News & Events 02/2002

AMHERST, Mass.—Two prominent scholars will speak on affirmative action as part of a national round table being held in Amherst from Sunday, March 3, through Tuesday, March 5. Both talks are open to the public at no charge.

Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation and co-director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, will lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 3, in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College.

Juliet Garcia, president of the University of Texas at Brownsville, will speak at 8:00 p.m. Monday, March 4, in the Cole Assembly Room.

A professor of education and social policy at Harvard, Orfield is especially interested in civil rights, education policy, urban policy and minority opportunity. He recently has written about standardized tests, changing patterns of school desegregation and the impact of diversity on the educational experiences of law students. In addition to his scholarly work, Orfield has served as a court-appointed expert in school desegregation cases and has testified in civil rights cases across the U.S. His books include Raising Standards or Raising Barriers?: Inequality and High-Stakes Testing in Public Education (2001) and Chilling Admissions: The Affirmative Action Crisis and Search for Alternatives (1998).

Juliet Garcia was named president of the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) in 1992, after serving for six years as president of Texas Southmost College (TSC), where she was recognized as the first Mexican-American woman in the nation to head an American university. When she was named president of UTB, Garcia was charged with developing a partnership between UTB and TSC, a community college, in order to consolidate resources, increase efficiency, eliminate transfer barriers and provide improved educational opportunities for the people of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The partnership was lauded by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools as the first community university of its kind in the south. Today, the community university, known as UTB/TSC, offers a full range of occupational-technical, continuing education and community education programs with certificate and associate degrees traditional in community colleges. UTB/TSC also offers baccalaureate and masters degrees. Students move through the partnership without need to transfer.

Orfield’s and Garcia’s talks are part of the second National Round Table on Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action for Senior Administrative Practitioners in Small Liberal Arts Colleges and Universities. The theme of the round table this year is “Affirmative Action/Diversity/Inclusion: Devising a Relevant Paradigm.” The event is hosted by Amherst College and Five Colleges Inc.

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AMHERST, Mass.—The Amherst College Campus Police Department is teaching a new version of its popular Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) classes to a younger generation of women, running a series of self-defense classes for 12- to 16-year-olds and their college-age mentors in conjunction with the Five-College Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. The girls and their mentors are meeting for five Monday evenings, ending with their final class, on March 11,when the girls will put on pads and practice techniques against simulated attacks.

“We are teaching the same techniques that we teach to older students but we are framing the discussion and the explanations in a way that is comfortable and appropriate for younger people,” said Amherst College police officer Ali Wicks about the new Big Brothers/Big Sisters class. “The reality is that the type of training and empowerment that goes on in RAD may be most essential for girls and young women, so we would not want to exclude them from the opportunity to learn these skills.”

In the past five years, 350 women at Amherst College—students, faculty and staff—have participated in the Rape Aggression Defense course on the college campus. The course teaches its participants how to react and protect themselves in a dangerous situation, a lesson that the campus police department hopes to be able to convey to younger students as well. More information about RAD, a large network of self-defense educators throughout the U.S. and Canada, can be found at the RAD System's Website.

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AMHERST, Mass.-- Jodi Magness, professor of classical and Near Eastern archaeology at Tufts University, will speak on “Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus” on Thursday, March 7, at 4:30 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room, Converse Hall at Amherst College. Magness’s talk, the second in series called Rethinking Jesus: His Intellectual, Spiritual and Material World, is sponsored by the Willis D. Wood Fund and the Religion Department at Amherst College. Her talk is free and open to the public.

Magness has been a professor in the departments of art history and classics at Tufts since September 1992. She received a B.A. in archaeology and history from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1977 and a Ph.D. in classical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. From 1990 to 1992 she was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Syro-Palestine Archaeology at the Center for Old World Art and Archaeology at Brown University. Magness has participated on many excavations in Israel and Greece. In the summer of 1995 she co-directed excavations in the Roman siege camps at Masada and Israel, and in the summer of 1997 she directed excavations in the ancient village of Yattir in Israel.

