Calendar of Events

The Amherst College Musical presents Green Day’s American Idiot!

You must reserve tickets using the following form: https://forms.gle/5bpvdvWxC8SJ1yt58

Tickets are FREE for Five College students, faculty and staff. We hope to see you there!

The Department of Theater and Dance is excited to present a special showing of CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR by a canary torsi, a project invested in how meaning is created by audiences and performers in real time through the languages of theater: spectacle, casting, scores and scripts. At Amherst College at Kirby Theater, for the first time, CAST and STAGE are being presented as one evening with an intermission.

Amherst College is partnering with A.P.E. and The School for Contemporary Dance & Thought to bring AUTHOR to 33 Hawley as part of the Bodies in Motion Festival. The interactive installation runs until Jan. 31 at the Northampton Center for the Arts, located at 33 Hawley Street in Northampton.

CAST is a performance by four of the performers that created the trilogy. At each performance, a new, computer-generated script is culled from transcripts of conversations on casting and representation. The performers receive their roles and the never-before-seen script in front of the audience and perform it for the first time in their presence.

STAGE is a visual and aural fantasia with live music. STAGE explores the role of theatrical devices in affecting what an audience sees and perceives.

AUTHOR is a participatory video installation that invites each visitor to interact with the performers through a text-based computer game. Forming a poetically mediated stream-of-conscious between visitors and the video recordings, visitors navigate their relationship to the performers’ language and images on the topics of performing, representation and casting. The algorithm of the game invites each visitor to discover their own voice inside the machine, to construct their own meaning in “conversation” with the personal material of the performers.

The presentation of CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR is generously supported by a New England Foundation for the Arts Expeditions Grant, and by the Arts at Amherst Initiative and the Groove Fund at Amherst College, in cooperation with the Northampton Center for the Arts.

Admission for all events is free. To reserve tickets for CAST and STAGE, call (413) 542-2277. Seating is limited, so reservations are recommended.

For information on AUTHOR exhibit times, please visit the A.P.E. webpage: http://www.apearts.org/events--projects.html

AC After Dark presents Disney Bingo and Burritos! Come to Friedmann Room at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 1 and play 12 rounds of bingo. Prizes for each round with a mystery grand prize in the last round. Chipotle will be served.

The Amherst College Musical presents Green Day’s American Idiot!

You must reserve tickets using the following form: https://forms.gle/5bpvdvWxC8SJ1yt58

Tickets are FREE for Five College students, faculty and staff. We hope to see you there!

Become a member of the Indicator Magazine staff! Be a writer, editor and/or artist and see your work published and distributed across campus! We publish writing of any genre, any art that can be scanned or photographed, and offer the opportunity to gain editorial and design experience. No previous experience is required and beginners are welcome. We are an entirely student-run publication that publishes one issue per semester, meeting 3-4 times overall. Contact Editor-in-Chief Heather Brennan (hbrennan20@amherst.edu) if you are interested in joining or if you have questions, and check out our Fall 2019 issue now available in Frost, Val, the Science Center and Keefe!

Born in Iraq, Ibrahim Kazerooni was imprisoned under Saddam Hussein's regime and eventually fled the country in fear of Iraq's secret police. He completed theological studies in both Iran and Iraq, and also holds degrees in engineering, management and international relations, and a joint Ph.D. in religion and social change. He is the Imam of the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich.

An Interfaith Harmony Week offering from the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life

Become a member of the Indicator Magazine staff! Be a writer, editor and/or artist and see your work published and distributed across campus! We publish writing of any genre, any art that can be scanned or photographed, and offer the opportunity to gain editorial and design experience. No previous experience is required and beginners are welcome. We are an entirely student-run publication that publishes one issue per semester, meeting 3-4 times overall. Contact Editor-in-Chief Heather Brennan (hbrennan20@amherst.edu) if you are interested in joining or if you have questions, and check out our Fall 2019 issue now available in Frost, Val, the Science Center and Keefe!

In both poetry and scholarship, Kate Lilley tarries with the problematic of queer historical transmission and the constitution of the queer early/modern. Her work on the genres of early modern women’s writing, sapphic modernism, the queer mid-century, and contemporary experiments with all these, turns on questions of intertextual, intermedia and interpersonal encounter as exemplary mis/alliance. Conjuring scenes of revisionist feminist critique and complaint, her critical-creative poetics of queer feminist assemblage takes shape as a practice of secondary revision and working through. In music theory, "through composition" describes a mode of invention which continuously introduces new material without repetition. Here, Lilley uses it to signify the labile multifariousness of queer citation and reference as ground or continuo, repetition without repeating. In her latest book of poems, Tilt (2018), tropism and remediation drive successive detours through the copia of material history and genre, the affects of lived experience and the archive of poetic forms, lighting on Greta Garbo, The Children’s Hour and her own #MeToo scandal.

Kate Lilley is an award-winning Australian poet, author of Versary (2002), Ladylike (2012) and Tilt (2018). She is also a well-known scholar of queer feminist literary history, editor of Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World (Penguin Classics) and Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (UWAP), and director of creative writing at the University of Sydney.

This salon is co-sponsored by the CHI, Creative Writing Center, Department of English and Department of Sexuality, Women's & Gender Studies. A reception will follow.

Please join us for a special Staff Survey Coffee Hour on Thursday, February 6 from 10-11 a.m. in the Science Center Café. This coffee hour will focus on the 2020 Staff Survey. Laptops will be available for people to participate in the online survey, and Dina Levi, Director of Inclusive Leadership, will be on hand to answer questions.

