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 Connell ’26 Wins 2024 Dante Prize
Post Date: 01-21-2025
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.Bard College Student Jessica Zoll ’26 Receives Fund for Education Abroad Spring 2025 Scholarship
“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
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.Marina van Zuylen On Teaching Baudelaire
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
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Bard Welcome Corps Scholarships Awarded to Two OSUN RhEAP Students for 2025
Bard Welcome Corps Scholarships Awarded to Two OSUN RhEAP Students for 2025
Bard College’s Welcome Corps on Campus (WCC) program has accepted two students from OSUN’s Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives in Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya, to attend Bard in the 2025-26 academic year. Grace George Kharthum and Ruot Wichar Duop, originally from Sudan, secured the highly coveted scholarships from WCC, a refugee sponsorship program supported by US governmental agencies and higher education institutions, after completing the Hubs’ Realizing Higher Education Access Program (RhEAP) program. At Bard, Duop plans to study computer science and English literature, with a focus on developing data, software, and machine learning to provide innovative solutions to challenges in healthcare, education, and governance. Kharthum will pursue a degree in sociology, focusing on gender, education, and global development. “My journey from a refugee camp in Kenya to Bard College in New York is a testament to the power of education and support from dedicated individuals and organizations,” said Kharthum.
Post Date: 10-07-2024
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Internationally Renowned Writer Joyce Carol Oates Will Give a Reading at Bard College on October 21
Internationally Renowned Writer Joyce Carol Oates Will Give a Reading at Bard College on October 21
On Monday, October 21, at 4 pm, internationally renowned writer Joyce Carol Oates will give a reading at Bard College in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize, among many other honors. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and the New York Times best seller The Falls.
The reading, which is being presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public. With Morrow, Oates is co-editing Conjunctions:83, Revenants, The Ghost Issue, which will be published in November. Revenants will bring together fiction and poetry on the “unliving-living” by a wide array of esteemed writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Ben Okri, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Patricia Smith, Valerie Martin, Jonathan Carroll, Reggie Oliver, James Morrow, Can Xue, Brian Evenson, Paul Muldoon, and others.
Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Post Date: 09-24-2024
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Bard Prison Initiative Announces Javier Fuentes as Paris Review Visiting Professor
Bard Prison Initiative Announces Javier Fuentes as Paris Review Visiting Professor
The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), in partnership with the Paris Review, is pleased to announce that Javier Fuentes has joined its faculty through the Paris Review Visiting Professorship, a position created for a distinguished writer to teach a course on literature that has inspired them. Fuentes, a Spanish-American writer and 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow, is the author of Countries of Origin, a novel which chronicles a tumultuous, passionate love affair between two young men from vastly different worlds during one, extraordinary summer in Spain. Fuentes’s first course for BPI, called Physical and Psychological Spaces in Literature, will explore the way time and place affect the structure of literary narrative. The Paris Review Visiting Professorship is just one of many additions that BPI, now in its 25th year, is embarking on for expanding its academic program, faculty, and community.
Post Date: 09-24-2024
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Professor Marisa Libbon Reviews Two Books About Jane Austen and English Fashion in the European Review of Books
Professor Marisa Libbon Reviews Two Books About Jane Austen and English Fashion in the European Review of Books
Bard Associate Professor of Literature Marisa Libbon published her review of two books about Jane Austen’s clothes, “Needle and Pen: Dressing is writing or, the clothes in the writer’s closet”, in the latest issue of the European Review of Books. The two books she reviews, the monograph Jane Austen’s Wardrobe by Hilary Davidson and the novella The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, both explore how bespoke clothing can be a mirror of the people it was made for. Beyond just reviewing these works, Libbon presents selections of Austen’s fashion to explore how Austen “shaped her novels and her wardrobe simultaneously.”
Writing about the 1990s (a period when four of Austen’s novels were adapted to film and TV) as the “Age of Austen”, Libbon explains how important Regency-era fashion has been to our understanding of the period and how it has sometimes eclipsed the actual author. Austen’s wardrobe, Libbon argues, is where we can find information we’ve overlooked about Austen’s life. Putting this information beside DeWitt’s novella, she concludes that fashion and the written word both help us remember the past: “the words we use, like the clothes we wear, give us shape.”
