News & Events 09/2004

September 16, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Daniel Barbezat, a professor of economics at Amherst College, received the Jonathan Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching Economic History at the 2004 annual meeting of the Economic History Association.

The award, established in memory of Jonathan Hughes, an outstanding scholar and committed teacher of economic history, was given to Barbezat after consideration of course materials, letters from current and former students, and letters from colleagues commenting on the quality of Barbezat's teaching, his development of curriculum, student mentoring and participation in student activities.

A member of the Amherst faculty since 1988, Barbezat received B.A. degree in economics and philosophy from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Champaign.

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September 23, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- The Emily Dickinson Museum will sponsor a lecture by Dickinson scholar Martha Nell Smith, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, about the poet's fascinating niece, "Martha Dickinson Bianchi: Poet, Novelist, Pianist, Editor ... Niece," on Sunday, Oct. 10, at 3 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College. The program is free and open to the public.

Smith will present a biographical portrait of one of the women most influential in fostering Emily Dickinson's legacy in the 20th century. In a family filled with interesting personalities, Martha Dickinson Bianchi's is among the most interesting and least understood. Chiefly known now for her significance in preserving the Dickinson legacy through the editing of her aunt Emily's poems and her care in preserving The Evergreens, Bianchi was accomplished in her own right as a writer, scholar, musician and intellectual. Smith will offer an illuminating portrait of the woman whose aunt once said of her, "We almost question where we are, without our martial Mattie." Bianchi's heirs were instrumental in saving The Evergreens, her parents' home, which is now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Smith, who is also director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, is the author of Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992), Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (coauthored with Ellen Louise Hart, 1998) and the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson (with Mary Loeffelholz, forthcoming in 2005). The recipient of many awards for her work on Dickinson and in new media, Smith is coordinator and general editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, and a founding member of the Emily Dickinson International Society.

The Emily Dickinson Museum consists of two historic houses, the Homestead and The Evergreens. The Museum is owned by the Trustees of Amherst College. Other upcoming events include "Margaret Maher's Amherst- Emily Dickinson's Maid and Muse," a walking tour on Saturday, October 23. In October the Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 1-5 p.m., and will also be open on Sunday, Oct. 10, from 1 to 5 p.m. Please visit the Museum's Website at www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org for more information about guided tours and other programs. For more information about this lecture, please contact Cindy Dickinson, director of interpretation and programming, at 413/542-8429.

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September 23, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (2004), will discuss the topic "Why Are Americans Cheating More?" on Thursday, Oct. 7, at 7:30 p.m. in the Babbott Room in the Octagon at Amherst College. Callahan's talk, sponsored by the Mellon Project on Teaching and Learning, is open to the public at no charge.

Writing in The New York Times, Chris Hedges called Callahan "a liberal who argues that America has lost its moral compass." His dream, Callahan told Hedges, is a society in which "people who play by the rules get ahead."

A graduate of Hampshire College with a Ph.D. degree in politics from Princeton University, Callahan is a co-founder of Demos, a public policy center and think tank that combines research and advocacy, working to strengthen democracy and expand economic opportunity within the United States (www.demos-usa.org). Callahan's books include Kindred Spirits: Harvard Business School's Extraordinary Class of 1949 and How They Transformed American Business; his essays about American history, business and public policy have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and The American Prospect. A frequent voice on television and radio, Callahan is also a regular commentator for Marketplace on public radio. From 1994 to 1999 Callahan was a fellow at the Century Foundation, where he engaged in public policy research and analysis.

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September 23, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- The Emily Dickinson Museum and the Amherst College English Department will present "Margaret Maher's Amherst- Emily Dickinson's Maid and Muse," a walking tour led by Aife Murray, scholar and artist, on Saturday, Oct. 23, at 1:30 p.m. Free and open to the public, the tour will explore the town of Amherst from the perspective of Margaret Maher, longtime employee of the Dickinson family. Participants should meet on the lawn of the Museum, at 280 Main St. in Amherst. The walk route is about a mile and a half in length and includes some moderate uphill walking. The rain date is Sunday, Oct. 24 at 1:30 p.m.

Margaret Maher-a maid whom the poet Emily Dickinson described as "brave - faithful - punctual - and courageous-" was a poor immigrant from County Tipperary Ireland. This competent young woman was headed to California when the Dickinson family brought her into the Homestead kitchen,where she worked for 30 years. Baking loaf cakes together or washing dishes, Dickinson and Maher shared much of the day- and they shared sensibilities that included respect for the power of poetry. The tour will explore "downstairs" at the Homestead and the bond between the poor Irish Catholic Margaret Maher and wealthy New England Protestant Emily Dickinson that changed American literary history.