In acclaimed director Fritz Lang’s first sound film and classic Weimar-era thriller, suspense reaches fever pitch as a notorious serial killer (Peter Lorre) terrorizes the big city to the point where the police and a crime syndicate conduct parallel campaigns to catch the criminal.

This film will be shown at both 4 and 7:30 p.m. in German with English subtitles.

Long before the Bechdel Test codified and implicitly critiqued the failure of films to make female interaction the focal point of narrative activity, Fred Zinnemann’s 1977 Julia and Claudia Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends both described the difficulty of conceptualizing female affiliation in narrative as well as visual sequences. Within widely different industrial and political contexts, they each narrated the ways in which explicit interdiction and other forms of “sororophobia” arise as forms of plot advancement and affective dislocation in the lives of paired female friends. In Julia, the adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s memoir foreshadows as public historical and political allegory this separation or dislocation. In Girlfriends, the focus is personal and intimate, although the premise of the plot is also that this interdiction is a political and aesthetic matter. In both, an endeavor to separate affection from desire is gestured at as a condition of affection. This lecture will explore the ways in which women, in historical fact or imaginative revision, can be brought together as girlfriends.

Melissa Hardie is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Sydney. Much of her work considers “novel objects,” bridging modernist to contemporary textual practices to find unexpected areas of connection between what are usually thought of as discrete periods, practices or genres. Her recent essays have turned to Marielle Heller’s 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, about writer Lee Israel; texts by filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and novelist Djuna Barnes; and George Cukor’s last film, Rich and Famous, which narrates the friendship of two women writers. Her current book investigates how the closet is a critical vector in the remediation of forms of confession and disclosure, focusing on television, cinema, memoir and the starlet. She is also co-editing a book on Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls with Meaghan Morris and Kane Race. Hardie is driven by an ethos of inclusivity, which means she focuses on the underexplored and underrepresented edges of canons and how fields are transformed when inclusion and diversity are made central concerns.

A reception will follow.

Since the sequencing of the first human genome, over 30,000 disease-associated variants have been identified, the majority through genome-wide association studies. While these advances in our understanding of how genetics contribute to disease risk are now being used to inform translational research, including development of therapeutics and genetic risk screening, large-scale genetic studies have primarily used only genomes with European ancestry. If this pattern continues, advances in genetics will be limited, with the ensuing risk that therapeutic innovations leave out large segments of the global population. In addition, genetic risk scores, having been developed primarily on European genomes, do not translate to other populations, thus leading to many false positives and negatives. Expanding study collections to other populations will help alleviate some of these disparities, however without engaging scientists and physicians on all levels and providing them with the knowledge and skills necessary to perform these studies in their populations, there is a significant risk that the findings will again result in a widening of the massive research and treatment gaps with the rest of the world.

Using research on major mental health disorders, including schizophrenia and psychosis as examples, this talk will discuss work being done in the Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Populations-Psychosis (NeuroGAP-Psychosis), a study which began collection in 2018 and aims to collect DNA and phenotypic data from over 17,000 cases (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) and 17,000 controls from Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. I will present preliminary findings and highlight the development and implementation of a partner-training and capacity-building program, the Global Initiative for Neuropsychiatric Education in Research (GINGER), which focuses on building the next generation of computational genetics researchers in East and South Africa.

Lori Chibnik, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a biostatistician and assistant professor with an appointment in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Machine learning is revolutionizing the sciences, but most existing methods require large amounts of human-generated training data to succeed. In this talk, we will introduce the unsupervised clustering problem, which requires an algorithm to make predictions without training data. We will discuss some classical methods for clustering before introducing a couple of new approaches. Throughout, connections with graph theory, Fourier analysis and probability theory will be developed. We will also demonstrate
applications to image processing and remote sensing.

James M. Murphy is an assistant professor of mathematics at Tufts University. His research interests include theoretical machine learning and applied harmonic analysis. He works on problems in unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, high-dimensional probability theory, image and signal processing, graph theory and frame theory.

Tara Westover and Anthony Jack ’07 will discuss “What Would Equality in Education Look Like?” in a conversation moderated by Professor Leah Schmalzbauer. A book signing will follow this event.

Tara Westover is an American historian and writer known for her unique and courageous education journey. She was born to Mormon survivalist parents opposed to public education. Tara never attended school. She spent her days working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother... until Tara decided to get an education and experience the world outside of her community. Tara taught herself enough mathematics, grammar and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. She was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom and continued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from BYU in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an M.Phil. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a Ph.D. in history in 2014. Her new book, Educated, is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a story that gets to the heart of what education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it. Tara argues that education is not just about job training, but a powerful tool of self-invention. Educated was long-listed for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and has spent 32 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Former U.S. President Barack Obama named Educated as one of the books on his summer reading list of 2018.

Anthony Jack ’07, sociologist and assistant professor of education at Harvard University, is transforming the way we address diversity and inclusion in education. His new book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students, reframes the conversation surrounding poverty and higher education. In it, he explains the paths of two uniquely segregated groups. First, the “privileged poor”: students from low-income, diverse backgrounds who attended elite prep or boarding school before attending college. The second are what Jack calls the “doubly disadvantaged”—students who arrive from underprivileged backgrounds without prep or boarding school to soften their college transition. Although both groups come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the privileged poor have more cultural capital to navigate and succeed—in the college environment and beyond.

This event is funded by the Croxton Lecture Fund.

