Faculty

Director of the Literature Program
Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall 304
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-389-8618

Matthew Mutter teaches American literature, culture, and intellectual history from the eighteenth century to the present. He has particular interests in philosophy and literature; religion, secularism, and modernity; international modernism; American cultural criticism; and the relation between the humanities and the social sciences. His first book, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance was published by Yale University Press in 2017. His essays and reviews have appeared in English Literary History, Twentieth Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Modernism/Modernity, Common Knowledge, The Hedgehog Review, and Marginalia. His current research ranges from the metaphysical imagination in J.M. Coetzee’s late fiction to the engagement of American novelists and poets with the burgeoning cultural authority of the social sciences in the twentieth century. This latter work will become a book-length study that ranges from T.S. Eliot’s criticism of explanatory paradigms in early anthropology to controversies among Black American writers in the later twentieth century about the novel as form of sociology. He has recently completed an essay on James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, which frames their book-length dialogue, A Rap on Race, as a struggle between poetic thinking and social-scientific discourse for moral authority.

Associate Professor of Literature, Bard Master of Arts in Teaching Program, and Faculty Associate, IWT
Office: MAT Building, 105
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7112

Assistant Professor of Italian; Director, Italian Studies
Office: Seymour 206
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7377 

Franco Baldasso, FAAR ’19, is Assistant Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Program. His main research interests are 20th and 21st century literature, art and cultural history, the relations between Fascism and Modernism, political violence and its memory, and the idea of the Mediterranean in modern aesthetics.
 
He authored two books in Italian: Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (2007), and Curzio Malaparte, la letteratura crudele. Kaputt, La pelle e la caduta della civiltà europea (2019). He also co-edited an issue of Nemla-Italian Studies titled “Italy in WWII and the Transition to Democracy: Memory, Fiction, Histories” (2014).

Franco is the recipient of the 2019 Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies from the American Academy in Rome. His research has been supported by the A.W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Remarque Institute at NYU.

His articles have appeared in Modern Language Notes, Romance Notes, The Italianist, Italian Modern Art, Context, Nemla-Italian Studies, Annali d’Italianistica, Allegoria, Poetiche, Scritture Migranti, Tradurre, Przeglad Polityczny, publicbooks.org, leparoleelecose.it, alfabeta2.it.

Franco is a member of the Advisory Board of the journal Allegoria, and of the “Archivio della Memoria” of the Centro Studi sulla Grande Guerra “P. Pieri” in Vittorio Veneto (TV). He is currently finalizing a book manuscript titled: “Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory and Literature in Post-fascist Italy.”

Laurea in Lettere Moderne, Università degli Studi di Bologna; MA, PhD, New York University. At Bard since 2015.

Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities
Office: Hegeman Science Hall, 303
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7142 

Assistant Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall 204
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7284

Focusing on the multiethnic literatures of the United States, Alex Benson’s courses in the Literature program are often cross-listed in interdisciplinary fields such as American Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies, Experimental Humanities, and Human Rights. In his classrooms, students connect the close reading of literary texts with the analysis of other artistic media (music and visual arts, particularly), with theories of everyday language use, and with the social and ecological wake of North American colonization. His research deals with two major areas: 1) ideas about voice, sound, and ability in American literature and anthropology; and 2) the narrative forms of extinction discourse (and related issues in environmental writing). Recent publications include “Gossypoglossia: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Pragmatics of Dialogue” (Narrative, May 2019) and “‘Bartleby’ on Speed” (Leviathan, March 2019), along with pieces in Small Axe, Criticism, Qui Parle, and the American Literary History Online Review. He serves on the executive board of the NYC metro area chapter of the American Studies Association. Before coming to Bard, he received both his BA in Rhetoric and his PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature
Office:  Preston 116
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-6822

Jonathan Brent is a historian, publisher, translator, writer and teacher.  At Yale University Press (1991-2009) he established the Annals of Communism series.  His books include Stalin’s Last Crime (2003); and Inside the Stalin Archives (2008). 

In 2009, Brent became Executive Director and CEO of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where he initiated The YIVO Vilna Collection Project in 2014. In 2019 Jonathan Brent received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania presented by H.E. Dalia Grybauskaitė, President of the Republic of Lithuania. 
 
Brent lectures and publishes widely on Jewish, Soviet and East European history and is Alger Hiss Visiting Professor at Bard College.

Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing;
Codirector, Written Arts Program
Office:Shafer House 303
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7891

Associate Professor of Spanish; Chair, Languages and Literature Division
Office: Seymour 201
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-6073

Professor Caso’s areas of expertise include Hispanic languages and literature and Latin American literature. She is the author of Practicing Memory in Central American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); has contributed a chapter to The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature; and explored the implications of literacy in “‘Walking the Path of Letters’: Negotiating Assimilation and Difference in Contemporary Mayan Literature,” published in CHASQUI: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana. Additionally, her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Revista Iberoamericana and Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, among others; and she has contributed to critical compilations analyzing novelists such as Manlio Argueta and Rosa María Britton. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century narratives of Latin America, Central American literature, subaltern studies, memory and literature, the cultural production of collective identities, the limits of representation through writing, literature and human rights, ethics and representation, and theories of space and place. Teaching interests include Spanish for heritage speakers, Latin American testimonio, the city in Latin American fiction, literature of human rights in Latin America, historical fiction, and crafting Mayan identities. AB, Harvard University; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley. At Bard since 2004.

Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall 306
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone:845-758-7697

Assistant Professor of Classics
Office: Aspinwall, 307
E-mail:  [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7283

Associate Professor of Classics; Co-Director, First Year Seminar
Office: Aspinwall 309
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7282

Dean of College
Professor of English
Office: Ludlow 208
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7242

Visiting Assistant Professor Arabic
Office: Seymour 104
Email:  [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7552

James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities
Office: Aspinwall 108
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 917-513-5049
Website: www.markdanner.com

Assistant Professor in Literature 
Office:  Aspinwall 212
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7212

Distinguished Professor of Literature, Africana Studies, Human Rights, Foreign Languages and Cultures Office: Hegeman 303
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7535

Visiting Professor of Literature
Office: Achebe House, 4
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7171

Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature 
Office: Aspinwall 303
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7220

Los Angeles native and daughter of the late writer-producer-director Melvin Frank, Elizabeth Frank is the Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bard College. She spent her high school years in London and Geneva.  After two and a half years at Bennington College, she transferred to U.C. Berkeley, where she finished her undergraduate work and went on to receive a Ph.D. In 1973, she began research on a critical biography of poet Louise Bogan (1897-1970), which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 2004, she published the novel Cheat and Charmer, about a Hollywood family caught up in the turmoil of the McCarthy period. Frank is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Throughout the seventies and eighties, she wrote frequently about art for such magazines as Art in America and Artnews, and published a brief introduction to the work of Jackson Pollock with Abbeville Press.  She published as well a monograph on painter Esteban Vicente (Hudson HIlls), and, recently, a monograph on painter Karen Gunderson, again with Abbeville. She has co-translated two novels--Isaac's Torah, and Farewell, Shanghai--by Bulgarian screenwriter and novelist Angel Wagenstein, both published by Other Press. Frank continues to write fiction and is working on a monograph about painter Susan Crile. Her teaching interests include American literature ("all of it, from the Puritans to last Tuesday"), major Jewish authors, the literature of the Balkans, Russian literature, and poetry. Since 1982, she has been a member of the literature faculty at Bard College. Frank's adult daughter is a Bard alum and former Russian Studies major, and her brother Andrew Frank, a composer, graduated from Bard in 1968. "I love teaching at Bard." she says, "The students are wonderful,the small classes so full of excitement and discovery, and the campus always so lovely in every season." She lives in New York City (because of the museums, parks, bookstores and infinite places to walk), and travels every year to Sofia, Bulgaria. 

English Faculty, Director of MAT Program
Office: MAT Building, 101
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7136

Bard Center Fellow
Office: Aspinwall 206
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7600

Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies
Office: Fairbairn 104
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7648

Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall 205
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7203

Associate Professor of Arabic; Director Middle Eastern Studies
Office: RKC 202
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7676

Professor of Comparative Literature Director, Human Rights Program
Office: Arendt Center 202
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7086
Website: www.bard.edu/hrp

Thomas Keenan is Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College, where he teaches human rights, media studies, and literature and  directs the Human Rights Project as well as Bard’s B.A. program in Human Rights.  He is also affiliated with the Center for Experimental Humanities and the Center for Curatorial Studies. 

Within the framework of the Open Society University Network, he serves as project co-leader for the Threatened Scholars Initiative as well as the Program in Human Rights and the Arts. 

