News & Events 10/2003

October 5, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-Amy Rosenzweig, a 1988 graduate of Amherst College, has received one of this year's 24 "genius awards" given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, announced this morning. The prestigious $500,000 MacArthur Fellowships are unusual in that they are given to a wide range of artists, writers, scientists, academics and social activists, and that the recipients can do as they please with the grant.

Rosenzweig, a chemist at Northwestern University, is working to reveal the structural mechanisms for the metabolism of metals in living cells. Metals such as copper, iron and zinc play critical roles in much enzyme activity, but can be toxic if they accumulate out of control. Aberrant metal metabolism has been identified as the critical factor in such diseases as Menkes syndrome, Wilson disease and familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and may represent an important element in Alzheimer's and prion diseases.

Originally from Pittsburgh, where she attended The Ellis School, Rosenzweig received a B.A. in chemistry at Amherst College. She went to earn a Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was an NIH Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. She joined Northwestern University in 1997 as professor of biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology with a joint appointment in chemistry.

Patricia O'Hara, The Thalheimer Professor of Chemistry at Amherst, recalls saying of Rosenzweig as a student, "She has the brains and knows how to get things done." Rosenzweig was one of the founders of the women's ice hockey team at Amherst. In 1995, she received the Pryde Award, given to an Amherst alumnus who has distinguished herself in research, and returned to the college to lecture.

Previous Amherst alumni who have received MacArthur grants include biologist Carl Woese '50, historian Theodore Rosengarten '66, activist Roseanne Haggerty '82 and novelist David Foster Wallace '85.

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October 28, 2003
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, will give the annual Schwemm Fund Lecture in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College on Monday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m. Carson's talk, on "Healthcare and Healthy Lifestyles," and a catered reception to follow are free and open to the public.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan Medical School, Carson is a world-renowned neurosurgeon whose practice includes traumatic brain injuries, brain and spinal cord tumors and neurological and congenital disorders. He is best known for leading the medical team that separated German Siamese twins in 1987. He and his team performed the first successful separation of twins joined at the head 10 years later.

Carson is the president and co-founder of two humanitarian organizations: the Benevolent Endowment Network, which helps to fund medical care for pediatric neurosurgery patients whose families are without insurance to cover expenses; and the Carson Scholars Fund, an organization recognizing young people for extraordinary academic and humanitarian accomplishments. He is also highly regarded for his work as a motivational speaker, and was the keynote speaker at the 1997 President's National Prayer Breakfast. His many published works include three books: Gifted Hands, Think Big and The Big Picture.

The Schwemm Fund, the Office of the President, Health Professions Advising, the Biology Department, Neuroscience Program and Center for Religious Life at Amherst College and the Willis Wood Foundation are sponsoring Carson's visit.

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October 28, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- In his new book, Light Disguise ($14, 63 pp., Copper Beech Press, Providence, R.I., 2003), David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English at Amherst College, offers 30 new poems that "question and re-question their sense of something seen or perhaps of something heard," according to poet Richard Wilbur. Sofield will read from Light Disguise at the Alumni House at Amherst College on Monday, Nov. 17 at 8 p.m., as part of the Creative Writing Center's series of readings.

Light Disguise offers lyrics that explore the dailyness of living, informed by a intelligence that Mary Jo Salter, poet and professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, calls "elegant, erudite, [and] deeply felt." Daniel Hall, poet and writer-in-residence at Amherst says Light Disguise is "as lean and satisfying a book as I've read in years."

Sofield works comfortably in such traditional forms as the villanelle and sonnet, in couplets and sestets, but also writes long sequences in strict blank verse. As novelist and poet Brad Leithauser, lecturer in humanities at Mount Holyoke College, says, "Unlike so much formal poetry on the scene today, Sofield's work manifests a craftsmanship whose end is not mere deference to tradition or the simple urge to flaunt erudition or expertise; the poems' formal designs are in service to subject matter."

Sofield's poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The New Criterion, Southwest Review and The New Republic. He co-edited Under Criticism (with Herbert F. Tucker, 1998), a collection of critical essays, to which he contributed "Richard Wilbur's 'Lying'."

Sofield has taught English and creative writing at Amherst since 1965. He received a B.A. from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford.

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October 28, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Daniel N. Robinson, professor of philosophy at Oxford University and adjunct professor of psychology at Columbia, will give two lectures at Amherst this fall. The first, "Moral Science at the Founding: Ruling Passions," will take place on Friday, Oct. 31, in the Babbott Room in the Octagon. Robinson will deliver a second lecture on Tuesday, Nov 11, at 8 p.m., also in the Babbott Room, on "Republicanism and Essentialism: The Founder's Idea of Human Nature." Both talks, the inaugural lectures of a series sponsored by the Colloquium for the American Founding, are free and open to the public.