Become a member of the Indicator Magazine staff! Be a writer, editor and/or artist and see your work published and distributed across campus! We publish writing of any genre, any art that can be scanned or photographed, and offer the opportunity to gain editorial and design experience. No previous experience is required and beginners are welcome. We are an entirely student-run publication that publishes one issue per semester, meeting 3-4 times overall. Contact Editor-in-Chief Heather Brennan (hbrennan20@amherst.edu) if you are interested in joining or if you have questions, and check out our Fall 2019 issue now available in Frost, Val, the Science Center and Keefe!

The Life Stories series provides a forum for the Amherst community to get to know each other outside of our professional and academic roles. At each lunch, a student, faculty or staff member will share a story from their lives, followed by the opportunity for participants to engage in reflection and discussion. Lunch provided.

Dr. Thierry Pauyo ’05 is a professor of orthopedic surgery at McGill University and has worked in collaboration with a number of sports teams, including the Penguins and Steelers, and is currently the sport orthopedic surgeon to the Montreal Canadiens. Anyone interested in the practice of sports medicine will enjoy the opportunity to sit down with Thierry to hear about his journey from Amherst hockey player and neuroscience major to his multifaceted career today. Thierry can share his unique perspective on the world of professional sports, and specifically the National Hockey League, along with the role of health professionals in that context. An orthopedist by training, Thierry will share the challenges and opportunities that being involved in sports medicine present.

As part of his multifaceted career, Dr. Thierry Pauyo ’05 has worked in Haiti as part of his dedication to international aid efforts in orthopedic care. A professor and orthopedic surgeon, Thierry works with Partners in Health to develop greater capacities for orthopedic care in Cange and at l’Hopital Universitaire de Mirebalais, which is on track to become the largest solar-powered hospital in the world. This evening lecture presents a great opportunity for students interested in global health to hear directly from a physician who has taken his values and his commitment to medicine into the realm of addressing health issues specific to countries like Haiti. We are happy to partner with Amherst GlobeMed for this event.

All are welcome to the Common Table—a casual, drop-in time to share lunch and conversation on a topic of spirituality, belief or values. Please click the link below to see the list of weekly topics. Hosted by the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.

Join us for lunch and conversation with Dr. Thierry Pauyo ’05, an orthopedic surgeon and former Amherst College hockey player. This is a chance to discuss the challenges and opportunities for student-athletes of color on campus and to share perspectives about that experience. Dr. Pauyo will share his reflections of his time on the hockey team then, as a sports medicine physician for professional hockey teams today and as a player of a sport whose teams have been predominantly white. His perspectives and thoughts of his experiences, together with those of current student-athletes, can inform our understanding of Amherst today.

Celebrate the opening of the Mead’s spring exhibitions at this evening reception, featuring “The Best Impressions: Inside the Edward C. Crossett Collection of Prints,” along with new rotations of works in “Starting Something New: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions and Gifts and Ten Years of Trinkett Clark Memorial Student Acquisitions.” Join us for curatorial remarks, live music and refreshments in the galleries.
Free and open to all!

Interested in study abroad? Meet with an IES Abroad representative. IES Abroad offers more than 140 study abroad programs in 18 countries throughout the world. Fun Fact: This year, 2020, is IES Abroad’s 70th anniversary as a not-for-profit study abroad provider. The organization was started in 1950 in Vienna, Austria.

Come learn more about Middlebury’s study abroad options in 16 countries and full-immersion summer language programs!

Dr. Gonzalves will discuss the Smithsonian Institution’s ambitious programming challenge—to present tie-based music-related events every day in 2019. It’s also the planet’s largest music museum. You will hear an insider’s take on the state of research, collections and exhibition work at an institution tasked with the "increase and diffusion" of knowledge.

Join us for an Orthodox Christian gathering of prayer and conversation. Bishop John Abdalah of the Antiochian Orthodox Church will open the evening with remarks on globalization and identity. The series continues on March 11 and concludes on April 15. All are welcome to attend!

A live taping of Hot Take, a new podcast that takes an intersectional, critical, but constructive look at climate change coverage in news and journalism

Steven Dunn, aka Pothole (because he’s deep in these streets), is the author of two novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press—Potted Meat (2016) and water & power (2018)—and a chapbook, Our Migrations (Business Bear Press, 2018). Potted Meat, which Laird Hunt described as “full of wonder and silence and beauty and strangeness and ugliness and sadness and truth and hope,” has been adapted to film by Foothills Productions. Dunn was born and raised in West Virginia, and is currently an MFA student at Stetson University, and an MFA instructor at Regis University.

The reading will be followed by refreshments.

Stop by the Mead for a morning of waffles, card-making, and poetry-writing to celebrate friendship on campus. Bring a friend or make a new one. This program is offered in partnership with the Arts at Amherst Initiative, The Common, Amherst College’s Human Resources Activities Committee and the Women’s and Gender Center.
This event is free and open to Amherst College faculty, staff and students.

In this musical romantic drama, a young figure skater gives up her career when she is hospitalized with an injury. After she meets a failed hockey player, he helps her to believe in herself again and proves that true feelings can pave the way to reaching a dream. Directed by Oleg Trofim and completed in 2018, the film's runtime is 113 minutes.

The film is in Russian with English subtitles. The film will be screened at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m.

Come learn how to visualize data using maps taught by Professor Nussbaum, a lecturer at Mount Holyoke College. In addition to academia and research, she promotes the use of statistics in government and industry by advocating for evidence-based policymaking and the federal statistical agencies. Everyone is welcome! RLadies hopes to encourage, inspire and support women in the R community.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in SMUD 208.

