News & Events 10/2006

October 19, 2006
Director of Media Relations
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AMHERST, Mass.—Abdulaziz Sachedina, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, will give a series of three lectures at Amherst College this fall on “The Ideals and Realities of the Islamic Community.” Sachedina will begin his discussion of the Shiite sect with a talk titled “Succession to the Leadership: The Genesis of Shiism” at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 9, in the Cole Assembly Room of Converse Hall. His second lecture, “Messianic Shiite Theology and Its Political Ramifications,” will be given on Thursday, Nov. 30, and he will discuss “Modern Theological-Juridical Shiite leadership” on Thursday, Dec. 7. The talks are free and open to the public and sponsored by the religion department and the Willis D. Wood Fund.

Sachedina, author of Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, is a professor of Islamic and Shi’ite studies; theological and juridical studies in the department of religious studies at the University of Virginia. He was educated at the University of Toronto, the Aligarh Muslim University in India and the Ferdowski University in Iran, and has taught in Canada at Wilfred Laurier, Waterloo and McGill Universities, at Haverford College and at the University of Jordan, Amman. Born to a West Indian family in Tanzania, Sachedina has been praised for his reassertion of “Islam’s potential as a source of tolerance and pluralism” (Middle East Journal). A prominent member of the Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism objective within the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Sachedina works to bring knowledge of Islam as a peace-building religion to the general public. He is currently conducting a study titled “Islamic Law for Muslim Physicians: The Spiritual Foundations of Biomedical Ethics in Islam.”

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October 31, 2006
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AMHERST, Mass.—Catherine Ciepiela, professor of Russian at Amherst College, will read from The Same Solitude, her new book that follows the epistolary romance between Russian poets Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 9, at Amherst Books (8 Main Street). Sponsored by the Creative Writing Center at Amherst College, this event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

The novel represents a fascinating study of the unlikely yet lasting relationship that arose between two of Russia’s greatest modernist poets during the 1920s. The correspondence began in 1922, after Pasternak sent a letter praising the poetry of the newly exiled Tsvetaeva, and Ciepiela masterfully develops the ensuing decade-long affair through previously untranslated letters and poems. The title of the book comes from a poignant excerpt from one of Pasternak’s letters: “Still, we have the same solitude, the same journeys and searching, and the same favorite turns in the labyrinth of literature and history.” Ciepiela’s work reveals the widening gap that grew up between an increasingly radical Soviet Russia and European Russian émigrés during this tempestuous period. The book has received superior critical praise, and Clare Cavanaugh applauds Ciepiela’s “impeccable scholarship, theoretical acumen and rich, resourceful close readings.”

Ciepiela, who received her B.A. in interdisciplinary studies from Amherst College in 1983, has been a member of the Amherst faculty since 1989. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University, and has received fellowships from Yale University, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She also co-edited and wrote the introduction for The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems(2006).

The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. For more information, please call 413/542-8200.

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AMHERST, Mass.—Dominic Poccia, the Rufus Tyler Lincoln Professor of Biology at Amherst College, will join the advisory board of Signal Transduction: Receptors Mediators and Genes, a journal established six years ago as the official journal of the Signal Transduction Society. He has also been appointed associate editor of The Biological Bulletin, which publishes experimental research on a full range of biological topics and organisms from the fields of neurobiology, behavior, physiology, ecology, evolution, development and reproduction, cell biology, biomechanics, symbiosis and systematics. In addition, Poccia continues to serve as an associate editor for Molecular Reproduction and Development and is the associate editor in charge of the reproductive biology section of the Journal of Experimental Zoology.

Signal Transduction: Receptors Mediators and Genes is based in Germany and devoted to scientific exchange between investigators concerned with mechanisms that underlie the generation and processing of inter- and intracellular signals. As a member of the advisory board, Poccia will provide support and advice to the editors and review and solicit new submissions. He is currently editing a special edition of the journal concerning cell and developmental signaling mechanisms in echinoderms. The Biological Bulletin, published since 1897 by the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass., is one of America’s oldest peer-reviewed scientific journals. Its editor-in-chief is James L. Olds, director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, and a 1978 Amherst graduate.

