News & Events Faculty Stories

March 31, 2010

A leading authority on U.S. military power and a renowned physicist are among the intellectual luminaries who will arrive at AmherstCollege in the coming academic year to teach courses that will allow students to benefit from their unparalleled expertise.

January 12, 2010                               

AMHERST, Mass.—High levels of air pollution—even levels considered acceptable by federal standards—markedly increase school absences, according to a new study by AmherstCollege economics professor Steven Rivkin, his former student E. Megan Kahn Shaw ’04 and a team of researchers.

January 20, 2010
Peter Rooney
Director of Public Affairs
413-542-8452
prooney@amherst.edu.

AMHERST, Mass.—The Physics Department at AmherstCollege will be the beneficiary of federal stimulus money, thanks to a $350,000 National Science Foundation grant received by Professors Jonathan Friedman, David Hall and Larry Hunter and UMass physicist Mark Tuominen. 

December 2009

AMHERST, Mass. — Deborah Gewertz, the G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology at AmherstCollege, and Frederick Errington, a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at TrinityCollege in Hartford, Conn., are the authors of Cheap Meat:  Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands (University of California Press, 2009, $55 hardcover/$21.95 paperback).

December 17, 2009

AMHERST, Mass. — Hilary J. Moss, assistant professor of history and black studies at AmherstCollege, has published Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press, 2009, $37.50).

November 3, 2009                                             

AMHERST, Mass. – Larry Hunter, professor of physics at AmherstCollege, has received a three-year, $359,733 grant from the National Science Foundation to test for violations of two major physical theories: Local Lorentz Invariance (LLI) and time-reversal invariance. The findings of his experiments may one day have profound implications on particle theory and could drastically change scientists’ thinking about what Hunter describes as “the fundamental underlying symmetries of nature.”

November 20, 2009

A member of the college’s information technology department and two faculty colleagues are hoping that a new tutor will be able to provide answers to many of the questions that learners of Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese may have.

September 17, 2009

AMHERST, Mass. – David S. Hall, associate professor of physics at Amherst College, has received a three-year, $469,086 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award will support Hall’s studies of gases cooled to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero—the lowest possible temperature in the universe—and will allow him to build on work done by legendary physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in the 1920s.

June 29, 2009

AMHERST, Mass. — The Anacapa Society, a professional organization promoting research in all areas of theoretical and computational physics at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI), has found a permanent residence. On June 2, members of the group signed a letter of understanding with Amherst College that formalized its relationship with the school and established the college’s campus as its official home.

June 3, 2009

AMHERST, Mass. – Amherst College’s Jill S. Miller, assistant professor of biology, and Rachel A. Levin, visiting assistant professor of biology, have together received a five-year, $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

April 27, 2009

When a reader searches Richard Wilbur’s name on The New Yorker magazine’s Web site, an incredible 99 results mentioning the prolific poet and member of the college’s Class of 1942 appear. (To put that in context, look up “Robert Frost” and 56 links pop up, while “Emily Dickinson” generates 75.) The pieces themselves are quite impressive, not surprisingly: They include Wilbur’s poems, reviews of his books and translations and other miscellaneous references, such as an intriguing letter by Norman Mailer that cites in passing an invitation Jackie Kennedy made to said Amherst alumnus in the 1960s.

April 2, 2009                              
Contact: Emanuel Costache ’09
Media Relations Intern
413/542-2321

AMHERST, Mass.—Wako Tawa, professor of Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College, has been awarded a grant of $150,000 from the secondary education program of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to support her efforts to strengthen the teaching of “category four” languages, especially at the secondary level.

February 5, 2009   

AMHERST, Mass. — Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and expert on law, has edited a collection of essays about wrongful convictions in the United States.

February 2, 2009               

AMHERST, Mass.—Martha Sandweiss, professor of American studies and history at Amherst College, has just published Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line ($27.95, The Penguin Press, 2009), the extraordinary story of Clarence King, a 19th-century white explorer, geologist and writer who, for 13 years, lived a double life as a black Pullman porter and steel worker named James Todd.