The author of 17 books and editor of more than 30 volumes, Robinson covers a remarkable range of disciplines, including the brain sciences, philosophy and history of science, moral philosophy, philosophy of law, philosophy of mind, and intellectual history. His most recent book is Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications (2002).

Robinson has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of the History of Psychology of the American Psychological Association and a Distinguished Contribution Award from the APA's Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.

A consultant to a number of governmental and private organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services, Robinson also worked with the Public Broadcasting System on the award-winning series, The Brain, and again with PBS and the BBC on the sequel, The Mind.

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October 28, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- In the latest installment of the 2003-04 Music at Amherst Series, the Peabody Trio will present works by Mozart, Schnittke and Schubert on Saturday Nov. 15, at 8 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall.

The Peabody Trio-Violaine Melançon on violin, Natasha Brofsky on cello and Seth Knopp on piano-won the prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 1989, and has since established itself as one of the leading piano trios in the world, performing in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, and internationally in England, Israel and Japan. The Trio has also performed in such summer festivals as Tanglewood Music Center, the Ravinia Festival, the Skaneateles Festival and the "Music in the Vineyards" festival in Napa, California. Deeply committed to the education of young musicians, the Trio currently serves as the resident faculty ensemble of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, a position it has held since 1989, and spends its summers as ensemble-in-residence at the Yellow Barn Music School and Festival in Putney, Vt.

The Peabody Trio has received acclaim from critics, including those at The New York Times who praised its "beautifully polished, lush sound" and at The Los Angeles Times, where a reviewer wrote of its "incandescent playing of great verve and sensitivity." A Philadelphia Inquirer critic wrote that the Trio's concert was "an unforgettable experience, renewing my faith in the powers of live performance."

Admission to the concert is $21. Senior citizens and Amherst College employees can buy tickets for $18, and students for $5. Tickets may be reserved by calling 413/542-2195 on weekday mornings. The Amherst College Concert Office has a Website at www.amherst.edu/~concerts/.

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October 28, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-The Amherst College Women's Chorus will sponsor a festival of women's choral music on Saturday, Nov. 8,at 7:30 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College.

The choruses that will participate are the Amherst College Women's Chorus, directed by Mallorie Chernin and Daniel Leistra '03; the Radcliffe Choral Society, directed by Katherine FitzGibbon; the Northfield Mount Hermon Select Women's Ensemble, directed by Sheila Heffernon; the Smith College Chorus, directed by Pamela Getnick; and the Dessert Singers, from the Northampton Community Music Center, directed by Justin Golden '83.

For more information, call the Amherst College Choral Society at 413/542-2484.

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October 17, 2003
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- This year's annual Forry Lecture Series at Amherst College will consider the "Ethics, Metaphysics, and Psychology of Belief." The talks, sponsored by the philosophy department and the Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science, are free and open to the public.

Louise M. Antony, a professor of philosophy at Ohio State University, will present the first lecture, "Explaining and Causing: Two Sides of Belief," on Friday, Nov. 7, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115).

On Thursday, Nov. 20, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall, Richard Moran, the Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Philosophy DSepartment at Harvard University, will speak about "Being Told and Being Believed."

Gideon Rosen, professor of philosophy at Princeton University, will give a talk titled "You Should Have Known Better: Culpable Ignorance in Law and Morality," on Thursday, March 11, at 4:30 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall.

On Thursday, March 25, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall, Robert Stalnaker, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will ask "What is de re belief?"

Paul Harris, professor of education and faculty member in the human development and psychology area at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will take up "The Ontogenesis of Trust in Testimony" on Thursday, April 8, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall.

The final lecturer of the series will be Paul Boghossian, professor and chair of philosophy at New York University, who will speak on "Objective Knowledge" on Thursday, April 15, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall.

For more information, contact the Department of Philosophy at 413/542-5805.

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October 17, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-Philosopher Louise M. Antony, a professor of philosophy at The Ohio State University, will talk about "Two Sides of Belief" on Friday, Nov. 7, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115). Her talk, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at Amherst College and the Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science as part of a series on "Ethics, Metaphysics, and Psychology of Belief," will be free and open to the public.

Antony specializes in the philosophy of language, philosophical issues in cognitive science, the philosophy of mind and feminist theory. She is the co-editor of two books, A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (with Charlotte Witt, 1993), and Chomsky and His Critics (with Norbert Hornstein, 2003).

Antony received a B.A degree in philosophy from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard.

