Richard Banfield is a true Midwesterner. He was born in Austin, Minnesota and graduated from high school in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Richard's Amherst education was interrupted by the war. Actually, the Army sent him to Amherst for 12 months trying to become an Air Force meteorologist. He graduated from Columbia Medical School and finally hung out his shingle in 1957 and practiced Obstetrics and Gynecology at Stamford Hospital till 1992.
In his words, his one claim to fame was that he was instrumental in getting fathers to be with their wives during delivery. His ties to Amherst go way back, as his great, great grandfather was given the task of designing the Amherst seal.
Julie Dobrow is director at Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Tufts University and Senior Fellow, Tisch College of Civic Life.
She received her AB from Smith College in anthropology and sociology, and her MA and PhD. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Tufts University, where she also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Child Study and Human Development, the Film and Media Studies Program and in the Tisch College of Civic Life, where she is a senior fellow in media and civic engagement.
While some of her research focuses on issues of children and media, her other research centers on historical issues and biographical topics. Her recent book, After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet, was published this year by W. W. Norton & Company. Dr. Dobrow has written and spoken extensively on the lives of Mabel Loomis, David Peck Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, co-curated exhibits at the Amherst History Museum and led Dickinson/Todd tours in Amherst.
Dobrow has also worked as a journalist, writing a column for the Huffington Post and publishing articles in numerous magazines and newspapers.
Jim Hamilton has a Master's degree in Printing Technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He worked for many years as a market researcher. His grandfather, Hugh Hamilton, class of 1920, joined an Army ambulance unit that formed at Amherst in June 1917 and served in France and Belgium during the last year of World War I.
Jim's book, The Black Cats of Amherst, draws on diaries, letters, and photographs to tell the story of his grandfather's ambulance unit. Jim is also the author of The Writing 69th, which covers a group of journalists, including Walter Cronkite, Homer Bigart, and Andy Rooney, who trained to accompany a bombing mission over Germany during World War II.
MIKE KELLY
Mike Kelly is the head of the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, where he oversees the school's collection of more than 80,000 rare books along with a host of archival and manuscript collections. He has worked in special collections for over twenty years; he spent eleven years as the Curator of Books at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University before coming to Amherst in 2009. He has held many positions within the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association, including a term as RBMS Chair in 2011-12, and he is an active member of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM).
He received his Master in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin where he spent two years as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center; he also holds an MA in English from the University of Virginia. In 2016, he was awarded the Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas by the Bibliographical Society of America for his work on the bibliography of Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut. He co-curated (with Carolyn Vega) the exhibition "I'm Nobody! Who Are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson" at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York which ran from January through May 2017.
In the summer of 2018, Mike co-taught the course "A History of Native American Books & Indigenous Sovereignty" in Amherst for Rare Book School. He was elected to membership in the Grolier Club in 2005 and the American Antiquarian Society in 2016.
MATT RANDOLPH '16
Matt Randolph is a historian who studies the black experience in the United States as well as the African diaspora generally in the Americas. He graduated from Amherst with majors in History and Spanish. During his junior year at Amherst, Matt studied abroad in Santiago, Chile, where he conducted research on the experiences of Haitian and Dominican immigrants in Chile. He hopes to soon pursue further academic scholarship through a doctoral program in history.
At Amherst, Matt founded the student publication Amherst Soul and also contributed articles to AC Voice and The Amherst Student. As the historian for the Amherst College Black Student Union, Matt worked closely with college archivists to uncover and illuminate the stories of black alumni. Matt's current research investigates questions of black identity, belonging, and community in higher education.
Originally from Maryland, Matt moved to Oakland, California after his graduation. From 2016 to 2018, he worked in fundraising and external relations for Asylum Access, a global human rights organization that helps refugees rebuild their lives around the world. Matt has also volunteered for museums in California, including the African-American Museum and Library in Oakland and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.
