Event Calendar

Please join us for the Russian Table for Russian conversation and conviviality! Grab your lunch and head upstairs. We hope to see you there! In case you prefer to use a tray, please ask a Valentine staff member.

Thesis writers, set yourself up to succeed this year by joining fellow students to write together regularly! Every Thursday night, the Writing Center and Library open up the Center for Humanistic Inquiry for students writing theses (and similar long-term, complex writing projects) to work side-by-side, fueled by snacks, coffee and camaraderie.

Join Amherst student Andrew Tawfeek '21 as he demonstrates the simple mathematical beauty of polytopes. Join the fun and build a 3-D polygon to display in the Science Center! This is an event open to everyone: first-years, faculty, staff, art majors, STEM-minded...all are welcome!

Join the Queer Resource Center staff and Dr. Darien McFadden & Dr. Sarah Erickson from the Counseling Center for an open discussion space centering conversations related to being LGBTQ+ at Amherst and beyond.
Presented by the QRC in collaboration with the Counseling Center.

Professor Ronald T. Raines, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Chemistry

ABSTRACT: The lipid bilayer that encases human cells has evolved to keep the outside out, and the inside in. This barrier is not, however, impenetrable. Some small molecules, including many drugs, can burrow through and manifest therapeutic activities. Others can be “cloaked” to endow membrane permeability, and then uncloaked inside cells. We have learned how to beneficially cloak proteins, which are typically 100-fold larger than small-molecule drugs. Specifically, the conversion of protein carboxyl groups into esters enables a protein to traverse the lipid bilayer. The nascent esters are substrates for endogenous esterases that regenerate native proteins within cells. The ability to deliver native proteins directly into cells opens a new frontier for molecular medicine.

Please join us for a public masterclass as M@A Chamber artists, the Parker Quartet, work with students on their craft.

Miki Dezaki, a Youtuber who was threatened and harassed by Japan’s notorious netouyo (cyber neo-nationalists) for his video on racism in Japan, is not shying away from controversial topics with his debut feature length documentary on the comfort women issue. The film dives deep into the most contentious dispute between Japan and Korea and finds answers to hotly debated questions, such as: Were the comfort women “sexual slaves” or prostitutes? Were they coercively recruited? Were there really 200,000 comfort women? And, does Japan have a legal responsibility to apologize?
Dezaki masterfully interweaves footage from demonstrations, man-on-the-street interviews, news and archival clips with in-depth interviews with the most prominent scholars and influencers from both sides of the debate, including Yoshiko Sakurai (journalist), Kent Gilbert (lawyer/celebrity), Mina Watanabe (secretary-general of the Women's Active Museum), Koichi Nakano (political science professor) and Yoshiaki Yoshimi (historian).
“Shusenjo” reveals surprising confessions and revelations that uncover the hidden intentions of both supporters and detractors while deconstructing the dominant narratives. That Dezaki has managed to bring nuance to a sensationalized and often oversimplified issue is just one of the many reasons that “Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue” is a must-see work.
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Languages & Civilizations; History; Sexuality, Women’s, & Gender Studies; and Film & Media Studies.

Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D., assistant research professor at the University of Connecticut, will give a talk titled “A Tale of Two Symbioses: development and maintenance of bacterial partnerships with the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid.” Sarah McAnulty is a squid biologist and the executive director of the science communication non-profit Skype a Scientist! In her talk, she will cover her research on the Hawaiian bobtail squid and its relationship with the bioluminescent bacterium Vibrio fischeri and how the immune system plays a role in these interactions. She will also speak on the symbiosis within female squid’s reproductive system, the accessory nidamental gland. In addition to discussing her science, she will discuss the many ways that scientists can get involved in their communities, both local and online.

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. A leading voice in the debates about culture, gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her award-winning books and articles have been translated into 14 languages. Her most recent book, published by Harvard University Press in 2013, is titled Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Abu-Lughod’s scholarship, mostly ethnographic and based on long-term fieldwork in Egypt, has focused on the power of cultural forms, from poetry to television soap operas; the politics of knowledge and representations of cultural “others”; violence and memory; and the question of liberalism and global projects of human and women’s rights. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Carnegie Scholar, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Sponsored by the Center for Humanistic Inquiry Feminist Thought Working Group.

Christopher Chambers-Ju ’04, Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross, will give a talk titled “Mobilizing Teachers: The Political Strategies of Mass Member Organizations in Latin America.”
Chambers-Ju ’04 received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017. His research examines the politics of education through a focus on teacher’s unions. Studying the cases of Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, he examines why some teachers take to the streets while others form an organized voting bloc, with distinct relationships to political parties. By focusing on teachers, he seeks to shed light on broader dynamics of education policy-making and political change in contemporary Latin America.
This event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Political Science Department at Amherst College with funding from the Lurcy Endowment and the Lamont Funds.

Please join us for the Russian Table for Russian conversation and conviviality! Grab your lunch and head upstairs. We hope to see you there! In case you prefer to use a tray, please ask a Valentine staff member.

See the poster for more information.

Chon A. Noriega is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, both at UCLA, and Consulting Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He has published on media, performance and the visual arts. Noriega has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including: “Home—So Different, So Appealing” (2017-18), “Asco and Friends: Exiled Portraits” (2014), “L.A. Xicano” (2011-12), and “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement” (2008-10). He is currently completing a book on artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934) and an oral history project on Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957).
Noriega describes the subject of his lecture as follows: “I remember walking through the WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibition with Barbara Hammer in spring 2007. She had insisted that the curators show her films in the museum galleries and play them on a loop, not exile them to a side theater where they would be shown on a schedule. But letting her speak during the walk through was another matter. So Barbara grabbed the microphone and stood by her work: ‘Film is an art form,’ she began. Today, media installations and even two-dimensional media works like Barbara’s are quite common in contemporary art exhibitions. This talk is not so much about the aesthetic status of film/video in the gallery space—one dealt with quite well by Kate Mondloch and Catherine Elwes—as it is about the curatorial frameworks that render certain artists and artworks as ‘orphans of modernism’ or ‘ghosts of modernity.’ I will draw on my own experiences as a curator and art historian who was trained in cinema and media studies.”
Reception to follow.

Professor Andrea Frisch, University of Maryland, College Park and Leibniz Universität Hannover, will give the biennial lecture in honor of Professor Jay L. Caplan. Her talk, “The Histoire mémorable between News and History: Framing Accounts of Current Events in the French Wars of Religion,” will address the ways in which current or very recent events were packaged generically in the turbulent context of the French Wars of Religion.
“At the center of my investigation is the histoire mémorable, since in sixteenth-century France – in contrast to her European neighbors – some form of this label was regularly applied to accounts of current events. As a generic indicator, the category is deeply ambiguous: On the one hand, the term “mémorable” implied a shared inheritance of consensually venerated material that one had a duty to remember, and that was traditionally associated with History; on the other, in the glut of printed matter in the age of confessional conflict, the epithet “mémorable” was repeatedly attached to material that was recent, undigested, and frequently contentious, characteristics more typical of what was coming to be known as news. Ultimately, the histoire mémorable was the terrain upon which personal, polemical, pamphlet-style accounts could make a bid for entry into the long-term, capital-H historical record.”
This event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.
Co-sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series at Amherst, the Amherst College French Department, and the Turgeon Fund.

Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Symposium: “Looking Back to the Future: Twenty Years of A/P/A Studies in the Five Colleges” presented by Dr. David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.