Professor Magness’s primary fields of research interest include the Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic pottery of Palestine; Roman military equipment; the archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls; and ancient synagogues. Her publications include Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology circa 200-800 C.E. (1993), and many journal and encyclopedia articles.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Poet and physician Rafael Campo, a 1987 graduate of Amherst College, will discuss “Medicine and Humanities: the Liberal Arts and Medical Education in the 21st Century” in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at the college on Thursday, March 7, at 7 p.m. Campo will read his own poetry and reflect on the influence the liberal arts had on his training as a doctor. His talk, sponsored by the Charles Drew Pre-medical Society at Amherst College, is free and open to the public.

Rafael Campo “listens to the sounds the body makes, but what he hears is poetry,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. David Abel in the Boston Globe noted that “Campo himself has long turned to writing as a means of coming to terms with his dual role of living in the mainstream wearing a white coat and being a gay Cuban American.”

Since graduating from Amherst and receiving his medical degree at Harvard in 1992, Campo has written four books of poetry: Landscape With Human Figure (2002); Diva (1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; What the Body Told (1996), winner of a Lambda Literary Award; and The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (1994), winner of the National Poetry Series 1993 Open Competition. The Poetry of Healing (1996), his collection of prose, also received a Lambda Literary Award for Memoir.

Campo is a PEN Center West Literary Award finalist and a recipient of the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences Annual Achievement Award, and recently received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Echoing Green Foundation. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The Best American Poetry 1995, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares and the Washington Post Book World. He teaches medicine at Harvard Medical School and is an associate at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, having joined the Division of General Medicine in 1995.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Political columnist, provocateur and biographer David Horowitz will speak in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College on Tuesday, March 12, at 7:30 p.m. Horowitz was in the news last year for placing provocative advertisements in college newspapers that denounced reparations for slavery and suggested antiwar demonstrations after September 11 were attacks on America akin to treason. His talk, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Amherst College Republicans and the Young America’s Foundation.

Horowitz is the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles. A best-selling author and editor, Horowitz may be best known for his intellectual and political journey from left-wing radicalism to conservatism. After earning a B.A. in English from Columbia University in 1959 and an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961, Horowitz emerged as a leader of the New Left as editor of Ramparts magazine, an influential left-wing journal.

Dissatisfied with the results of radicalism in practice, Horowitz withdrew from politics in the ‘70s to write. He and Peter Collier co-authored a series of best-selling biographies of prominent American families: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976), The Kennedys: An American Drama (1985), The Fords: An American Epic (1987) and The Roosevelts: An American Saga (1994). For these works, the Los Angeles Times called Collier and Horowitz “the premier chroniclers of American dynastic tragedy.” In 1978 Horowitz was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1990 he received the Teach Freedom Award from former president Ronald Reagan.

In Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (1989), Collier and Horowitz chronicled the legacy of the New Left and its effects on American politics and culture. Horowitz’s political journey is recounted in his autobiography Radical Son, (1997). Author George Gilder called Radical Son “the first great American autobiography of his generation.”

Horowitz is the editor of Frontpage, a conservative online publication of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, in which he has outlined his recent ad campaigns. He also appears often in the online magazine Salon, where he has written about Noam Chomsky, Bin Laden’s American supporters, Social Security, police brutality in Cincinnati and gays in the military. His latest article, “Axis of Snobbery,” condemned “liberal intellectuals who praise Bush for prosecuting the war but still insist he’s stupid” as “the real dummies.”

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AMHERST, Mass.—The Amherst College Choral Society, directed by Mallorie Chernin (Greg Brown ’98, acting director), and the Amherst College Orchestra, directed by Mark Lane Swanson, will present a concert of American music on Sunday, March 3, at 3 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall.

Swanson will conduct a program that will feature the “Canticle of Freedom” by Aaron Copland, “An American in Paris” by George Gershwin and “Chichester Psalms” by Leonard Bernstein. “Chichester Psalms” will feature young countertenor Sam Wadsworth of West Hartford, Conn.

