News & Events 04/2001

AMHERST, Mass. - The Dickinson Homestead in Amherst will sponsor the annual Emily Dickinson Poetry Walk on Saturday, May 12, at 1 p.m. The walk honors the memory of the poet Emily Dickinson, who died on May 15, 1886. The event is free and open to the public.

The walk will begin at 1 p.m. in the garden at the Dickinson Homestead at 280 Main Street, and proceed through Amherst, stopping at various sites significant in Dickinson's life. (A full schedule follows.) Members of the Amherst community will read a selection of Dickinson's poems at each location. At 2:30 p.m. the procession will arrive at West Cemetery on Triangle Street to gather at the Dickinson grave, where all are welcome to read their favorite poems and to join in a lighthearted toast to the poet's memory.

The Dickinson Homestead will be open on May 12 from 1 to 5 p.m. for self-guided tours. Homestead guides will be on hand to answer questions. No reservations are necessary, and admission is free. The Dickinson Homestead is a National Historic Landmark owned by the Trustees of Amherst College. For more information call the Dickinson Homestead at 413/542-8161. The Homestead has a Website at http://www.dickinsonhomestead.org

Maps of the one-mile route of the Poetry Walk route will be available at the garden at the Homestead. Participants are welcome to join the walk at any point along the route. Those who wish to participate only in the cemetery reading should meet at the Dickinson grave in West Cemetery on Triangle St. at 2:30 p.m.

Emily Dickinson Poetry Walk
Schedule of Readings

1 p.m. Dickinson Homestead garden, 280 Main Street
1:20 p.m. Amherst Train Station, Railroad Street
1:40 p.m. Front steps of The Evergreens, 214 Main Street
2 p.m. Front lawn of the Jones Library, 43 Amity Street
2:20 p.m. Parking lot behind Zanna, 187 North Pleasant Street (next to Ren's Mobil Service, site of Dickinson home)
2:30 p.m. Dickinson grave site, West Cemetery, Triangle Street

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AMHERST, Mass.— Catherine G. Pfaffenroth, a graduating senior at Amherst College, has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship for postgraduate study overseas. Pfaffenroth, daughter of Peter and Sara Pfaffenroth of Chester, N.J., will study the shifting boundaries between “fine art” and “crafts” in Vienna around 1900.

The Viennese Sezessionstil was the Austrian analogue of Parisian Art Nouveau: movements that “represented a change in approach to the creation of art,” as Pfaffenroth wrote in her Fulbright proposal. “There was significant public confusion as to whether this constituted a change in decorative style or a revolution in the methods of self-expression. Did individuals regard themselves as artists or craftsmen?”

Pfaffenroth plans academic study at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Vienna, with additional work at Secessionist Museum and the sterreichisches Museum fr agewandte Kunst. She hopes to work in the arts when she leaves Amherst and later attend graduate school in art history or decorative arts.

A European studies, fine arts and French major at Amherst, Pfaffenroth was the director of the Bluestockings, an a capella group, and also sang in the Amherst College Concert Choir. She worked as a yearbook photographer, and was a member of The Friends of the Amherst College Library and the Amherst Architecture Club.

Congress created the Fulbright Program in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Senator J. William Fulbright, sponsor of the legislation, viewed scholarship as an alternative to armed conflict. Today the Fulbright Program, the federal government’s premier scholarship program, funded by an annual Congressional appropriation and contributions from other participating countries, allows Americans to study or conduct research in over 100 nations.

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April 23, 2001
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.— Peter A. Kupfer, a graduating senior at Amherst College, has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship for postgraduate study overseas. Kupfer, son of Carl and Carola Kupfer of Highland Park, Ill., will study how the cultural identity of the German Democratic Republic was embodied and reflected in the treatment of opera at the Komische Oper in East Berlin.

“How can such seemingly simple black marks on a white page create so many totally dissimilar, yet equally feasible, worlds?” Kupfer asked about music in his Fulbright proposal. “Not only did the East German government need to control music being composed during the Cold War, but it also needed to reconcile the music of the great German composers with its political agenda.”