Join us as we welcome Nikki Giovanni, poet and University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Ms. Giovanni will be this year's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr./Black History Month Symposium keynote speaker.

A brief biography in Ms. Giovanni's own words:
"I was asked to do a biography, so this is it. I am 71 years old. I highly recommend old age; it’s fun. I have been awarded an unprecedented seven NAACP Image Awards, which makes me very very proud. I have been nominated for a Grammy; been a finalist for the National Book Award. I am very proud to have authored three New York Times and Los Angeles Times best-sellers, highly unusual for a poet. I am a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. I don’t have a lot of friends, but I have good ones. I have a son and a granddaughter. My father, mother, sister and middle aunt are all deceased literarily making me go from being the baby in the family to being an elder. I like to cook, travel and dream. I’m a writer. I’m happy."

Nikki Giovanni is one of America’s most celebrated poets. Her work, which has both drawn from and influenced the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements, has been central to the cultural conversation since Giovanni first rose to prominence in the 1960s. Her literary contributions include books for children and adults, creative nonfiction and spoken-word albums. She has been awarded 25 honorary doctorates, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, numerous NAACP Image Awards, the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award, the Langston Hughes Award and the Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award. Since 1987 she has been a member of the faculty at Virginia Tech, where she is a University Distinguished Professor.

Come and get some puppy love on Valentine's Day! Dog treats and human treats will be provided. There will also be a craft station to make your own Valentine. Sponsored by the Counseling Center, the Science Center, and Alumni and Parent Programs.

Named the Cleveland Quartet Award-winner and honored with the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Dover has become one of the most in-demand ensembles in the world. The quartet’s rise from up-and-coming young ensemble to occupying a spot at the top of their field has been “practically meteoric” (Strings).
Performing works by Mozart, Barber, Shaw, and Shostakovich

“Charismatic, full-voiced” (The New York Times) bass-baritone Davóne Tines joins the Quartet for
Barber’s "Dover Beach" and Caroline Shaw’s "By and By."

Program:
Mozart: Quartet in C Major, K. 465, "Dissonance"
Barber: Dover Beach, Op. 3
Caroline Shaw: "By and By"
Intermission
Shostakovich: Quartet No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 117

Single ticket prices:
General public: $28
Senior citizens (65+) and Amherst College employees: $22
Students with valid ID: $12
FREE student rush available at the box office beginning one hour before the concert.
Single tickets on sale at:
https://amherst.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1310&r=a160827c183...

The Amherst College Jazz Ensemble and the Jihye Jazz Orchestra perform Lee’s new work, "Try Out," for the McBride Jazz Commission Series on Feb. 15 at 8 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Center, on the Amherst College campus.

Admission is free; no tickets are required. Donations to benefit the Amherst Survival Center will be gratefully accepted.

This year’s composer of the 16th composition in the Jazz Commission Series is New York City-based Jihye Lee. Her 13-piece Jazz Orchestra performs her new work "Try Out," and the ACJE performs music from Les Hooper, Gil Evans and Peter Pan.

For a complete listing of upcoming Amherst College Department of Music events, please visit us on the web: www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/music/events

Seminar with Javier Apfeld, Ph.D., assistant professor in the biology department at Northeastern University

C. elegans processes sensory information to choose between freeloading and self-defense strategies

My lab’s goal is to elucidate how the brain regulates aging and resilience to oxidants, using the nematode C. elegans as a tractable model organism. Our work combines molecular genetics, quantitative microscopy, mathematical modeling and engineering. During my Ph.D., I pioneered using genetics to study aging in Professor Cynthia Kenyon’s lab, and discovered that intercellular communication regulates lifespan in the nematode C. elegans. I then translated this new science of aging in biotech. Returning to academia, I help develop enabling technologies for studying C. elegans aging in collaboration with Professor Walter Fontana, a theorist and computational scientist.

Professor Isomae Jun’ichi from the International Research Center for Japanese Studies will address the experience of prayer and despair in Japan following the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. A prominent scholar of religion, Professor Isomae explores the challenges of capturing the unseen world of hope and despair in contemporary Japan. There will be a response by Professor Marion Eggert of the Ruhr-University Bochum.

The Paris Musée d’Ennery owes its existence to a young woman who, in the 1840s, had an interest in acquiring the Chinese and Japanese “monsters” hidden in antique shops. Fifty years later, Clémence Lecarpentier d’Ennery bequeathed her collection of nearly 7,000 objects to the French state. Although she assembled these pieces and built a house and galleries to curate and display them, museum conservators posthumously erased her life’s work, presenting it instead as her husband’s achievement.

This lavishly illustrated talk will present the museum, its collections and its history before teasing out some of the complicated social factors—among them class, gender, religion and nationalism—that led to the museum’s marginalization as a cultural institution.

Please join us for Coffee Hour! Meet Employee Council representatives and other staff from around campus, talk about issues that matter to you, and enjoy a free coffee and muffin—it’s on us!

Students compete with five- to seven-minute speeches using this year’s theme: Justice.

Winners receive cash prizes and recognition in the College award ceremonies.

Join us for a keynote lecture from Dick Goldsby, Amherst's Thomas B. Walton Jr. Memorial Professor of Biology, Emeritus, on “The Nature and Biology of Race.” The talk will be followed by a moderated question-and-answer session.

Professor Goldsby is the author of the 2019 book Thinking Race: Social Myths and Biological Realities.