MARTHA SAXTON
Martha Saxton did her undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and became an independent scholar, writing among other things, biographies of Jayne Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott. While researching and writing her next book, she got a doctorate in history at Columbia University. In 1996, she joined the History and Women's and Gender Studies Departments at Amherst College, teaching U.S. and women's history and human rights. She also taught in the Inside/Out Program, taking Amherst College students to the Northampton County Jail where they studied with incarcerated students.
In 2003, Houghton Mifflin published her study, Being Good, Women's Moral Values in Early America. With Frank Couvares, her colleague in the History Department, she co-authored two revisions of Interpretations of American History, and in 2014, she contributed essays on early Amherst College missionaries to The Transformation of this World Depends on You by photographers Wendy Ewald and Fazal Sheik. Her latest project is a return to biography: a study of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother, which Farrar Straus will publish in 2019. The Bunting Institute, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library and the Starr Center for American History at Washington College have all supported her work. She retired from Amherst College in 2016 and is currently editing a volume of historical essays about the College for its bicentennial, entitled Amherst in the World.
JEREMY SIMON '13
Jeremy Simon is a double major in French and History. He wrote a history thesis titled The Liberal Arts at War: Alexander Meiklejohn and Amherst College in World War I, which partially grew out of his enjoyment of the College Archives, where he worked for his final two years at Amherst. His archival pursuits also led him to serve as an amateur historian in The Student and for the Mead Art Museum.
After graduating, Jeremy went to work for Facing History and Ourselves, an educational non-profit headquartered in Brookline, MA devoted to designing curricula and training teachers to teach horrific historical events and help students think about preventing them. The questions raised by this history and what he had studied at Amherst - including the heedless rush of nations into World War I - led Jeremy to pursue a PhD in social psychology, focusing on intergroup bias and dehumanization. Jeremy is now a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University where he uses neuroscientific techniques to understand and combat prejudice.
FRED VENNE
Fred Venne is museum educator at Beneski Museum of Natural History, part of a collaborative network of ten museums located in and around Amherst.
Mr. Venne has more than thirty years of experience in educational administration, science education, museum education, and informal science learning. A graduate of University of Massachusetts with degrees in Business, Educational Leadership and Educational Administration, Mr. Venne began his career as a non-profit agency director where he redeveloped the vision, mission and goals of a turn of the century organization with a long history of serving immigrant populations.
In 2011 Mr. Venne came to the Beneski Museum of Natural History to help re-imagine the educational and outreach work of the museum. One critical aspect of this re-imagined effort involved multiple partnerships with educational, cultural, media and research organizations. Numerous on- and off-site projects have evolved as part of this partnership work. One such project involved the American Association for State and Local History 2108 award winning public program project, "Impressions From a Lost World," website. Working with a team led by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association the educational efforts of the Beneski Museum helped to bring alive and make available to a broad audience some of the early history of science at Amherst College.
Over the years, Mr. Venne's work included serving as the CEO and program developer for several non-profits, consultant to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, adjunct faculty with Fitchburg State University, science teacher, science curriculum developer, and school principal. Fred has presented at local and national conferences on the subjects of "Systemic Change" and "Universal Design for Learning (UDL)" and "Inquiry Based Science".
JANE WALD
Jane Wald is executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens, owned by the Trustees of Amherst College. She earned her A.B. with a major in history and minor in Latin at Bryn Mawr College, graduating with the Helen Taft Manning Prize in history. With an interest in material culture and public history, she studied historical archaeology in the departments of history and anthropology at the College of William and Mary before earning her M.A. in history at Princeton University.
She was employed at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in central Massachusetts, until she became the first (and only) director of The Evergreens, the home of Austin and Susan Dickinson next door to Emily Dickinson's Homestead, and a member of the team that organized the transfer of The Evergreens to Amherst College. She became executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum in 2006 and has overseen numerous restoration, capital, and programmatic improvements. Her research and publications deal with the Dickinson's material legacy including the histories of the two historic structures, texts owned and valued by the family, and the origins of literary tourism at the Dickinson site.