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Sat, Feb 1, 2020
The Amherst College Musical Presents Green Day's "American Idiot"
7:30 pm Power House
The Amherst College Musical presents Green Day's American Idiot!
You must reserve tickets using the following form: https://forms.gle/5bpvdvWxC8SJ1yt58
Tickets are FREE for Five College students, faculty and staff. We hope to see you there!
Tickets Required
CAST and STAGE by a canary torsi
7:30 pm Kirby Memorial Theater
The Department of Theater and Dance is excited to present a special showing of CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR by a canary torsi, a project invested in how meaning is created by audiences and performers in real time through the languages of theater: spectacle, casting, scores and scripts. At Amherst College at Kirby Theater, for the first time, CAST and STAGE are being presented as one evening with an intermission.
Amherst College is partnering with A.P.E. and The School for Contemporary Dance & Thought to bring AUTHOR to 33 Hawley as part of the Bodies in Motion Festival. The interactive installation runs until Jan. 31 at the Northampton Center for the Arts, located at 33 Hawley Street in Northampton.
CAST is a performance by four of the performers that created the trilogy. At each performance, a new, computer-generated script is culled from transcripts of conversations on casting and representation. The performers receive their roles and the never-before-seen script in front of the audience and perform it for the first time in their presence.
STAGE is a visual and aural fantasia with live music. STAGE explores the role of theatrical devices in affecting what an audience sees and perceives.
AUTHOR is a participatory video installation that invites each visitor to interact with the performers through a text-based computer game. Forming a poetically mediated stream-of-conscious between visitors and the video recordings, visitors navigate their relationship to the performers' language and images on the topics of performing, representation and casting. The algorithm of the game invites each visitor to discover their own voice inside the machine, to construct their own meaning in "conversation" with the personal material of the performers.
The presentation of CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR is generously supported by a New England Foundation for the Arts Expeditions Grant, and by the Arts at Amherst Initiative and the Groove Fund at Amherst College, in cooperation with the Northampton Center for the Arts.
Admission for all events is free. To reserve tickets for CAST and STAGE, call (413) 542-2277. Seating is limited, so reservations are recommended.
For information on AUTHOR exhibit times, please visit the A.P.E. webpage: http://www.apearts.org/events--projects.html
Sun, Feb 2, 2020
Mon, Feb 3, 2020
Join the Indicator Magazine!
All day Morrow Dormitory, Indicator Office (basement)
Become a member of the Indicator Magazine staff! Be a writer, editor and/or artist and see your work published and distributed across campus! We publish writing of any genre, any art that can be scanned or photographed, and offer the opportunity to gain editorial and design experience. No previous experience is required and beginners are welcome. We are an entirely student-run publication that publishes one issue per semester, meeting 3-4 times overall. Contact Editor-in-Chief Heather Brennan (hbrennan20@amherst.edu) if you are interested in joining or if you have questions, and check out our Fall 2019 issue now available in Frost, Val, the Science Center and Keefe!
Tue, Feb 4, 2020
Protik K. Majumder, Williams College: "Heavy Metals, Cheap Lasers and Precision Measurements of Atomic Structure"
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm Science Center, A011
With important contributions from many Williams undergraduates over recent years, we have completed a series of high-precision spectroscopic measurements in Group III and IV atoms such as thallium, indium and lead. These results test state-of-the art theoretical models of these complicated atoms and guide further refinement. I will discuss some recent results including a new precision measurement of a "forbidden" transition in lead which makes use of a laser polarimetry technique capable of microradian optical rotation resolution. Improved models of these heavy atoms aid in the bigger goals of testing the Standard Model (and beyond) with table-top atomic and laser physics experiments.
Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni: "Islamic Law and Human Rights"
7:30 pm Fayerweather Hall, Pruyne Lecture Hall
Born in Iraq, Ibrahim Kazerooni was imprisoned under Saddam Hussein's regime and eventually fled the country in fear of Iraq's secret police. He completed theological studies in both Iran and Iraq, and also holds degrees in engineering, management and international relations, and a joint Ph.D. in religion and social change. He is the Imam of the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich.
An Interfaith Harmony Week offering from the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life
Wed, Feb 5, 2020
CHI Salon: "Through Composed" with Kate Lilley
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm Frost Library, 210
In both poetry and scholarship, Kate Lilley tarries with the problematic of queer historical transmission and the constitution of the queer early/modern. Her work on the genres of early modern women's writing, sapphic modernism, the queer mid-century, and contemporary experiments with all these, turns on questions of intertextual, intermedia and interpersonal encounter as exemplary mis/alliance. Conjuring scenes of revisionist feminist critique and complaint, her critical-creative poetics of queer feminist assemblage takes shape as a practice of secondary revision and working through. In music theory, "through composition" describes a mode of invention which continuously introduces new material without repetition. Here, Lilley uses it to signify the labile multifariousness of queer citation and reference as ground or continuo, repetition without repeating. In her latest book of poems, Tilt (2018), tropism and remediation drive successive detours through the copia of material history and genre, the affects of lived experience and the archive of poetic forms, lighting on Greta Garbo, The Children's Hour and her own #MeToo scandal.
Kate Lilley is an award-winning Australian poet, author of Versary (2002), Ladylike (2012) and Tilt (2018). She is also a well-known scholar of queer feminist literary history, editor of Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World (Penguin Classics) and Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (UWAP), and director of creative writing at the University of Sydney.
This salon is co-sponsored by the CHI, Creative Writing Center, Department of English and Department of Sexuality, Women's & Gender Studies. A reception will follow.