Co-sponsors for this lecture are:
Being Human in STEM
Departments of Biology, Sociology, Anthropology and Black Studies
Office of Diversity and Inclusion
Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Science Center

Come celebrate Toni Morrison’s birthday with a film screening of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Drinks and desserts will be available.

This artful and intimate meditation on the legendary storyteller examines her life, her works and the powerful themes she has confronted throughout her literary career (imdb.com).

Co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty and the Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies Department

Free and open to the public

Tag der Offenen Tür: The German Department will be accepting applications to live in the German House (Porter House) for 2020-21. Come to the Open House with your questions and check out the wonderful atmosphere at the German House. Refreshments will be served. The applications are available on the Residential Life website (Housing Portal) and are due by February 27, 2020.

Learn how two Amherst College statistics professors got to where they are now in their careers in data science. Everyone is welcome! RLadies hopes to encourage, inspire and support women in the R community.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Refreshments will be served.

Join the Peer Advocates for Sexual Respect for a group discussion on masculinity and parties on campus! This event is a follow-up to our panel on masculinity last semester.

An evening of poetry and performance from Dao Strom, whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. The New Yorker has called her work “Quietly beautiful … hip without being ironic.” She makes music as The Sea & The Mother and is the author of five books, including a bilingual poetry/art book, a hybrid-form memoir with a song-cycle, a collection of novellas and a novel. She is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists of the Vietnamese diaspora, as well as the editor of diaCRITICS. Refreshments will follow.

Amherst Dreaming Club invites you to its first meeting this Wednesday in Cohan Skylounge at 8 p.m. Open to all Amherst community members, Amherst Dreaming Club hopes to bring people together to share and learn about dreams, from lucid dreaming techniques to dream analysis. No previous experience required. Any questions can be directed to dshulman20@amherst.edu or mjohnson22@amherst.edu.

Christopher Myers is an artist and writer based in New York City. A widely acclaimed author of literature for young people, he is also an accomplished fine artist who has lectured and exhibited internationally. His work questions what it means to be an artist and to create art that is rooted in the experience of global cultural exchange.

Meet Myers for lunch in the Amherst College Multicultural Resource Center. Learn more about his artistic practice, his work in publishing, how his work centers historically marginalized perspectives in art and literature, and how he collaborates with artists and craftspeople across cultures and around the world.

Fictional romantic biopic starring Alexander Fehling as the young Goethe struggling as an aspiring poet. When working as an assistant at a law court, he falls hopelessly in love with a young woman who is already engaged, triggering events that provided the inspiration of Goethe’s first international success, the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

This film will be shown at both 4 and 7:30 p.m. in German with English subtitles.

Rhonda Cobham-Sander, the Emily C. Jordan Folger Professor of Black Studies and English, will reflect with us about her teaching now and how her teaching has evolved throughout her career at Amherst College.

RSVP through the Center for Teaching and Learning website.

Some definitions of the word symmetry include “correct or pleasing proportion of the parts of a thing,” “balanced proportions” and “the property of remaining invariant under certain changes, as of orientation in space.” One might think of snowflakes, butterflies and our own faces as naturally symmetric objects—or at least close to it. Mathematically, one can also conjure up many symmetric objects: even and odd functions, fractals, certain matrices and modular forms, a type of symmetric complex function. All of these things exhibit a kind of beauty in their symmetries, so would they lose some of their innate beauty if their symmetries were altered? Alternatively, could some measure of beauty be gained with slight symmetric imperfections? We will explore these questions, guided by the topic of modular forms and their variants. What can be gained by perturbing modular symmetries in particular? We will discuss this theme from past to present: the origins of these questions have their roots in the first half of the 20th century, dating back to Ramanujan and Gauss, while some fascinating and surprising answers come from just the last 15 years.

Christopher Myers is an artist and writer based in New York City. A widely acclaimed author of literature for young people, he is also an accomplished fine artist who has lectured and exhibited internationally. His work questions what it means to be an artist and to create art that is rooted in the experience of global cultural exchange.

Join us for an artist talk with Christopher Myers to learn more about his artistic practice and the thinking behind this year’s Rotherwas Project.

This program is supported by the Arts at Amherst Initiative and is free and open to all.

It's the time we've all been waiting for! That's right, it's tax and financial aid re-application season. If you didn't know, everyone on financial aid has to re-apply every year and everyone who receives financial aid for housing and food has to file taxes. Don't fret, Amherst QuestBridge Low Income Community will help you as well as answer all your burning questions about financial aid and taxes. You've got to do it anyway, why not do it around friends and snacks??

Sarah Knott is a writer, feminist and professor of history. She is the author, most recently, of Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History, which The New York Times described as “a joy to read.” She is currently an associate professor of history at Indiana University and a research fellow of the Kinsey Institute.

Sponsored by the Department of History, the Lamont Lecture Fund, and the Eastman Lecture Fund

This year’s Five College Dance Faculty Concert features five faculty and guest artist works (one from each campus) that investigate human distance and intimacy. Set against the backdrop of global social and environmental crises, these performances provide ways to contemplate how we connect—or not—with our own internal landscapes, with other individuals and with our physical surroundings. The concert invites performers and audiences to consider how embodiment, movement collaboration and the community inherent to performance can provide not solutions to the difficulties we face, but rather new avenues by which to broach them.

All five pieces are premieres that either continue or initiate the artists’ choreographic investigations with Five College Dance students. Featuring new work by newer members of the Five College Dance community, this concert can be seen as a look into the future of Five College Dance.

