Writer Rick Moody to Give Reading at Bard College on March 31
Award-winning writer Rick Moody will give a reading on Monday, March 31, at 4 pm in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. The event, which is cosponsored by the literary magazine Conjunctions, will be the final installment in Bradford Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series (ICFRS) and is free and open to the public.
Writer Rick Moody to Give Reading at Bard College on March 31
The ICFRS, hosted by Morrow, professor of literature at Bard College and the founder and editor of Conjunctions, has run for over 35 years and welcomed numerous literary luminaries to Bard, such as Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Karen Russell, Jayne Anne Phillips, Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Millhauser, Can Xue, Quincy Troupe, Richard Powers, Sigrid Nunez, Brandon Hobson, Marc Anthony Richardson, and others.
Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, and three works of nonfiction, including an essay collection about music. His most recent novel, Hotels of North America (Bay Back) is told through a sequence of online reviews and in 2015 was named a best book of the year by NPR and the Washington Post. Moody has received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is a prolific contributor to Conjunctions, where he has been published 26 times.
Post Date: 03-11-2025
Daniel Mendelsohn and An-My Lê Join the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Bard professors Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, and An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, have been announced as newly elected 2025 members of the Academy of Arts and Letters. Mendelsohn and Lê, who are among 24 new members to join the organization in 2025, were elected in recognition of notable achievements in their fields into the departments of Literature and Art, respectively.Daniel Mendelsohn and An-My Lê Join the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Post Date: 03-04-2025
Writers Kelly Link and Jedediah Berry ’99 to Give Reading at Bard College on March 3
Award-winning writers Kelly Link and Jedediah Berry ’99 will give a reading on Monday, March 3, at 4:00 pm in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. The event, which is presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s Bard course on innovative contemporary fiction and is cosponsored by the literary magazine Conjunctions, will include a Q&A with the authors and is free and open to the public.Writers Kelly Link and Jedediah Berry ’99 to Give Reading at Bard College on March 3
Kelly Link is known for her novel The Book of Love, and for her multitude of short stories, including the acclaimed collection Get in Trouble, which spans genres including fantasy, horror, and magic realism. Jebediah Berry ’99 is the author of The Naming Song, The Manual of Detection, and The Family Arcana, a story told in the form of cards.
“What a special joy to welcome back my former Bard student, Jedediah Berry, to speak with my students and give a public reading alongside one of my favorite writers and longtime Conjunctions contributors, Kelly Link,” said Morrow, professor of literature at Bard College and the founder and editor of Conjunctions. “As I wrap up my own years at Bard and my Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading series, I think of how many students have gone on to successful careers in the literary world, and I hope my current students will be inspired by Jed’s triumphs as a writer. Both Kelly Link’s The Book of Love and Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song were just named two of the five finalists for the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Award in Sci-Fi/Fantasy for 2025. It will be wonderful to congratulate them both in person at Bard.”
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press), Magic for Beginners (Random House), Pretty Monsters (Speak), Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog, and the novel The Book of Love (all Random House). Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of a World Fantasy Award, Nebula Award, and Hugo Award, and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. She is the cofounder of Small Beer Press and coedits the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and owns Book Moon, an independent bookshop in Easthampton, MA.
Jedediah Berry ’99 is the author of The Naming Song (Tor Books), his most recent novel which is a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His first novel, The Manual of Detection (Penguin Press), won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. His story in cards, The Family Arcana (Ninepin Press), was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. With Andrew McAlpine, he cowrote the Ennie Award-winning tabletop adventure game setting, The Valley of Flowers (Phantom Mill Games). Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes.
Post Date: 02-25-2025
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Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
A new book by Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, covers how Dante Alighieri’s poem profoundly influenced other writers and artists in the centuries that followed, leaving its mark on authors such as John Milton, Mary Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, and shaping issues ranging from women’s identity to debates about censorship of canonical literature. “By recounting the history of the poem’s reception by readers over the centuries—from Giovanni Boccaccio and Michelangelo in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to modernist writers and filmmakers such as Antonio Gramsci and Jean-Luc Godard, Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be,” writes Andrew Frisardi for the Wall Street Journal.
Post Date: 01-28-2025
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Celeste Connell ’26 Wins 2024 Dante Prize
Celeste Connell ’26 Wins 2024 Dante Prize
Bard student Celeste Connell ’26 has won the 2024 Dante Prize, a longstanding award bestowed by the Dante Society of America for the best essay on the Italian poet Dante Alighieri by an undergraduate in the US or Canada. Connell, a junior in classical studies and literature at Bard, was awarded the prize for her essay “Lucan’s Exiles: Solitude and Moral Vision in the Commedia.” “Celeste’s prize-winning essay was unusually brilliant for a student at her early stage of development as a scholar,” said Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard. “She established quite convincingly that the political rhetoric of Lucan’s Pharsalia, a pro-republic epic poem written around the time of Virgil’s more imperial Aeneid, influenced Dante in constructing his moral vision in the Commedia. It’s always challenging to establish direct links of influence, especially between works separated from one another by more than a millennium; and yet Celeste did just that, employing her perceptive skills in close reading along with her thorough knowledge of the Latin source. The resulting essay was one that any scholar would be proud of.”