Kupfer plans to examine the records and documents of the Komische Oper kept at the Deutsches Musikarchiv in Berlin, and to interpret their ideological importance in his studies in the Lehrgebiet fuer Musiksoziologie in the Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar at the Humboldt Universitaet.

A music, German studies and computer science major at Amherst, Kupfer has been president of the Amherst College Orchestra, in which he also played bassoon. He also played on the ultimate frisbee team and was president of the German House. Upon completing the Fulbright Kupfer plans to attend graduate school or work in the computer industry.

Congress created the Fulbright Program in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Senator J. William Fulbright, sponsor of the legislation, viewed scholarship as an alternative to armed conflict. Today the Fulbright Program, the federal government’s premier scholarship program, funded by an annual Congressional appropriation and contributions from other participating countries, allows Americans to study or conduct research in over 100 nations.

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AMHERST, Mass.— Stephen M. Ruckman, a graduating senior at Amherst College, has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship for postgraduate study overseas. Ruckman, son of Roger and Kathy Ruckman of Chevy Chase, Md., will study the role of ethics in political philosophy in England or Scotland.

“ My central aim … is to thoroughly examine political action in a moral context, ” Ruckman wrote in his Fulbright proposal. “In my first class in political science at Amherst College, I was dismayed by the professor’s assertion that political leadership is only successful when it is amoral. I refused to be bound by Machiavelli. ”

Ruckman plans academic study in ethical philosophy at either the London School of Economics or the University of Edinburgh. He hopes to earn a law degree one day and work in government.

Ruckman, a political science major at Amherst, has been the principal violist with the Amherst College Orchestra and played with the Tsrema string quartet for four years. Active in student politics, Ruckman was elected president of the Student Government Organization in his senior year, and was a member of the Amherst College Diversity Coalition. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Congress created the Fulbright Program in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Senator J. William Fulbright, sponsor of the legislation, viewed scholarship as an alternative to armed conflict. Today the Fulbright Program, the federal government’s premier scholarship program, funded by an annual Congressional appropriation and contributions from other participating countries, allows Americans to study or conduct research in over 100 nations.

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AMHERST, Mass. - The orchestra and chamber music ensembles of Amherst College will present three free concerts in Buckley Recital Hall at the college.

The Amherst College Orchestra will perform on Saturday, April 28, at 8 p.m. They will be joined by student soloists who recently won the concerto competition at the college. Darcy Ogden '01 will be the soloist for "Poem for Flute and Orchestra" by Charles Griffes, Aaron Butler '02 will be the soloist for the Piano Concerto no.2, op.40 by Felix Mendelssohn and Tony Xu '01 will be the soloist for the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no.2, op.18. Lanfranco Marcelletti will conduct; Miriam Teitel '00 is the assistant director.

The Tsrema String Quartet will perform on Saturday, May 5, at 3 p.m. featuring works by Brahms, Shostakovitch and Lewis Spratlan, the Peter R. Pouncey Professor of Music at Amherst. Spratlan won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his opera, "Life is a Dream."

The chamber groups of the orchestra will perform on Tuesday, May 8, at 8 p.m. The program will include the Overture "La Peri" for brass ensemble by Dukas, the Sinfonia for Winds by Donizetti, the Symphony no. 32 of Mozart, the Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 6 with Stephen Ruckman '01, David Abramowicz '01 and Jonathan Min '01 as soloists, and the Brahms Violin Sonata.

Lanfranco Marcelletti received advanced degrees from the Yale University School of Music and is the director of instrumental music at Amherst.

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April 19, 2001
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—During their Spring Break in March, 18 Amherst College students, two professors and two staff members traveled to Cuba as part of an educational delegation. The group will discuss their 10-day visit, the trade embargo against Cuba and economic globalization on Tuesday, April 24, at 7 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College. Karin Weyland, assistant professor of American Studies and sociology and anthropology, and several students will show the video documentary about their trip they have been preparing. The event is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served.