The choreographers are:
Deborah Goffe, assistant professor of dance, Hampshire College
Barbie Diewald, assistant professor of dance, Mount Holyoke College
Sarah Lass, Smith MFA ’18, Smith College guest artist
Jenna Riegel, assistant professor of dance, Amherst College
Aston K. McCullough, assistant professor of dance science, UMass Amherst

Main Studio Theater, Hampshire College
Tickets are $5 for students/seniors and $10 for general admission, and are available online: www.fivecolleges.edu/dance

See the poster for more information.

Enjoy a children’s storybook reading and signing with author and artist Christopher Myers. Books will be available for purchase. After story time, stay for free activities inspired by Myers’s latest exhibition, Rotherwas Project 5: The Red Plague Rid You for Learning Me Your Language. Choose from sonnet writing, quilting, mapping and more!

Refreshments will be served.

Activities are designed for children ages 6–11, but all are welcome to attend. This program is presented in partnership with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, The Common and the Amherst College Women’s and Gender Center.

Free and open to all!

If you have accessibility concerns, please contact Danielle Amodeo at (413) 542-5651.

The music department presents a special talk by jazz historian and professor of American studies Sherrie Tucker. All are invited.

Professor Tucker’s talk focuses on the work of composer, musician and humanitarian Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), who is renowned for her innovations in composition, sound technology, research, philosophy and practices of listening, as well as feminist and environmental humanitarian projects. Less known is her work on all-ability improvisation through the Adaptive-Use Musical Instrument (AUMI), a free download/app that transforms any laptop, desktop, iPad or iPhone into a musical instrument that uses motion tracking to adapt to every body. Oliveros considered the AUMI a continuation of, not a departure from, her life’s work, listing it as her major research project with her department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in her final years. From 2007 until her passing, she spoke of the AUMI as interconnected with her other projects and collaborations intended to expand our abilities to listen, and thus to expand consciousness—such as the Sonic Meditations, Expanded Instrument System and Deep Listening® practice. 

In this lecture/demonstration, jazz studies scholar Sherrie Tucker shares what she has learned as a member of the ongoing collaborative AUMI Research Project, including how it challenged her exclusive relationship with jazz as an object of study, and pivoted her jazz studies questions and methods toward explorations of inclusive mixed-ability listening, sounding and sociality. Participants are invited to bring laptops, iPads or iPhones (sorry, Android users), if they wish. Those who want to try the AUMI in advance may download it free of charge at http://aumiapp.com/download.php.

Sherrie Tucker (professor, American studies, University of Kansas) is the author of Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke, 2014) and Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Duke, 2000) and co-editor, with Nichole T. Rustin, of Big Ears:  Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke, 2008). She is a member of the AUMI Editorial Collective, whose collaborative volume, Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) is currently under review at University of Michigan Press. She is a member of two major collaborative research initiatives: the International Institute of Critical Improvisation Studies and Improvisation, Community and Social Practice (for which she served as facilitator for the Improvisation, Gender and the Body research area), both funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a founding member of the Melba Liston Research Collective, a member of the AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument) Project and founding member of AUMI-KU InterArts, one of six member institutions of the AUMI Research Consortium. She was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University in 2004-2005, where she was a member of the Columbia Jazz Study Group. With Randal M. Jelks, she co-edits the journal American Studies. She serves with Deborah Wong and Jeremy Wallach as series editors for the Music/Culture Series at Wesleyan University Press. She is the proud holder of a Deep Listening® Ear-tificate.

For more information, contact Professor Jason Robinson (jrobinson@amherst.edu).

Denise Murrell is the curator behind the highly praised exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today that opened last year at the Museé d’Orsay in Paris. Murrell’s new analyses and rigorous research into social and art histories resulted in the writing of significant biographies for previously unknown Black models and muses, and the suggestion of new titles for paintings by Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso and others where those depicted had previously been reduced to words like “negro” or “mulatto.” Beyond the focus on 19th- and 20th-century art, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue have created entirely new paradigms for research and teaching, and have transformed perspectives in the history of art.

Murrell was recently appointed to the post of associate curator of 19th- and 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a newly created position that will involve her working closely with both the museum’s modern and contemporary department and its European painting department. The first new appointment by the Met director Max Hollein signals that new perspectives are being pursued at the museum, moving beyond the Western lens. “Max and his team want to proactively move toward a more inclusive presentation of art history across all periods,” Murrell told The New York Times (November 20, 2019).

Murrell’s lecture is sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series and the Department of Art and the History of Art at Amherst College. Following her Friday lecture, Murrell will be leading a faculty seminar and a workshop with students at the Smith College Museum of Art. Murrell’s visit is being organized by Karen Koehler, visiting faculty in art and the history of art at Amherst and professor in architectural and art history at Hampshire College, and Darcy Buerkle, associate professor of history and affiliate in the study of women and gender at Smith College.

Image: Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell

Join us to watch 26 short films from Five College students. Celebrate diverse works of animation, documentaries, experimentals and narratives. A small award ceremony will be held at the end, with a special audience award.

Free snack is included!

Founded in 1994, the Five College Student Film & Video Festival is an annual event featuring original films and videos by Five College students. The festival has become an important venue for film students to meet, collaborate and share their productions with their peers and with the Five College film community.
Students from each of the Five Colleges organize the festival with the assistance of a student director from the host college and a faculty advisor. The festival, which is sponsored by the Five College Film Council, is held each year during the spring semester. Submissions are evaluated by a jury of students and faculty members from each campus. Selected works are shown at the festival, and awards are given.

