September 16, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Professor Anthony W. Marx, president of Amherst College, will speak to first-year students about "Nations and Exclusions" on Tuesday, Sept. 30, at 4 p.m. in Johnson Chapel. The annual Croxton Fund Lecture is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and tickets are required. Tickets are distributed first to first-year students and faculty teaching first-year seminars at Amherst College; the remaining tickets will be available to other Amherst students, faculty and the public on a first-come-first-served basis on September 24 and 25 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Keefe Campus Center Atrium at Amherst College. There is a limit of two tickets to each person, and half the tickets will be distributed each day.

Marx, who began his tenure as Amherst's president on July 1, is a noted scholar of nationalism. His most recent book, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism, was published this year; he is also the author of a dozen substantive articles and Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (1992), and Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil (1998). Making Race and Nation received the American Political Science Association's 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award, for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism, and the American Sociological Association's 2000 Barrington Moore Prize, for the best book of the preceding three years in comparative-historical sociology.

Educated at Wesleyan and Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1981, Marx received the M.P.A. degree from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1986, then earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton in 1987 and 1990. He taught at Columbia University, where he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, and served as director of the Columbia Urban Educators program.

The Croxton Lecture Fund was created in 1988 by William M. Croxton '36 in memory of his parents, Ruth L. and Hugh W. Croxton. Income from this fund is used to bring lecturers with substantial reputations to Amherst College for the purposes of educating Amherst students. A broad range of views will be represented by Croxton Lecturers.

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