News from the Division of Languages and Literature

"I was preparing myself for a life with books, sharing them with students like the ones who just read Joyce with me." Professor Luzzi explores our quest for ambitious summer reading, and how even failing to make our goals can lead to great insights.

“Like two mirrors facing each other, Wild West reënactments and the myths that fuel them shed light on the emotions driving the response to ‘the border crisis,’” writes Luiselli.

“Inside my family’s home, I could lay full claim to being an Ethiopian; on the streets of Addis Ababa, however, I had to contend with the obvious facts,” writes Professor Mengestu.

Seneca’s essay “On Anger” has just been republished as “How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management,” with a translation and introduction by James Romm. Romm talks about the work’s relevance today.

Luzzi, professor of comparative literature at Bard College, observes that literature can be valuable to the thinking businessperson because it offers a lens on human nature, provides “test cases” that can generate models for decision making, and gives a crucial sense of history and perspective.

Conjunctions:72, Nocturnals—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—gathers fiction, poetry, and essays from leading writers, both emerging and established, on the theme of night, its denizens, and its chronicles.

Bard College senior Evan Tims ’19, a written arts and human rights major, has won a highly selective Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for the 2019 summer session. This is the second summer Tims has been awarded this competitive scholarship. CLS, a program of the U.S. Department of State, provides recipients with overseas placements that include intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains. These 8-week programs are all fully funded, including the costs of tuition, visas, airfare, home stays, and a stipend for cultural enrichment/excursions. The CLS program offers foreign language study at sites worldwide in 14 languages identified as critical to United States national security and economic prosperity. The languages include Azerbaijani, Bangla, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.

Tims will study Bangla at the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in Kolkata, India. Spoken from the densely populated nation of Bangladesh to the Kolkata metropolis in the Indian state of West Bengal, Bangla is the seventh most spoken language in the entire world. With a population of 4.5 million, Kolkata is the largest city in East India and the third largest in India after New Delhi and Mumbai. In Kolkata, Tims will spend 20 morning hours per week in the classroom focusing on grammar, conversation, pronunciation, journal writing, and dictation language classes. In the afternoons, Tims will take a cultural activity class, such as singing, dancing, storytelling, cooking, or painting, and meet with his native language partner for Bangla conversation practice. Tims will engage in weekly local group excursions in order to explore the area, gain in-depth knowledge of culture and history, and meet locals from different backgrounds. Tims will also travel on one overnight excursion to Bishnupur. The summer study culminates in an independent project of his choosing, presented to his fellow classmates entirely in Bangla. During his stay, Tims will live with a host family to maximize language learning and the cultural immersion experience.

“I study Bangla because someday I hope to work in the field of climate change induced migration,” says Tims. “Bangladesh is facing numerous challenges due to its low elevation and large coastline. Additionally, I have a strong interest in Bengali literature and culture. I intend to pursue graduate research on the narratives and forms of expression in relation to a changing environment.”

CLS is part of a wider government initiative to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering foreign languages that are critical to national security and economic prosperity. CLS plays an important role in preparing students for the twenty-first century’s globalized workforce and increasing national competitiveness. CLS is a program of the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It is supported in its implementation by American Councils for International Education.
 

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic is the story of what happened after Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father enrolled in his Bard College course on Homer’s Odyssey.

Five Bard College students won prestigious Fulbright Awards for individually designed study/research projects or English Teaching Assistant Programs. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top-producing institution.

Marion Adams ’19, a German studies and philosophy major, won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Austria. She will teach English and study how Jewish museums there negotiate their country’s role in commemorating traditional and stimulating contemporary Austrian-Jewish culture. Alexa Frank ’15, who graduated with a dual degree in film and Asian studies, won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to pursue her graduate studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. Economics and human rights major Sofia Hardt ’18 won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Argentina, where she will conduct a study of labor market choices and incentives in relation to Argentina’s Universal Child Allowance. Tonery Rogers ’19 is an alternate for a Fulbright Award to Morocco.

Asian studies majors Corrina Gross ’19 and Kerri Anne Bigornia ’19 both won Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Awards to Taiwan, where they will teach English to primary and middle school students. Olivia Donahue ’19 has been awarded a Fulbright to Germany, where she will spend next year teaching English.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide. Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, and teachers. Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, actor John Lithgow, composer Philip Glass, opera singer Renee Fleming, and economist Joseph Stiglitz are among notable former grantees.
 

