Dear Members of the Barnard Community,
It is my honor to share the very exciting news that Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri ‘89 will return to Barnard College as the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing. In addition to her leadership in Creative Writing, she will hold affiliate status in the Comparative Literature and Translation Studies Program and in the Department of Italian, and will be appointed as a Senior Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. Jhumpa Lahiri will join the Barnard faculty in July 2022, after completing the spring semester at Princeton University, where she has been a professor of Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts since 2015 and the Director of the Creative Writing Program since 2019.
Jhumpa Lahiri graduated from Barnard in 1989, with a degree in English and a focus on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. From Barnard, she went on to receive an M.A. in English, an M.A in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, an M.A. in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, all from Boston University. Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award, and The New Yorker Debut of the Year Award for her debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. She is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in fiction. In 2014, she was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. While living in Rome, Lahiri composed a collection of essays in Italian titled In Altre Parole (In Other Words). She continues to write and publish in Italian: The Clothing of Books (2016), Dove mi trovo (2018), and Il quaderno di Nerina (2021) were originally published in Italian. Her latest book, Translating Myself and Others, will be published in May 2022.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s return to the Barnard community will enrich the academic and artistic pursuits of our students and extend the College’s storied history of fostering the art of writing. She will teach courses in creative writing, translation, Italian, and comparative literature, and will not only share her masterful approach to fiction writing, but her deep learning in translation studies, Italian, and comparative literature as well.
To learn more about Lahiri’s background, including a timeline of her career, visit Jhumpa Lahiri ’89 Returns to Barnard College as the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing.
We are thrilled to be welcoming Jhumpa Lahiri back to Barnard, and certain that her imprint on creative writing, translation, and the critical and intellectual discourse within the humanities will be profound.
My very best,
Linda A. Bell
Provost and Dean of the Faculty