The concert is free and open to the public, although early arrival is strongly recommended.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Noelle Noyes, a senior at Amherst College, has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Scholarship and will travel next year to Osnabrhck to study the integration into German life of ethnic Germans who have returned to Germany after centuries of exile. She is the daughter of Kristi and Geoffrey Noyes of Oneida, New York.

The “unique story” of these Spaetaussiedler, Noyes wrote in her application, began in the late 18th century. Catherine the Great, “German-born empress of Russia, actively recruited German farmers to resettle in newly conquered territories in order to cultivate the fertile soil. By 1897, there were 1,971,000 ethnic Germans living in the Russian Empire.” Their lives were “relatively peaceful” until the Second World War, when Josef Stalin, “using the invasion of the USSR by Nazi forces as a pretext, began a program of cultural genocide against the German population,” including mass exile to Siberia.

The post-war German constitution guaranteed these exiles a “right of return,” which more than a million and a half ethnic Germans have exercised since the fall of the Soviet Union. During the 40 years of the Cold War, only around 1 million ethnic Germans were able to migrate from the Soviet bloc to Germany. Since the easing of travel restrictions that began in 1987, however, 2.7 million Spaetaussiedler have exercised their right of return.

Noyes spent two summers in Germany, as an intern with the U.S. Department of State in Leipzig, and with a German organization in Brandenburg devoted to increasing cultural awareness. Working with “Project World Openness” in the village of Eggersdorf in 2001, she found that the “Spaetaussiedler were extremely isolated and very hesitant even to make conversation with the Germans.”

Her experience in Germany was frankly “disheartening.” Noyes, who grew up in a small village in New York State and spent a semester in China experiencing the “frustrations” and “mistrust” that often assail an outsider, says she hopes to “produce a comprehensive study of the ways in which government policy, German historical and societal attitudes towards immigration and citizenship, and the unique immigrant experiences of the Spaetaussiedler themselves all fit together to produce the isolation of the Spaetaussiedler within German society.” She will work with Klaus Bade at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrhck University.

Noyes is writing her senior honors thesis in European Studies at Amherst on the Spaetaussiedler, and hopes to continue her graduate education in international relations. She also has played ice hockey and ultimate Frisbee, run track and cross-country, played the oboe in the Amherst College Orchestra and Woodwind Quintet, and worked in the college library.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is a non-profit foundation established by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953 for the promotion of international research cooperation. Since 1990, the foundation has awarded 10 German Chancellor Scholarships annually to prospective leaders from the United States to carry out research projects in Germany. These scholars are also given an opportunity to appreciate the social, cultural, economic and political situation in Germany. The von Humboldt Foundation promotes an active world-wide network of scholars. See the Foundation's Website.

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AMHERST, Mass.— The Dickinson Homestead, home of the poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), at 280 Main St. in Amherst, Mass., will open for its 2002 season on Saturday, March 2. The Homestead—the birthplace and home of the poet for 40 years—is open for guided tours from March through mid-December.

New this year is a free exhibit that will introduce visitors to major themes in Dickinson’s life, including her poetry, her education, her family and her interest in immortality. Located in the new Tour Center in the kitchen at the Homestead, the exhibit is free and open to the public whenever the Homestead is open.

The Homestead and The Evergreens will sponsor several events this year, including a concert on Sunday, April 21, at 3 p.m. in honor of National Poetry Month, and “ 'The Angle of a Landscape’: Nature and Art in Emily Dickinson’s World,” a series of summer programs related to the outdoors. The annual Emily Dickinson Poetry Walk will take place on Saturday, May 18 and the Birthday Open House on Saturday, Dec. 14.

The Homestead’s days and hours of operation change seasonally. In March, the Homestead is open Wednesday and Saturday with tours on the hour from 1 to 4 p.m. (Last tour at 4 p.m.). Beginning in April, the Homestead is open Wednesday through Saturday, from 1 to 4 p.m.