He is the author of Fables of Responsibility, Stanford UP 1997; and, with Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull, Sternberg Press 2012. He is co-editor, with Wendy Chun, of New Media, Old Media, Routledge 2006, 2nd ed. 2015. He also co-edited two books, produced jointly with Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies: The Human Snapshot, Luma 2013 with Tirdad Zolghadr, and The Flood of Rights, Luma 2017, co-edited with Suhail Malik and Tirdad Zolghadr. Some of his writing can be found at https://bard.academia.edu/ThomasKeenan.

He serves on the boards of a number of human rights organizations and journals, including Forensic Architecture; the Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies; Scholars at Risk; The Journal of Human Rights; and Humanity.

Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature Office: Shafer House
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7205
Website: www.rk-ology.com

Professor of German
Office: Aspinwall 301
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7213

Professor of Russian
Office: Fairbairn 302
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7390

Assistant Professor of Chinese
Office: Fairbairn 304
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone:  845-758-7338

Lu Kou is a medievalist and a scholar of pre-modern Chinese literature. His research interests include medieval Chinese literature and culture, court culture, historiography, classical tales and their adaptations in vernacular genres and modern media, and global Middle Ages. He is working on two book manuscripts, respectively on rhetoric and persuasion in early medieval China and on medieval historiography. He is also interested in writing a book in Chinese that introduces the debates, controversies, and promise of the global Middle Ages. At Bard, Lu Kou teaches both language courses and courses in translation. His teaching interests include the fantastic in literature, world literature, queer culture, and classical Chinese poetry.

David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature
Office: Shafer House 201
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7241

Ann Lauterbach was born and grew up in Manhattan, where she studied painting at the High School of Music and Art. She received her BA (English) from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and went on to graduate work (English) at Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She lived in London for seven years, working as an editor, teacher, and curator of literary events at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her early poems were published in England. Returning to New York in 1974, Lauterbach worked in art galleries and began to publish poetry and art criticism. She has taught in the Writing programs at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Princeton, Iowa, City College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. From 2007-2011 she was a visiting Core Critic (Sculpture) at the Yale School of Art. In 2006, she was a Faculty poet for the Summer Literary Seminars in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 2013 she was named Distinguished Sherry Poet at the University of Chicago; her work was the subject of a seminar in Paris in 2014, and a collection, in French, was  subsequently published by Joca Seria.  Her poems have also been translated into Spanish and German. Lauterbach has written on artists Joe Brainard, Jessica Stockholder, Taylor Davis, Kenji Fujita and Cheyney Thompson, among others, and for the exhibition “Whole Fragment” at the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery in Reno, Nevada. She has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Spell (Penguin, 2018). Her prose has been collected in The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking, 2006); The Given & The Chosen, and Saint Petersburg Notebook. 

Lauterbach has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her 2009 collection, Or to Begin Again, was nominated for a National Book Award. 

She is a contributing editor of Conjunctions. She was, from 1991-2020, co-Chair of Writing in the interdisciplinary Milton Avery School of the Arts and, since 1997, Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature, at Bard College.  Her archive is housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall 203
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone:  845-758-7211

Marisa Libbon was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her BA, MA, and PhD in English, and at Oxford University, where she received an MPhil in Medieval English Studies (1100-1500). She specializes in the literature of medieval Britain and in book history, especially the codicology and paleography of medieval manuscript-books. Her research and teaching interests include history writing, hagiography, insular political culture, multilingualism, and textual and cultural transmission. She has published and has forthcoming articles on crusading romances in their manuscript contexts, the intersection of history writing and rumor during crusade, and the circulation of medieval England’s popular culture in the thirteenth century. Her first book, Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England (The Ohio State University Press, 2021), argues that talk among medieval England’s public, especially talk about history and identity, was essential to the production of texts and was a fundamental part of the transmission and reception of literature. In addition to her interests in the very old, she also studies post-modern and contemporary poetry. At Bard, she primarily teaches courses on early British literature and medieval manuscripts in the Literature Program and in the Medieval Studies and Experimental Humanities concentrations. 

Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall 310
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7556

 

Peter L’Official teaches courses in African American literature and culture, twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, and across the American literature sequence at Bard, where he is affiliated with the American Studies, Africana Studies, and Environmental and Urban Studies programs, as well as the Experimental Humanities concentration, and the Architecture Initiative. His research is primarily concerned with how literature, place, architecture, and the visual arts intersect, and his research interests include Black and Afro-Latinx culture, contemporary art, the cultural politics of architecture and urban design, aesthetics and visual culture, and urban history. His first book, Urban Legends: the South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, was published by Harvard University Press in 2020, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Associate Professor of Spanish
Office: Seymour 203
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-6050

Professor of Comparative Literature Office:Seymour 204
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7150
Website: www.josephluzzi.com

Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities
Office: Seymour 106
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7450
Website: www.danielmendelsohn.com

Associate Professor of Literature
Office: Aspinwall 108
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7221
 

Alys Moody teaches and writes about modernism and world literature. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism and the editor, with Stephen J. Ross, of Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. She is currently writing a book about world hunger and world literature, and translating the collected essays of the Martinican decolonial literary critic, René Ménil. In September 2021, she will begin a four-year term as the co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity. Born and raised in country Australia, she lived and taught in France, the UK, New Zealand and Australia before coming to Bard in 2019.

Professor of Literature; Bard Center Fellow; Editor, Conjunctions
Office: Shafer House
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7054

Bradford Morrow is a Professor of Literature and Bard Center Fellow, L&L and Written Arts, 1990—present (BA, University of Colorado, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa; Yale University, Danforth Fellow). Editor, Conjunctions.
     Morrow is the author of nine novels, including Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), Trinity Fields (Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist), Giovanni’s Gift, Ariel’s Crossing, The Diviner’s Tale, The Forgers, The Prague Sonata, and The Forger’s Daughter, a collection of stories, The Uninnocent, along with other fiction publications including Fall of the Birds and The Nature of My Inheritance. His work has been translated into over 12 languages. He founded and edits the acclaimed literary journal, Conjunctions, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, the last three decades of which have been published by Bard College. As well as editing some 75 book-length issues of Conjunctions, featuring the work of over a thousand writers, Morrow edits the journal’s weekly online publication which has a large and international readership.
     Recipient of various awards, among them the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2007 PEN/Nora Magid Award, Morrow has further edited a number of anthologies and books, among them The New Gothic (with Patrick McGrath, 1994); The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (with David Shields, 2011); The Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth; World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth; and The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (with Sam Hamill). Morrow has also published several volumes of poetry, including Posthumes and A Bestiary (illustrated by 18 artists such as Vija Celmins, Richard Tuttle, Eric Fischl, Kiki Smith, Joel Shapiro), as well as a children’s book, Didn’t Didn’t Do It, in collaboration with legendary cartoonist Gahan Wilson. 
     He divides his time between New York City and an old farmhouse in upstate New York. His personal interests include bird watching and collecting rare books.
www.bradfordmorrow.com
www.conjunctions.com
 

Professor of Spanish; Director, Spanish Studies
Office: Seymour 202
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7382

Melanie Nicholson is a Professor of Spanish at Bard College. She received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry (2002) and Surrealism in Latin American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost (2013). Her articles on Latin American poetry and prose have appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Crítica Hispánica, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Journal of European Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and Comparative Literature Studies, among others.  She has published translations in Yale Review, Puerto del Sol, and Translation Review. Prof. Nicholson is currently working on a book that explores the bestiary and the beast fable in Latin American literature.

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-6822
 

Distinguished Writer in Residence
Office: Shafer House
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7600

Assistant Professor of Arabic
Office: Seymour 103
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7506

Dina A. Ramadan teaches modern and contemporary Middle Eastern cultural production at Bard College. She holds a PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and was a EUME postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien from 2013-14. She has contributed to Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Review of Middle Eastern Studies, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and is currently completing a book manuscript, The Education of Taste: Art, Aesthetics, and Subject Formation in Colonial Egypt (Edinburgh University Press). A senior editor of Arab Studies Journal, she guest edited the Spring 2010 themed issue on the visual arts. She is a founding member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA). 