The members of the delegation, co-sponsored by Witness for Peace, a politically independent grassroots organization that works for social justice in Latin America, wanted to broaden their classroom perspective on Cuba by observing and engaging with a world radically different in its culture, economy and political system. In the months before the trip, they read extensively to familiarize themselves with the island, meeting weekly in a Special Topics class to discuss the questions raised by their studies.

In Cuba, the delegation met with Cuban citizens and visited schools, health clinics, agricultural cooperatives, factories, museums and government ministries, adding first-hand knowledge to the factual and theoretical base. A goal of the journey was to return and share the knowledge and personal growth gained with the Amherst community, promoting social engagement with issues of international relations, public health, public education and Cuban culture.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Legendary jazz vocalist Jon Hendricks will appear on Friday, May 4 at 8 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College. Hendricks will be joined by his daughter Aria Hendricks, his new trio (Peter Mihelich on piano, Neal Miner on bass and Andy Watson on drums), the Amherst College Jazz Ensemble and composer, lyricist and pianist David Lahm (Amherst ’61.) The concert, free and open to the public, will celebrate Robin McBride’s gift to the college of a collection of more than 2000 jazz albums. McBride graduated from Amherst in 1959.

Jon Hendricks, born in 1920, has been called the “James Joyce of jive” by Time magazine and “the poet laureate of jazz” by jazz critic and historian Leonard Feather, for his ability to write songs that weave together different vocal parts. Hendricks began singing on the radio in his teens. In 1958 he, Annie Ross and Dave Lambert formed the trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross toured and recorded all over the world, developing a repertoire of “vocalese,” a style of setting witty intricate lyrics to improvisational instrumental jazz solos and crafting swinging poetry. Their first recording was Sing Along With Basie (1958), which was just what they did: singing all the parts (except rhythm) to recreate with voices the big-band standards of Basie, Ellington and others.

Hendricks continued a solo and ensemble career, and was jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He taught music at California State University at Sonoma and the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked with Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Buck Clayton, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin, and his 1985 album Vocalese won five Grammy Awards. In recent years Hendricks has been singing again with Annie Ross.

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AMHERST, Mass. - Paul Farmer, professor of social medicine at Harvard University Medical School and director of the Clinique Bon Sauveur in Haiti, will discuss "Pathologies of Power: Rethinking Health and Human Rights in the Global Era," on Saturday, April 28, at 10:30 a.m. in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College.

Farmer will argue for research and action grounded in the struggle for social and economic rights. He believes that future progress in human rights will be linked to the equitable distribution of the fruits of scientific advancement.

In addition to his teaching and clinical work in Haiti, Farmer is the director of the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard and the co-director of Partners in Health, an international organization that brings medical care to the world's poor people. He has written several works of medical anthropology, including Infections and Inequalities (1999). His research interests include health and human rights, infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV, and community-based control of infectious diseases. Farmer was profiled recently in the New Yorker in an article called "The Good Doctor."

Pastries, coffee and tea before the lecture and a light luncheon afterward will be provided by the Black Sheep Bakery. The event is organized by the Religious Advisors at Amherst College and sponsored by the Schwemm Fund and is free and open to the public.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Thomas Dumm, professor of political science at Amherst College, has been named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The foundation will support his research on loneliness and experience for the 12-month period beginning in September 2001. Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded on the basis of past accomplishment and future promise as a scholar, writer and artist.

Dumm is the author of four books that have explored the relationship of punishment to the origins of American democracy, different aspects of contemporary American political culture, and poststructuralist political theory. His most recent book is A Politics of the Ordinary (NYU Press, 1999). He finishes his term as founding editor of Theory&Event, an internationally juried journal of contemporary political theory, in December of this year. Theory&Event was first published in 1997, and was at its founding the first exclusively online humanities journal published by a major university press (Johns Hopkins University Press, Project MUSE). It currently is carried by several thousand libraries worldwide.

Dumm will be engaged in research and will present lectures in London, England; Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, Australia; and Pelican Bay, Calif. in the coming year.

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AMHERST, Mass. - The Students of Mixed Heritage at Amherst College (SMHAC) will present a multimedia display of "The Growing Multicultural World," in the Keefe Campus Center Atrium from Sunday, April 22 to Sunday, April 29. The Campus Center is open daily from 9 a.m. until 2 a.m.; admission is free.

