News & Events Amherst in the News

Around the first anniversary of his death, LouderSound.com published a feature on the life and career of Steinman, the songwriter behind such hits as Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album.

“At Amherst College he wrote a musical version of a futuristic rock take on Peter Pan, The Dream Engine, which laid the foundation for much of his later work, including Bat Out of Hell and Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 hit ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’” writes classic rock reporter Dave Ling.

Punctuated with music videos from YouTube and a playlist of Steinman’s songs, the article delves into his “tempestuous relationship” with Meat Loaf and other figures in the music industry, his longtime health problems, his work in musical theater, and the “massively bombastic” energy for which his creative projects were famous. 

In an Outside the Office column for Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today, Dr. Brian Kim ’97 writes about joining the Zumbyes at Amherst and how he still draws upon his singing skills in his work as an ophthalmologist today.

“Even though my college days are decades ago, the skills I learned from my Zumbye brothers help me care for my patients to this day,” writes Kim, a partner at Professional Eye Associates in Dalton, Ga., and clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Medical College of Georgia. He explains how he has become known for singing to his patients to distract them from their anxiety. 

He describes how he auditioned for the acappella group twice despite having “no musical background,” and how they “taught me the basics—breathing techniques, singing from the diaphragm, opening the mouth and projecting sound.” He fondly remembers the Zumbyes’ tour of Florida, during which the group stayed at his family’s home and performed the national anthem at a Golden State Warriors NBA game. 

The column also includes Kim’s thoughts on his medical training, teaching experiences and family life.

Karkazis, a professor of sexuality, women’s and gender studies at Amherst and a senior research fellow with the Global Health Justice partnership at Yale, appears on a recent episode of WPSU radio’s Take Note to talk about her 2019 book Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, in which she and co-author Rebecca M. Jordan-Young correct mistaken or oversimplified ideas about the hormone.

“Part of the argument in the book is that it’s impossible to know both what testosterone is and what it does without also thinking about it as a cultural entity,” Karkazis says to host John Weber. “And there are a lot of notions about what we want it to do, what we think it does, that aren't always borne out by the evidence.” 

The interview delves into the testosterone myths reflected in a famous episode of This American Life. Karkazis points out that there are multiple types of testosterone, that it can be measured in different ways, and that “there is no straightforward direct relationship between testosterone level and violence.” The host and professor also discuss how misunderstandings about the hormone shape policies as to who may or may not participate in women’s athletic competitions. 

The study, published in Environmental Research Letters and publicized by the TNC Network, shows that, across New England, “communities in the lowest income quartile, and communities with the highest proportions of people of color, have access to only about half as much protected land near where they live.” It is accompanied by an online mapping tool to highlight “specific opportunities for future conservation based on environmental justice criteria.”

“We hope that this tool can both empower local communities interested in protecting nearby land and offer guidance to conservation organizations regarding who needs to be at the table in land-use planning decisions,” says Lurie, who helped to catalyze the project through her work as an academic intern at Amherst.

“Changes in leadership structure, outreach, and programming can increase access by making open spaces truly welcoming to all,” says Sims, professor of economics and environmental studies.

The team behind the study and map also includes Boston-based social justice scholar Neenah Estrella-Luna and Harvard Forest researchers Lucy Lee and Jonathan Thompson.

Speace has just released the album Tucson and is pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry at Spalding University in Kentucky. In a Q&A for No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music, the singer-songwriter discusses her reading habits.

Interviewer Henry Carrigan asks Speace such questions as “What books are on your nightstand now?,” “How does reading influence your songwriting?” and “What’s your ideal reading experience?”

In her answers, Speace makes several direct and indirect references to Amherst College and its literary alumni: She identifies Lauren Groff ’01 as one of the “masters” of “strong narrative and incredibly rich language”; lists Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace ’85, as a book she has “faked reading”; and declares The Montague Bookmill, which she discovered while a student at Amherst, “my all-time favorite bookstore.”

