Amherst College Professors are Editors of Law on the Screen

March 31, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science; Lawrence Douglas, associate professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought; and Martha Merrill Umphrey, associate professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College are the editors of Law on the Screen ($50, 288 pp., Stanford University Press, Palo Alto 2005), a collection of essays that explore the connections between law and film, examining film for its jurisprudential content.

The contributors to Law on the Screen are among the scholars who have only recently begun to examine how law works in the movies and to explore the consequences of this cinematic representation of law. Images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film have proliferated in recent years. This is significant because mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive and important as are other social forces, such as globalization, neo-colonialism and human rights, which are transforming legal life. Law on the Screen critiques the present legal world and imagines an alternative one that expands studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.

Sarat, who has taught at Amherst since 1974, has written many books. Most recently he was the co-author with Stuart Scheingold of Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism and Cause Lawyering (2004). His next book, Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution, will be published in 2005 by Princeton University Press. Sarat has served as president of the Law and Society Association and of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

Douglas is the author of the acclaimed book The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001). His current book project, Reflections on the Glass Booth, on perpetrator trials, will be published by Princeton University Press. His essays and commentary have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Times Literary Supplement.

A member of the Amherst faculty since 1993, Umphrey is currently completing a book on criminal responsibility in the gilded age trials of Harry K. Thaw, and editing an anthology, Trials, for the International Library of Essays in Law and Society. She has also, with Sarat and Douglas, co-edited Lives in the Law (2000), Law's Madness (2001) and The Place of Law (2003), previous volumes in the Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought.

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Emily Dickinson Museum to Celebrate National Poetry Month with Second Annual “A little Madness in the Spring” April 22 and 23

March 31, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—The Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens will sponsor the second annual “A little Madness in the Spring” event in honor of National Poetry Month on Friday, April 22 and Saturday, April 23. In addition to an extended tour schedule for the two days of festivities, the Museum will offer activities for children, lectures, a concert, a café and a hike on the newly named Emily Dickinson trail at Amherst's Groff Park. Many events are free and open to the public.

Participatory dramatic readings, prepared by Professor Karen Sanchez-Eppler's Amherst College English seminar, are among the many highlights of the two days. Friday's lecture will feature Marta Werner of D'Youville College in Buffalo, N.Y., speaking on “Dickinson's Fragments” at Frost Library on the Amherst College campus at 4 p.m. On Saturday, in addition to the 11 a.m. walk in Groff Park, outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy a 1:30 p.m. lecture by Judith Farr, author of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Concluding the two-day program, Harvard's Jorie Graham will give a 4 p.m. poetry reading at the First Congregational Church in Amherst, across the street from the Museum. A complete schedule for both days is attached.

“Our first foray into 'Madness' last year was great fun and a great success,” said Cindy Dickinson, the Museum's director of interpretation and programming. “This year we hope to provide the public with another diverse array of activities that promote the enjoyment of and appreciation for poetry.”

The Emily Dickinson Museum's days and hours of operation change seasonally. In April and May, the Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday, from 1 to 4 p.m. Beginning in June and continuing through August, the Museum will be open Wednesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults, $7 for seniors/students, $5 for young people ages 6 to 18, and no charge for children under 6.

The Museum is located at 280 Main Street in Amherst and is owned by the Trustees of Amherst College. For more information about the Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens please call 413/542-8161 or visit www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org. Wheelchair accessible parking is available at the Homestead; all other vehicles are asked to park on the street or in an Amherst College lot on Spring Street. Call for more information about accessibility.

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Psychologist Daniel Gilbert To Speak on “How to Be a Proper Coward ” at Amherst College April 14

March 31, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, will speak on “How to Be a Proper Coward” on Thursday, April 14, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at Amherst College. Gilbert's talk, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at Amherst College and the Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science, is the third in a series on “Well-Being.” The lecture is free and open to the public.

“There's nothing wrong with being afraid, just as long as your fear is properly calibrated with the things you're afraid of,” says Gilbert, the author of numerous scientific articles on “affective forecasting.” Gilbert's studies of affective forecasting—how, and how well, people predict their reactions to future events—have been featured in The New York Times, Money Magazine, The New Yorker, Oprah, Psychology Today and other periodicals. Writing recently in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that Gilbert and his colleagues prove that “People are bad at forecasting their emotions—at appreciating how well, under most circumstances, they will recover.” In domains ranging from romance to finance, people make mistakes.