Visiting Associate Professor of Writing
Office: Shafer House 102
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-6822
Website: www.susanfoxrogers.com

James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics
Office: Aspinwall 307
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7283

Associate Professor of Japanese
Office: Seymour 101
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-752-4506
 

Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture
Office: Aspinwall 103
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7571

Assistant Professor of Japanese
Office: Seymour 105
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-6265

Wakako Suzuki is an assistant professor of Japanese at Bard College, specializing in Meiji literature, translation, and childhood studies. She has published “On the Present Reception of Yokomitsu’s Work in North America—From the Perspective of Shanghai Discussed in the Classroom,” and “Youth,” both in Yokomichi Riichi Studies, and “Sacred or Profane? Representing War Orphans in the Post-war Occupation of Japan: Ishikawa Jun’s ‘The Jesus of the Ruins’” in Japan Studies Association Journal, vol. 16 (2018), and Review of Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Routledge, in GNCC Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol 41, 2019. Her forthcoming article will published in the upcoming issue of East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (EAJPC7.1.). 

Professor of French; Co-Director, Center for Faculty and Curricular Development
Office: Hopson 102
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7121

Professor Trudel teaches courses in French literature and culture (19th-21st century), French intellectual history, and comparative literature. He is the author of La Terreur à l'oeuvre (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2007), a study of Jean Paulhan, the famed editor of the Nouvelle Revue française, and has co-edited several books and journal issues, on Jean Paulhan's poetry and politics, on "détournement" in modern and contemporary French literatures, on the avant-garde and the "arrière-garde," and on the poetics of lists. He is a member of the editorial/advisory boards of the journals Romanic Review, French Forum, and the Australian Journal of French Studies. He received his BA from Concordia University, Montreal; his MA in French Literature from McGill University; and his PhD in Romance Languages from Princeton University. 

Assistant Professor of Classics
Office:  Aspinwall 300
E-Mail:  [email protected]
Phone:  845-758-7600

I am a literary historian of the late Roman world, ca. 200-800 CE, a period also known as Late Antiquity. My research is primarily focused on understanding how practices of reading and writing evolved in these centuries among Greek and Latin communities, especially in the contexts of the classical tradition, the rise of Christianity, and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. My current book project, The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Antique Gaul (under contract with Oxford), explores the transformation of classical Latin poetry into a spiritual practice and discourse of religious reform amid the turbulence of the fifth century.

Like many of the late ancient Romans I study--Augustine, Boethius, the Desert Fathers--I am interested in probing the relationship between literacy and literature, on the one hand, and identity, ethics, and selfhood on the other. I try to teach the literature of Late Antiquity in these terms, as a space where we may explore groundbreaking experiments in reshaping connections, material and ideological, between what one reads and who one is; between how one reads and how one lives. 

Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Office: Hopson 103
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7381

Associate Professor of Russian; Director, Russian and Eurasian Studies Program
Office: Fairbairn 303
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone:845-758-7391

Olga Voronina is Associate Professor of Russian at Bard College. She teaches courses in Russian language, literature, and film; the art of Vladimir Nabokov; collective memory and trauma narratives. Voronina is the editor of The Brill Companion to Soviet Children’s Literature and Film (2019) and translator and editor, with Brian Boyd, of Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Véra (2015). An author of essays on Soviet cultural politics, children’s literature and education, and Nabokov’s poetics and metaphysics, she serves on the board of the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation.  

Associate Professor of German; Program Director, German Studies
Office: Aspinwall 300
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7363

Thomas Wild, Associate Professor of German Studies and Literature, works on modern European and German literature and culture. In his research as well as in his teaching he’s particularly interested in the intersections between literature and history, politics, and philosophy. A current focus of his work addresses the poetics and ethics of multilingualism. Thomas Wild has published an introductory book on Hannah Arendt’s life, work, and reception and a monograph on Hannah Arendt’s intellectual relationships with post-war writers. His most recent book on the distinguished poet Ilse Aichinger discusses a contemporary poetics of hospitality. Several editions of letters emerged from Thomas Wild’s ongoing intrigue for correspondences and intellectual networks, including prominent writers such as Uwe Johnson, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Joachim Fest. Poetry is an interlocutor in most of his courses and in many of his publications, among the latter are a collection of poems by Thomas Brasch and translations of contemporary American poets. Thomas Wild serves as general editor on the distinguished international team preparing the first scholarly edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works, which appears in print and digitally, presenting all published and unpublished writings of this eminent thinker in the original English and in the original German – a project providing the foundation for future research on Hannah Arendt, digital humanities, and what it means to think in a plurality of languages.

Assistant Professor of Literature
Office:  Fairbairn 306
E-Mail:  [email protected]
Phone:  845-758-7193

Associate Professor of Chinese
Office: Fairbairn 307
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 845-758-7545