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Dear Bennington Alumni and Friends,

Welcome to the new Bennington Magazine! 

In December 2022, when the Taliban’s ban on tertiary education took effect in Afghanistan, Aisha Khurram was about to finish her law degree. She and her classmates mourned the painful repeat of history. Two decades of progress for women’s rights—which in 2020 related to more than 100,000 Afghan women enrolled in public or private universities and more than 2,000 female lecturers at higher education institutions—were being reduced to ashes.

51�������� congratulates Bruna Dantas Lobato ’15 who won the National Book Award for her translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain in a ceremony on the evening of Wednesday, November 15.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the first person to prove that the earth was a sphere and to calculate its circumference. Swagatta Datta ’23, who studied theoretical mathematical physics at Bennington, is following in ​​his footsteps. Only Datta is interested in the universe.

By Craig Morgan Teicher

Hugh Ryan graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2009 and went on to publish two acclaimed books of nonfiction, When Brooklyn Was Queer (2019) and The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which won the Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction and the Warren Johansson Award. He has taught nonfiction at the Writing Seminars since 2022, and just sold his next book, Becoming History, a memoir in essays. He talked with me about turning research into writing and falling back in love with the essay.