Bard professor Nuruddin Farah talks to the Johannesburg Review of Books about family, tradition, and life in exile: “I roamed the world, made the world my small village.”

Aven Williams is a sophomore at Bard with a joint major in Literature and Middle Eastern Studies. She is back home in Vermont now, and keeping herself busy with course work, family time, and just reading for pleasure. She finds joy in being together with the whole family, as they work through this hard time as a team. They often play board games or watch movies together—the Lord of the Rings series is a family favorite.

Aven's family loves to come together over a good meal. "My mom is a really good cook," Aven says, "so food is big for us!" The family has been cooking together, including recently homemade pizza, cod and lobster soup, and tofu curry with naan.

The pandemic has brought Aven and her extended family together, as well; they're keeping in touch by blogging about their day-to-day lives. Aven also stays in touch with her host family in Paris, from when she studied abroad during her gap year. This crisis has allowed them to talk more and feel more connected as they all face many of the same challenges. "I feel like we are able to be more empathetic toward each other," Aven says.

Aven tries to incorporate some of her life at Bard into her new routine at home. She is looking forward to joining the new Bard Bookworm Club, which has started meeting online. She misses playing with the Bard Frisbee team but she enlists her family to play in their backyard. 

Aven finds hope and connection in social media. "I can see that everyone is coming together. I've been enjoying online concerts, too." Overall Aven is “proud of how Vermont is handling the crisis” and she loves that she is able to connect with her friends on apps such as House Party, which allows large video calls and the ability to play games together. Aven is not taking her time home for granted and she is grateful to have a loving support system in her family and her Bard community. 
 

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning author Masha Gessen as Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Division of Languages and Literature. Gessen, who joins the faculty in fall 2020, will teach courses through the Written Arts Program that integrate literature, writing, and contemporary culture and politics. “Masha Gessen is one of the most essential voices in our cultural landscape. They bring an invaluable perspective as a writer whose work sits at the intersection of literature and global politics. We are thrilled to welcome them into the Bard community,” says Dinaw Mengestu, professor of written arts and Director of the Written Arts Program.

Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of eleven books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy, which will be published in June. Gessen’s previous book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a Nieman Fellow, and has received an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. Gessen has taught at Amherst College and Oberlin College. They live in New York City.

PHOTO CAPTION: Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning author Masha Gessen to the faculty.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lena Di


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About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 159-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
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Bard College Writer in Residence Valeria Luiselli has been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim fellowship for her work in fiction. Luiselli is among the 175 winners of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 96th competition for the United States and Canada. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3000 applicants. The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the unique characteristics of the fellowship program. 2020 Fellows are drawn from 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 78 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and 2 Canadian provinces.

More than 40 Bard faculty members have received Guggenheim fellowships to date. Previous recipients from Bard College include Mark Danner, Ittai Weinryb, Nancy Shaver, Lothar Osterburg, Peggy Ahwesh, JoAnne Akalaitas, Peter Hutton, Ann Lauterbach, An-My Lê, Norman Manea, Daniel Mendelsohn, Bradford Morrow, Judy Pfaff, Luc Sante, Stephen Shore, Mona Simpson, and Joan Tower.

Valeria Luiselli is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) and Faces in the Crowd (2013), and the books of essays Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017). Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf), won the 2020 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the American Academy for Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and the Folio Prize. It was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the NBCC award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Luiselli received the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature, and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her literary work has been translated to over 20 languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's. Luiselli has worked as a volunteer translator in the Federal Immigration court, translating testimonies of asylum-seeking undocumented minors, and conducted creative writing workshops in a detention center for undocumented minors. She has taught at Bard College since 2019 and is working on a sound piece about violence against land and bodies in the borderlands.
About the Guggenheim Fellowship Program
Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted more than $360 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Awards, and other important, internationally recognized honors. The Guggenheim Fellowship program remains a significant source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. New and continuing donations from friends, Trustees, former Fellows, and other foundations have ensured that the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will be able to continue its historic mission. The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation is once again underwriting the Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, and a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music is supporting supplemental grants for composers. For more information on the Fellows and their projects, please visit the Foundation’s website at www.gf.org.

Meet the Data-Sitters Club, a group of scholars who’ve come together to do computational text analysis of the enormously popular children’s book series The Baby-Sitters Club from the 1980s and ’90s, about a group of middle school girls in a fictional suburban Connecticut town who formed a successful babysitting business. Cecire, director of Bard’s Center for Experimental Humanities and a children’s literature specialist, is interested in models of American girlhood in the books and how they connect to models of womanhood. “I find it especially interesting that they start a company together,” says Cecire. “What does it mean to have a group of friends who are organized around a business, a business that has such gendered implications?”

President Trump and some of his allies have made a point of calling the coronavirus a “Chinese virus,” the “Wuhan virus,” or, simply, a “foreign virus”—a type of rhetoric that taps into ancient and primitive fears, writes Professor Buruma. “A leader who applies chauvinism and prejudice to a frightening disease is not best equipped to deal with a pandemic. Nationalism should have no place in medical discourse. And medical language should never be applied to politics. Coronavirus isn’t Chinese or foreign; it is global. Blaming alien forces, whether in the name of God, or science or simple prejudice, is bound to make things a great deal worse.”

Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature, has won a 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. The prizes encourage and support emerging to midcareer immigrant artists and scientists who have demonstrated exceptional achievements early in their careers. The Creative Promise Prizes are awarded annually in biomedical science and in a rotating category of the arts—this year’s was literature. Three winners are selected in each category through an application process juried by panels of experts in each field. The Creative Promise Prizewinners each receive a $50,000 cash award and are honored at an awards ceremony in New York City. Luiselli was recognized for her “intelligent fiction and nonfiction” that interrogates the U.S. immigration system.

Robert Cioffi, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, recently spoke at an online Open House for the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C., where he is currently a fellow. He led a presentation and discussion on the timely topic of ;“Disease and Social Order: The Plague Narratives of Thucydides and Lucretius,” which was live streamed on YouTube.

For the upcoming summer of 2020 (or 2021, depending on COVID-19), Bard College Classical Studies Major Em Setzer ’22 has been awarded a Digital Humanities Internship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, a research institute for Classics in Washington, D.C. As an intern, Em will reside in D.C. at the Center, and over the course of eight weeks, will work on the Free First Thousand Years of Greek project and on the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri. Congratulations, Em!