News from the Division of Languages and Literature

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?”

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.

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.”

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!

History, in one view, “is the record of what people have done: Richard Crookback, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn. The final installment of the ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy is a reminder that a history is not the same as a story. I suspect that Mantel had already said everything she had to say about Thomas Cromwell in the first two books, but felt compelled—by her evident love for the character; perhaps, too, by the appetite of her audience for more—to doggedly follow the historical trail to its conclusion.”

Alejandra Pizarnik was a leading voice in 20th-century Latin American poetry—Octavio Paz described her writing as exuding “a luminous heat that could burn, smelt, or even vaporize its skeptics.” Six volumes of her poetry have been translated into English. The recently issued A Tradition in Rupture (Ugly Duckling Presse), translated by Bard’s Cole Heinowitz, presents Pizarnik’s critical writings in English for the first time.

On Monday, March 2, 2020, Berlin Prize–winning author Carole Maso will read from her work at Bard College. Known for her experimental, poetic, and fragmentary narratives, “Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried away with her, far beyond the usual limits of the novel,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Maso will be introduced by Bard literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented by Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. 
 

“Much of the feminist dystopian fiction published over the last few years takes place in the future, in worlds uncomfortably similar to our own. The Illness Lesson, however, proves that books can fit squarely within that genre even when set in the past — in this case, small-town Massachusetts in 1871. Think ‘City Upon a Hill’ ideals and ‘The Scarlet Letter’-style misogyny and you’ll have a pretty good idea of this sly debut novel, which scarily hints that, since the 19th century, perhaps not a whole lot has changed.… Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections” (Siobhan Jones, New York Times).

Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, February 24. This event is free and open to the public. The reading begins at 7 p.m. and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium.

Using Orwell’s Down and Out to Understand and Write Histories of Homelessness Then and Now 

Bard College presents its annual Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature, with Nick Crowson, Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The lecture takes place in the Lásló Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium (Room 103) of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation on Tuesday, February 18, at 4:45 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
 
What does George Orwell's classic account of homeless living in London during the interwar years offer the historian? Where should we locate this semi-fictionalised account in the tradition of the incognito social investigator? Professor Crowson's lecture will address these questions and ask how Orwell helps us understand the physical manifestations of homelessness in modern Britain. In doing so, he shows how historians can play a crucial role in facilitating better, historically-informed public discourse around homelessness.

Nick Crowson holds the Chair in Contemporary British History at the University of Birmingham. The author and editor of many books, including Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–40; Britain and Europe: A Political History since 1918; and A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945, he is writing a new history of homelessness in modern Britain seeking to integrate the lived experience with the policy responses. His research is widely used by a range of policy and cultural organisations, including Crisis, Shelter, the Museum of Homelessness and the Cardboard Citizens Theatre Company.

This annual lecture forms part of the endowment of the Chair in British History and Literature that was established in 2010 to commemorate Eugene Meyer (1875–1959)—the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and first President of the World Bank. The endowment has given Bard the opportunity to extend its commitment to teaching and research in modern British studies. Professor Richard Aldous holds the Eugene Meyer Chair.

Photo courtesy Peter Berthoud.

The fallen executive committed a cardinal, culturally unacceptable sin: hubris.

Justus Rosenberg, Bard Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature and Visiting Professor of Literature, has penned a new memoir, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground (William Morrow, 2020).

Bard’s Clemente Course in the Humanities in Kingston, New York, kicks off its spring session this week at the Kingston Library. Marina van Zuylen, Bard faculty member and Clemente Course director, talks about the nationwide Clemente Course, and how the program connects to Bard’s mission to make college education more inclusive and accessible. The spring 2020 Kingston Clemente Course begins on Thursday, February 6 and takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. There is no tuition, and the program includes free childcare and transportation. Students earn 6 Bard College credits upon completion. Prospective students are encouraged to come to the open house to preview the program on Tuesday, February 4, 6:00 to 8:00 pm, or simply attend the first class on Thursday. Marina van Zuylen is a professor of French and comparative literature at Bard, director of the French Studies Program, and national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities.
 