Poccia’s latest project involves a paper titled “Improvisational Thinking in the Liberal Arts Curriculum” that he will deliver at the University of Michigan in December at the Inaugural Conference of the International Society for Improvised Music, “Time, Sound, and Transcendence: Forging a New Vision for Improvised Music Pedagogy and Practice,” which will include performances, workshops and papers from individuals involved in all kinds of improvised music in tradition-specific realms as well as in trans-stylistic approaches. His paper is based on experiences with his First Year Seminar 6 course Improvisational Thinking.

A member of the Amherst faculty since 1978, Poccia was educated at Union College and Harvard University. When not studying the spermatogenesis and reactivation of sperm nuclei following fertilization, Poccia plays jazz saxophone and clarinet.

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October 30, 2006
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—The Amherst Center for Russian Culture will sponsor a symposium on “The Russian Ballet: Choreographers and Critics” on Saturday, Nov. 11, in the Center for Russian Culture in Webster Hall at Amherst College. Lynn Garafola, a professor of dance at Barnard College, will speak about the 19th-century Russian dancer and choreographer Marius Petipa at 9 a.m. Stanley Rabinowitz, the Henry Steele Commager Professor and Professor of Russian at Amherst College, will speak on the ballet writings of Akim Volynsky at 10 a.m. Irina Klyagin, the archivist for the Harvard Theater Collection at the Harvard College Library, will conclude the morning presentation with a talk on dance historian Liubov Blok at 10 a.m. In the afternoon, at 2 p.m., Tim Scholl, an associate professor of Russian at Oberlin College, and Maria Ratanova, doctoral student at Harvard University, will consider aspects of George Balanchine’s choreography. All events are free and open to the public.

In connection with the symposium, Dayna Goldfine’s and Dan Geller’s recent documentary film, Ballets Russes (2005), will be screened at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 10, in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at Amherst College. Lynn Garafola will speak briefly about the background of the film and the group about which it was made. The Mead Art Museum will sponsor another related event, an exhibit on “Russian Theatrical Design,” on view from Oct. 27 through Dec. 10, Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

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October 26, 2006
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AMHERST, Mass.—David E. Schneider, an associate professor of music at Amherst College, is the author of Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality ($49.95, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006), a book that dispels myths about the relationship between nationalism and modernism in early 20th-century music by re-examining the great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s debt to Hungarian and Central European musical traditions.

Bartók’s ability to synthesize Western art music with the folk music of Eastern Europe is well known, but Schneider demonstrates that Hungary’s leading modernist composer was also strongly influenced by the art music tradition. Drawing from a wide array of primary sources, including contemporary reviews and little-known Hungarian documents, Schneider presents a new approach to Bartók that acknowledges the composer’s debt to 19th-century Hungarian composers as well as to influential contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky. Schneider reads the composer’s artistic output, from his 1903 graduation from the Music Academy to his 1940 departure for the United States, as a continuation and a profound transformation of the very national tradition Bartók publicly rejected. By clarifying why Bartók felt compelled to obscure his ties to the past and illuminating what that past was, Schneider dispels myths about Bartók’s relationship to 19th-century traditions and also provides a perspective on the relationship between nationalism and modernism.

A member of the Amherst faculty since 1997, Schneider has served as chair of the music department since 2005. Schneider has Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in historical musicology from the University of California at Berkeley and an A.B. in music from Harvard College. The author of many essays and articles on modern music and Bartók, Schneider has also been a professional clarinetist since 1986.

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October 24, 2006
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—On Friday, Oct. 27, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the upper terrace of Valentine Dining Hall, Amherst College, in association with the “Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown” ™ program of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), will host a bevy of local farmers as part of the college’s family weekend activities. The event will provide Amherst students and their families with an opportunity to learn about and even sample a selection of the many goods that are grown, manufactured and produced in the Pioneer Valley.