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October 15, 2003
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-The inauguration of Anthony W. Marx as the 18th president of Amherst College will take place on the steps of the Robert Frost Library at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 26. In case of rain, the ceremony will be held in Johnson Chapel, with a live simulcast to Stirn Auditorium, Merrill 2, 3 and 131. Marx will deliver his inaugural address, after a reading by poet Richard Wilbur '42 and remarks by Amos B. Hostetter, Jr. '58, the chair of the board of trustees of Amherst College. The Amherst College Inaugural Band and the Amherst College Choral Society will offer music.

At 3 p.m. the same day, in Johnson Chapel, Marx will moderate a discussion on "The Liberal Arts: Privilege and Responsibility" with Sheldon Hackney, Catharine Stimpson, Sen. Harris Wofford, Diana Chapman Walsh and William Julius Wilson.

Anthony W. Marx began his tenure as Amherst's president on July 1, 2003, after serving for 13 years on the faculty at Columbia University, where he was professor and director of undergraduate studies of political science.

Marx is a respected teacher and an internationally recognized scholar who has written three books on nation building, particularly in South Africa, but also in the U.S., Brazil and Europe. He also has established and managed programs designed to strengthen secondary school education in the U.S. and abroad. During his last year at Columbia, he served as director of the Gates Foundation-funded Early College/High School Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which establishes model public high schools as partnerships between school systems and universities. He founded the Columbia Urban Educators Program, a public school teacher recruitment and training partnership. In the 1980s, he helped found Khanya College, a South African secondary school that helped prepare more than 1,000 black students for university.

Marx is the author of a dozen substantive articles and three books, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (Oxford University Press, 1992), Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2003). Making Race and Nation received the American Political Science Association's 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award (co-winner 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.

Marx received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 (the youngest member of the Columbia political science faculty to be so honored). He also has received fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Humanities Center, the Howard Foundation and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Marx attended Wesleyan and Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. degree in 1981. He received his 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.

Marx is married to Karen Barkey, professor of history and sociology and director of undergraduate studies in sociology and historical sociology at Columbia. A popular teacher and prominent scholar, she is the author of Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization and co-editor (with Mark von Hagen) of After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building, the Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires. Marx and Barkey have two children, Joshua and Anna-Claire.

The inauguration events, open to the public as space permits, will be broadcast live on the Web at the Amherst College site, www.amherst.edu/inauguration. Between the morning and afternoon events, brunch will be served by the college Dining Service at Valentine Dining Hall.

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October 15, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Amherst's new president, Anthony W. Marx, will moderate a discussion of "The Liberal Arts: Privilege and Responsibility" on Sunday, Oct. 26, at 3 p.m. in Johnson Chapel. Sheldon Hackney, Catharine Stimpson, Harris Wofford, Diana Chapman Walsh and William Julius Wilson will join Marx. This discussion is open to the public at no charge.

Sheldon Hackney is a professor of U.S. history at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the South since the Civil War, American utopias, the Civil Rights movement and the 1960s, and the American identity. Hackney had served as president of Penn for 12 years when he stepped down in 1993 to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds projects in history, literature, philosophy and other humanities disciplines. He left the NEH in 1997.

Catharine Stimpson is a University Professor at New York University, where she also is dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science. Stimpson was a founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and the first director of the Women's Center of Barnard College and the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University.

Senator Harris Wofford was a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania from 1991 until 1994, and the president of the Corporation for National and Community Service from 1995 until 2001. Wofford, who helped found the Peace Corps in 1961, has been a law professor and president of the State University of New York at Old Westbury and Bryn Mawr College.

Diana Chapman Walsh, the president of Wellesley College since 1993, previously chaired the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she was also the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor. Walsh has specialized in workplace democracy and principles of leadership, including the study of the practice of medicine within corporations. Walsh wrote Corporate Physicians: Between Medicine and Management and co-edited Science and Health, an analysis of social and cultural determinants of illness.

William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, has written widely on urban poverty, urban race and class relations, and social inequality in cross-cultural perspective. He is the author of Power, Racism, and Privilege; The Declining Significance of Race; The Truly Disadvantaged; When Work Disappears; and The Bridge Over the Racial Divide.

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October 15, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Activist Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, will speak in Stirn Auditorium at Amherst College at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 21, as part of an effort to promote the March for Choice next April. Her speech, sponsored by the Amherst Feminist Alliance, is free and open to the public. Smeal will speak instead of Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization for Women, who had to cancel her appearance.

Smeal, the former president of NOW, led the drive to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the largest nationwide grassroots and lobbying campaign in the history of the modern women's movement. She is the author of How and Why Women Will Elect the Next President (1984), which predicted that women's votes would be decisive in presidential politics. For more than 30 years, Smeal has been active in such equal-rights victories as the integration of Little League, newspaper help-wanted ads and police departments. She worked for passage into law of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Equal Credit Act, Civil Rights Restoration Act, Violence Against Women Act, Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and Civil Rights Act of 1991. Since 1996 she has led the Feminist Majority Foundation (Website at www.feminist.org). In 2001, Smeal joined with activist Gloria Steinem to take over the publishing of Ms. magazine.