Aífe Murray is a scholar, writer and artist based in San Francisco. She has given presentations and exhibited or performed her work in the United States and abroad. She first created the tour "Margaret Maher's Amherst" in 1997 as part of her mixed media and public art installation for the exhibition Language as Object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College. She studied language and art history at the University of Florence (Italy), is a history and social theory graduate of Hampshire College, and has an M.A. in English - Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Murray's forthcoming book, Maid as Muse - Margaret Maher and Her Poet Emily Dickinson, will look at how Margaret Maher and other poor servants altered the life course of not only a poet but of American literature.

The Emily Dickinson Museum consists of two historic houses, the Homestead and The Evergreens. The Museum is owned by the Trustees of Amherst College. In October the Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. Please visit the Museum's Website at www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org for more information about guided tours and other programs. For more information about this program, please contact Cindy Dickinson, director of interpretation and programming, at 413/542-8429.

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September 23, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Bruce Tulgan, a 1989 graduate of Amherst College, founder of RainmakerThinking and an internationally recognized expert on young people in the workplace, will give a speech titled "The Power of Young Talent: How Young Professionals Impact the Workplace," on Mon., Sept. 27, at 6:15 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at the college. This event is free and open to the public.

This is the first of a series of conversations with professionals that the Amherst College Pre-Business Group will sponsor this academic year. Tulgan's talk, which will include refreshments and discussion as well as a lecture, is also sponsored by the Tuck Business Bridge Program, which provides an opportunity for highly qualified liberal arts juniors and seniors to learn business skills through courses taught by the top ranked faculty of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

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September 14, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- The study of law is, and ought to be, one of the liberal arts-and "law just might be saved from the lawyers," if it were taught to more undergraduate college students, according to Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in a forthcoming book, Law in the Liberal Arts ($45, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2004), Sarat argues that the liberal arts needs the study of law, but also that the American legal system can learn from the liberal arts.

"For legal scholarship," writes Sarat in the CHE, the disregard for law as a liberal art "means that the work of understanding law is generally coupled with the lawyer's need to understand how to use it or with the policy maker's desire to reform it, impoverishing our ability to see the complex connections of law, culture, and society in all their variety and to connect theorizing about law with the humanities and social sciences."

"In the liberal arts," Sarat continues, "the failure to more fully articulate and institutionalize legal scholarship deprives them of a subject of enormous richness and interest. Systematic study of law advances the goals of a liberal education because of the importance of law in culture and society, as well as the capacity of legal study to engage and enhance the intellectual, analytic, and imaginative capacities of undergraduates."

Sarat has taught at Amherst since 1974, and is the author of When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition. He has served as President of the Law and Society Association and of the Association for the Study of law, Culture, and the Humanities.

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September 10, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Pianist Chongya Shin, a member of the music faculty at Amherst College, will perform works of Schubert, Debussy, Beethoven and Chopin on Sunday, Sept. 19,at 4 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall at the college. The recital is free and open to the public.

Shin, a native of Seoul, received both her bachelor's and master's degrees in music from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she continued as a teacher of piano in the preparatory division after graduation. She has participated in master classes with Alfred Brendel and Paul Badura-Skoda in Vienna, as well as with French pianist Jeanne-Marie Darre.

A soloist with the Boston Pops, the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra, The New England Conservatory Orchestra and the Windham Community Orchestra, Shin also has given many solo recitals and chamber music concerts throughout New England. She currently teaches piano at Amherst College and is head of the piano department at the Brattleboro Music School.

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September 8, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Ethan Clotfelter, an assistant professor of biology and neuroscience at Amherst College, recently completed a review that indicates that the increasingly bizarre behavior of animals all over the world-manic goldfish, confused frogs, fearless mice and seagulls that can't stand upright-may have an environmental cause: chemicals that interfere with the production and transportation of hormones.

Published in London in August in Animal Behaviour (vol. 68, p. 465), Clotfelter's review was also featured in New Scientist (Sept. 3, 2004.) He told the news magazine that researchers looking for environmental damage might look first at what animals are doing, as behavior is more easily perturbed than anatomical measures. "Toxicologists may be missing a trick: changes in animal behavior could be an early warning that certain chemicals are harmful. You might see behavioral effects long before you see a population crash."

The pollutants, known as endocrine disruptors, range from heavy metals such as lead to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and additives such as bisphenol A. According to New Scientist, "For decades, biologists have known that these chemicals can alter the behavior of wild animals. And in recent years it has become clear that pollutants can cause gender-bending effects by altering animals' physiology, particularly their sexual organs. But now two major reviews have revealed that the chemicals are having a much greater impact on animal behavior than anyone suspected. Low concentrations of these pollutants are changing both the social and mating behaviors of a raft of species. This potentially poses a far greater threat to survival than, for example, falling sperm counts caused by higher chemical concentrations."