“A ‘Guggenheim’ is one of the most sought-after honors in academe and culture,” says a brief article in The Boston Globe. “Eleven of this year’s 180 recipients are Massachusetts residents.” And one of those is Vaughan, the Alfred Sargent Lee ’41 and Mary Farley Ames Lee Professor of Black Studies and chair of Black studies at Amherst.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, based in New York, has awarded the fellowships annually for 97 years. “The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going,” says foundation president Edward Hirsch in a press release about the fellowship recipients for 2022.

At Amherst, Vaughan teaches such courses as “African Migrations and Globalization” and “Christianity and Islam in Africa.” His many publications include the books Religion and the Making of Nigeria and Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s–1990s. He has prevously received Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, a Ford Foundation Fellowship and the 2021 Waldo G. Leland Prize from the American Historical Association, among other honors.

“Amherst enrolls 10 to 15 community college transfer students a year (out of about 495 new students),” says an Inside Higher Ed Q&A with Associate Dean of Admission Alexandra Hurd ’06. “It’s a small program but a big commitment to transfers.” 

The article, written by Yazmin Padilla of the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, explains that “in 2010, Amherst was reaching the end of a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation grant designed to lay the foundation for a community college transfer program. Despite the challenges of the Great Recession, the campus decided to sustain their commitment.” 

It goes on to explore how Amherst enrolls and supports these transfer students as part of an intentionally diverse campus population, through such measures as financial aid, transfer-focused orientation events and the Class & Access Resource Center. “President [Biddy] Martin has really pushed us past the point of representation and to a conversation on inclusion,” says Hurd, adding that “faculty very much supported the program and voiced how much they value having these students in their classrooms and as part of the community.”

Turow, who practices law in Chicago and whose bestselling novels include Innocent and The Burden of Proof, is the subject of a column in Michigan’s Oakland County Legal News.

“Literary success didn’t come easy for Turow, whose books have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and have been translated into some 25 languages,” writes Tom Kirvan. “His first novel, in fact, was rejected 25 times before gaining a semblance of acceptance, thereby assuring that Turow would be a lifelong proponent of ‘stick-to-itiveness.’”

In addition to that first novel, 1987’s Presumed Innocent, the column mentions Turow’s first nonfiction book, One L, published in 1977, while he was at Harvard Law School; his forthcoming novel, Suspect; and his years teaching creative writing at Stanford University after graduating from Amherst. It also quotes some of Turow’s remarks from a presentation at the University of Michigan Law School many years ago.

In a Q&A for UVAToday, White, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and a former soccer player for Phillips Academy Andover and Amherst, talks about his new book, Soccer in American Culture: The Beautiful Game’s Struggle for Status (University of Missouri Press).

The Q&A begins with a question from interviewer Whitelaw Reid about how, in the mid-20th-century United States, “the sport didn’t have the kind of popularity that it did in other parts of the world.” “[A]t at both Andover and Amherst, the teams I played on had good equipment and good practice and game fields,” White says. “I do remember some supportive comments from fans at home games. But on the whole, we played in obscurity.”

The interview continues with discussion of the more recent “renaissance” in Americans’ enjoyment of men’s and women’s soccer, as both spectators and players. White attributes this to a number of factors, including the passage of Title IX in the 1970s, changes to the organizations of soccer leagues, and “the digital revolution [that] has expanded the capacity of Americans to play and watch sports.”

MIT News highlights the work of Bahr, an associate professor of literature at MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. He is “completing a book on the Pearl-Manuscript—a rare surviving 14th-century document” whose component works “are critical to our understanding of the medieval world and literature.”

The article, with an embedded slideshow and video, explains that the handwritten, colorfully illustrated manuscript comprises “Pearl,” a poem about a bereaved father, as well as the stories “Patience,” “Cleanness” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” “Part of my job,” Bahr is quoted as saying, “is to help these texts be audible and resonant in a very different cultural, social, and religious context than the one in which they were created.”

The article describes how the professor, who arrived at MIT in 2007, teaches courses on Beowulf, Chaucer and Old English. It mentions that he “fell in love with medieval literature as an undergraduate at Amherst College … and initially envisioned settling into a teaching career at a small liberal arts college.” It also notes that Bahr is a former skater who now works as a national judge with the United States Figure Skating Association.

