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Welcome Letter from Program Director William Dixon

Letter to the Class of 2025 

May 11, 2021 

Dear Language and Thinking Students, 

Welcome to Bard! My name is Bill Dixon, and I am the Director of the Bard College Language and Thinking Program. I am writing to introduce myself and to tell you about some of the work that we will be doing together in August and to tell you what you need to do to get ready for it. 

The first thing that you should do is to purchase and read Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. You should bring the book with you to Annandale and finish reading it by the time you arrive. Daniel Mendelsohn teaches Classics and First Year Seminar here at Bard, and his book tells the story of having his own father attend his seminar on Homer’s Odyssey some years ago. Mendelsohn’s story is about self-knowledge, family, and memory, but it also about the lifelong work of education more broadly, both as a teacher and as a student, a practice that often depends upon a certain openness to new language, ideas, texts, and one’s own writing too. We think that you will find Mendelsohn’s story to be an inspiring invitation to your own journeys at Annandale, one that will take a fresh turn once you begin the Language and Thinking Program in August. 

Much of our work in L&T will be centered around the Language and Thinking Anthology, which is a collection of texts that you will receive from your instructor on the first day of the program. Our Anthology this year asks the question, “What begins with translation?” In the course of our readings, we will reimagine the work of translation as a practice that takes many strange turns: between languages and cultures, but also between genres of art and music, scientific disciplines, political movements, social identities, and even forms of life. The writers in our Anthology (Sophocles, Charles Darwin, Audre Lorde, Etel Adnan, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, among many others) all grapple with translations of various kinds in this larger sense. 

To begin in translation often means to turn a corner without quite knowing where you are headed, which is an excellent way to find yourself in someplace new. It is also an excellent way to practice your education in community with other people. Throughout our work together in the Language and Thinking Program, we will often find ourselves surprised by crossings into new places. We will read and write together, create and perform new work in collaboration with each other, and think with and listen to each other.  

I look forward to meeting all of you in August. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. I can be reached by email at [email protected]. 

Best wishes, 

William Dixon PhD. 
Director 
The Language and Thinking Program 
Bard College 
[email protected]