Reservations are recommended for tours, especially on Saturdays, and may be made by calling 413/542-8161. Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors/students, $3 for young people ages 6 to 18, and no charge for children under 6 or for students currently enrolled at one of the Five Colleges.

For more information, please call the Homestead at 413/542-8161, or visit the Homestead’s web site. The Homestead is a National Historic Landmark owned by the Trustees of Amherst College.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Amherst College Class of 1979, a physician and leading medical ethicist, will talk about the “Ethics of International Research” on Friday, Feb. 22, at 4 p.m. in Stirn Auditorium at Amherst College. Emanuel’s talk, the annual Everett H. Pryde Lecture, will be free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served before the talk.

Emanuel, chair of the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, is also a breast oncologist. After earning an A.B. in chemistry at Amherst, he received an M.S. in biochemistry from Oxford University, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University. He was a fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at the Kennedy School of Government and Harvard University.

Emanuel has written about advance-care directives and end-of-life issues, euthanasia, the ethics of managed care, and the physician-patient relationship in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Annals of Internal Medicine and other medical journals. The JAMA praised his book on medical ethics, The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity (1991), for rejecting “the idea that our problems in medical ethics stem from new developments in technology. Rather, [Emanuel] traces them to the failure of liberal political philosophy,” for which Emanuel prescribes a remedy of “liberal communitarianism.”

Emanuel served on the Ethics Section of President Clinton's Health Care Task Force and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Brin Professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School.

The Everett H. Pryde Fund, established in 1986 by Mrs. Phyllis W. Pryde in honor of her husband, is used to bring to Amherst distinguished alumni who specialize in chemistry and to honor a senior who is an outstanding research assistant in chemistry. Everett Pryde graduated in the Amherst College Class of 1939, obtained an M.A. at the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, and went on to become a distinguished scientist and researcher in natural chemistry, publishing more than 100 papers and was awarded 20 patents.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Joseph E. Stiglitz, the John J. McCloy ’16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations at Amherst College and professor of economics at the graduate schools of both business and international relations at Columbia University, will deliver two lectures at Amherst College. He will discuss “Information Economics: A New Paradigm,” on Thursday, Feb. 28, and discuss “Globalization and Its Discontents,” on Friday, March 1. Both talks, which will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall, will be free and open to the public. Stiglitz, Amherst College Class of 1964, received the Nobel prize in economic science in 2001.

Stiglitz served as chief economist and senior vice president, development economics, at the World Bank from 1997 until 2000. The New York Times in 1999 called him “the most outspoken critic of the practices that the big industrial nations favor in their relations with the developing world,” and quoted his observation that there is an “intellectual gap between what we know and what is still practiced” in the bank’s thinking on sustaining growth in developing nations. The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration, Stiglitz has taught at Stanford, Princeton and Yale and All Souls College, Oxford.

Stiglitz is a leading scholar of the economics of the public sector. He helped revive interest in the economics of technical change and other factors that contribute to long-run increases in productivity and living standards. As an academic economist in the ’70s, Stiglitz helped create “the economics of information,” an approach that observes that markets fail to work perfectly because participants have less-than-perfect information. Without good information, for instance, foreign investors will not invest in a developing nation, no matter how high it sets its interest rates.

In 1979, the American Economic Association awarded Stiglitz its biennial John Bates Clark Award, given to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contributions to economics. He has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society.

The John J. McCloy ’16 Professorship was established at Amherst College in 1983 to honor John J. McCloy and his outstanding career of service and accomplishment in American politics and international diplomacy. Stiglitz’s visit is hosted by the Amherst College Department of Economics.

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AMHERST, Mass.—David W. Blight, the Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College, has received the Lincoln Prize given by the Lincoln & Soldiers’ Institute at Gettysburg College for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory ($29.95, 512 pp., Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2001). The prize is given annually to the best work on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era.

