Faculty

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Rebecca Cole Heinowitz
(co-director)

English literature, especially Romanticism, with an emphasis on poetics, imperialism, the gothic, and psychoanalysis; twentieth-century and contemporary British and American poetry, including the Second Generation New York School and Language Poetry; writing poetry.

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Marisa Libbon 
(co-director)

Literature of medieval England, including Old and Middle English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman, with particular attention to material culture, and textual transmission and instability; romance; historiography; hagiography; law and literature; paleography and codicology; medieval and contemporary poetic form; contemporary poetry.

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Jaime Alves

American literature and culture, especially 19th and early 20th centuries; domesticity and gender; science, medicine, and disability studies; newspapers, periodicals and archival research; museums, freak shows, and other performances as purveyors of knowledge and sites of informal learning; literature, writing, and discussion in secondary school English Language Arts curriculum and instruction. 

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Franco Baldasso

Italian Literature and Visual Cultures; Fascism and Modernism; the legacy of political violence in Italy; European intellectual history; Fiction and History; Primo Levi and testimony; the Mediterranean in modern and contemporary aesthetics; Elena Ferrante and other invisible cities.

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Thomas Bartscherer

Ancient Greek and modern German literature and philosophy, particularly those points at which they intersect, and related topics in aesthetics, ethics, and moral psychology; dramatic literature (particularly tragedy and theories of the tragic), theatre, and performance; technology and science in relation to the humanities; contemporary art and poetry; Rezeptionsgeschichte; critique genetique; liberal arts education and pedagogy.

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Alex Benson

American literature, particularly 19th and early 20th century; cultural theory; theories of the vernacular; sound studies; literature and the social sciences, especially anthropology; animals and the environment in literature and visual culture.

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Jonathan Brent

Soviet History and Literature, with particular emphasis on Stalin, Stalinism and the late Stalinist period; special interest in Mayakovsky, Olesha, Babel, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn and Erofeev and Soviet cultural politics; 20th C. East European avant-garde, including Russian Futurism and Oberiu, Dada, Polish, Jewish and Czech writers; East European Jewish history and culture, in particular the Jewish Renaissance of c. 1850 to 1940.

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Mary Caponegro

Fiction writing, contemporary fiction, modernism, post-modernism.

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Nicole Caso

Central and Latin American literature, colonial to contemporary; the literature of socio-political trauma; literature that highlights the dynamic between space and identity formation: geography, cartographies of power, the creation of imagined communities; the repercussions and possibilities of the city or global spaces as represented in texts.

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Maria Sachiko Cecire

Medieval literature (especially Middle English) and its reception; children's literature and culture; media studies; digital humanities; cultural studies; gender and identity.

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Lauren Curtis

Latin and Greek literature, especially tragedy, comedy, epic, elegiac and lyric poetry; The culture, technologies, and aesthetics of writing and performance in the ancient world; Greek and Roman religion and ritual; Women and gender in ancient literature;  Ancient and modern translation and literary reception.

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Deirdre d’Albertis

Deirdre d'Albertis is Professor of English at Bard College and the author of Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text as well as an editor of the Pickering and Chatto complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell.  She has published widely on Victorian women of letters including Emily Bronte, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Bronte, Eliza Lynn Linton, Hannah Cullwick, and Mary Howitt among others. Her current research is focused on transnational feminist networks and social reform in nineteenth-century Britain, America, and Northern Europe.

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Ziad Dallal

Modern Arabic Literature and Thought, especially the intersection of literary history with the history of science with a focus on nineteenth century Arabic prose; World Literature; Translation Theory and Praxis; Philology; Historical Epistemology and Conceptual History; Political Philosophy; Marxism and Finance; Theories of Representation.

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Mark Danner

Mark Danner is a writer and reporter who for 25 years has written on politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict. He has covered, among many other stories, wars and political conflict in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, and, most recently, the story of torture during the War on Terror. Danner is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and Chancellor’s Professor of Journalism, English, and Politics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Adhaar Noor Desai

Research and teaching interests include Shakespeare and his contemporaries, late medieval and early modern poetics, the history of science, cultural materialism, and media studies. Presentations at Shakespeare Association of America, American Comparative Literature Association Conference, and New England Medieval Studies Consortium, among others.

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Nuruddin Farah

Distinguished Professor of Literature,Africana Studies, Foreign Languages, and Cultures. Somali novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter. Educated at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Works include two trilogies, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorshipand Blood in the Sun, and several novels, novellas, short stories, plays. International prizes include the Premio Cavour (Italy), the Kurt Tucholsky Prize (Sweden), the Lettre Ulysses Award (Berlin), and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In recent years he has been a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. At Bard: 2010–11; 2013–

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Peter Filkins

Translation, poetry, German literature, 20th-century American and European literature.

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Elizabeth Frank

American literature, seventeenth through twenty-first centuries;  Jewish literature; writing fiction; art criticism and art writing in  general; European literature, particularly the novel; Slavic languages  and literature, with an emphasis on Russian and Bulgarian; translation  from Bulgarian to English; Hollywood and film; literature and politics;  Shakespeare; American drama; poetry; nonfiction: personal essays and  writing about science.

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Derek Furr

Romanticism and its legacies; sound recording; folk music and poetics; postcolonial Anglophone literature; reading disabilities; secondary school English Language Arts curriculum and instruction; writing fiction and essays.

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Stephen Graham

Victorian literature, nineteenth-century European novels; the intersection of nineteenth-century fiction, science, and historiography; canon formation, history of pedagogy.

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Donna Ford Grover

American literature, including African-American literature and Asian-American literature; William Faulkner; Caribbean literature; American Gothic; literature by Americans abroad; literature by women; feminism; domesticity.

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Elizabeth M. Holt

Modern Arabic literature, in particular the novel; serialization and history of the Arabic press; legacies of Francophonie in the Arab world and its diaspora; A Thousand and One Nights; Arab women's writing and the politics of feminism in the Arab world; translation theory and practice; Arabic language pedagogy; theories of nationalism and the production of literary space.

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Thomas Keenan

Comparative literature and literary theory; human rights; media studies; evidence; free speech.

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Robert Kelly

Poetry, and many other topics.

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Franz R. Kempf

German literature, including The Ring of the Nibelung; Goethe; Grimms’ Fairy Tales; Richard Wagner; and Kafka.

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Marina Kostalevsky

Russian literature; Symbolism and Russian religious philosophy; Russian modernism; the relation between literature, music, and theater.

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Lu Kou

Medieval Chinese literature and culture; global Middle Ages; rhetoric and legitimacy; the fantastic in Chinese literary tradition; gender and sexuality; queer culture in China; Chinese poetry and poetics; literary theory and criticism.

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Ann M. Lauterbach

Poetry; modernism and post-modernism; art and politics

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Patricia Lopez-Gay

Contemporary Spanish literature, with a strong interest in visual art and comparative literature (Spain, France, Brazil); Academic Program Affiliations Latin American and Iberian Studies; research focus theories of the archive, autobiography, translation studies, and historiography.

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Joseph Luzzi

Dante; Italian and European Romanticism; Renaissance Florence; Italian cinema; modern Italian culture and society; issues in comparative literary studies; the Enlightenment.

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Daniel Mendelsohn

Memoirist, critic, translator, literary journalist.  Contributes essays on literature, theater, film and television to many major publications, primarily The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times. Primary interests: Classical Literature, especially Greek tragedy and Homeric Epic; Holocaust literature; gay and lesbian literature; Modern Greek literature, especially Constantine Cavafy.

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Alys Moody

Global modernism; world literature; histories and theories of hunger; decolonization; materialist feminisms; the social and political role of art, especially as shaped by the legacies of modernism; the history of theory; literary education and the history of the university.

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Bradford Morrow

Twentieth-century fiction, especially contemporary fiction; Gothic literature; twentieth-century poetry, especially Pound, Rexroth, and late-century innovative poetries, as well as New Wave Fabulism and the fable in general.

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Matthew Mutter

American and British modernism; religion, secularism, and literature; literature and ethics; 19th and 20th century American intellectual history; cultural criticism; philosophical aesthetics; theories of comedy and tragedy.

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Melanie Nicholson

Latin American Literature, especially twentieth-century poetry and narrative; surrealism and its influence on Latin American writers; the literature of the Conquest; Jorge Luis Borges; translation; Hispanic immigrants in the United States.

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Joseph O'Neill

Irish literature; American literature; post-colonialism; post-nationalism; literary theory.

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Dina Ramadan

Arabic language and literature, particularly the twentieth century novel; Middle Eastern cultural production, especially film and visual arts; modern Arab intellectual history; the question of modernity; the intersection between the aesthetic and the educational; nationalism and post colonial theory.

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Susan Fox Rogers

Non-fiction, including the literature of the outdoors and the literature of the Hudson Valley.

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James Romm

Greek and Latin language; Greek history and prose literature; the classical tradition, cartography and geography.

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Justus Rosenberg

Comparative literature, especially the socio-political or ideological aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century masterpieces.

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Nathan Shockey

Modern Japanese literature, intellectual history, and visual art; theory and history of media and technology; mass culture and political movements; urban space and critical geography; histories of reading, publishing, and the book.

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Karen Sullivan

Comparative literature; medieval and Renaissance French, Provençal, Latin, Italian, and Byzantine literature; Old French, Old Provençal, and medieval Latin languages; medieval philosophy, theology, and history; medieval “human rights”; heresy and the Inquisition; torture; romance; Louisiana.

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Wakako Suzuki

Modern Japanese literature; History of Childhood and Children’s Literature, Translation Theory and Praxis; Gender and Sexuality; Literary Criticism and Debates

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Éric Trudel

French literature, especially twentieth-century French literature; poetic discourse; literary theory; literature and philosophy; literature and the visual arts; French cinema; Quebecois literature.

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Marina van Zuylen

Comparative literature, especially the French, German, and Russian literatures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; aesthetics; literature and medicine; literature and philosophy; literature and the arts; literature and psychoanalysis; the relationship between conversation, idleness, and the work ethic in the Franco-American imagination.

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Olga Voronina

Literature of Russian Modernism; Russian and Soviet literary institutions, rhetoric and literature of the Cold War; Soviet and post-Soviet children’s literature; and the art of Vladimir Nabokov.

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Thomas Wild

Modern German, European, and transatlantic literature and philosophy, mainly 20th century; Hannah Arendt; intersections of literature, history, ethics and poetics; translation; edition; intellectual correspondences; film; contemporary, post-1989 (German) literature, arts, and political thinking.

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Daniel Williams

19th- and early 20th-century British literature, especially the novel; South and Southern African literature; history of science; environmental humanities and animal studies; literature and philosophy; law and literature; aesthetics and art criticism.

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Li-Hua Ying

Classical and modern Chinese poetry and fiction; Chinese film studies; Chinese calligraphy; literature from Taiwan; writings on Tibet.