Prominent among these is a variety of sugary treats that are sure to delight the college student’s palate. Warm Colors Apiary, a South Deerfield-based company that supplies Valentine with local honey, will educate students about beekeeping with an interactive display featuring live bees and different types of honey. Flayvors of Cook Farm will furnish five of its most popular ice cream flavors for a “make your own sundae” extravaganza, along with various cow-themed exhibit including cowbells and statuettes. Beth Cook, co-owner of the third generation farm in Hadley, provides Amherst’s co-op “Zü” house with its dairy products and is thrilled to be working further with Amherst College. The North Hadley Sugar Shack will represent Massachusetts’ strong but underappreciated maple industry with maple sugar candies. The event will also boast a cornucopia of colorful crops from prominent local farmers, such as flowering kale, exotic eggplant and log-grown shitake mushrooms.

CISA—a non-profit organization that unites local farmers, producers and consumers in an effort to preserve and promote community agriculture—began the “Be a Local Hero” Campaign in 1999 to advertise locally grown farm products and provide them with a wider consumer base. The initiative is the longest-running “buy local” program in the country, and Amherst College is excited to be contributing with this Family Weekend event. Debbie Omasta, the dining hall manager for Valentine, says that dining services aims for “student satisfaction” with the event. “The main purpose of hosting this is to let folks know that we do believe in this program and that we do our best to buy only the best local, high-quality items,” she says. Dan Conlon, co-owner of Warm Colors Apiary, appreciates the initiative that Amherst College takes in sustaining local agriculture. “Big schools can do a lot to support local farmers, and Amherst has really reached out to take the lead in that.” Conlon believes that participation from consumers like Amherst College is vital to the program because it “helps keep our farms going.”

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October 20, 2006
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Political essayist Gabriel Schoenfeld will give a talk titled “Should The New York Times Be Prosecuted under the Espionage Statutes?” at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 24, in the Paino Lecture Hall in the Earth Sciences Building at Amherst College. The fourth lecture in the series sponsored by the Colloquium on the American Founding at Amherst, Schoenfeld’s talk is free and open to the public.

The author of The Return of Anti-Semitism (2004), which Publishers Weekly praised for its “pungent, well-written, argumentative analysis,” Schoenfeld has written on world affairs for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New Republic and other publications, including Commentary magazine, where he is the senior editor.

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October 19, 2006
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte ’63, Woods Hole Research Center scientist I. Foster Brown ’73 and educator Amy Rosenthal ’02 will present a lecture on “Contemporary Brazil: Law, Politics and Resources” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 9, in Stirn Auditorium and a panel discussion the same evening at 7:30 p.m. also in Stirn Auditorium at Amherst College. The second in a series of lectures titled “The Rain Forest Crunch,” sponsored by the environmental studies program and the Office of the President at Amherst College, the talk and panel are free and open to the public.

After Amherst, District Judge Peter J. Messitte received a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School. Messitte then joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer and was stationed in Sao Paulo, Brazil until 1968. Upon his return to the U.S., he entered private practice in Washington and Maryland. An associate judge in Maryland from 1985 to 1993, Messitte was nominated for appointment as a United States District Judge by President Bill Clinton, and received his commission in 1993.

In addition to many awards in the U.S., Messitte has been honored in Brazil with the Gran Cruz da Ordem de São José Operário for Judicial Merit in the field of labor, Tribunal Regional do Trabalho, Mato Grosso and the Medalha de Mérito Acadêmico, Academia Paulista de Magistrados, for Academic Contributions to the Brazilian Judiciary. Messitte was a member of the International Judicial Relations Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States between 1997 and 2003, chairing the Working Group for Latin America and the Caribbean. He has served as a consultant on judicial reform projects throughout Latin America and Africa, and most recently in Turkey.