Race and Reunion is a study of how Americans—black and white, from North and South, soldiers and politicians, writers and editors—made sense of America's most wrenching war. Eric Foner of Columbia University wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “Race and Reunion demonstrates forcefully that...it still matters very much how we remember the Civil War.” “Blight conclusively demonstrates” wrote Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World, that the post-war “United States was caught up almost immediately in a ‘tormented relationship between healing and justice,’ and the abolitionist, emancipationist view of the war’s aims quickly receded into the background.”

Race and Reunion also received the 2001 Frederick Douglass Prize as the year’s outstanding book on slavery. A pioneer of the emerging field of memory studies, Blight is also the author of the award-winning Frederick Douglass’s Civil War (1989) and many other books and articles. More information from the Harvard University Press Website.

Previous Lincoln Prize winners have included Ken Burns, James M. McPherson and John Hope Franklin. They are announced each year on Lincoln's birthday (Feb. 12). The 12th annual award will be presented at an April 2 banquet at The Union League Club of New York. First prize is accompanied by a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ life-size bust, “Lincoln the Man.” More information on the Lincoln Prize.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Harvard University law professor Lani Guinier will speak on “Rethinking Gender and Power: Building Diverse Learning Communities,” on Saturday, Mar. 2, at 8 p.m. in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College. Her talk, free and open to the public, is part of a series of events at Amherst commemorating the 1976 arrival of the first women students at the college, “Coeducation at 25: Celebrating Accomplishments and Envisioning the Future.”

Lani Guinier became a professor of law at Harvard Law School in 1998, the first black woman to hold that title. She had previously been a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. Guinier was nominated by President Clinton to be U.S. Assistant Attorney General in 1993. Her bid was withdrawn because of conservative attacks on her solutions to racial problems.

Guinier received a B.A. degree in 1971 from Radcliffe College and a J.D. in 1974 from Yale Law School. She was a law clerk and juvenile court referee from 1974 to 1977, special assistant to the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1977 to 1981 and assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York City from 1981 to 1988. Guinier joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty in 1988. She has received many awards, including the 1995 Champion of Democracy Award from the National Women's Political Caucus, the 1995 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession and the 1994 Rosa Parks Award from the American Association of Affirmative Action.

Guinier is the author of Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998), Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change (with Michelle Fine and Jane Balin; 1997) and The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (1994). Among her articles are "The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming the Innovative Ideal," (with Susan Strum) California Law Review (1996); "[E]racing Democracy: The Voting Rights Cases," Harvard Law Review (1994); "Groups, Representation, and Race-Conscious Districting: A Case of the Emperor's Clothes," Texas Law Review (1993); "The Triumph of Tokenism: The Voting Rights Act and the Theory of Black Electoral Success," Michigan Law Review (1991); and "No Two Seats: The Elusive Quest for Political Equality," Virginia Law Review(1991).

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AMHERST, Mass.—Colin Diver, Amherst College Class of 1965 and a member of the Amherst College board of trustees since 1998, was elected the fourteenth president of Reed College Feb. 9. He will assume his responsibilities on July 1. Diver is the Charles A. Heimbold, Jr., Professor of Law and Economics and former dean at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

“Colin Diver is a spectacular choice to lead Reed at this time in the school’s history,” said Walter Mintz, chairman of the Reed board of trustees, announcing the decision. “He is a superb teacher-scholar and an acknowledged leader in American higher education; his integrity, strength of character, and commitment to intellectual openness are emblematic of the highest standards of American higher education,” he continued. Mintz went on to say that, in his opinion, Diver will become “an important voice in articulating the value of a vigorous undergraduate education in the liberal arts and sciences, the sort of education for which Reed is famous.”

“I believe passionately in the ideals of liberal education,” said Diver, 58. “To me, Reed embodies those ideals better than any institution I know. It is deeply humane, fiercely independent, and uncompromisingly rigorous. I can’t think of a more stimulating environment in which to work and study. My wife, Joan, and I are also looking forward to making our home in the Pacific Northwest and becoming an integral part of the Portland community.”