Clotfelter looked at data on animals as diverse as egrets and gulls, snails, quails, rats and macaques, minnows, mosquito fish, falcons and frogs, and considered altered behaviors that include mating and parenting, nest building, learning, predator avoidance, foraging, activity levels and even balance. The New Scientist article is available online at www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996343.

A member of the Amherst faculty since 2003, Clotfelter received a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in zoology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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September 8, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- The Amherst College Creative Writing Center has announced its Fall Reading Series. All events are free and open to the public, and refreshments will follow the readings.

Elizabeth Alexander
Thursday, Sept. 16, 8 p.m.
Amherst Books, 8 Main Street

Susan Stinson
Monday, Sept. 20, 8 p.m.
Amherst Books, 8 Main Street

May-lee Chai
Monday, Sept. 27, 8 p.m.
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115), Amherst College

Dan Chiasson
Thursday, Oct. 21, 8 p.m.
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115), Amherst College

Chris Bohjalian
Monday, Nov. 8, 8 p.m.
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115), Amherst College

Judith Frank
Monday, Nov. 15, 8 p.m.
The Alumni House, Amherst College

For more information, visit the Creative Writing Center Website at www.amherst.edu/~cwc or call 413/542-8200.

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September 8, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College will feature "East Asian Art: Recent Acquisitions and Loans," an exhibition of highlights from its permanent collection, from Sept. 7 through December 19. Samuel C. Morse, a professor of fine arts and Asian languages and civilization at Amherst, will give a gallery talk on "Contemporary Japanese Art at the Mead: Yokoo, Morimura and Shibata" on Wednesday, Nov. 3, at 12 noon.

More than 40 Japanese woodblock prints, known as ukiyo-e, recent major gifts of William Green and Howard Hamilton to the permanent collection, are a highlight of the show. These superb prints in vivid color are rare and many have never been publicly displayed. Theatrical subjects, including prints depicting kabuki actors in major roles by Hiroshige, Toyokuni, Shunsho and other noted artists, are a key theme. The epic tale Chushingura (The Storehouse of Loyalty) is illustrated in a series of woodblock prints by Sadahide, accompanied by additional prints by Toyokuni and Hiroshige. Contemporary works of Japanese art on view, such as five posters by Tadanori Yokoo and a fan with photographic self-portrait by Yasumasa Morimura, show the witty appropriation and transformation of Western art and celebrities to comment on gender and popular culture. The exhibition also features ceramics with selections from the Mead's collection of Japanese folk pottery and a long-term loan of Korean celadon ware.

Despite ongoing construction on campus, the Mead Art Museum is open. The temporary entrance is located next to Stirn Auditorium, and the museum remains wheelchair accessible; please call ahead for details. The Mead is open regular hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Thursday evenings until 9 p.m. More information is available on the museum's Website at www.amherst.edu/~mead or by calling the Mead Art Museum at 413/542-2335. All events are free and open to the public.

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September 8, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Novelist May-lee Chai, the Visiting Writer in the Creative Writing Center at Amherst College, will read from her work at 8 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 27, in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at the college. The event, sponsored by the Creative Writing Center, is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Of Glamorous Asians, Chai's forthcoming collection of stories and essays, Marilyn Krysl has remarked, "We're in the hands of a sophisticate with a piercing eye, a nuanced intelligence and a sprightly sense of irony." Chai's earlier work earned similar praise: her first novel, My Lucky Face, an intimate investigation of China's cultural revolution, was called "beautifully told." Her second book, The Girl from Purple Mountain, a family memoir that Chai co-wrote with her father, was nominated for a National Book Award in 2001. Chai's fiction and essays have been widely published in such places as the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA and Missouri Review.

The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. More information is available at the center's Website www.amherst.edu/~cwc.

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September 8, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Novelist Susan Stinson will read from her work at 8 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 20, at Amherst Books at 8 Main Street. The event, sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Marilyn Wann describes Stinson's novel Venus of Chalk as satisfying "like that first long breath after a good cry; like a thorough spring cleaning; like a warm, clothing-optional hug." Her three earlier books offer similar pleasures: as Alice Sebold puts it, "Through an ardent faith in the written word, Susan Stinson is a novelist who translates a mundane world into the most poetic of possibilities." Her work, which has been published in The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review and The Woman's Review of Books, has received the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction, as well as a number of fellowships. Stinson lives in Northampton, where she is currently at work on a novel about the 18th century theologian and preacher Jonathan Edwards.

The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. More information is available at the center's Website www.amherst.edu/~cwc.