Assistant Professor of Literature Daniel Williams reviews Anna Kornbluh’s The Order of Forms. “Kornbluh anchors her brilliant and challenging book in the 19th-century realist novel but goes well beyond those confines to argue forcefully for the political dynamism and durability of forms and formalisms in our time,” he writes.
 

Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from recent work on Monday, February 24. This event is free and open to the public. The reading begins at 7 p.m. and will be held in the Reem-Kayden Center’s László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium at Bard College. For more information call 845-758-7087.

Beams received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016). Her newest book, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday 2020), will be released on February 11. Beams’ residency at Bard College is for the fall 2020 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The nine stories in Clare Beams’ debut collection of fiction, We Show What We Have Learned, range from factual, historical settings and characters to eerily fantastical ones, displaying a startling depth and an epic scale of imagination. While the characters, and the situations they find themselves in, are sometimes surreal, their psychologies are always absolutely real—fully, compassionately drawn. Every one of these stories has a world and a lifetime behind it, and every one is a compelling, disquieting, and immensely pleasurable journey, reverie, and dream for its reader. Clare Beams is a subtle, quiet master of short fiction, who writes in beautiful and exquisitely crafted prose.”

“I am so much more grateful to Bard and to the Bard Fiction Prize committee than I can possibly say for this recognition of my work and for this gift—one of the best gifts anyone could give me, as a writer who’s also a parent of young children—of time. To join this list of winners, so many who are heroes and heroines of mine, is an honor, and to join the inspiring Bard community is a thrill. I can’t wait to meet the students and faculty and work on my third book, a new novel, in their midst,” says Beams.

Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Illness Lesson, will be published by Doubleday in February of 2020. Her fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing 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 Greg Jackson for his short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).

Valeria Luiselli, the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College, was honored with the 2020 American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her novel Lost Children Archive. Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.

The Paris Review Foundation has announced the appointment of Mona Simpson as the magazine’s new publisher. Simpson, a Guggenheim Fellow and NEA Award–winning author of six novels, began her involvement with the Paris Review as a work-study student in Columbia’s MFA program. She has served on the staff as a senior editor in the past, and has been a member of the board of directors and the editorial committee since 2014.

Artist and author Jibade-Khalil Huffman talks about his multimedia works and his interdisciplinary experience at Bard as he prepares for You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, his upcoming solo exhibition at the Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles. “At his essence, Huffman is a collector of digital and tangible objects, giving birth to different representation of collage in video, photography, and installation,” writes Marcel Alcalá.

Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, was announced to the longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, for his collection Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. The award carries a prize of $10,000. 

Distinguished Writer in Residence Dawn Lundy Martin is among the judges for the PEN Open Book Award. Bard alumnus Pierre Joris ’69 is one of the judges of the Award for Poetry in Translation.

Bard’s Maria Sachiko Cecire talks to Slate about children’s fantasy literature, looking at the way 20th-century authors of what she calls the “Oxford School” used the genre “as a means to preserve a sense of magic inside a modern world they saw as increasingly hostile to belief.”

Associate Professor of Literature Maria Cecire talks with fellow Rhodes Scholars Jean Balchin and Yan Chen about her new book, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century. The trio discusses what makes fantasy literature magical, why parts of it are culturally inflected, and what we can do to reimagine its future. Cecire also discusses her work as the director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College.

Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse and Writer in Residence Francine Prose were in conversation at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library on the evening of Monday, December 16. The event celebrated Marcuse’s new book Fruitless, Fallen, and Woven, published by Radius Books. This stunning three-volume set traces the arc of 14 years of Marcuse’s work, from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, immersive photographs of Fallen and Woven. Her work features elaborate tableaux of flora and fauna suggestive of the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock and the symbolism of medieval tapestries. She discussed the creative process with Francine Prose, award-winning writer and best-selling author of more than 20 works of fiction.

The Out100 Journalist of the Year talks to the founder of #MeToo, Tarana Burke, about his new book Catch and Kill, and the very real dangers of telling the truth.

Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies Features New Work from Brian Evenson, Joyce Carol Oates, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim

To be mindful of the planet we call home is to be aware that our natural world is suffering. Its oceans are rising up, as if in protest. Its populations of birds and fish, of mammals and reptiles, are, many of them, in steep and steady decline. Forests, coral reefs, habitats of every sort of life form, from tree frogs to butterfly fish, from elephants to bees, are profoundly afflicted. Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—gathers writings that examine and lament the plight of our planet, while also celebrating its grand sublimity, its peerless beauty, and its indispensability. Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Earth Elegies features an exclusive interview with Underland author Robert Macfarlane, conducted by Diane Ackerman; a new translation of Sabine Schiffner poems; as well as new work from Brian Evenson, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Joyce Carol Oates, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim.
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. 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/conjunctions73. 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.

 

Professor Luzzi participated in the November 16 roundtable “Emergence of Empathy: Encountering the Other through Fiction” at the Helix Center in New York City, which draws together leaders from different spheres of knowledge in the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology for interdisciplinary roundtables.

“We tolerate mockery of the elderly that we’d never allow if it targeted another group,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose. “But we’ll all be old one day. In any case, I think that the animosity toward the old is less economic than existential, less political than primal, less about student debt than about fear of one’s own ageing. No one particularly wants to get old, however preferable it is to the alternative: an early death. What’s striking is that the prejudice against the elderly is the only bigotry directed at the inevitable future of the bigot.”

“In her new memoir, In the Dream House, Machado achieves a formally inventive representation of a difficult subject,” writes Katy Waldman in the New Yorker. “Yet the arc of this ordeal, although it forms the book’s skeleton, is not Machado’s true subject. Instead, In the Dream House is primarily about the quandary of constructing In the Dream House. It is a quandary both because the telling is painful and because Machado, who has no language for this telling, must invent one.”

On Monday, November 11, National Book Award–winning author Sigrid Nunez will read from her work at Bard College. The New York Review of Books writes that “Nunez’s keen powers of observation make her a natural chronicler,” and, according to the New Yorker, “Nunez has proved herself a master of psychological acuity.” Nunez will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, director of Bard’s Written Arts Program. Presented by Bard Literature Professor Bradford Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and Bard’s Written Arts Program, the reading takes place at 6:30 p.m. in the Reem-Kayden Center László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. Books by Nunez will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music. For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, call 845-758-7054, email [email protected], or visit conjunctions.com.

From the languages we speak to politics, philosophy, art, and architecture, the ancient Greeks and Romans have profoundly shaped the history of ideas. By engaging with their legacy, we can develop critical tools for considering our own ideas and beliefs in a fresh light. Studying the ancient past, then, is a vital part of a liberal arts education, as we prepare students to engage critically, imaginatively, and empathetically with the contemporary world around us. To encourage and support students pursuing this important course of study, Bard College has established a new scholarship in Classical Studies. Generous donor support for this scholarship reaffirms that classical studies are more important today than ever. 

The Classical Studies Scholarship recognizes academically outstanding students committed to classical studies. Scholarships cover up to full tuition for four years and are awarded based on need. Scholarship students must maintain a 3.3 grade point average or higher while earning at least 32 credits per year. Recipients are also eligible for a $1,500 stipend for classics-related summer programs (e.g. archaeological excavations, American School at Athens/Rome, language study) following their sophomore or junior year. Transfer students are also eligible for Classical Studies Scholarship funding.

Desirable experiences for selection as a Classical Studies Scholar include a proven interest in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and their legacies; an interest in, and potential for, learning Greek and Latin; strong performance in high school classes related to English and world literature, languages, history, and/or other related humanities subjects. For more information or to apply, go to connect.bard.edu/register/classics_scholar.

“We in the Classical Studies Program are thrilled about this new initiative. These need-based financial aid scholarships, which include support for summer opportunities such as travel abroad and intensive language study, allow Bard College to make a unique contribution to ongoing efforts to widen access and increase equity in the field of Classics. We are excited to welcome the first scholars to Bard in Fall 2020, where they will join our thriving program and work with our award-winning faculty to pursue their passion for the ancient world,” says Associate Professor of Classical Studies Lauren Curtis.