I. Foster Brown was an independent scholar at Amherst and went on to receive M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in geology from Northwestern University. Since 1987 he has been a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) and since 1996, a professor of ecology and natural resource management at the Federal University of Acre (UFAC) in Rio Branco, Brazil. From 1981 to 2002 he was an associate professor of geochemistry at the Federal Fluminense University in Niteroi, RJ, Brazil. Specializing in sustainable development in the Amazon basin, Brown coordinates the WHRC’s program dealing with deforestation, water quality and land use in the Brazilian Amazon and directs the program for human resource development in Third World countries. He has published widely in those fields, and is also the author of “Innocence in Brazil,” a travelogue, published online by the Woods Hole Research Center.

A member of the Brazilian Committee on Education for the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia from 1996 until 2000, Brown was also a member of the working group for establishing the University of the Forest in Acre, Brazil, and later the coordinator of two successive UFAC research projects supported by the Pilot Program for the Preservation of Brazilian Tropical Forests. UFAC is one of only two Amazonian universities awarded support, and the latter project was one of two chosen for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, June 2002.

After Amherst, Amy Rosenthal received an M.A. degree in international educational administration and policy analysis from Stanford University, and worked as a researcher at UFAC, where she helped direct a rural education project focused on natural resource management. She will be conducting out research in 2007 in California, New Zealand, Brazil and Peru.

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October 13, 2006
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—The notion that an animal would need a hard skeleton to leave behind a fossil imprint is something of a fossil itself, according to Whitey Hagadorn, an assistant professor of geology at Amherst College. Hagadorn is the lead author of a paper titled “Cellular and Subcellular Structure of Neoproterozoic Animal Embryos” in the latest issue of Science magazine (Vol. 314, no. 5796). Hagadorn and a team of researchers from the U.S., U.K., China, Sweden, Switzerland and Australia, among them Matthew McFeely, a 2005 graduate of Amherst College, demonstrate that “the earliest animal fossils are nothing more than ancestral sponge-like animals,” Hagadorn says.

Hagadorn, McFeeley and their colleagues also document the first fossil example of cells about to undergo division. Fossilized embryos predating the “Cambrian Explosion” by 10 million years provide evidence that early animals had already begun to adopt some of the structures and processes seen in today’s embryos. The article reports the first direct evidence that primitive animals 550 million years ago were capable of asynchronous cell division during embryonic development.

The researchers also believe they’ve identified specialized structures inside the cells, such as bubble-like vesicles that the cells might have used to transport, store or metabolize molecules. Slight aberrations during the fossilization of dead embryonic cells even reveal what appear to be dividing nuclei. It was assumed such structures existed in early animals, but until now, no known fossils of the structures existed.

The research uncovered 162 fossils of animal embryos from the Doushantuo Formation of south central China, still encased in a fertilization envelope, a protective husk that likely aided the preservation of the embryos long enough for fossilization to occur.

Hagadorn’s and McFeeley’s co-authors are Stefan Bengtson (Swedish Museum of Natural History), Philip Donoghue, Neil Gostling and Maria Pawlowska (University of Bristol, England), Kenneth Nealson (University of Southern California), Marco Stampanoni (Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland), F. Rudolf Turner and Rudolf Raff (Indiana University Bloomington) and Shuhai Xiao (Virginia Tech).

The project was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, NASA, the National Natural Science Foundation (China), the Natural Environment Research Council (U.K.), the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (U.K.), the Mellon Foundation, the Trustees of Amherst College, the Swedish Research Council and the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.

A member of the Amherst faculty since 2002, Hagadorn studies the earliest known marine animal communities—“paleocommunities” exposed in the sedimentary rocks in mountain ranges created about 500-550 million years ago in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. Sedimentary structures and fossils provide clues about the nature of ancient seafloor environments, as well as the animals that lived there. Hagadorn was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. degree) and the University of Southern California (M.S. and Ph.D. degrees.

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October 11, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson will give a talk titled “The Western Way of War” at 4 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 13, in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College. The third lecture in the series sponsored by the Colloquium on the American Founding at Amherst, Hanson’s talk is free and open to the public.

Hanson was a full-time farmer before joining California State University at Fresno in 1984 to initiate a classics program. Educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the American School of Classical Studies and Stanford University, Hanson still lives and works with his family on a 40-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, Calif., where he was born in 1953. Currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Hanson has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, Calif., a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University, a recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for opinion journalism, an Alexander Onassis Fellow and the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Hanson has written widely on Greek, agrarian and military history and contemporary culture. His many books include Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983), The Western Way of War (1989), Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience (1991), The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1995), Fields without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (1996), Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with John Heath, 1998), The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (1999), The Soul of Battle (1999); The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer (2000); Carnage and Culture (2001), Bonfire of the Humanities (with Bruce Thornton and John Heath, 2001), An Autumn of War (2002), Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (2003) and Ripples of Battle (2003).

Hanson has written essays for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Post, National Review, American Heritage, Policy Review, Commentary, National Review, the Wilson Quarterly, the Weekly Standard, Daily Telegraph and Washington Times. He has been interviewed often on National Public Radio, the PBS NewsHour and C-Span BookTV. He is a columnist for the National Review Online and serves on the editorial board of Arion, the Military History Quarterly and City Journal, as well as the board of the Claremont Institute.

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October 9, 2006
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413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2006 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Edmund S. Phelps, a 1955 graduate of Amherst College. The academy said in a statement that Phelps, a professor of political economy at Columbia University, “challenged the earlier view on the relationship between inflation and unemployment. He recognized that inflation does not only depend on unemployment but also on the expectations of firms and employees about price and wage increases.” “Amherst College is deeply honored by this recognition,” says Anthony W. Marx, the president of the college. “Ned Phelps is a brilliant scholar and a wonderful colleague.” Phelps is the fourth Nobel laureate from Amherst College: he joins Joseph E. Stiglitz ’64 (Economics 2001), Harold E. Varmus ’61 (Medicine, 1989) and Henry W. Kendall ’50 (Physics, 1990).

Phelps “has fundamentally altered our views on how the macroeconomy operates,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy. Geoffrey R. Woglom, the Richard S. Volpert ’56 Professor of Economics at Amherst College, says Phelps’s work on “intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy is still taught in the intermediate macroeconomics course at Amherst and at most other schools.” According to Woglom, Phelps “analyzed how the apparent tradeoff in the short run between lower unemployment at the cost of more inflation would disappear in the long run, and laid the groundwork for the New Classical revolution in macroeconomics, around 1975, which fundamentally changed the way economists analyze government stabilization policies.” This “Phelps-Friedman analysis” was co-developed independently in 1969 with Milton Friedman.

Woglom says that Phelps’s “earlier work in the theory of economic growth showed that increases in the savings rate typically would lead eventually to increases in consumption as economic growth raised income: you could trade off less consumption today for more in the future. But increasing the savings rate too much would lower consumption now and also in the future.

“Phelps was viewed as a major contributor to the theory of growth in the 1960s,” Woglom concludes, “and his ideas are used in analyzing current issues such as the reform of the Social Security system.”

Born in Evanston, Ill., Phelps earned a B.A. in economics from Amherst in 1955, and received M.A. (1956) and Ph.D. (1959) degrees from Yale University. He has taught at Columbia since 1971, where he directs the Center on Capitalism and Society.

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October 9, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Mark London, author of the forthcoming book The Last Forest: The Amazon in the Age of Globalization, will give a talk with that title at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 26, in the Cole Assembly Room at Amherst College. The first in a series of lectures titled “The Rain Forest Crunch,” sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program and the Office of the President at Amherst College, London’s talk is free and open to the public.