A recipient of research awards from the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Psychological Association, the American Philosophical Society and the Guggenheim Foundation, Gilbert has a B.A. degree in psychology from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton. His book Stumbling on Happiness, will be published by Knopf in 2006.

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Amherst College Black Studies Professor Patrícia de Santana Pinho Considers African Influence on Brazil in New Book

March 30, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Patrícia de Santana Pinho, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Black Studies at Amherst College, is the author of Reinvenções da África na Bahia (R$42, Editora Annablume, São Paulo, 2004), a new book that examines black identities in the Brazilian state of Bahia, considered the most African part of the country.

Using theories of cultural studies and sociology, Pinho traces the ways in which Africa has been imagined and reinvented by Afro-Bahian cultural groups, analyzing how it has functioned as an inspiring reference for the construction of cultural and political black identities, but also serving to freeze blackness in static icons that are manipulated by the local government, the consumer market and the tourism industry. Reinvenções da África na Bahia combines local and global perspectives to examine the position of Brazil in the Black Atlantic world, focusing specifically on African-American “roots tourism” and how it locates Brazil in the African Diaspora.

A native of Brazil, Pinho has B.A. and M.A degrees in sociology and a Ph.D. in social sciences from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in São Paulo. She has been a visiting affiliated graduate student and a visiting lecturer at the Department of African American Studies and the Council on Latin American Studies at Yale University.

More information, in Portuguese, about Reinvenções is available at the publisher's Web site http://www.annablume.com.br.

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Poet Tess Taylor To Read at Amherst College Apr. 28

March 30, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Poet Tess Taylor will read from her work on Thursday, April 28, at 8 p.m. in Fayerweather 117 at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, the event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Currently a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, Taylor graduated with the class of 2000. Her chapbook of poems, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of American's inaugural Chapbook Fellowship Competition, and was published in December 2003. She has won the Morton Marr poetry prize from the Southwest Review and the Dorothy Sargent Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and Literary Imagination.

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

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Amherst College To Honor Richard Wilbur's Collected Poems April 6

March 29, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—To honor the publication of his Collected Poems, a tribute to poet Richard Wilbur, a 1942 Amherst graduate, will be held on Wednesday, April 6, at 4 p.m. in the Alumni House at Amherst College. Readings and discussions by poets, teachers and students will culminate in a performance by Richard Wilbur himself. Free and open to the public, the event will be followed by a reception.

Readers will include Anthony Marx, professor of political science and president of Amherst College; William H. Pritchard '53, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English and author of Lives of the Modern Poets, among other works of criticism; David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English and the author of Light Disguise: Poems; Andrew Parker, professor of English; Susan Snively, associate dean of students, director of the writing center, and the author of The Undertow, among other books of poems; and Tess Taylor '00, author of The Misremembered World and currently a Copeland fellow at Amherst College.

Wilbur's body of work encompasses poems, translations, essays, song lyrics and children's books. His previous books of poetry include The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947); Things of This World (1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (1969); and New and Collected Poems (1988), also winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Sponsored by the Creative Writing Center at Amherst College and the Scott Turow Fund, this event is part of an ongoing series, featuring both emerging and established authors. For more information please visit www.amherst.edu/~cwc.

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Poet Piotr Sommer To Read in Amherst College Series April 7

March 29, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Piotr Sommer will read from his poetry and translations on Thursday, April 7 at 8:00 pm, at Amherst Books (8 Main Street). Sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, the event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

John Ashbery describes Piotr Sommer as “the great poet of ‘everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps.' Like Frank O'Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls ‘improper names'—the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us.” A poet and translator of English, Irish, and American poetry, Sommer is the author of eight books of poetry, including one in English, Things to Translate (1991), and two books of essays. Of his recent collection, Continued, Madeline Levine writes, “Deceptively simple, his poems contain a tension between small moments—harmony with the world and a wry recognition of inevitable loss. Readers will find in Piotr Sommer a poet to treasure.” Sommer is currently a fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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

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Brentano Quartet and Elizabeth Keusch To Present Music at Amherst March 26

March 25, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—In the final installment of the 2004-05 Music at Amherst Series, the Brentano String Quartet will perform the Schoenberg String Quartet No. 2 with soprano Elizabeth Keusch on Saturday, March 27, at 8 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College.

