News & Events Amherst in the News

Associated Press – Wright shares thoughts about his career and his starring role in American Fiction, a new adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. “There might be an impression of this film being comedic and satirical,” he says, “but there’s a deep vein of simple humanness inside of it that I appreciated.”

“Across an expansive array of roles both small and large for more than two decades, Wright has been among the most malleable of actors, able to transform endlessly while still maintaining a singular, rigorously grounded screen presence,” writes Jake Coyle. “But it’s Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction in which Wright gives one of the best performances of his career.”

“Wright attended private school, studied political science at Amherst College and briefly sought an MFA at New York University before leaving to pursue acting full time,” Coyle adds. Wright has performed in, among many other projects, Basquiat, The French Dispatch, Westworld and Angels in America, for which he won a Tony, an Emmy and a Golden Globe. 

NBCNews.com – Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture, shares thoughts about his new children’s book, The Mexican Dreidel, co-authored with Linda Elovitz Marshall and illustrated by Maria Mola.

“For Stavans, maintaining his heritage after moving to the United States [from Mexico] became a focus of his writing. In the last three decades, the Amherst College professor has written over 30 books on American, Latino and Jewish identities,” writes reporter Arturo Conde. This new picture book “tells the story of a magical wooden dreidel, or spinning top, that a grandmother gives her grandson in a Mexican town.”

“Whether it is now, when antisemitism is rising, or in the past, during the Holocaust, or even further back, during the Spanish Inquisition, Hanukkah is a reminder that we have to find a way to endure,” Stavans is quoted as saying. “Hanukkah reminds us that as we go from one diaspora to another, we can get inspiration from moments of resistance in the past to continue our story.”

The Boston Globe – Reporter Ed Symkus interviewed Daring and Stahl, friends who live in Marblehead, Mass., and have been performing and recording together since they first met in a Boston coffeehouse in 1973. 

“I went to Amherst College, then I was signed to Columbia Records with a band, but the band broke up just before our album. So, I decided to go to law school in Boston, at Suffolk,” Daring is quoted as saying. 

After that, Symkus writes, “Daring practiced entertainment law. He also wrote, edited, and directed TV commercials; began composing music for film soundtracks, including 18 directed by John Sayles; founded the Daring Records label; and made a self-titled solo album” in addition to his collaborations with Stahl.

“We rehearse even when we don’t have a gig,” Daring says. “Age takes a toll on voice and chops. But we’re still good. We’ll rise above the threshold. We’ve been playing together for 50 years. That doesn’t happen to people very often.”

Forbes – “Clark’s large-scale, community-centered, and participatory projects are brought together for the first time during the exhibition Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other,” writes Chadd Scott. “The exhibition features six of Clark’s projects created through mass participation, two directly addressing the Civil War, a theme common to her artmaking.”

Those two Civil War-themed projects are Unraveling and Monumental Cloth, which were exhibited in the Mead Art Museum in 2018. More broadly, the six works in We Are Each Other—on view at the High Museum until Feb. 18, 2024—serve as a refutation of the individualism that is often prized in American culture and in the art world. On the contrary, Clark, Amherst’s Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Art and the History of Art, sees every artwork and every human life as inherently collaborative.

“I'm inviting all of those other people to come in and make the work with me because that helps me understand the work better,” she is quoted as saying. “When we remember that we are each other—you are me, I am you—we’re not the same person, but we are both human beings … [it] allows us to say we’re complicated.”

Simmons.edu – Previously a Postbaccalaureate Fellow working with the Amherst College Collection of Native American Literature, Innerarity is profiled on the website of Simmons University, where she has begun graduate studies at the School of Library and Information Science. She is focused on building and preserving archives for her community, the Ione Band of Miwok Indians of California.

“I had never really engaged in archival spaces before,” Innerarity says of her yearlong Frost Library fellowship after graduating from Amherst. “Previously, I felt that [as an Indigenous individual] I did not belong in these kinds of spaces, but I felt very welcome there, and I learned so much about tribal histories and collections.”

The profile also describes Innerarity’s work with the Miwok Heritage Center in Ione, Calif., and quotes her about “the oral vs. written binary”: “Even though orality and performance are very important to many tribal communities, Native folks have been involved in writing and printing as long as those communicative technologies have existed here.” Innerarity advises other BIPOC graduate students to cultivate support networks for themselves, and suggests resources for learning about the significance of Thanksgiving to Native peoples.  

