Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, Professor of Literature

In a letter to the Bard community, President Leon Botstein memorialized Professor Heinowitz.

To the Bard College Community:

It is my sad duty to inform members of the Bard community of the untimely loss of our friend and colleague, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, who suffered a tragic accident while hiking in California over the weekend. Her loved ones ask that her memory be honored and her family remembered in our prayers.

Professor of Literature Rebecca Cole Heinowitz was born and raised in San Diego, California. She earned a BA in creative writing and comparative literature from the University of California San Diego and an MA and PhD in comparative literature from Brown University. Prior to coming to Bard College, she taught literature and Spanish at Brown University, Brandeis University, and Dartmouth College. 

Dr. Heinowitz joined the faculty at Bard College in 2004 and became full professor in 2021. She was a vibrant member of the Languages and Literature division and taught courses that spanned Romantic and Gothic literature, Romantic imperialism, 20th-century and contemporary poetry and poetics. Cole Heinowitz was an unforgettable and unique teacher and colleague. Her mind and personality were magnetic and singular. She combined a mesmerizing presence, uncommon perceptions, and a deep and intense enthusiasm for scholarship and art and the community of learning. 

Most recently she led a seminar at BardNYC titled Poetry as Radical Community: New York Poetics from 1960 to the Present, that extended the classroom space to introduce students to the network of poetry communities active around them. Other courses Rebecca Cole Heinowitz developed and taught at the College include: British Romantic Poetry, The Powers of Horror: Sublimity, Exoticism, and Monstrosity, Rewriting Conquest/Envisioning Latin America, Poets Theater, Empire, Sexuality and the Making of Romantic Travel, Romanticism and the Philosophy of Language, and many more. Dr. Heinowitz also regularly taught First-Year Seminar and was codirector of the course, with Robert Weston, from 2013–16. She was a guiding light of the Literature Program as director from 2016 through 2021. She joined the Language and Thinking Program faculty in 2024 and was a frequent guest speaker, introducing students to the world of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through a careful consideration of how “the creature has become such an apt metaphor for the diverse range of persons that society excludes,” ultimately encouraging her audience to consider interdisciplinary questions of kinship and belonging. 

An accomplished writer, musician, translator, and scholar, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz’s unique gifts spanned many literary-historical fields, genres, and languages. She was the author of three books of poetry: Daily Chimera (Incommunicado, 1995), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour, 2002), and The Rubicon (The Rest, 2007). She translated widely from Spanish into English, concentrating on 20th-Century Latin American poetry. Translated works include Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic (Ediciones Sin Fin, 2023; Wave Books, 2013) and Bleeding from All 5 Senses (White Pine, 2020), both by Mexican infrarrealist poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro; A Tradition of Rupture, the collected essays of Argentine poet and fiction writer Alejandra Pizarnik (Ugly Duckling, 2019); and Primeval Wing by Mexican poet Mara Larrosa (forthcoming from Ediciones Norteadas). Dr. Heinowitz’s translations from French include Succubations & Incubations: Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (Infinity Land, 2020).

Rebecca Cole Heinowitz’s scholarly and critical writings have appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Wordsworth Circle, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, the Chicago Review, and the Boston Review as well as in the edited volumes the Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose and Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire. She was also the author of the critical monograph Rewriting Conquest: Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Since Rewriting Conquest, she had been working on a book-length study exploring the poetics of direct communication with the nonhuman world, Poetry as Coexistence.

Dr. Heinowitz was the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a 2019 New York State Council on the Arts Grant (for her translations of Pizarnik) and the Cliff Becker Prize from the American Literary Translators Association (for her translation of Bleeding from All 5 Senses). She performed her poetry in a myriad of venues including the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Washington Art Gallery at Dutchess Community College, the Boston Annual Poetry Conference, and the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz was also cohost and cocurator (with Iris Cushing) of the Imaginary Elegies Reading Series at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, New York. 

A celebration of life will take place on Tuesday, June 3 at 11 am at Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Synagogue, the country’s second oldest synagogue and the oldest in continuous use in Charleston, South Carolina. Members of the Bard community are invited to attend the service via live streaming here.

Those who wish to attend in person and participate in the memorial are asked to speak from prepared remarks of no more than five minutes. For more information, please contact Hillary Green ([email protected]).

In remembrance of her life, the family has requested that any charitable donations be made to the Rebecca Cole Heinowitz Memorial Fund for Student Support and Relief at Bard by clicking here. Or, send checks to: Gift Recorder, Bard College PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 (please note on the memo line in memory of Rebecca Cole Heinowitz for SSRF). Alternatively, donations may be made to RMHC Charleston, 81 Gadsden Street, Charleston, South Carolina 29401.

The chaplaincy, Dean of Students Office, and the counseling services are available to all members of the Bard community, particularly those who wish to seek help in coming to terms with this news. Those resources are available after hours by calling Security. The Student Services team will be hosting open drop in hours in the Yellow Room in the Campus Center from 4:00–6:00 pm on Thursday, May 29 for any members of the community seeking information, advice, consolation, and counseling.

Leon Botstein
President

Post Date: 05-28-2025