On Tuesday, April 23, American Book Award–winning author Valeria Luiselli will read from her work at Bard College. “The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli’s hands—electric, elastic, alluring, new. . . . She is a superb chronicler,” writes the New York Times. Luiselli, who was recently appointed as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard, will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow and Director of Bard’s Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu. The reading, presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 6:00 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. Books by Luiselli will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and has lived in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, India, Spain, France, and New York City. She is the author of a book of essays, Papeles falsos/Sidewalks (2012, 2014) and the internationally acclaimed novel Los ingravidos/Faces in the Crowd (2013, 2014), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2014, she won the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize, an annual award honoring young and promising fiction writers. Her novel La historia de mis dientes/The Story of My Teeth (2013, 2015) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Impac Prize 2017; and was named one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the Year. Her recent book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions won the 2018 American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Luiselli received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. Her latest novel, Lost Children Archive (2019), which was written in English, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, please call 845-758-7054, email [email protected], or visit conjunctions.com.

Further Reading

Valeria Luiselli Assays the Death of the Pioneer Myth in Lost Children Archive (Atlantic)

Valeria Luiselli, At Home in Two Worlds (New York Times)

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive Confronts the Complexities of Writing About the Border Crisis (New Yorker)
 

On Tuesday, April 23, American Book Award–winning author Valeria Luiselli will read from her work at Bard College. “The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli’s hands—electric, elastic, alluring, new. . . . She is a superb chronicler,” writes the New York Times. Luiselli, who was recently appointed as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard, will be introduced by MacArthur Fellow and Written Arts Program Director Dinaw Mengestu.

Bard alumna, literature major, and technology reporter Natalia Drozdiak cowrote the story for Bloomerg on the first image of a black hole, a “huge breakthrough for humanity.”

Robert Cioffi, assistant professor of classics, has been awarded two fellowships from Harvard University for work on his scholarly monograph, Narrating the Marvelous: The Greek Novel and the Ancient Ethnographic Imagination. One, from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, provides funding for an additional semester of research leave. In addition, he has been named a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., where he will be in residence for the spring semester of 2020.
 

Celia Bland, writer and associate director of the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, discusses the evolution of her writing, the prevalence and influence of motherhood and her Cherokee heritage, and her collaboration with artist Dianne Kornberg.

Poet Fred Moten and philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams engage in a conversation about the place of poetry in a world increasingly defined by political and social strife, disorientation, and loneliness.

Peter Filkins’s H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds is one of the first major works to be published about this influential writer. A survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, Adler published two dozen books of poetry, fiction, social science, history, and religion that detail the story of the Holocaust and analyze its influence on our world today. Filkins taps correspondence, broad historical research, and unpublished manuscripts to tell the story of how Adler lived through his times, and his effort to maintain human dignity amid systematic oppression, political corruption, and insufferable duress.

Veronica Chambers ’87, editor of the Times’s archival storytelling project, talks to WNPR about the paper’s new obituary series.

Erin Singer and Kelsey Peterson, two contributors to Conjunctions, Bard College’s groundbreaking literary journal, have won the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for their work in Conjunctions.

Two contributors to Conjunctions, Bard College’s groundbreaking literary journal, have won the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for their work in Conjunctions. The winning contributions are:

“Bad Northern Women” by Erin Singer, from Conjunctions:70, Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue (Spring 2018)

“The Unsent Letters of Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal” by Kelsey Peterson, from Conjunctions:71, A Cabinet of Curiosity (Fall 2018)

The award judges this year were Danielle Evans, Alice Sola Kim, and Carmen Maria Machado. The award comes with a cash prize of $2,000 and publication in The PEN America Best Debut Short Stories anthology (via Catapult). Conjunctions and the winners were invited to the 2019 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, February 26 at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.

Recently Conjunctions has been named a finalist for the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction by the American Society of Magazine Editors, as well as the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. “Skeleton, Rock, Shell” by Conjunctions contributor Sejal Shah was named a finalist for the inaugural Chautauqua Janus Prize. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, and Best American Essays 2018, and work from our pages has appeared in anthologies such as Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Dean Toal delivered the keynote speech at the two-day event, which was organized by the Irish Embassy Berlin in partnership with the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin.

Students at Bard High School Early College in Baltimore share their insights and experiences reading the new translation of Homer’s Odyssey by Emily Wilson. The course is part of The Maryland Odyssey Project, an initiative that gives high school students the opportunity to engage with the Odyssey in new ways.