The Brentano String Quartet— Mark Steinberg, violin; Serena Canin, violin; Misha Amory, viola; and Nina Maria Lee, cello—has been singled out for its technical brilliance, musical insight and stylistic elegance since its founding in 1992, receiving many international awards. Reviewer Paul Griffiths in The New York Times wrote “The Brentano String Quartet... is something special. Their music making is private, delicate and fresh, but by its very intimacy and importance it seizes attention.” The Boston Herald , meanwhile, calls Elizabeth Keusch a “complete artist” and praises her “confidence and strength.”

The Brentano became the first quartet-in-residence at Princeton University in 1999, and served as quartet-in-residence at New York University from 1995 until 2003. The quartet is in residence at Amherst College this year.

The Brentano has made appearances in major musical centers in North America in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, La Jolla, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Toronto, Washington, DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Houston, New Orleans, Kansas City and Boston. In addition the quartet has appeared in such European venues as Royal Festival Hall in London, the Accademia de Santa Cecilia in Rome, and in Frankfurt, Cologne, Florence, Geneva, Stuttgart and Paris.

The quartet maintains a strong interest in the music of our time and has commissioned and premiered works by Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Bruce Adolphe, Steven Mackey and Jonathan Dawe in addition to Chou Wen-chung. The quartet has collaborated in recent years with Pulitzer-prize winning poet Mark Strand. Its recordings include a CD of music by Bruce Adolphe, one of Haydn's Op. 71 quartets, and one of works by Steven Mackey.

The latest information can be obtained from the Amherst College Concert Website at www.amherst.edu/~concerts. Admission to the concert is $22; senior citizens and Amherst College employees, $19; and students $5. For more information and brochures call the Concert Office at 413/542-2195, or e-mail concert manager Michael Baumgarten at mhbaumgarten@amherst.edu.

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Maria Heim To Give Lazerowitz Lecture at Amherst College April 14

March 17, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Maria Heim, assistant professor of religion at Amherst College, will give the annual Max and Etta Lazerowitz Lecture, on Buddhist Ideals of Happiness on Thursday, April 14, at 4:30 p.m. in the Alumni House at Amherst College. The talk is free and open to the public, as is a reception immediately following.

Heim, who received a B.A. degree in philosophy and religion from Reed College and a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian studies from Harvard University, is interested in South Asian religion and ethics, and Sanskrit and Pali language and literature. Her first book concerns specifically religious conceptions of the gift and generosity in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, and she is now working on Buddhist theories of moral agency. She has been a member of the Amherst faculty since 2003.

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.

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Writer Catherine Newman To Read at Amherst College April 12

March 17, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Author Catherine Newman will read from her work on Tuesday, April 12, at 8 p.m. at Amherst Books (8 Main St.). Sponsored by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center, the event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Of her memoir Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, Chris Bohjalian writes, "Catherine Newman captures poignantly, powerfully and honestly that wondrous roller-coaster called parenting. Pure and simple, this book is a laugh-out-loud gem." Claire Messud writes, "Frank, hilarious, sometimes agonizing and always delicious, Catherine Newman's account of early parenthood will ring true for all who have been there, and provide rare insight to those on their way."

Newman is the author of the child-raising journal, "Bringing Up Ben & Birdy" on BabyCenter.com, and her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including the New York Times best-selling The Bitch in the House. A 1990 graduate of Amherst College, she now works as the Academic Department Coordinator for its Creative Writing Center.

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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Archaeologist Richard Brilliant To Speak on "The Roman Peace" at Amherst College March 24

March 10, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-Richard Brilliant, Anna S. Garbedian Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, will speak on "The Roman Peace and Its Cost-Benefit Imagery" on Thursday, March 24, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at Amherst College. Funded by the Department of Fine Arts and the Eastman Lecture Fund, this talk is free and open to the public.

Author of many articles and 11 books, most recently My Laocoon (2000) and Un Americano a Roma (2000), Brilliant has traveled and studied widely in Western Europe and the Mediterranean. He explores the triumphal imagery, found in the provinces and in the metropolis, which combines the exaltation of Roman victors and the submission of their victims. This imagery often portrays the connection between peace and prosperity as well as the benefits, from the Roman point of view, of urban culture imposed on rural barbarians. The conquered did not always accept pacification and colonization so favorably, and yet often sought admission to the Roman Empire.

Most Western European cities rest on Roman foundations: the Latin language and Roman law inform the modern cultures of Portugal, Spain and France; highways still follow the Roman road system; the gauge of railroad tracks has been determined by the width of Roman vehicles; and European art is itself one of the greatest legacies of Roman cultural imperialism.

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