• Howell D. “Chick” Chickering, the G. Armour Craig Professor of Language and Literature, received the Medieval Academy of America’s 2011 CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies. Past students submitted beaming reviews in support of his nomination. Wrote one student, “What Chick transmitted to you was a total, unrestricted love of the subject, the subject being learning, and learning being exercising the brain, laughing, not understanding and not understanding till finally you got it.”
  • In a bid to boost their bottom lines, colleges have always worked hard to host camps, enrichment courses and other programs during the summer, when most students are away. While some colleges have seen declines in these programs, Amherst’s 2011 summer revenues increased to about $1.6 million, from $1.3 million two years ago. Amherst hosted Nike-sponsored tennis camps and a popular Great Books camp (cofounded by Professor Ilan Stavans) this summer, among many other programs.
  • Abiodun_Rowland
    Rowland Abiodun
    “Magic!” one audience member exclaimed after the second act of The Garden of Martyrs, a new opera composed by Eric Sawyer, associate professor of music. Based on Michael C. White’s novel by the same name and partly funded by the college’s Center for Community Engagement, the opera examines the 1806 case of  two Irish Catholic immigrants who were executed in Northampton, Mass., for a murder they likely didn’t commit.
  • Luca Grillo, assistant professor of classics and European studies, received an honorable mention “for excellence of scholarly and teaching achievements” in the recent competition for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty. Grillo plans to write a commentary on the 56 B.C. Cicero oration “On the Consular Provinces.”
  • Rowland Abiodun, the John C. Newton Professor of Art and the History of Art and Black Studies, received the Arts Council of the African Studies Association Leadership Award. “As the first art historian from Africa to receive this award,” he says, “I’m deeply honored and humbled.”
  • In an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Review, Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, advocated for federal passage of the DREAM Act and tried to answer the question: “An illegal immigrant earns a Ph.D. Now what?

Photo by Charlie Quigg '09

Tags:  FYI