Calendar of Events

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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

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.