This year’s Five College Dance Faculty Concert features five faculty and guest artist works (one from each campus) that investigate human distance and intimacy. Set against the backdrop of global social and environmental crises, these performances provide ways to contemplate how we connect—or not—with our own internal landscapes, with other individuals and with our physical surroundings. The concert invites performers and audiences to consider how embodiment, movement collaboration and the community inherent to performance can provide not solutions to the difficulties we face, but rather new avenues by which to broach them.

All five pieces are premieres that either continue or initiate the artists’ choreographic investigations with Five College Dance students. Featuring new work by newer members of the Five College Dance community, this concert can be seen as a look into the future of Five College Dance.

The choreographers are:
Deborah Goffe, assistant professor of dance, Hampshire College
Barbie Diewald, assistant professor of dance, Mount Holyoke College
Sarah Lass, Smith MFA ’18, Smith College guest artist
Jenna Riegel, assistant professor of dance, Amherst College
Aston K. McCullough, assistant professor of dance science, UMass Amherst

Main Studio Theater, Hampshire College
Tickets are $5 for students/seniors and $10 for general admission, and are available online: www.fivecolleges.edu/dance

See the poster for more information.

This year’s Five College Dance Faculty Concert features five faculty and guest artist works (one from each campus) that investigate human distance and intimacy. Set against the backdrop of global social and environmental crises, these performances provide ways to contemplate how we connect—or not—with our own internal landscapes, with other individuals and with our physical surroundings. The concert invites performers and audiences to consider how embodiment, movement collaboration and the community inherent to performance can provide not solutions to the difficulties we face, but rather new avenues by which to broach them.

All five pieces are premieres that either continue or initiate the artists’ choreographic investigations with Five College Dance students. Featuring new work by newer members of the Five College Dance community, this concert can be seen as a look into the future of Five College Dance.

The choreographers are:
Deborah Goffe, assistant professor of dance, Hampshire College
Barbie Diewald, assistant professor of dance, Mount Holyoke College
Sarah Lass, Smith MFA ’18, Smith College guest artist
Jenna Riegel, assistant professor of dance, Amherst College
Aston K. McCullough, assistant professor of dance science, UMass Amherst

Main Studio Theater, Hampshire College
Tickets are $5 for students/seniors and $10 for general admission, and are available online: www.fivecolleges.edu/dance

See the poster for more information.

Are you an Amherst senior? Want to develop campaign and fundraising skills, volunteer on behalf of Amherst, learn about alumni opportunities after graduation and have access to special events and perks? Join the Class of 2020 Senior Gift Committee for brunch! Bring your appetite and a friend, and come get the tea (or coffee) on our programming and volunteer opportunities this semester.

Laura L. Kiessling, Ph.D., the Novartis Professor of Chemistry in Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give a talk titled “Carbohydrates at the Host–Microbe Interface.”

Our health depends on maintaining a functional microbiome and avoiding the propagation of pathogenic microbes. Our group seeks to understand the mechanisms of microbial control by focusing on a prominent feature of the cell’s exterior—the carbohydrate coat. From humans to fungi to bacteria, all cells on Earth possess a carbohydrate coat. A critical role of this coat is to serve as an identification card. Our group has been examining the role of carbohydrate-binding proteins, called lectins, in influencing our microbiota and in immune defense. This seminar will focus on understanding the basis of carbohydrate-protein interactions and how they are used to control microbes. We envision that our findings can lead to alternative means to combat pathogens, methods for rapid approaches to ID microbiota, and the development of new strategies to regulate microbiome composition to promote human health.

One of the most valuable skills you can have is being able to network strategically and effectively. Kim Karetsky ’99 will be at Amherst College as part of the Loeb Center’s Alumni in Residence Program. As an expert in leadership and learning, she will be hosting an interactive workshop on strategic networking and providing tactics and tips on how YOU can gain the most from your connections with alumni and others. Kim is the founder and CEO of KHK Leadership and Learning, a consulting business which designs and implements customized professional development and leadership services to organizations and individuals. After spending 15 years at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan in leadership and professional development roles, Kim created KHK and is dedicated to helping her clients build skills in leadership. She is also dedicated to helping Amherst College students become the leaders of tomorrow. Through this workshop, she will help YOU develop skills and tactics on how to effectively connect with alumni and others and how to develop long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with others that can impact your professional (and personal) lives.

Interested in starting a business one day or the lessons an entrepreneur learns when starting a new venture? Then have breakfast with Kim Karetsky ’99 as part of the Loeb Center’s Alumni in Residence Program. Kim Karetsky ’99 is the Founder and CEO of KHK Leadership and Learning, a consulting business which designs and implements customized professional development and leadership services to organizations and individuals. Before becoming a founder-owner, Kim spent 15 years honing her skills and abilities in leadership and professional development at Goldman, Sachs & Co and J.P. Morgan Chase. She took her knowledge and experience to create a company that is now transforming businesses and their people into leaders. This breakfast is a great opportunity for all students to learn what it takes to start a company and how women entrepreneurs succeed.

All are welcome to Common Table—a weekly, drop-in lunch conversation on a topic of spirituality, belief or values. Hosted by the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.

The rise of algorithmic analysis has been met by a rise in the interest in storytelling, suggesting that we are most human in the stories we tell, and that the stories we tell cannot be readily rendered into numbers. And so data scientists and digital humanities scholars have turned their attention to narrative forms in hopes of at least sketching out a computational model of narrative which might reveal how narratives work, at least as texts, if not also as vehicles for the delivery of meaning. Much of this work has, however, focused on texts like novels, skipping over the kinds of texts that most of us produce each and every day, both online and off.