The Brown and White – “[H]umanists should be thinking about tech from the get-go and tech folks should be thinking about humanities from the get-go,” Snyder tells the university’s student newspaper.  He and Edwards, who met at Amherst and are married, co-teach “Algorithms and Social Justice,” cross-listed in women, gender & sexuality studies and industrial & systems engineering. 

“After first meeting in an undergraduate Chaucer poetry class at Amherst College … Edwards and Snyder got married in 1998 and both began teaching at Lehigh in 2003,” says the article, written by Arava Rose. “Now, Edwards is an associate professor of English in addition to women, gender and sexuality studies, splitting her time between the two fields. Snyder is a professor of industrial and systems engineering and the director of the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems and Computation.”

After a conversation about the potential for computer algorithms to detect bias in writing, the professors realized “they wanted humanities students to have technical competence and engineers to have knowledge about critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies and more.” They have been teaching “Algorithms and Social Justice” since 2022. 

Public Seminar – “Aggrieved crowds have been throwing objects—stones, shoes, pies, eggs—that have doled out insult and injury in equal measure seemingly for centuries,” writes Chowdhury, associate professor of anthropology, in an excerpt from an essay first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly. “A common show of collective grievance, pelting has lost neither its significance nor its frequency over time.”

Chowdhury gives historical examples of displeased audiences pelting public figures, from the Roman emperor Vespasian, to playwright Oscar Wilde, to the newly crowned King Charles III of England. She relates pelting to other scholars’ theories about crowds and “the ‘carnivalesque,’ a term Mikhail Bakhtin used to describe an ethos similar to that of the medieval carnival.”

“Even when individual perpetrators of pelting are heroized or punished (remember Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, the Iraqi shoe thrower?), pelting is a performance of crowd sovereignty in all its joyous, violent, fun, furious, and law breaking glory,” the professor writes. “Spontaneous and ritualistic, orgiastic and meticulous, funny and somber, pelting is both a medium and a metaphor of the crowd.”

The New York Times – Groff takes reporter Elizabeth A. Harris on a hike through the Florida woods to give insight into her writing, reading and athletic habits. The acclaimed author’s newest book is the novel The Vaster Wilds, “in which a young woman escapes from Jamestown, Va., in the 17th century, and tries to survive on her own in the wilderness.”

“Groff played soccer at Amherst College and met her husband, Clay Kallman [’00], on the crew team,” Harris writes. Kallman is then quoted as saying, “For her, writing has been a great outlet, and so have athletic pursuits.”

“Groff, whose work slides back and forth between historical and contemporary settings, has had three New York Times best sellers and is unusually productive for a literary writer,” the article says, identifying those three bestselling books as 2015’s Fates and Furies, 2018’s Florida and 2021’s Matrix. “She’s able to keep up her publishing pace by working on several projects, even several novels, simultaneously, holding entire, vibrant worlds distinct in her mind.” She also reads an estimated 300 books per year.

The Boston Globe – “The Latino imagination isn’t an empty vessel easily filled with recycled parts. From time immemorial, we’ve had an extraordinary assortment of superheroes,” Stavans writes in a critique of the new hit movie based on a DC Comics character.

Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst, begins by listing some of the heroic figures of “the Mexico of the 1970s where I grew up,” such as Kalimán, el hombre increíble, and “the Aztec deity Quetzalcóatl, a proto-superhero with magical powers.” 

He then expresses disappointment that Blue Beetle places a Mexican American family at the center of a derivative mass-market movie whose title hero, dating back to comic books of 1939, didn’t even originate as a Latino character: in the new film, “the protagonist’s Latinidad feels more like a corporate ploy than an authentic feature.” The professor muses on parallels between Blue Beetle, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, but laments that the movie itself doesn’t make the most of those parallels.

The Student Doctor Network – Thaler is an assistant professor of neurology at Mount Sinai Hospital, specializing in treatment of stroke and headache patients, and a co-author of The Only Neurology Book You’ll Ever Need. Here, she answers questions about her education and career path and how she balances writing, teaching and practicing medicine.

“I decided to become a physician when I was in college,” says Thaler, who majored in English and neuroscience at Amherst. “I loved my science classes—I found evidence-based thinking incredibly satisfying—and, even more, loved the idea that I could one day use the information I was learning to help take care of patients … [plus] I knew I could keep writing as a physician.”

The doctor responds to further questions from Laura Turner about attending the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, her day-to-day work as a neurologist and professor, problems in the U.S. health care system, and more.