Dr. Emily Hayman—BHSEC instructor in literature, previously of Columbia University’s great books program—teaches this course. “It’s really fun to read with students and allow them to identify the ways in which we see echoes of the themes and ideas that we find in the Odyssey in works that are coming out now,” she observes. Hayman assigned the students to compare the Odyssey with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hit musical Hamilton, searching for common themes and archetypal characters. The students created their own performance projects from the assignment.

“It’s important for high school students to read the Odyssey,” remarks student Samina Sabree. “It’s connecting to the roots of where literature initially came from, and I feel like that could help students appreciate reading a lot more.”

“I’ve read two different translations of the Odyssey, the Lattimore translation and the Wilson translation,” says student Marc Monroe. “I would say the Wilson translation will help a high school student who hasn‘t read older books or hasn‘t read books in another language get into the book, because it's very relatable to them.” Monroe found that reading Homer informed his studies of Plato, Confucius, and the Koran.

The Maryland Odyssey Project is made possible with generous support from Maryland Humanities, the Onassis Foundation USA, The Mitzvah Fund for Good Deeds, and the Society for Classical Studies.

Maryland Odyssey Project from Amy L. Bernstein on Vimeo.
 

Bard College is proud to be included on the list of U.S. colleges and universities that produced the most 2018–2019 Fulbright U.S. students. Each year, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announces the top-producing institutions for the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. The Chronicle of Higher Education publishes the lists annually.
 
Six students from Bard received Fulbright awards for academic year 2018–2019.  “We are extraordinarily proud of our Fulbright Scholars, who are studying chemistry in Ireland and Islamic radicalization in Kosovo, and teaching English in Argentina, Malaysia, Georgia, and Germany. They epitomize the intellectual engagement, global awareness, and curiosity about the world that is the hallmark of a Bard education,” said David Shein, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Studies.

“We thank the colleges and universities across the United States that we are recognizing as Fulbright top-producing institutions for their role in increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries,” said Marie Royce, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. “We are proud of all the Fulbright students and scholars from these institutions who represent America abroad, increasing and sharing their skills and knowledge on a global stage.”

The Fulbright competition is administered at Bard College through Dean of Studies David Shein ([email protected], 845.758.7045), and Assistant Dean of Studies Kaet Heupel ([email protected], 845.758.7454).
 
Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 390,000 participants—chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential—with the opportunity to exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. Over 1,900 U.S. students, artists, and young professionals in more than 100 different fields of study are offered Fulbright Program grants to study, teach English, and conduct research abroad each year. The Fulbright U.S. Student Program operates in over 140 countries throughout the world.
　　　
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is a program of the U.S. Department of State, funded by an annual appropriation from the U.S. Congress to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education.
　　　　
The Fulbright Program also awards grants to U.S. scholars, teachers, and faculty to conduct research and teach overseas. In addition, some 4,000 foreign Fulbright students and scholars come to the United States annually to study, lecture, conduct research, and teach foreign languages.
 
For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit eca.state.gov/fulbright.
 

Bard College is proud to be included on the list of U.S. colleges and universities that produced the most 2018–2019 Fulbright U.S. students. 

Lauterbach brings every kind of writing into her work, writes critic John Yau: dialog, essay, letter, diary, lyric, prose, list, philosophical investigation, memory, fiction, dream, and citation.

Author Valeria Luiselli starts a two-year residency at Bard College in the fall. Her new book, Lost Children Archive, confronts the impact of the border crisis on kids and families.

Brendan Mathews's debut story collection, This Is Not a Love Song, is “packed with vivid detail, emotional precision, and deft, redemptive humor.”

Greg Jackson, Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College, will read from his work on Monday, February 18, at the College’s Reem-Kayden Center.

Valeria Luiselli has previously chronicled the true stories of immigrant children. Her new novel is a fictionalized version of those brutal histories.

When great writers are great teachers: Neil Gaiman takes his writing courses at Bard and offers them “in a sort of weird, mad, concentrated burst” for MasterClass.

In her latest book, Unquiet, novelist Linn Ullmann turns to a subject she has always avoided: her complicated upbringing and her famous parents.

Assistant Professor of Classics Robert Cioffi reviews Josephine Quinn’s In Search of the Phoenicians.

Farah’s new novel offers no easy answers in the clash between religious extremism and secularism as it plays out in a Somali family living in Norway.