The March for Choice, which hopes to "demonstrate overwhelming majority support for a woman's right to choose safe, legal abortion and birth control," according to the march's Website (www.marchforchoice.org), will take place in Washington, D.C. on April 25. This year's march is the first to be "a collaborative effort," as it is being organized by the Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in addition to NOW. The presidents of these groups are promoting the event on college campuses this fall, according to Barbara Sieck '05, who chairs the Amherst Feminist Alliance.

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October 15, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Danny Roberts, gay rights activist and former cast member of "The Real World: New Orleans" on MTV, will speak on "Real World, Real Life, Real Issues" in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College on Thursday, Nov. 6, at 8 p.m. His talk, sponsored by the Amherst College Pride Alliance as part of Coming Out Week, is free and open to the public.

During his season on MTV, Roberts openly discussed his sexuality and relationship he was having with a military officer. His boyfriend, a captain in the U.S. Army, came to visit him on the reality television show, but his identity had to be hidden in order to prevent his being arrested as a military officer having homosexual relations.

Roberts now lectures regularly on college campuses and sponsors a Web site that encourages communication among young gay people throughout the country. He recently appeared on "Dawson's Creek" and "The Real World Road/Rules Challenge."

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October 9, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass -Poet Lisa Chávez, will read from her work on Monday, Nov. 10, at 8 p.m. in Porter Lounge in Converse Hall at Amherst College. The reading and refreshments, sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, are free and open to the public.

Chávez is "a poet sensitive to the pulse of our times," according to Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Her second book of poems, In an Angry Season, is a poetic retelling of American history in four sections: "Captivity," "At the World's Fairs," "Surrender," and "The New World." With what Stavans describes as a "forceful voice that leaves a... mark in the reader's mind," Chávez, a Chicana Mestiza, weaves together histories of brutality and oppression, of creative passion and integrity. In narrative poems richly textured with her extensive research and political acuity, Chávez speaks in the voices of those who have been made captive-whether to racism or national policy, to bad marriages, alcoholism or poverty-and asks, ultimately, what it means to be civilized.

Born in Los Angeles, Chávez was raised in Fairbanks, Alaska and now lives in Albuquerque where she teaches at the University of New Mexico. Her first book of poems was Destruction Bay, and her poetry has also appeared in such publications as The Americas Review, The Colorado Review and Prairie Schooner and the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation. She is currently at work on a memoir.

The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. See the Center's website, www.amherst.edu/~cwc, for more information.

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THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELLED

October 9, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-Printmaker Michael Mazur '57, the 2003 Robert Frost Library Fellow, will speak on Friday, Oct. 31 at 4: p.m. in the Teaching Gallery of the Mead Art Museum,. Mazur's lecture, sponsored by the Friends of the Amherst College Library, is free and open to the public. Mazur will be in residence at Amherst College the week of Oct. 27, working with Betsey Garand, visiting assistant professor in the Fine Arts Department, and students in fine arts.

A renowned printmaker and painter, Mazur graduated from Amherst in 1957 and received his M.F.A. from Yale. He has taught at RISD, Brown, U.C. Santa Barbara, Harvard and Brandeis University, and his work appears in major museums around the U.S. and abroad. A 1964 Guggenheim Fellowship is among the many awards he has garnered during his distinguished career.

The Friends of the Amherst College Library is a group of students, alumni, faculty, staff and friends who support the library. For more information, visit www.amherst/edu/library/friends.

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October 9, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-Daniel Ellsberg, the writer and activist who released the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, will deliver a talk entitled "What Lies Ahead: Vietnam's Lessons for Iraq and the War on Terrorism" on Monday, Nov. 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College. The talk will be followed by a book signing and refreshments. All events are free and open to the public.

A Marine Corps veteran who became part of the U.S. Government's Defense and State Departments, Ellsberg worked on the RAND Corporation's 1967 McNamara study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. He later distributed the report to the New York Times and Washington Post, among other newspapers. His book about the affair, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, was reissued in paperback this past September.

Ellsberg will also speak about "Secrets and Lies: Nuclear Threats, Iraq and the War on Terror" in Wright Hall at Smith College on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m. Introductory remarks will be made by Veterans Education Project member and Vietnam veteran Cherie Rankin.

These events are organized by the Veterans Education Project in observance of Veterans Day. They are sponsored by the Smith College Government Department; the Amherst College History and Women's and Gender Studies Departments; Five College Peace and World Security Studies; the Mount Holyoke Politics Department; the UMass-Amherst Women's Studies Program; the Amherst College Democrats; and the Association of Amherst Students.

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