Of Note – As part of a summer internship with WDAV Classical Public Radio, Odulio—a music major and trumpet player at Amherst—presents a two-part multimedia blog post about Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony and its renowned “posthorn solo.”

“There are entire books written about this symphony,” Odulio writes, “so while we can’t cover the full scope of the piece in this two part series, I hope to provide some insight that might help you understand and appreciate this wonderful Mahler masterwork.” 

Part 1 of Odulio’s essay outlines and analyzes the six movements of the 1896 symphony, concluding that it “is a colossal affirmation of human life that does not shy away from the suffering we experience, but invites us to flourish in spite of it.” Part 2 delves into the third movement, which “contains one of the most iconic trumpet solos in the entire orchestral repertoire.” Both blog entries include photos, audio, video, and links to sources and further reading.

The New Yorker – Instead of touting her many successes in stand-up, writing and acting, Nancherla lists a lifetime of mistakes and disappointments in an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome.

“I got my first supporting part in a movie, and they forgot to invite me to the première,” Nancherla writes. “Learned secondhand from a co-worker at my first late-night writing job that one of my bosses ‘does not get what it is you do exactly.’ Hard agree! Let me know if you ever figure it out!” The résumé also describes how she lied her way to third place in a science fair at age 14 and got stood up by her own therapist at 31. Her “Special Skills” include “Not brushing my teeth correctly (according to my dentist).”

Under “Education,” Nancherla lists her B.A. in psychology from Amherst College, noting: “Have barely used degree except during small talk (most often to polite nods), though it has led to a real weakness for online personality tests.” She does not know where her diploma is.

Read. Talk. Grow. – On a Mayo Clinic podcast about books and women’s health, Newman discusses We All Want Impossible Things, her 2022 novel about hospice care and navigating a friend’s death from ovarian cancer. Known for many books, essays and columns, Newman is a hospice volunteer and the academic department coordinator for Amherst College’s Writing Center.

The podcast episode is hosted by Dr. Denise Millstine and also includes Dr. Maisha T. Robinson, chair of the Mayo Clinic’s Division of Palliative Medicine. With Newman, they talk about services offered in palliative care, the best ways to support not only patients themselves but also their friends and family, and the humor that can arise even when dealing with illness and death. 

Newman comments on moments in her fictional novel, as well as her real-life experiences with caring for, and then losing, a terminally ill friend. “I thought of it as shoveling out this massive hole, like we were working all day doing this thing, and then the person dies and there’s a hole there. Then there is the grief,” she says. “The death, for the survivors, is really just the beginning of something, and that also really surprised me.”

The Conversation – “Understanding the psychological processes that lead them to misperceive what those around them are actually thinking is the first step in helping students speak up in the face of bad behavior,” Sanderson writes. “The next—and crucial—step is to shift norms about what group loyalty means.”

Sanderson is the Poler Family Professor of Psychology and chair of psychology at Amherst. Her most recent book is 2020’s Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels. In this essay, she describes a tragedy at her son’s college: a student who had been drinking sustained a head injury and later died because his friends delayed seeking help. She relates this story to other “problematic behavior in group settings” such as fraternity hazing. 

One reason people fail to intervene in bad behavior, the professor explains, is pluralistic ignorance, wherein a “majority of people privately believe one thing” (i.e., that the behavior is wrong or risky) “but incorrectly assume that most others feel differently” (i.e., that the behavior is nothing to worry about). Another reason is that loyalty drives them to keep quiet, lest reporting the behavior get their friends in trouble. Sanderson suggests a better understanding of loyalty: “Being a good friend, fraternity brother, or teammate means speaking up, not staying silent.”

Colorado Public Radio – “When the American poet Robert Frost died in 1963, President John F. Kennedy stood up and addressed a memorial service gathered at Amherst College,” writes reporter Eden Lane. Now Neil Bicknell ’64 “is working with renowned American composer Adolphus Hailstork to create a new work that includes lines from JFK’s Amherst speech interspersed with lines from poems by Robert Frost.”

The symphony, which will have its world premiere at the Colorado Music Festival (CMF) on July 16, shares its title, JFK: The Last Speech, with a book, documentary and website produced by the Amherst class of 1964. Kennedy’s Amherst address is known as his “last speech” because he delivered it just weeks before his November 1963 assassination. Lane’s article includes quotes from the speech itself, as well as from Bicknell, Hailstork and CMF Music Director Peter Oundjian.

The symphony will also be performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra in October, and at Amherst College on Nov. 11.