This presentation surveys recent work in corpus stylistics, digital humanities, and information and data sciences, and then sketches out what might be a way to discern the shape of small stories. Examples are drawn from local legends about treasure, the clown legend cascade of 2016 and select literary works, among other things.

Dr. John Laudun, professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is “fascinated by how humans create their world with relatively simple resources.” His current work in culture analytics has brought collaborations with physicists and other scientists seeking to understand how texts can be modeled computationally in order to better describe their functions and features.

This film is based on real life events and tells a story of Soviet hockey player Valeri Kharlamov’s career and the first match of the Summit Series between the USSR and Canada in 1972. Directed by Nikolai Lebedev and completed in 2013, the film’s runtime is 134 minutes.

The film is in Russian with English subtitles. The film will be screened at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m.

Amherst alum Dr. Chris Lim, member of the graduating class of 2012, will be available for a drop-in conversation on “The Path to Grad School.” After finishing his studies at Amherst as one of the first two BCBP (biochemistry and biophysics) majors, he attended graduate school in molecular biophysics & biochemistry at Yale. He is currently on his way to UC Berkeley to start his next chapter doing postdoctoral research in structural biology.

Stop in for a friendly conversation with Chris and Carolyn Margolin, Program Director for Careers in Science and Technology of the Loeb Center.

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!

You are cordially invited to join us for the Five College German Studies Undergraduate Research Symposium. We hope to see you there! Please contact mhowes@amherst.edu with questions.

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 includes 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

On Friday join The Amherst STEM Network (a new student-run science magazine) for Lime Red bubble tea and Fresh Side tea rolls and celebrate the launch of their first few articles! Stop by the Science Center living room between 4:30pm and 6pm to meet the group and learn about what they do. This event is open to STEM and nonSTEM students alike!

Join Professor Judith Frank, in conversation with National Book Award recipient Susan Choi and finalist Laila Lalami. This event free an open to the public, to be followed by audience Q&A and book signing. Hosted in partnership with the National Book Foundation.

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out in 2019. Trust Exercise won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Choi teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain and the United States. She is author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, Arab American Book Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was on the Man Booker Prize longlist and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere. A recipient of British Council, Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, she teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a Los Angeles Times best-seller, a best-of-2019 selection from NPR and Time and a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.

Judith Frank is author of a book of criticism, Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor, and two novels, Crybaby Butch, which won a 2004 Lambda Literary Award, and All I Love and Know. In 2008, Frank received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. They have been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and have published short fiction in The Massachusetts Review, Other Voices and Best Lesbian Love Stories 2005. They teach English and creative writing at Amherst College and are currently working on a novel about race, reproduction and queerness.

Join host J. Riley Caldwell-O'Keefe, director of Amherst College’s Center for Teaching and Learning, in conversation with Northampton's own poet laureate, Karen Skolfield.

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Karen Skolfield’s book Battle Dress won the 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Frost in the Low Areas won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry and the First Book Award from Zone 3 Press. The poet laureate for Northampton, Mass., for 2019–2021, Skolfield has won the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review, 2015 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and 2015 Arts & Humanities Award from New England Public Radio, among other awards and fellowships. Her poems can be found in dozens of journals and magazines. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her M.F.A.

J. Riley Caldwell-O’Keefe directs Amherst College’s Center for Teaching and Learning. She was recently elected to the Core Committee of the Professional and Organizational Development Network. Previously, Caldwell-O’Keefe was a faculty member in the Boise State University theater department and associate director of the general education program. She served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force and traveled the world as stage manager for Air Force Entertainment’s Tops in Blue, then drew on this experience for her master’s and doctoral work, which she completed at UC Santa Barbara with a feminist studies emphasis. Her current research focuses on implicit bias in course evaluations, students as pedagogical partners, and teaching and learning at small liberal arts colleges.

Join host Jennifer Acker '00, founder and editor-in-chief of The Common literary magazine, with special guest Jesmyn Ward, the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice, for the novels Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).

This event is free and open to the public, to be followed by audience Q&A and book signing.

Ward's memoir, Men We Reaped, deals with the loss of five young men in her life. Ward edited the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, a New York Times best-seller. In 2020, she will release Navigate Your Stars, an adaptation of her 2018 Tulane University commencement speech. A professor of creative writing at Tulane, Ward received the 2016 Strauss Living award and a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2018.

Jennifer Acker ’00 is founder and editor-in-chief of The Common and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World. Her short stories, essays, translations and reviews have appeared in Amazon Original Stories, The Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, Guernica, The Yale Review and Ploughshares, among other places. Acker has an M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest.

First meeting of the semester! This is a safe space for Five College students identifying or questioning along the asexual or aromantic spectrums to share and celebrate their identities. Newcomers encouraged!

Inspiring performances, luminous sound and exceptional musicianship are the hallmarks of the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. Renowned for its dynamic interpretations and polished, expansive colors, the group has rapidly distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation. Performing works by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Szymanowski and Beethoven.

“pinpoint precision and spectacular sense of urgency” —The Boston Globe

Program:
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus Szymanowski: Quartet No.2
Intermission
Beethoven: Op.132

Tickets are available in the 14 days ahead of each performance at amherst.universitytickets.com.
Single ticket prices:
General public: $28
Senior citizens (65+) and Amherst College employees: $22
Students with valid ID: $12
FREE student rush available at the box office beginning one hour before the concert.