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September 8, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Poet Elizabeth Alexander will read from her work at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 16, at Amherst Books at 8 Main Street. The event, sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Arnold Rampersand has called Elizabeth Alexander "one of the brightest stars in our literary sky, a poet of poise and power." Alexander is the author of three collections of poetry, including her most recent, Antebellum Dream Book, and a book of essays about race, art and culture, The Black Interior, in which she studies "black life and creativity behind the face of stereotype and limited imagination." Alexander's poems and essays have been widely anthologized and published in such places as the Paris Review and The Village Voice, and she has lectured across the country on African American art and culture and abroad for nearly two decades. She currently teaches in the English and African-American Studies Department at Yale University.

The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. More information is available at the center's Website www.amherst.edu/~cwc.

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September 1, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College will present "Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side: Photographs by Bruce Davidson" from Tuesday, Sept. 7, through Sunday, Oct. 24, 2004. Organized and presented by the Mead Art Museum on the occasion of the centennial of Singer's birth, the exhibition reflects his remarkable collaboration with Davidson in 43 photographs made between 1957 and 1990. Bruce Davidson will present a slide lecture, followed by a public screening of the film Isaac Singer's Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko's Beard on Thursday Sept. 30, at 4 p.m. in Stirn Auditorium. Jill Meredith, the museum director, will give a gallery talk on Thursday, Oct. 7, at 5 p.m. in the museum.

"Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side" includes a selection of Davidson's portraits of Singer, stills from the film, the black and white portfolio "The Garden Cafeteria," and selections from the Lower East Side series. "The Garden Cafeteria," was a collaboration depicting denizens of the East Broadway restaurant frequented by Singer during his trips to The Jewish Daily Forward. This portfolio, never previously exhibited, includes an introduction by Singer. Through Davidson's lens we see Singer's literary world of Holocaust survivors and émigrés from Eastern Europe - a displaced culture in its twilight.

Born in Poland in 1904, Isaac Bashevis Singer lived much of his life in the United States, where he died in 1991. The Yiddish writer collaborated with the New York documentary photographer Bruce Davidson on the film Isaac Singer's Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko's Beard in 1973. Singer and Davidson, friends who lived in the same building on the upper West Side of Manhattan and shared an interest in New York City street life, created a funny and surreal feature, both a documentary about Singer in New York and a dramatization of one his short stories. During and after production, Davidson made portraits of Singer and later returned to the Lower East Side for a series of documentary photographs.

Born in 1933, Davidson began to photograph as a child in Oak Park, Ill., winning a prize in the Kodak National High School Competition at 16. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. A freelance photographer for LIFE, he joined Magnum Photos in 1958, and produced documentary photo essays, such as "Brooklyn Gang" and the "Freedom Rides." In 1962 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and photographed the Civil Rights Movement, including a rally in Harlem, Ku Klux Klan cross burnings and the marches in Birmingham and Selma. In 1966 he won the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts and documented East 100th Street in Harlem, work that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and published in 1970. His most recent project is Subway (2004), a revised and expanded book and exhibition of New York City culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

An illustrated catalogue, published by the Mead Art Museum and the University of Wisconsin Press, will accompany the exhibition, with texts by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ilan Stavans and Jill Meredith, and an interview with Bruce Davidson by Gabriele Werffeli.

Despite ongoing construction on campus, the Mead Art Museum is open. The temporary entrance is located next to Stirn Auditorium and the museum remains wheelchair accessible; please call ahead for details. The Mead is open regular hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Thursday evenings until 9 p.m. More information is available on the museum's Website at www.amherst.edu/~mead or by calling the Mead Art Museum at 413/542-2335. All events are free and open to the public.

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September 1, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Sherre L. Harrington has been appointed as Amherst College's new Librarian of the College. She succeeds Willis Bridegam, who retired at the end of August after 29 years as Amherst's College Librarian. Harrington's appointment is effective September 1.

Harrington comes to Amherst from Vanderbilt University, where she worked since 1987. Her interests encompass women's studies and the social responsibility of the library, and she is an active member of the American Library Association.

Harrington has been a librarian at Vanderbilt for nearly 17 years, serving most recently (since 1998) as director of the Stevenson Science and Engineering Library at Vanderbilt. Prior to that, she was assistant director for public services at Vanderbilt's Central Library and Stevenson Library (1990-1998) and bibliographic instruction coordinator at Central Library (1987-1990).

Harrington also served as acting director of Vanderbilt's Anne Potter Wilson Music Library from 2000 to 2001. Before joining the Vanderbilt staff, Harrington was director of library services at the Salkehatchie campus of the University of South Carolina (1977-1987).

Harrington earned a B.A. degree in English language and literature from the University of South Carolina in 1976 and a master of librarianship degree from the University of South Carolina's College of Librarianship in 1977.

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