Post Date: 01-21-2025
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Bard College Student Jessica Zoll ’26 Receives Fund for Education Abroad Spring 2025 Scholarship
Bard College Student Jessica Zoll ’26 Receives Fund for Education Abroad Spring 2025 Scholarship
Jessica Zoll ’26, a Bard College student majoring in literature, has received a scholarship from Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) for the spring 2025 semester. Zoll is one of 71 undergraduates from around the country selected by 92 volunteer reviewers, and with FEA’s Education in Ireland Access Partner Scholarship, she will attend University College Cork in Ireland.
“As a first-generation college student and American, I never imagined that studying abroad or earning a scholarship to cover my entire €7,400 tuition would be within reach, but that changed when I came to Bard,” said Zoll. “My support system here is incredible, and it's through this community that I’ve been introduced to opportunities that align not only with my academic goals, but also with my personal interests. I study Victorian literature, but didn't think studying in a place so rich in 19th-century history was feasible. Through the Fund for Education Abroad's Inclusive Ireland Access Partner Scholarship, I’ve been awarded the chance to study at University College Cork—the city is steeped in Victorian history, and the courses are too! I feel incredibly fortunate and excited for this next step in my academic journey. This really feels like a win for not just me, but for my entire family.”
The Fund for Education Abroad provides scholarships and ongoing support to students with financial need who are underrepresented among the US study-abroad population. Of the 71 scholars awarded this application cycle, 93% identify as students of color; 28% identify as LGBTQ+; 23% identify as male, 70% as female, and 7% as genderfluid or nonbinary. Characteristic of FEA scholars, 94% are first-generation college students, 30% are current or former community college students, and 37% have never left the United States. Currently studying in universities and colleges in 27 states, the new FEA Scholars will attend programs in over 25 countries across five continents.
Since its inception in 2010, FEA has awarded over $3.7 million in scholarships to 1186 undergraduates, and supports students before, during, and after their study abroad experience with scholarships and programming.
“We are honored to have the support of so many who are striving to make study abroad more accessible,” said FEA Program Manager Joelle Leinbach. “As we look ahead to 2025, FEA will continue to put access and equity first as we consider further improvements to our application process and expand our ranks of volunteer reviewers.”
Post Date: 12-17-2024
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Marina van Zuylen On Teaching Baudelaire
Marina van Zuylen On Teaching Baudelaire
Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard, appeared in a session hosted by the Teagle Foundation as part of a workshop series on methods to strengthen general education. Van Zuylen speaks about how she has taught Charles Baudelaire’s “The Bad Glazier” throughout the years, and how those teaching approaches have shifted as the needs of her students have changed over the past 20 years. “This is a wonderful text because it introduces us to so many questions,” said van Zuylen. “For me this text was a perfect example of art as an escape… It’s an escape because, it’s also a text about maybe the quality of desire, the quality of when we act for reasons that we don’t ourselves understand and this is something that is so exciting about literature. Only in literature, maybe, can we get this sense that characters act in a way that is forbidden in real life.”
Post Date: 12-16-2024
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Bard College and Six Faculty Awarded New York State Council on the Arts Grants
Bard College and Six Faculty Awarded New York State Council on the Arts Grants
Six Bard College faculty members have been named as recipients of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for 2025. NYSCA Support for Organizations grants were awarded to Erika Switzer, assistant professor of music and director of the Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship at Bard, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, and Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard. Additionally, Bard College received a Support for Organizations Award for 2025 in the amount of $40,000. NYSCA Support for Artist grants were awarded to DN Bashir, assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard, and Ann Lauterbach, professor of languages and literature.The NYSCA grants are intended to increase access to arts funding and recognize the substantial economic and social impact of New York state’s arts and culture sector.
Erika Switzer and Lucy Fitz Gibbon will receive a grant in support of operational expenses and projects at Sparks & Wiry Cries, an organization, cofounded by Switzer and where Fitz Gibbon serves as managing editor, that curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars with innovative initiatives. These projects will include the upcoming Brooklyn premieres of Meltdown, a dramatic work for mezzo and piano trio which engages the layered stories and science of climate change through the lens of a female glaciologist, and Skymother, which weaves together the family history of composer Timothy Long (Choctaw, Muscogee Creek) with the Haudenosaunee creation story, Sky Woman.
Sarah Hennies, along with her duo partner, Tristan Kasten-Krause, a bassist and composer, will receive the grant for their new work Saccades for double bass and percussion at the Wassaic Project, an artist-run nonprofit contemporary art gallery, artist residency, and art education center. The piece is to be performed in total darkness with a single candle flame.