Avallone’s 2019 Bettie Page Halloween Special is “a tribute to Bard,” he writes. The plot unfolds at “Annandale College” in upstate New York, where settings and characters are modeled on Avallone’s memories of Bard.

On Monday, October 28, Bard Fiction Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Peter Orner will read from his from his new collection, Maggie Brown & Others, at Bard College. The Washington Post writes: “Peter Orner is that rare find: a young writer who can inhabit any character, traverse any landscape, and yet never stray from the sound of the human heart.” Orner will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, director of Bard’s Written Arts Program. Presented by Bard Literature Professor Bradford Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and Bard’s Written Arts Program, the reading takes place at 6:30 p.m. in the Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito ’60 Auditorium. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. Books by Peter Orner will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music. For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, call 845-758-7054, email [email protected], or visit conjunctions.com.
 

“Pax Americana was never formally an empire,” writes Professor Buruma. “And the allied nations in Europe and East Asia are not colonial possessions. But the level of those states’ dependence is a problem, especially at a time when an erratic, spiteful and isolationist president is in charge of the United States.”

New Faculty Chairs and Distinguished Professorships include Susan Aberth in Art History, Valeria Luiselli in Written Arts, Kelly Reichardt in Film and Electronic Arts, and An-My Lê in Photography

Bard College has appointed four new chairs and distinguished professorships across disciplines this fall. In the Division of the Arts’ Art History and Visual Culture Program, Susan Aberth has been named Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History. This chair was formerly held by Jean French. In the Division of Languages and Literature’s Written Arts Program, Valeria Luiselli has been named Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. In the Division of the Arts’ Film and Electronic Arts Program, Kelly Reichardt has been named S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. In the Division of the Arts’ Photography Program, An-My Lê has been named Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts. This chair was formerly held by Peter Hutton.

Susan Aberth is an art historian whose area of specialization is surrealism in Latin America. Aberth’s teaching interests focus on Latin American art, African art, Islamic art, and other religious art and practices. Additional interests include African religious practices in the Americas, and the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the occult. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos mágicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and the Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles; MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Aberth has been at Bard since 2000.

Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. A 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times and one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Question, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are; and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. Luiselli founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She received her BA from UNAM in Mexico, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has been at Bard since 2019.

Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker whose latest film, Certain Women—starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone—premiered in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the top award at the London Film Festival. Her other films include: Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), and River of Grass (1994). Her film First Cow is currently in postproduction. Reichardt has received the United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival. She has had retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. Reichardt received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She has taught at Bard College since 2006.

An-My Lê is a photographer who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, but left that country during the final year of the war in 1975 and subsequently found a home as a political refugee in the United States. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Her film and photography examine the effects and representation of war and have included the documentation of (and participation in) Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA PS1. An-My has been teaching at Bard since 1999.

Bard faculty members Marina van Zuylen and Daniel Terris spoke at "Educating for Freedom, for All," a forum marking the 75th Anniversary of the Teagle Foundation. The event featured leaders and fresh voices promoting equity in higher education. It took place on Thursday, October 3, at the Harold Pratt House in New York City. Daniel Terris, dean of the Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences in East Jerusalem, spoke on the panel "Opening Minds" on the topic of educating for citizenship. Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard College and national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, spoke on the panel "Liberal Arts for All" on how the humanities bring hope to adults in crisis.

Author Clare Beams has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016). Beams’ residency at Bard College is for the fall 2020 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Beams will give a public reading at Bard in spring 2020.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The nine stories in Clare Beams’ debut collection of fiction, We Show What We Have Learned, range from factual, historical settings and characters to eerily fantastical ones, displaying a startling depth and an epic scale of imagination. While the characters, and the situations they find themselves in, are sometimes surreal, their psychologies are always absolutely real—fully, compassionately drawn. Every one of these stories has a world and a lifetime behind it, and every one is a compelling, disquieting, and immensely pleasurable journey, reverie, and dream for its reader. Clare Beams is a subtle, quiet master of short fiction, who writes in beautiful and exquisitely crafted prose.”