Post Date: 09-16-2024
Literature Events
- 2/03Monday5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Olin Humanities, Room 102Monday, February 3, 2025
Big Chop: Race, Trauma, and Refusal in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Shenny De Los Angeles’ “The Ritual to Beauty”
Gisabel Leonardo
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lola explores her contentious relationship with her mother, childhood trauma, and racial identity through hair. Similarly, Shenny De Los Angeles’ autobiographical documentary short “The Ritual to Beauty” explores themes of race, gender, and haircare through intimate interviews with Shenny’s mother and grandmother. These women turn to haircare as a site of expression to address the trauma they and the women before them have endured. In critical moments of release, both Lola and Shenny shave their heads in complete refusal of the Dominican aesthetics of race that promote hair straightening. In a Dominican context, the “Big Chop”—as this is often referred to in anglophone cultures—conjures a negative affect that mirrors the traumatic memory of El Corte, or The Parsley Massacre (1937), when tens of thousands of Haitians were slaughtered at the hands of Dominican armed forces. The works explored here confront the racial terror of the corte to heal generational trauma rooted in an anti-Black aesthetic imaginary. Through literature and visual media, this talk explores the nuances and consequences of the “chop” as an act of aesthetic refusal and an affirmation of Dominican Blackness.
Gisabel Leonardo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a graduate minor in Latina/o Studies. Her interdisciplinary work centers expressions of gender, race, and sexuality through performance in contemporary Dominican and diasporic Dominican literary, artistic, and musical cultures. While at Illinois, she had the pleasure of designing and facilitating language, literature, culture, and media studies courses at several levels of instruction while also serving as a Graduate College Fellow and a Humanities Research Institute Predoctoral Fellow. Her teaching and research interests aim to center the cultural and literary production of marginalized voices across the Hispanophone Caribbean and its US diaspora. Her current work Melenas Malcriadas: The Black Aesthetics of Hair and Dominicanidad examines the conflicting affects of the Dominican hair salon and how Dominican hair culture is reproduced and reimagined in music, literature, and art. - 2/04Tuesday5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
- 2/12Wednesday5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Olin Humanities, Room 102Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Mystical Martyrs and Hidden Remains: Puerto Rico's Turbulent 1950s
Dr. Juan Diego Mariátegui
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Puerto Rico emerged from the 1950s transformed. By 1952, governor Luis Muñoz Marín inaugurated the Free Associated State, a new legal status that ostensibly ended Puerto Rico’s colonial subordination as a “non-incorporated territory” of the United States. Another key development in these heady years was the Korean War (1950-1953), in which 61,000 Puerto Rican soldiers participated. This conflict was crucial because it allowed Muñoz Marín to present Puerto Rico as an exemplary defender of capitalist democracy and thereby discursively support its colonial relationship with the United States. But there is a parallel war that occurred in this period: the armed insurrection known as the Jayuya Uprising that Pedro Albizu Campos and the pro-independence Nationalist Party launched as a response to the Free Associated State. This talk centers on two opposed visions of war, a nationalist one and a neo-imperialist one. Through the speeches of governor Luis Muñoz Marín, poems by the Nationalist mystic Francisco Matos Paoli, and a short story by pro-independence author José Luis González, I explore how literary representations of these armed conflicts formed different anti-colonialist cultural and political subjectivities at a time when the island’s commitment to the U.S. was enshrined.
Juan Diego Mariátegui is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh University. Prior to that he received a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago as well as a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies from Brown University. His teaching and research focus on modern Puerto Rican and Cuban literature, particularly the way literary representations of space explore the relationship between man and the natural world, the cultural dimensions of colonialism, and the tensions between citizenship and diaspora. - 2/17Monday5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Olin Humanities, Room 102Monday, February 17, 2025
Poetics of Maroonage: Posthuman Spaces in Hispanophone Caribbean Poetry
Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This presentation will discuss twenty-first century poetry by two Afro-Hispanophone Caribbean poets, Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico and Soleida Ríos from Cuba, to underline how their poetry imagines futures under threatening circumstances such as forced displacement and anti-blackness. How does the longue durée of Black resistance influence twenty-first-century poetics?
Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa will present her research, which takes place through an interdisciplinary approach in between history and poetics and in dialogue with scholars interested in how lyric language is historically inflicted and intertwined with social justice and Blackness. The intertwining of imagery of long-lasting Black resistance and the emotional and political dimensions of the posthuman lyric subject ensures the poetics of maroonage exposes transhistorical genealogies of hope.
Ethel Barja is a scholar, educator, and award-winning poet originally from the Andes, Peru. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and an MA in Hispanic literary Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor in the Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies Department at Salisbury University. Her research focuses on transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to Hispanophone Caribbean, Andean, and Latinx literature, integrating critical Indigenous studies, Afro-poetics, gender, and posthuman studies. She is the author of the monograph titled Poesía e insurrección: La Revolución cubana en el imaginario latinoamericano. Her poetry collections include Insomnio Vocal, Hope is Tanning on a Nudist Beach, and La Muda.