• After reading the book Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, by Professor Emeritus of Physics Robert Romer ’52, Gorham Cross ’52 acquired copies for his grandchildren’s high school library. When Romer shared with Cross his hope that every high school library in the Valley could have a copy, Cross made that happen, donating enough money to purchase 100 books and the necessary postage.
  • A Mead Art Museum exhibition that runs through May 29 sheds light on Orra White Hitchcock (1796-1863), wife of Amherst President Edward Hitchcock. She produced watercolors of native plants, lithographs of the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers, symbolic compositions and drawings of prehistoric fossils. She also created geological designs for her husband’s lectures.
  • Anthony Bishop, associate professor of chemistry,  received a 2010 Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. He will use the $60,000 grant to purchase equipment used to test the potency and selectivity of compounds in living cells.
  • Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America, by Assistant Professor of Black Studies and History Hilary Moss, won the History of Education Society’s 2010 award for the year’s most outstanding book on the history of education.
  • The Phi Beta Kappa Society awarded its 2011-12 Romanell Professorship to Professor of Philosophy Alexander George. As part of this professorship, George will deliver three public lectures at Amherst. “I expect to talk about belief in miracles,” George says, “via a consideration of the views of David Hume and of Ludwig Wittgenstein.”
  • Last May, the North American Society for Sport History waived a rule that former presidents are not eligible for awards and surprised Professor Allen Guttmann with an award in recognition of his “outstanding leadership in sport history.”
  • A unit of the National Archives has awarded $56,744 to Frost Library’s Archives and Special Collections to process the personal papers of three men who played key roles in economic and political reconstruction after World War II. The materials belonged to Charles R. Kades, a writer of the Japanese constitution; former Amherst professor Karl Loewenstein, who helped develop a constitution and civil administration in Germany; and former Amherst professor and trustee Willard L. Thorp ’20, assistant secretary of state for economic affairs under President Truman and a principal architect of the Marshall Plan.
Tags:  FYI