This display of biographical sketches, photographs, statistics, and literature about people of mixed race, culture and ethnicity at Amherst College, and also in the mass media, is designed to help bring about a greater awareness and understanding of the mixed heritage experience.

Jasmine E. Lee, an Amherst College junior who chairs the SMHAC, says that "the photographs should attract people, but then we hope they learn something by reading the words."

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AMHERST, Mass.--Poet Daniel Hall, a visiting writer at Amherst College, will talk about "Form and Freedom: Thom Gunn in America" on Friday, April 27 at 4 p.m. in Porter Lounge in Converse Hall at the college. This talk is sponsored by the Friends of the Amherst College Library.

Daniel Hall has published two collections of poetry. Hermit with Landscape was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1989. Strange Relation was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series in 1996. Hall has received awards and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation, among others. He teaches poetry writing at Amherst College.

Poet Thom Gunn, born in Kent, England, in 1929, spent time in the British national service and in Paris before enrolling in Trinity College, Cambridge. Since 1954 he has lived in San Francisco, where he studied poetry with Yvor Winters at Stanford University.

Gunn has written many books of poetry published in the United States and Britain, including Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), Frontiers of Gossip (1998), Collected Poems (1994), The Man with Night Sweats (1992), The Passages of Joy (1983), Selected Poems 1950-1975 (1979), Jack Straw's Castle (1976), To the Air (1974), Moly, and My Sad Captains (1971), Touch (1968), The Sense of Movement (1959) and several collections of essays.

Among the honors Gunn has received are a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches at the University of California in Berkeley and was the Robert Frost Library

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AMHERST, Mass.-- Patrick Caddeau, assistant professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Amherst College, will give the annual Max and Etta Lazerowitz Lecture, on "Endless Comment and Commentary: Use and Abuse of the World's First Novel, The Tale of Genji, Over the Last Millenium," on Tuesday, April 24, at 4 p.m. in the Alumni House at Amherst College. The talk, and a reception immediately following, are free and open to the public. Caddeau's talk will focus on the ways The Tale of Genji has been interpreted and appreciated in the nearly 1,000 years since its composition.

Professor Caddeau, a scholar of Asian language and literature, came to Amherst is 1998. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. His most recent works have appeared in the Edo Anthology of Japanese Literature and Shirin, published by the Faculty of Letters, Osaka University, Japan. Caddeau currently is working on a manuscript called "Aesthetic Persuasions: Higiwara Hiromichi and Literary Criticism in Edo Japan."

The Lazerowitz Lectureship is awarded each year to support and encourage members of the Amherst College faculty in their scholarly work. The Dean of the Faculty, in conjunction with the Lecture Committee, selects the recipient, a member of the faculty below the rank of a full professor, who presents a lecture on his or her research.

The Max and Etta Lazerowitz Lectureship was established in 1985 to honor the parents of the late Morris Lazerowitz, emeritus professor of philosophy at Smith College. Professor Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz, wife of the late Morris Lazerowitz and also emeritus professor of philosophy at Smith, attended the Lazerowitz Lecture each spring as an honored guest until her recent death in January.

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AMHERST, Mass. - Ten years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, five college professors who once lived under various kinds of communist rule in Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas will discuss their experiences on Monday, April 30, at 7:30 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College.

Four of the professors teach at Amherst. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, the Thomas B. Walton, Jr., Professor of Spanish was born in Cuba, received his B.A. from the Institutio de Education Superior in Havana in 1950, and left Cuba 11 years after the Communist revolution in 1959.

Ute Brandes, professor of German, hails from the former German Democratic Republic where she went to school up to 10th grade. Threatened with political persecution, her family fled to West Germany.

Hua R. Lan, director of the Chinese language Program and senior lecturer in Asian languages and culture, was born in China and received his higher education in Shanghai. Before he came to the USA in the early 80s, he lived through the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in Beijing, where he taught for many years at the Beijing Language and Cultural University.

