Professor Barnstone completed two books for Yale University Press: Portraits of 301 Poets and African Bestiary. He’s in good health, only 95, and happy with his wife Sarah Handler who he met in Beijing 40 years ago, though COVID has stopped their yearly months in Paris.
Professor Bernhardt-Kabisch published Kreise um Erda: Sonette und andere Liebeslyrik in 2023.
Sumie Jones, Professor Emerita, received a Lifetime-Achievement Prize in 2019 and completed, as editor-in-chief, a three-volume anthology in English of early modern Japanese urban literature in 2020. Since then, she has been living a somber life in a California retirement home.
Sumie gave two lectures last year. The first, “Uptown and Downtown in Early Modern Japanese Urban Literature: The Making of a Three-Volume Anthology,” was hosted by UC Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies with Michael Emmerich (UCLA) as commentator. It was attended on zoom by a record 170 global participants. In the program’s chat, Kristin Reed, a CMLT Ph.D. (2009) who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, wrote warmly recalling her experience as Sumie’s student and assistant, which moved Sumie to tears.
The second, titled “Punk Theatre Gone Classical: An Introduction to Japan’s Kabuki,” was an onsite lecture in May, given at the Village where she resides. The outrageous fashion in clothing among affluent juvenile delinquents in 17th-century Kyoto and a woman dancer who turned that fashion into what came to be known as kabuki fascinated 40 residents ages 70-100 and the history of the battles between censoring authorities and theatrical arts inspired much discussion.
A reading group led by the Village’s Building Engineer (who is impressively self-taught in Sanskrit and South Asian cultural history) introduced her to The Mahabharata. The leader became busy with the Village’s administration and the reading group dispersed with only a third of the epic read. Being a masochistic reader, Sumie, alone, has continued to enjoy the difficulty of the immense text in John D. Smith’s translation, making it her chief occupation currently.
A four-volume study, LITERATURE, A WORLD HISTORY, prepared under the auspices of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History, was published in summer 2022 by Wiley-Blackwell. This vast international project covering thousands of years of literary history from around the globe was prepared by a team of more than 30 scholars over a period of seventeen years. Professor Emerita Eileen Julien served as the project's Africa Editor, assembling the Africa team, editing and tying together their work.
In October, Professor Julien organized a solo show: Kalidou Sy, Return to the Native Land at the Museum of Black Civilizations (MCN) in Dakar, Senegal.
The subject of the exhibition, Kalidou Sy had been the director of Senegal's Schools of Fine Arts and Art Education (1986-1996); he was viewed as both an exceptional leader and an indefatigable "advocate for the arts."
Upon retiring in 1996, Sy moved to Bloomington, where he devoted himself fully to painting and artistic research until he died in 2005. In 2007 the Indiana University Art Museum, now the Eskenazi, held a retrospective in his honor. During Sy's American sojourn, he produced, above all, mixed-media paintings--his bogolan series--inspired by the Malian technique for dying cloth which he adapted to his new home, thereby creating "African" works made from materials at hand, such as Indiana clay. Sy was preparing a solo show to be held in Dakar, when he died. He wanted to present this new work from his "American period" to colleagues and citizens in Dakar and to donate two major paintings to Senegal.
Kalidou Sy: Return to the Native Land was meant to honor that dream. Alongside the presentation of Sy's paintings and drawings, the show featured a colloquium with artists and scholars from American and Senegalese art schools and universities who addressed the distinction of Sy's work; the relationship of "exile" to creativity, and the role that the Art Schools have played and continue to play in African and world arts.
Julien is now working on a book which will comprise photos of the show, the presentations of the colloquium participants, and testimonies by colleagues, students, friends and family.
Two books by Professor Sadlier were recently published: Memories of Underdevelopment, a study on the film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film: From Nationalism to Protest.
In addition to numerous pieces of her original poetry being published around the world, Professor Volkova also recently published a new book: Podoby Exilu v židovské literatuře a myšlení. She was also awarded Diplom imeni Atanasa Vančeva for High Literary Mastery by the committee of the “Sozvezdie duxovnosti” competition in Kyiv.
The College of Arts