Faculty

BIOGRAPHY:

Franco Baldasso (Ph.D, New York University) is the Director of Italian Studies, Assistant Professor of Italian, and Director of the Study Abroad Program in Italy. He published a book on the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna, 2007) and co-edited with Simona Wright an issue of Nemla-Italian Studies titled “Italy in WWII and the Transition to Democracy: Memory, Fiction, Histories.” His articles appeared in Modern Language Notes, Romance Notes, Context, Nemla-Italian Studies, Poetiche and Scritture Migranti. He is the recipient of many awards, such as the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, NYU Humanities Initiative Honorary Fellowship and the Remarque Institute Doctoral Fellowship.

Baldasso collaborates with publicbooks.org and is member of the scientific committee of the Archivio della Memoria della Grande Guerra of the Centro Studi sulla Grande Guerra “P. Pieri” in Vittorio Veneto (TV). He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled: “Against Redemption: The Early Postwar Debate over the Transition from Fascism to Democracy in Italy.”
 

Biography:

B.A., Bard College; M.A., Brown University. Visiting artist, American Academy in Rome (1994). Awards and prizes: Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2014), Lannan Residency Fellowship (2006), Bruno Arcudi Award (1997), Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College (1994), Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature (1991), General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers (1988). Contributing editor, Conjunctions. Author of five short story collections: Tales from the Next Village, The Star Café, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. Contributor to publications including Tin House, Black Warrior Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Epoch, Conjunctions, Sulfur, Gargoyle, and Iowa Review. At Bard since 2002.
 

Diploma in Musicology, Franz Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Program annotator, Cleveland Orchestra (1990– ); editor, Bartók and His World (Princeton University Press, 1995); contributor, Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra and Cambridge Companion to Bartók; articles in Orbis Musicae, International Journal of Musicology, Institute for Canadian Music Newsletter, Hungarian Quarterly, others. Visiting assistant professor, Oberlin College (2003– ); has also taught at Case Western Reserve University, Franz Liszt Academy of Music, John Carroll University, Kent State University. At Bard since 2007.

Joseph Luzzi (PhD, Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature and the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale UP, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), a Finalist for “The Bridge,” Book Award from the American Initiative for Italian Culture Foundation, an International Competition in Italy and the U.S.; My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins, 2015), a Book of the Month Selection from Minnesota Public Radio.

His forthcoming books include:

• A Terrible Beautiful Magic: Why We Need Literature (HarperCollins), a meditation on the centrality of literary discourse in our present cultural moment.
• Dante’s “Divine Comedy”: A Biography (Princeton UP), a consideration of this epic poem’s afterlife for the Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series.
• Editor, The Total Art: Italian Cinema from Silent Screen to Digital Image (Bloomsbury), an anthology of essays by leading scholars on issues and themes in Italian film history.

An active critic, Luzzi’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, Cineaste, Bookforum, and many other publications. Luzzi’s articles have appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature, Dante Studies, Italica, Adaptation, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, and many others, and he has co-edited special volumes on translation for the Yale Journal of Criticism and on literary value for the Modern Language Quarterly.

He has received fellowships from Villa I Tatti (Harvard University), the National Humanities Center (National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow), and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Other awards include a Yale College Teaching Prize and the Grandgent Essay Prize from the Dante Society of America.

B.A., M.A., Oxford University. Tenor; has had distinguished career in opera, oratorio, and recital. Debuted as Bastien in Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne at Kent Opera (1984); has performed, taught, and coached throughout Europe, Japan, and North America. Has worked under Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Ivan Fischer, René Jacobs, and other eminent conductors. CD recordings include performances in Bach’s St. John Passion (BWV 245) under John Eliot Gardiner, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy under Roger Norrington. First prize, English Song Award (1985); winner, Oratorio Society of New York Singing Competition (1999). At Bard since 2006.

Website: http://rufusmuller.com

Biography:

Karen T. Raizen (Ph.D., Yale University) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian. Her research focuses on operatic adaptations of Italian classics, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the Italian intellectual figure Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bloomsbury, 2018), and has published articles, essays, and reviews in Italica, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, and Senses of Cinema; she has also worked on a number of translations of scholarly articles and operas. She is a recipient of the Yale Elizabethan Club prize for her dissertation, “Adaptations in Arcadia: Orlando furioso on the Eighteenth-Century Operatic Stage.”
Dr. Raizen also has extensive training as a classical violist (B.M., Rice University; M.M., Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana). She has played in a number of ensembles and participated in festivals both in the U.S. and abroad.

Karen Sullivan is a specialist in comparative literature of the Middle Ages. She is the author of three books--"The Interrogation of Joan of Arc"; "Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature"; and "The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors"--as well as numerous articles on medieval French and Provençal literature and history. She is currently writing a book entitled "The Danger of Romance, or Why Literature is Better than Life." She regularly teaches medieval and Renaissance Italian authors (such as Francis of Assisi, Dante, Aquinas, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione, Ariosto, and Tasso) in her courses "Comparative Literature I," "Scholasticism vs. Humanism," "The Danger of Romance," and "Florence."