“I am so much more grateful to Bard and to the Bard Fiction Prize committee than I can possibly say for this recognition of my work and for this gift—one of the best gifts anyone could give me, as a writer who’s also a parent of young children—of time. To join this list of winners, so many who are heroes and heroines of mine, is an honor, and to join the inspiring Bard community is a thrill. I can’t wait to meet the students and faculty and work on my third book, a new novel, in their midst,” says Beams.

Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Illness Lesson, will be published by Doubleday in February of 2020. Her fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing 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 Greg Jackson for his short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).

Two Bard College faculty members have been named 2019 MacArthur Fellows. Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence in the Studio Arts Program and Valeria Luiselli, writer in residence in the Written Arts Program, are both recipients of this prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Fellows may use their award to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the Fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the Fellowship is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society. MacArthur Fellows receive $625,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Eleven Bard faculty members have previously been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.



Jeffrey Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, Korea, and England. He is a Choctaw-Cherokee artist who incorporates his heritage into his multi-disciplinary work, which includes abstract sculptures, paintings, and prints. Gibson earned his Master of Arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. Gibson has work in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Canada, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and more. Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington and Madison Museum of Art in Wisconsin and Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day at Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Gibson is a past TED Foundation Fellow, and a Joan Mitchell Grant recipient. He lives and works in New York.



Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. She is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times, one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are, and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. She founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She was born in Mexico City and currently lives in New York City.

Lampedusa is Price’s fictional account of how the aristocratic Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa came to write one of the best-selling novels in Italian history: The Leopard. “Price’s novel excels where it counts most: inside Lampedusa’s head,” writes Luzzi. “The prose is superbly controlled, richly textured, brimming with wise and lyrical insights that make it a worthy heir to its mighty predecessor.”

Acclaimed Somali writer and Bard professor Nuruddin Farah was awarded the $50,000 Ho-Chul Literary Prize at a ceremony in Seoul, South Korea, in August.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards are given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. The awards of $40,000 each will be presented to the six recipients on September 12 in New York City. Sarah, a freelance writer and editor who is currently pursuing an MFA at Bard, will use the grant to focus on her writing projects full time.

“Because the culture as a whole is so overwhelmingly commercial, it’s vital that professional, public, literary, and cultural criticism remain independent,” says Professor Mendelsohn. “Negative criticism is, in part, what fights against the commercial, or the merely stupid, or vulgar; it is a form of resistance, a reminder that we must think for ourselves and not have our judgments coopted by advertising and the ephemeral.”

“For Johns, factual certainties, such as the American flag or a plaster cast of a body part, enable him to dwell in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,’ and not reach after ‘fact,’ which would be redundant,” writes Yau in this two-part essay. “This is the pleasure that Johns gives us. He does not tell us what to see or think. He shows what seeing and thinking can be.”

Bard Language and Thinking faculty member Cecelia Watson brings the semicolon to life in this “deceptively playful-looking book that turns out to be a scholarly treatise on a sophisticated device that has contributed eloquence and mystery to Western civilization,” Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.
 

Jonathan Brent, Bard faculty member and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania from H.E. Dalia Grybauskaitė, President of the Republic of Lithuania. The honor recognizes Brent’s work in promoting cooperation between Lithuania and YIVO and for the preservation of the prewar Jewish archives of Lithuania.

Professor Mendelsohn invokes the classics to offer perspectives on modern-day events in this collection—“one fascinating essay after another from one of America’s best critics.”

In June 2019, Professor Lauren Curtis traveled to Fribourg, Switzerland, to participate in the conference, The Dance of Priests, Matronae, and Philosophers: Aspects of Dance Culture in Rome and the Roman Empire. She presented her new research about the relationship between dance and politics in ancient Rome, “Roman Rhythms: Music, Dance, and Imperial Ethics,” and learned about new approaches in ancient dance studies from specialists from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.