Mark London graduated from Amherst College in 1974 and attended law school at George Washington University. He is a trial lawyer and a partner in the firm of London & Mead in Washington D.C. and is the co-author of Amazon (1983, with Brian Kelly) and Four Little Dragons: Inside Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore: the Dawn of the Pacific Century (1983, with Brian Kelly).

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October 9, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—The Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens presents “Repast as Ritual: Dining at the Homestead and The Evergreens” from 2 until 4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 15, at the Amherst College Alumni House on Spring Street. The lecture by Amanda Lange of Historic Deerfield is the third installment of the museum’s fall 2006 “Pleasant and Perfect” series, which examines the 19th-century American home through the material world of The Evergreens, the home of Emily Dickinson’s brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson.

Even before moving into her new home, Susan Dickinson dreamed of entertaining her friends with an “oyster supper.” Such a supper was just one of countless meals that Susan oversaw during her almost 60-year residence at The Evergreens. From assembling breakfast to planning meals for notable guests like Ralph Waldo Emerson, dining at The Evergreens was no small affair. This program will examine dining customs at both the Homestead, home of the poet, as well as The Evergreens, and will give participants an up-close look at some of the dining-related treasures in the museum’s collection.

The curator of historic interiors at Historic Deerfield, in Deerfield, Mass., Amanda Lange was part of the Deerfield team that developed the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, a 27,000-square-foot facility for exhibitions, visible storage and work areas. Lange has also developed several exhibitions, including the current exhibition, “The Canton Connection: Art and Commerce of the China Trade, 1784-1860,” which focuses on trade relations between America and China in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and highlights Historic Deerfield’s collection of Chinese export art. In 1999 she was scholar-in-residence at The Evergreens and completed an inventory of the ceramics and collection there.

The Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens is owned by the Trustees of Amherst College. The museum is a member of Museums10, a partnership of 10 museums in the Pioneer Valley. For more information about the museum, please call 413/542-8161 or visit the museum’s Website.

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October 9, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—The Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens hosts “‘Silence as a Company’: Quiet Time at the Dickinson Homestead,” on Thursday, Oct. 26. From 10 a.m. to 12 noon, the Homestead doors will be open to visitors seeking a brief respite from cell phones, beeping handhelds and other unwanted distractions.

The program takes its name from a line in Emily Dickinson’s “To own the Art within the Soul” (Fr 1091). The “quiet time” program is not intended as an occasion for touring the poet’s home. Instead, visitors are invited to read silently, write or sketch. Portable chairs and copies of Emily Dickinson's poetry will be available for use in the house. Staff will circulate throughout the house during this time to provide assistance. A $5 donation is requested.

As our lives today seem busier than ever, we all need time for quiet and reflection,” said Cindy Dickinson, the museum’s director of programming and interpretation. “We hope that our new program will provide companionable peace for those seeking some calm, and opportunity to read some of Dickinson’s poetry or even to be inspired to write their own.”

The Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens is owned by the Trustees of Amherst College. In October, the museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 1-5 p.m. The museum is a member of Museums10, a partnership of 10 museums in the Pioneer Valley. For more information about the museum, please call 413/542-8161 or visit the museum’s website.

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October 9, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Elliott West, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, will speak on “Disease and the Making of Empires: Why It Matters that Lewis and Clark Didn’t Get Sick (Or at Least Really Sick)” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 26, in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at Amherst College. Sponsored by the history department and the dean of the faculty, this is the fifth annual lecture in a series named in honor of Anson D. Morse Professor of History and American Studies Hugh Hawkins, emeritus.

A specialist in the social and environmental history of the American frontier, West teaches and writes on the history of the American West. A native Texan, he received his doctorate from the University of Colorado. He has twice been chosen as teacher of the year at the University of Arkansas and was Arkansas’ teacher of the year in 1995.

West is the author of five books, including Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (1989); The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (1995); and The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado (1998), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the OAH Ray Allen Billington Prize, among others.

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