Martha Merrill Umphrey is Bertrand H. Snell 1894 Professor in American Government in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.  She received her B.A., J.D. and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan.  An active law and humanities scholar, her research and teaching address the interaction of law and culture, historically and theoretically, with particular emphases on the cultural life of trials; on cultural representations of law in film and literature; on American constitutional and criminal law in historical context; on privacy and speech; on law, visuality, and performance; and on law, love, and mourning.  She is co-editor of the Amherst Series in Law and Jurisprudence, and was the founding director of Amherst’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry.