Faculty

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Marisa Libbon 
(Director, Literature Program)

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Jaime Alves

Jaime Alves is an associate professor of literature and the MAT faculty chair in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College.

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

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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

Alex Benson (PhD, UC Berkeley) specializes in 19th and 20th century literature of the U.S. In his classes, students connect the close reading of literary texts with the analysis of music and film, with theories of everyday language use, and with the social and ecological wake of North American colonization. His first book, Sound-Blind: American Literature and the Politics of Transcription, was published by UNC Press in 2023. A second book project in progress examines representations of species extinction. More information about his work—including essays in such journals as PMLA, Narrative, Criticism, Leviathan, and Small Axe—can be found at alexbenson.com.

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Jonathan Brent

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John Burns

Professor Burns is an educator, poet, translator, and the author of Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age (Cambria Press, 2015). He has also authored books chapters, including “Teaching Infrarrealistas: Using Lesser Known Contemporary Poets in the Undergraduate Classroom” in Teaching Latin American Poetries (forthcoming) and “From Manifesto to Manifestation: The Infrarrealista Movement as an Alternative Latin American Literary Community,” in Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture; and articles and book reviews in publications such as Film International (web), 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada, and Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources. His publications also include translations—of the Chilean poet Raúl Hernández and Galician poet Salvador García-Bodaño, as well as translations of the Beat poets into Spanish—and his own creative work. He has been invited to lecture, read, or present papers throughout the world, including at venues in Japan, Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia, Canada, New York City, and Madison, Wisconsin, among others. He previously taught at Bard High School Early College Queens, Rockford University in Illinois, and Kobe College in Japan, where he served as Visiting Researcher. BA, University of Maine–Orono; MA, PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison. At Bard since 2019.

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Mary Caponegro

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

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Nicole Caso

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Maria Sachiko Cecire

Cecire's research and teaching interests include children’s literature and youth culture, media and digital studies, medieval literature and its afterlives, and the role of the humanities in contemporary society. She is the author of Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (2019), which explores transformations in Anglo-American popular culture in terms of institutional power, the legacies of racism and colonialism, and political and affective uses of childhood and the mythological past. She is also coeditor of Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789–Present (2015), author of a number of articles and essays, and a national project scholar for the American Library Association’s Great Stories Club, which supports reading and discussion groups for underserved US teens in juvenile justice, alternative school, youth outreach, and other settings. 

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Robert Cioffi

Robert Cioffi received his BA and PhD from Harvard University and an MSt from the University of Oxford. He loves ancient Greek novels, ghosts, and narratives of travel and ethnography, from Homer’s Odyssey to Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story (third or fourth century CE). He is particularly interested in the intersection of (ancient) empires and literary expression, and in the interactions between the literatures of Greece and Egypt. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. In addition to his scholarly work, he sometimes contributes to the London Review of Books and always watches too much television.

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Lauren Curtis

Professor Lauren Curtis teaches Ancient Greek and Latin language, literature, history, and culture at Bard College. Some of her regular courses include The Roman World: An Introduction, Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, Beginning Latin, and Beginning Ancient Greek. Her research focuses on dance, music, and the performing arts in Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as Latin poetry and Roman intellectual culture of the first century BCE. Her first book, Imagining the Chorus in Augustan Poetry was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Her most recent book, Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (co-edited with Naomi Weiss) will be published in August 2021. She is the author of articles in TAPA, Classical Philology, Arethusa, and Vergilius, is a member of the international research group IDA (Improntas de danza antigua: textos, cuerpos, imágenes, movimiento), and is a trustee of the International Ovidian Society. Professor Curtis holds a BA (Hons.) from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Classics from Harvard University. She is always eager to meet students who are interested in learning more about the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

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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

Ziad Dallal is Assistant Professor of Arabic at Bard College. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. His first research project, Arab Literary Politics, studies how nineteenth century Arab authors deployed the discourse of civilization in their literary narratives to imagine their place in the modern world. His second research project, Uneventful Literature, investigates a trend in contemporary Arabic literature that rejects a commitment to politics as a structuring event. His research is informed by political philosophy, critical theory, and translation theory and praxis.

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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

Adhaar Noor Desai teaches courses on Shakespeare, poetry, jokes, fictional characters, and Cultural Studies. He is one of the co-founders of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, an international consortium of scholars developing innovative interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of technology, creative practice, and social justice. His first book, Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition (Cornell UP, 2023), studies sixteenth-century writing pedagogy in order to provoke a reappraisal of how writing is taught in the contemporary literature classroom. His other published scholarship explores early modern English literature’s relationship to the history of science, technology, disability, and media and has appeared in journals and edited volumes like English Literary Renaissance, Philological Quarterly, Configurations, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage, and Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare. 

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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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Elizabeth Frank

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Derek Furr

Derek Furr is Dean of Teacher Education and a literature professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. He also teaches for the Bard Prison Initiative and the Institute for Writing and Thinking. He is the author of three books--Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (Palgrave 2010), Suite For Three Voices (Fomite 2012), and Semitones (Fomite 2015)--and has recent work in Jacket2, Twentieth Century Literature, and Raritan. Before coming to Bard, he was an English Language Arts teacher and reading specialist in the Charlottesville City Schools. B.A., Wake Forest University; M.Ed., University of Virginia; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia

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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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Alma Guillermoprieto

Alma Guillermoprieto is a prize-winning journalist and author, and a former professional dancer with the National Ballet Company of Mexico. A native of Mexico who now lives in Colombia, she has written frequently about Latin America for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and National Geographic. Guillermoprieto began her reporting career in 1978, covering the conflict in Central America for the Guardian and, subsequently, the Washington Post. She was one of two journalists (the other, Raymond Bonner of the New York Times) who broke the story of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in San Salvador. As a dancer, she studied with Merce Cunningham in New York City and taught at the National School of the Arts in Havana. Her many honors include a MacArthur fellowship, George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, two Overseas Press Club Awards, and a lifetime achievement award from the International Women’s Media Association. Her first book, Samba (Knopf, 1990), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of two collections of essays originally written for the New Yorker and New York Review of Books: The Heart That Bleeds (Knopf/Vintage, 1994) and Looking for History (Vintage, 2001). A memoir, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (Pantheon), was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2004. In its review, Foreign Affairs described Guillermoprieto as “one of the most perceptive commentators on Latin America, a writer whose political analysis is sensitive to culture and history and punctuated by telling details that illuminate larger dilemmas,” and the memoir as “once begun, almost impossible to put down.” In Spanish, she has published several anthologies of her work and others; she also edited La Vida Toda, an anthology of 21st-century US journalism. Guillermoprieto served as the first visiting professor at Harvard’s Institute for the Humanities, teaching a course on Mexican cinema and history. She has also taught at the University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies, University of Chicago, and Princeton University; in recent years, she’s taught online and physical journalism workshops throughout Latin America, the United States, and Spain. Guillermoprieto was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. At Bard: Fall 2023.

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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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Rebecca Cole Heinowitz

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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Elizabeth M. Holt

Elizabeth M. Holt is a cultural critic and historian, and an Associate Professor in the Division of Languages and Literature in Annandale. Holt has recently published on resistance literature in Beirut in the Journal of Palestine Studies, and on Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North in Research in African Literatures. She is the author of Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (Fordham UP, 2017). Holt is working on two monographs: Imperious Plots, a history of Arabic literature during the Cold War; and Solar Readings, a study centering the sun in Arabic and Anglophone film, poetry, theater, storytelling, and prose from the fourteenth century to the present. She serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Arabic Literature.

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Hua Hsu

Hua Hsu is the author of Stay True: A Memoir (Doubleday, 2022) and A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 2016). He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, having previously contributed to Artforum, Slate, the Village Voice, and The Wire (UK). He served on the editorial board of A New Literary History of America (HUP, 2009) and his scholarly work has been published in American Quarterly, Criticism, PMLA, and Genre. He currently serves on the boards of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Critical Minded, an initiative to support cultural critics of color. Hsu previously taught at Vassar College. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He publishes a zine about music and life called Suspended in Time. He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome.

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Thomas Keenan

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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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Ann M. Lauterbach

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Pete L'Official

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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

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Bradford Morrow

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Matthew Mutter

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Melanie Nicholson

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Joseph O'Neill

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

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Francine Prose

FRANCINE PROSE is the author of twenty-one works of fiction including, most recently, the novel, Mister Monkey, and the New York Times bestselling novel Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife and Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellowship at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A new novel, The Vixen, will be published in June 2021.

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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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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

Professor Sullivan is the author of Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (University of Chicago Press, 2023);The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions (University of Chicago Press, 2018); The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2005); The Interrogation of Joan of Arc (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and numerous articles on medieval French and Occitan literature. AB, Bryn Mawr College; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley. At Bard since 1993.

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Éric Trudel

Professor Trudel is the author of La Terreur à l’œuvre: théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan (Paris, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, coll. “L’imaginaire du texte,” 2007), and of several scholarly articles and volume chapters on 19th, 20th and 21st-century French and Francophone Literatures. He coedited Poétiques de la liste et imaginaire sériel (Montréal, Nota Bene, 2019), "Tout peut servir." Pratiques et enjeux du détournement dans le discours littéraire des XXe et XXIe siècles (Québec, Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2011), Jean Paulhan on Poetry and Politics (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2008), and oversaw issues of the journals LHT (Crises de lisibilité, 16, 2016, online) and L'Esprit Créateur (“Avant-garde & Arrière-garde in Modernist Literature”, 53/3, 2013; “The Documentary Mode”, 61/2, 2021).

BA, Concordia University, Montreal; MA, French literature, McGill University; PhD, Romance languages, Princeton University. At Bard since 2002.

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David Ungvary

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Marina van Zuylen

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Olga Voronina

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Thomas Wild

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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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Shuangting Xiong

Professor Xiong's areas of teaching interest and research include 20th-century Chinese literature and culture, Late Imperial Chinese literature, affect theory and aesthetics, Chinese cinema, and film and media studies. A particular interest is the relation between emotion and politics and the mediating role aesthetics plays in it. Her current book-length project examines the evolution of melodramatic narratives of family, kinship, and the Chinese revolution across different media in 20th-century China. Publications also include “The Legend of the Red Lantern,” The Lexicon of Global Melodrama (2022); and catalogue essays for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art exhibition Graphic Ideology: Cultural Revolution Propaganda from China, December 2017. She is the recipient of several teaching, research, and dissertation honors from the University of Oregon.

BA, Renmin University, China; MA, PhD, University of Oregon. At Bard since 2022.

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In Memoriam Li-Hua Ying
(1956–2023)

Li-hua Ying, born in Sichuan in 1956 and raised in neighboring Yunnan, China, was a devoted and beloved teacher and scholar. She joined the faculty at Bard in 1990 and taught continuously until her recent illness. She mentored students, built the Chinese language program from the ground up, and made key contributions to the Asian Studies and Literature program. Before Li-hua’s appointment, a Chinese language program at Bard did not exist; her tireless dedication and pedagogical talent enabled a notoriously difficult language to be learned and mastered by undergraduates at Bard. To her colleagues she was the very “backbone of Asian Studies at Bard.” For her contributions, Li-hua Ying was awarded the Michèle Dominy Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2021.

Li-hua ensured that Bard students studying Chinese had the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in Chinese language and culture. She established and directed the Bard Summer Intensive Chinese Program in China. She personally led groups of students, every summer, for more than two decades, in a two-month immersion program at Qingdao University. And in addition to founding a new area of study, Li-hua made valuable contributions to the curriculum in the Arts and Gender Studies. She was instrumental in helping the Bard Conservatory of Music build its significant relationships with China.

Li-hua received her B.A. from Yunnan Normal University, China and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. Among her publications are “Negotiating with the Past: The Art of Calligraphy in Post-Mao China,” “Vital Margins: Frontier Poetics and Landscape of Ethnic Identity,” and Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature. She also served for many years as the Executive Director of American Society of Shufa Calligraphy Education, promoting the teaching of Chinese Calligraphy in the U.S.

Li-hua will be remembered by her colleagues, students, and friends for her generosity of spirit, her kindness, and her optimism. These were central to her life and her teaching. Li-hua demonstrated an exceptional commitment to Bard as an institution as well as to her students. Bard’s thriving Chinese language and literature program is a living tribute to her devotion and leadership.

On behalf of the entire Bard community, I wish to extend my deepest condolences to her son Kyle Chao and her husband Charles Chao. We will be in touch with information regarding services as soon as we have details to share. I am sure many will wish to come together to celebrate a beloved colleague.

Li-hua Ying will be missed. The privilege to work alongside her and witness the command, calm, confidence, enthusiasm, and affection Li-hua exhibited in her work and life was, for me, a singular gift and honor.