All upcoming Authors, Books, & Writing programs

Discover the power of reflective writing inspired by visual art guided by the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art’s Writing Salon, Mary Hall Surface. Step into the Expressionist paintings of the fascinating early 20th-century German artist Gabriele Münter. Slow down, look closely, and reflect as you explore the window as a metaphor for shifting perspectives in our lives.

Poet William Butler Yeats was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, the cultural movement that preceded the country’s political independence from Britain. Lucy Collins, editor of the Irish University Review and an associate professor at University College Dublin, explores the cultural politics of early 20th-century Ireland as the crucible within which Yeats’ work was formed and examines how the political and the personal combine in some of his greatest poems.

Folklorists Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman explore an array of chilling holiday folklore from around the world, including the German Krampus who visits children who don’t make the “nice” list, the Icelandic Jólakötturinn, a gigantic cat that devours naughty children, and the Welsh Mari Lwyd, a skeletal horse with a taste for song and poetry. They reintroduce you to a more complex vision of winter, one that’s easy to forget in an increasingly hectic and standardized season.

When classicist Michael Ventris deciphered the Linear B script in 1952, he shed light on our understanding of the politics, economy, society, and religion of the world of Late Bronze Age Greece, sometimes referred to as "Mycenaean." Classicist and archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis examines what this writing system and a second still-undeciphered “Minoan” script, Linear A, can tell us about life in the Aegean during the second millennium B.C.E.

The late 18th century was a period rife with revolutionary fervor and transformative ideas that altered the course of history. The American Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1776, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, ratified in 1789, were radical manifestos that proclaimed new principles of governance and human dignity and challenged centuries-old political and social structures. Historian Alexander Mikaberidze explores these groundbreaking documents and the individuals who dared to imagine a new order that ignited flames of liberty that spread throughout the world.

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude consistently makes the lists of the “best novels of the 20th century.” With Joseph Luzzi, professor of literature at Bard College, explore the novel’s depiction of the colonial experience, its use of magical realism, the role of the supernatural in the narrative, and the qualities that give the book’s language its beauty and inventiveness.

A searing account of a former slave woman, Sethe, and her relationship to a mysterious figure whom she associates with her lost daughter, Toni Morrison’s Beloved provides insight into the horrors of slavery as well as the ways in which past personal trauma can continue to haunt the present. Joseph Luzzi, professor of literature at Bard College, considers the cultural, historical, and social issues in the novel; explores the brilliance of Morrison’s prose; and explains how and why she emerged as one of the most important American novelists of the last half century.

New York City in the early decades of the 20th century was a shaping force of America’s national culture. Cultural historian George Scheper explores the impact of the Progressive Era and the subsequent Jazz Age as reflected in the art, literature, and architecture created in the metropolis. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Though the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 helped propel the nation into the Civil War, the author has generally been thought of as having little engagement with the conflict itself. Author and scholar Robert S. Levine addresses that assumption by reviewing key moments in Stowe’s career from 1852 to 1870, focusing on the Civil War period with a discussion of her letters, novels, and essays—and providing a new picture of Stowe as a vigorous exponent of interracial democracy long after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In 15th-century Europe, members of the cultural elite, including Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. These were known as Renaissance studiolos (or "little studios”). Literature professor Andrew Hui tells the story of these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation and reveals how they became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.