December 2, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a summer seminar with 15 schoolteachers called “Punishment, Politics and Culture.” The five-week seminar will explore the role of punishment in U.S. law, politics, society and culture. The seminar offered in the summer of 2006 will be the 10th NEH seminar that Sarat has taught.

Sarat, who has taught at Amherst since 1974, is author, coauthor or editor of more than fifty books, including Mercy on Trial, When the State Kills and Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice. Most recently he was the co-author of Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism and Cause Lawyering (2004) and co-editor of Law on the Screen (2004). His teaching has been featured in the New York Times and on the NBC Today Show. Sarat was the co-recipient of the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Award given biennially to honor the best scholarship on “the subject of equal access to justice,” and has served as president of the Law and Society Association and of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent grant-making agency of the U.S. government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. Created in 1965, the NEH is the largest sources of funding for humanities programs in the United States.

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