Pavel Machala, professor of political science, was born in Czechoslovakia and studied at Charles University in Prague, where he was a student leader during the Prague Spring of 1968, emigrating to the United States soon after the Warsaw Pact invasion of that year.

Constantine Pleshakov, a visiting assistant professor of Russian studies at Mount Holyoke College and the author of Inside the Kremlin's Cold War (1996), comes from the former Soviet Union, where he taught at the Russian Academy of Sciences until 1996.

Adam Nagorski, a junior at Amherst and the president of the Foreign Policy Forum, says that "the European communist governments collapsed before most of today's students were even in high school. Hopefully, this forum will not only make the existence of those states a less distant memory but also reveal the true nature of life in past and present communist societies."

This event is sponsored by the Foreign Policy Forum at Amherst College, a student organization that seeks to raise awareness of, and promote intelligent and informed debate about, contemporary international issues. The forum has a Website at http://www.amherst.edu/~fpforum.

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AMHERST, Mass.--Peter W. Shea, a local tenor, will present "From Schubert to Weill: A Concert of German Lieder," on Thursday, April 26, at 4 p.m. in Porter House at Amherst College (next to the Lord Jeffery Inn). Gregory Hayes will accompany Shea on piano. The Amherst College Department of German and the German House are sponsors of the concert, which is free and open to the public.

In the first half of the program, Shea will present songs written by German poets J. W. Goethe and Heinrich Heine and composed by Franz Schubert (1808-78). He will sing settings by Kurt Weill (1900-50) and Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) of works by Goethe, Heine and Bertolt Brecht in the second half. These will include some familiar Brecht-Weill collaborations from the "Dreigroschenoper" and some works Weill and Eisler composed in their exile in Hollywood during the Second World War.

Peter W. Shea, a frequent tenor soloist with groups such as the Arcadia Players Baroque Orchestra, the Hampshire Choral Society and the Brattleboro Community Chorus, has sung professionally since 1972. He is a member of Singers' Project, a newly formed professional chorus. He studied voice at the Hartt School in West Hartford and historical musicology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Shea is a cataloger of Germanic languages and musical materials for the University Libraries at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is developing "Ihr Lieder! Ihr meine guten Lieder!," a Web-based performer's guide to musical settings of Heine's poetry (http://www.library.umass.edu/subject/music/heine).

Pianist Gregory Hayes, a 1973 graduate of Amherst College who also studied at the Manhattan School of Music, has taught at Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and is a senior lecturer at Dartmouth. In past seasons his harpsichord and piano performances have been heard regularly in New York and New England, with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the New England Bach Festival, the Mohawk Trail Concerts Series and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. He is director of music for the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, and conducts the Da Camera Singers. The author of numerous reviews, articles and liner notes for recordings, Hayes is on the faculty of the Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, Mass.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, has written When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition ($29.95, 314 pp., Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001), a critical appraisal of the effect of capital punishment on American law, politics and culture.

“State killing damages us all,” Sarat writes. He calls on the United States to “stop one line of killing that we have within our power to stop,” in order to preserve what we value in our legal institutions and begin to heal our cultural and political divisions. State killing, an apparently clean solution, leaves us divided and incapable of solving our many complex problems of crime, inequality and justice, he says.

Sarat considers the victims’ rights movement, the technology of executions and the role of juries and lawyers in capital cases. He also tells the story of an “everyday” capital trial that he witnessed in Georgia, a trial marked by “bold and powerful” violence—the crime itself, the defendant’s life story and the threat of a state killing. At the end of the trial, Sarat writes, “anxiety,” not “reassurance,” remains.

Sarat also offers an analysis of the representation of capital punishment in popular culture. Such recent films as Last Dance, Dead Man Walking and The Green Mile finally “legitimate state killing, even as they point out some of its operational failures.”

But state killing, Sarat writes, “reveals both the weakness of the state and its strength." Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of Dead Man Walking and a noted opponent of the death penalty, said of his book, “no one who reads it will be the same again.”

Sarat has taught at Amherst since 1974, and is the co-author of Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients and the editor or coeditor of numerous volumes, including The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture, Liberal Modernism and Democratic Individuality.

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