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning Mexican author Valeria Luiselli as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature. 

Why read? Joseph Luzzi, professor of comparative literature at Bard, talks about the importance of the written word in an era of mass media and mobile technology.

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning Mexican author Valeria Luiselli as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature. Luiselli, who joins the faculty this spring as a research associate, will begin teaching courses at Bard in the fall 2019 semester.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and currently lives in New York City. She is the author of a book of essays, Papeles falsos (Sidewalks), and the internationally acclaimed novel Los ingravidos (Faces in the Crowd), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2014, she was named one of the 5 under 35 by the National Book Foundation, an annual award honoring young and promising fiction writers. Her novel La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Impac Prize 2017; and was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015.

Her recent book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli’s books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker, among others. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her new novel, Lost Children Archive, which was written in English, will be published by Knopf in February 2019.
 

Thomas Wild of Bard College and Barbara Hahn of Vanderbilt University, editors of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works, Critical Edition, discuss the series. (In German)

Mengestu, chair of the Bard Written Arts Program, was asked to select his favorite work by a black female American. His choice: Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Bard IWT associate director Bland “turns her unflinching gaze upon the place of her childhood and adolescence, a native Cherokee homeland on the forested western edge of North Carolina.”

Bard professor Ann Lauterbach announced the new home of Professor Emeritus John Ashbery’s complete personal library at a poetry reading at Harvard earlier this month.

“In more than thirty-five collections of poetry, Kelly has utterly failed at one thing: to pigeonhole himself into predictability” (Booklist).

Townsend talks about the intriguing challenge of writing poems for a character, not as herself, in the new film The Kindergarten Teacher.

Conjunctions:71, A Cabinet of Curiosity features new work from Laura van den Berg, Ann Beattie, Brandon Hobson, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanna Scott, Can Xue, and more.

From the Bible to The Invisible Man, Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi offered a “soul-saving” One Day University lecture in Woodstock.

Professor Mendelsohn describes how he has experienced the Odyssey at different times in his life, and how he rediscovers the text with each new translation.

Bard alum Julie Fogliano’s A House That Once Was, published by Roaring Brook Press, is among 10 winners of the 2018 award.

Author Greg Jackson has received the Bard Fiction Prize for his debut short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016). Jackson’s lyrical and unflinching stories map the degradations of contemporary life with insight and grace. His residency at Bard College is for the Spring 2019 semester, during which time Jackson will continue his writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The eight stories collected in Greg Jackson’s Prodigals take the reader all over the earth and across time, from a drug-addled weekend in Palm Springs to the remote provincial compound of a reclusive French tennis champion; a man drives into a hurricane with his psychiatrist, and a woman recounts a story about a summer spent painting dorm rooms in the summer of 1984 with a deranged coworker while Foucault dies and violent news from Central America hisses in the background. These stories concern troubled and deeply human characters trapped in mirrored mazes of playfully structured narrative, written in electric and often hilarious sentences. Prodigals is a book that delights, disturbs, and surprises around every corner, with the hand of a masterful author always twisting the kaleidoscope to transform dazzling patterns of light, shape, and color before our eyes.”

“What a privilege and a thrill it is to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and join such an illustrious ensemble of past winners. For the support and vote of encouragement, I am deeply grateful to this year’s prize committee. The chance to make Bard my home through the spring, to join its community and get to know its remarkable student body, is an incredible gift, and I look forward to the friendships and conversations I hope will develop over the course of my residency, as the days lengthen and spring descends on this sanctuary in the Hudson Valley,” says Jackson.

Greg Jackson’s fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has received fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center and MacDowell Colony. A finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, he was chosen by Granta in 2017 for their decennial list of Best Young American Novelists. In 2016 he received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for Prodigals, a book the New York Times called “so bold and perceptive that it delivers a contact high.” He is currently at work on a novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, due out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that looks at the future of reporting, technology, and truth. Before turning to fiction, Jackson worked as an investigative journalist in Washington, D.C.

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 Carmen Maria Machado for her short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017).
 

“Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today” will be held at BHSEC Manhattan on October 31, followed by a lunch hour talk at Bard at Brooklyn Public Library on November 1.

His choice? Arthur Danto’s What Art Is: “Danto reminds us that art and the critical consideration of the aesthetic ought not remain the poor stepchildren of the academy.”

The Times asks 13 authors to recommend the most frightening books they’ve ever read.