Diver succeeds Peter Steinberger, who was appointed acting president of Reed following the resignation of Steven Koblik, and who will return to his position as Reed’s dean of the faculty. Diver will be the fourth Amherst alumnus to serve as president of Reed College. Dexter Keezer ’18 served from 1934 until 1942. Duncan Ballantine ’34 was president from 1953 until 1954. Paul E. Bragdon ’50 held the position from 1971 until 1988.

An expert in administrative law and regulation, Diver received his A.B., summa cum laude from Amherst, where he currently serves as a trustee, and his LL.B., magna cum laude, in 1968 from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review. He also holds an honorary degree from Amherst.

Amherst president Tom Gerety said Diver is “an astonishingly and delightfully intellectual man, one of our very best trustees, someone who loves ideas and the arguments and differences that come with them. He will make a great president at Reed. And I relish the chance to be his colleague in this work.”

Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, was founded in 1908 and named after Portland pioneers Simeon and Amanda Reed. The private, independent, nonsectarian, four-year college of the liberal arts and sciences has an enrollment of approximately 1,300 students and one of the most rigorous and intellectual undergraduate academic programs in the country. More information is available at the Reed College's Website.

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AMHERST, Mass.—The Altenberg Trio from Vienna will present the fifth concert in the 2001-02 Music at Amherst Series on Friday, March 1, at 8 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College, in a program of works for piano trio by Shostakovich, Ives, Haydn and Brahms.

The Altenberg Trio— violinist Amiram Ganz, cellist Martin Hornstein and pianist Claus Christian Schuster—was founded in 1994. Schuster and Hornstein were already known as founding members of the Vienna Schubert Trio, and Ganz as the longtime violinist with the Shostakovich Trio.

Reviewing the current major U.S. tour, The Los Angeles Times praised “the splendidly accomplished” Altenberg Trio, adding that “the technical authority of the players is matched by their spontaneity.” The Washington Post wrote that “they devoted all aspects of their keen musicianship in the service of a cohesive whole inspired by imagination and driven by pathos.” The Altenberg Trio records exclusively for Challenge records. See The Trio's Website.

When not on tour, the Altenberg Trio is in residence at the Vienna Musikverein and also at the Vienna Conservatory.

Admission to the concert is $20, senior citizens $16 and students $5. Tickets may be reserved by calling 413/542-2195 on weekday mornings. See The Amherst College Concert Office's Website.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Just before his New York recital debut in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall on March 2, Canadian baritone Joseph Kaiser will perform in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College on Sunday, Feb. 24, at 3 p.m. Kaiser will sing a diverse program, including the world premiere of Light Verse, a setting by Richard Beaudoin (Amherst College Class of 1998) of selections from John Updike’s Collected Poems: 1953-1993. Michael McMahon will accompany Kaiser on piano. The recital at Amherst is free and open to the public.

Kaiser’s program also will include Kurt Weill’s Four Walt Whitman Songs; Schubert’s “Sehnsucht," “Schwanengesang,” “An die Laute,” “Nachtstück,” “Sei mir gegrüßt” and “Auf der Bruck;” Francesco Santoliquido’s “I Canti della sera” and Pierre Mercure’s “Dissidence,” with texts by Gabriel Charpentier.

The recipient of the first Autrey Award of the Julian Autrey Song Foundation, Kaiser will follow his Carnegie Hall appearance with his New York City Opera debut singing Morales in Carmen and the roles of Lefty McCarty and Jerry Smith in John Philip Sousa’s The Glassblowers. In the Young American Artists Program at Glimmerglass Opera in 1999 and 2000, Kaiser performed in The Glassblowers and Central Park. He also has worked with the Canadian Opera Company. Last fall Kaiser performed in the world premiere of a staged version of Die Winterreise at Amherst College, where he had appeared in Cosi fan tutte in 2000. Kaiser is noted also for his solo work on the international concert stage.

Canadian pianist Michael McMahon performs regularly throughout Canada, Europe and the United States and has made many recordings.

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