As part of its Dallas 500 series, D Magazine profiles Horne, a former teacher and school administrator who is now CEO and president of the nonprofit Parkland Foundation, “focused on making healthcare more accessible to individuals in southern Dallas.”

The profile, by Will Maddox, quotes Horne’s thoughts on a list of topics both professional and personal. These include, among other topics, his first job, as a cashier at CVS; career challenges and successes, such as overcoming pandemic-related limitations and “raising over $5 million to support Parkland Health in response to public health crises”; his desire to “make Dallas a more walkable and connected city”; and favorite travel destinations.

Horne notes, “I was in a college acapella group—the Amherst College Zumbyes (pronounced Zoom-byes).” He also mentions his marriage to Marissa Horne ’00, whom he met when they were both students at Amherst.

Jack, an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, recently spoke with Harvard Political Review about his research into the various experiences of first-generation, low-income students at elite universities.

Also a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and holds the Shutzer Assistant Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Jack told interviewer Coby Garcia how his work as a diversity intern in Amherst College’s admission office helped to inspire his sociological focus: it opened his eyes to “the fact that so many students of color, who are low-income, come from boarding, day, and preparatory high schools” that teach them “how to interact with wealth and whiteness” of the kind they will find at prestigious universities. “They were more familiar and even comfortable with those things than the lower-income peers who did not go to prep schools,” Jack said.

The difference in experience between these two categories of low-income college students, and the question of what kinds of support the students need, is the topic both of the interview and of Jack’s 2019 book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students.

“I’m a historian. I’m an attorney. I’m an educator. I’m a blues man. And I am an organizer,” Williams has said on his podcast, Everything’s Political. Recently he was interviewed for Chalkbeat, a newsletter focused on education issues in Newark, N.J.

Chalkbeat’s Patrick Wall spoke with Williams, a veteran activist of the civil rights movement, about his childhood in Richmond, Va., during the Jim Crow era, and about enduring issues of racial segregation, as well as the current legislative attempts in many U.S. states to suppress teaching about race and racism. The history of Newark, and the teaching of that history in Newark Public Schools, was another topic of discussion.

When asked what he hopes his legacy will be, Williams said, “I want to educate people. I want to pass on the knowledge that I have, that we’ve accumulated, that I learned from standing on the shoulders of giants.”

After his death on March 8, The New York Times paid tribute to Marx, who taught English and American studies at Amherst from 1958 to 1977. During that time, he published the landmark book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.

“Marx found that American writers had adapted the venerable literary genre of pastoral—born in the ancient Middle East and perfected in classical times by Theocritus and Virgil—to convey and reflect the country’s culture from the 1840s on,” writes John Motyka in the obituary. “The form, which favors an idyllic rural scene over a more sophisticated urbane one, was expanded upon by writers like Whitman, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would jarringly interrupt that setting—Professor Marx called it an ‘interrupted idyll’—by pitting an industrializing culture against nature.”

The obituary describes The Machine in the Garden, published in 1964, as a highly acclaimed and influential book in American studies, but one that also drew criticism as the field changed in later decades. Motyka also mentions Marx’s other writings, his family, his military service, and his teaching at the University of Minnesota and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before and after his time at Amherst.

Boston.com reached out to Temeles, Amherst’s Thomas B. Walton Jr. Memorial Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, to make sense of the Feb. 7 footage of “a black cloud of birds rapidly diving straight down all at once” and striking the pavement on a Mexican street.

Temeles identified the species as yellow-headed blackbirds. Though other birds have been known to fall dead from the sky when encountering very low temperatures or toxic chemicals, the professor said, these “birds were still moving, and it indicated that there must have been some predator” in their path. 

“Temeles explained that diving down is one of the best ways for a flying creature to avoid a predator,” writes reporter Susannah Sudborough. “Birds might dive down and then hide in a bush until the predator is gone. In this case, Temeles said, there may have been something blocking the birds from seeing that they were plummeting straight to the ground, such as fog.”