Suzanne Kite will receive a grant for the proposed project, Owáǧo Uŋkíhaŋblapi (We Dream a Score), her first full orchestral work for her organizational partner, the American Composers Orchestra (ACO). The piece continues Kite’s exploration of individual, collective, and societal dreaming practices, using an Indigenous AI framework. NYSCA funding supports the development of an AI app in collaboration with the Brooklyn-based design firm School. Members of the ACO and the public will submit their dreams to the app, which transforms language into Lakȟóta Visual Language symbols.
DN Bashir’s Hollow House, sponsored by JACK Arts Incorporated, follows a group of New York residents meeting at a farm-to-table restaurant in an old house in the Hudson Valley. Inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, it explores unspoken power dynamics and “the systems that hold us captive.”
Ann Lauterbach will be awarded a grant in support of her project called “The Meanwhile: Linear Ruptures and Simultaneous Narratives,” which will have a performance and possible exhibition at the Flowchart Foundation.
Post Date: 12-10-2024
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Joseph Luzzi's Translation of Dante's Vita Nuova Reviewed in Open Letters Review
Joseph Luzzi's Translation of Dante's Vita Nuova Reviewed in Open Letters Review
Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature Joseph Luzzi’s translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova was reviewed by Steve Donoghue for the Open Letters Review. The new translation was published on December 3 by W.W. Norton’s imprint Liveright. Donoghue’s short review focuses on how Luzzi adapts Dante’s sometimes mystifying prose work. Donoghue notes that translators of the Vita Nuova have been surprised and “slightly taunted” by the work, and that “Luzzi aims for clarity without slavish stylistic imitation, [likening] his translation process to laying a transparent film over Dante’s text.” Luzzi’s “leaner” translation, he writes, is one reason readers can appreciate his updated, more modern version.
Luzzi has taught at Bard since 2002, and his previous book Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance was named one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022.
Post Date: 12-02-2024
Literature Events
- 3/31Monday4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Campus Center, Weis CinemaMonday, March 31, 2025
A Reading by Rick Moody
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Award-winning author Rick Moody will give a reading on Monday, March 31, at 4 pm in Weis Cinema at Bard College. This event, which is cosponsored by the literary magazine Conjunctions, will be the final event in Bradford Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and is free and open to the public. A Q&A will follow the talk.
Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, and three works of nonfiction, including an essay collection about music. His most recent novel Hotels of North America is told through a sequence of online reviews and in 2015 was named a best book of the year by NPR and the Washington Post. Moody has received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is a prolific contributor to Conjunctions, where he has been published twenty-six times. - 3/31Monday5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olin Humanities, Room 201Monday, March 31, 2025
Literature Salon: Translating Tropical Troy
John Burns, Associate Professor of Spanish,
Bard College
Olin Humanities, Room 201 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
What challenges and opportunities does translating a play from Spanish into English present? This talk will focus on the case of Troya tropical by contemporary Cuban playwright Gleyvis Coro Montanet, a play written largely in rhyming octosyllabic verse, which I am translating for an anthology focusing on contemporary Cuban literature that draws on references to Ancient Greece and Rome. We will specifically look at the ways in which the piece, which is brimming with references to Cuban literature and history, playfully reimagines the Trojan War in the context of contemporary Cuba. - 4/03Thursday5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olin Humanities, Room 102Thursday, April 3, 2025
The Poetry of Physics: What Literature Can Teach Us About the Ultimate Nature of Reality
William Egginton, Decker Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this lecture I explore the two major physical theories of the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, by way of what we could call their poetic and philosophical foundations. Key to this approach will be the idea that reality isn’t an unfiltered picture of what’s out there, but rather a complex human construct, and that because of that we need essentially human means to understand it, among them literature and philosophy. In this light I argue that philosophers like Plato and Kant, and poets like Dante and Borges, are key to understanding the ideas of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg.
William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named to several best of 2023 lists, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is co-author with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His most recent book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, was published in January 2024. - 4/22Tuesday5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 AuditoriumTuesday, April 22, 2025
Photo by: Ozlem DincRichard Ellmann, James Joyce, and Literary Biography: A talk by Zachary Leader
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce has been called “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” This talk, by the critic and biographer Zachary Leader, tells the story of the book and its maker, in the process arguing for the artistic claims not only of Ellmann himself, a remarkable man, but of literary biography in general.
Zachary Leader (born 1946) is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and did graduate work at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard University, where he was awarded a PhD in English in 1977. Although born and raised in the U.S. he has lived for over forty years in the U.K., and has dual British and American citizenship. His best-known works are The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2001), The Life of Kingsley Amis (2007), a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 (2015), which was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize in the U.K. The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965 to 2005 was published in 2018. He has written and edited a dozen books, including both volumes of the Saul Bellow biography, and is General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series published by OUP. A recipient of Guggenheim, Whiting, Huntington, Leverhulme and British Academy Fellowships, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Introduction: Gregory Moynihan, Associate Professor of History, Bard College
Q&A Moderator: Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, Bard College