Paul La Farge (1970–2023), Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing

To the Bard College Community:

It is with great sadness that I write to inform the Bard community of the loss of our esteemed colleague Paul La Farge on January 18, 2023, to cancer. Throughout his long battle with the disease, Paul’s attitude toward the illness was one of curiosity, courage, and compassion, and his generosity of spirit was deeply inspirational to all who were fortunate enough to know him. He was 52 years old. 

Paul was a native of New York City and attended Yale University. He first came to Bard in 2005 as the fourth winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, for his brilliant novel Hausmann, or the Distinction. The novel’s playful approach to historical fiction was typical of Paul’s oeuvre, in which the metafictional and the traditional are often intertwined. Paul began teaching at Bard in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2005, and taught Written Arts in the undergraduate College from 2010 to 2013. Over the course of his career, Paul also taught literature and writing at Wesleyan University, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Leipzig, and Bennington College.

Paul was the author of five novels including The Artist of the Missing (1999), Hausmann, or the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011), and The Night Ocean (2017), and was in the process of completing his sixth novel at the time of his death. Paul’s prose was marked by elegance and wit, capacious intellect, precision, and refinement. His fiction was both erudite and humane, and the intersection of literature, technology, history, and culture informed his pedagogy. His stories and essays appeared in the New Yorker, Cabinet, the Paris Review, the Believer, Conjunctions, Salon, Playboy, the Village Voice, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s, and ranged from explorations of the Elvish language in Tolkien’s books to investigations of psychic research.

Paul was the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin, and received two California Book Awards.

Paul left an indelible mark on the Written Arts and MFA programs at Bard. He will be greatly missed. On behalf of the entire Bard community, I wish to extend our deepest condolences his wife, Sarah Stern.

Leon Botstein
President
Bard College

Post Date: 01-25-2023