Thu, Feb 6, 2020
Helene Keyssar Lecture: "The Girlfriend Film: Affection and Affiliation" with Melissa Hardie
Long before the Bechdel Test codified and implicitly critiqued the failure of films to make female interaction the focal point of narrative activity, Fred Zinnemann's 1977 Julia and Claudia Weill's 1978 Girlfriends both described the difficulty of conceptualizing female affiliation in narrative as well as visual sequences. Within widely different industrial and political contexts, they each narrated the ways in which explicit interdiction and other forms of "sororophobia" arise as forms of plot advancement and affective dislocation in the lives of paired female friends. In Julia, the adaptation of Lillian Hellman's memoir foreshadows as public historical and political allegory this separation or dislocation. In Girlfriends, the focus is personal and intimate, although the premise of the plot is also that this interdiction is a political and aesthetic matter. In both, an endeavor to separate affection from desire is gestured at as a condition of affection. This lecture will explore the ways in which women, in historical fact or imaginative revision, can be brought together as girlfriends.
Melissa Hardie is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Sydney. Much of her work considers "novel objects," bridging modernist to contemporary textual practices to find unexpected areas of connection between what are usually thought of as discrete periods, practices or genres. Her recent essays have turned to Marielle Heller's 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, about writer Lee Israel; texts by filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and novelist Djuna Barnes; and George Cukor's last film, Rich and Famous, which narrates the friendship of two women writers. Her current book investigates how the closet is a critical vector in the remediation of forms of confession and disclosure, focusing on television, cinema, memoir and the starlet. She is also co-editing a book on Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls with Meaghan Morris and Kane Race. Hardie is driven by an ethos of inclusivity, which means she focuses on the underexplored and underrepresented edges of canons and how fields are transformed when inclusion and diversity are made central concerns.
A reception will follow.
Statistics Colloquium: "Tackling Disparities in Genetics Research: Building the Research and Researchers Together" - Lori Chibnik
4:30 pm Seeley G. Mudd Building, 206
Since the sequencing of the first human genome, over 30,000 disease-associated variants have been identified, the majority through genome-wide association studies. While these advances in our understanding of how genetics contribute to disease risk are now being used to inform translational research, including development of therapeutics and genetic risk screening, large-scale genetic studies have primarily used only genomes with European ancestry. If this pattern continues, advances in genetics will be limited, with the ensuing risk that therapeutic innovations leave out large segments of the global population. In addition, genetic risk scores, having been developed primarily on European genomes, do not translate to other populations, thus leading to many false positives and negatives. Expanding study collections to other populations will help alleviate some of these disparities, however without engaging scientists and physicians on all levels and providing them with the knowledge and skills necessary to perform these studies in their populations, there is a significant risk that the findings will again result in a widening of the massive research and treatment gaps with the rest of the world.
Using research on major mental health disorders, including schizophrenia and psychosis as examples, this talk will discuss work being done in the Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Populations-Psychosis (NeuroGAP-Psychosis), a study which began collection in 2018 and aims to collect DNA and phenotypic data from over 17,000 cases (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) and 17,000 controls from Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. I will present preliminary findings and highlight the development and implementation of a partner-training and capacity-building program, the Global Initiative for Neuropsychiatric Education in Research (GINGER), which focuses on building the next generation of computational genetics researchers in East and South Africa.
Lori Chibnik, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a biostatistician and assistant professor with an appointment in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Exhibition Opening and Lecture on Petrov-Vodkin's "Mother of God and Child"
4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Center for Russian Culture, 202 Webster Hall
Please join us for the opening of the exhibition One Scholar, One Work: Masterpieces from the Thomas P. Whitney Collection of Russian Art and a lecture by Professor Wendy Salmond (Chapman University), "Exploring a Modern Icon: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin's Mother of God and Child, 1922." The painting is on view in the Gallery of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Webster 202. A reception will follow.
Math Colloquium: "Unsupervised Clustering, Harmonic Analysis and Applications" - James Murphy
Machine learning is revolutionizing the sciences, but most existing methods require large amounts of human-generated training data to succeed. In this talk, we will introduce the unsupervised clustering problem, which requires an algorithm to make predictions without training data. We will discuss some classical methods for clustering before introducing a couple of new approaches. Throughout, connections with graph theory, Fourier analysis and probability theory will be developed. We will also demonstrate
applications to image processing and remote sensing.
James M. Murphy is an assistant professor of mathematics at Tufts University. His research interests include theoretical machine learning and applied harmonic analysis. He works on problems in unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, high-dimensional probability theory, image and signal processing, graph theory and frame theory.
"What Would Equality in Education Look Like?": A Conversation with Tara Westover and Tony Jack '07
8:00 pm Johnson Chapel
Tara Westover and Anthony Jack '07 will discuss "What Would Equality in Education Look Like?" in a conversation moderated by Professor Leah Schmalzbauer. A book signing will follow this event.
Tara Westover is an American historian and writer known for her unique and courageous education journey. She was born to Mormon survivalist parents opposed to public education. Tara never attended school. She spent her days working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother... until Tara decided to get an education and experience the world outside of her community. Tara taught herself enough mathematics, grammar and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. She was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom and continued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from BYU in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an M.Phil. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a Ph.D. in history in 2014. Her new book, Educated, is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a story that gets to the heart of what education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it. Tara argues that education is not just about job training, but a powerful tool of self-invention. Educated was long-listed for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and has spent 32 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Former U.S. President Barack Obama named Educated as one of the books on his summer reading list of 2018.
Anthony Jack '07, sociologist and assistant professor of education at Harvard University, is transforming the way we address diversity and inclusion in education. His new book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students, reframes the conversation surrounding poverty and higher education. In it, he explains the paths of two uniquely segregated groups. First, the "privileged poor": students from low-income, diverse backgrounds who attended elite prep or boarding school before attending college. The second are what Jack calls the "doubly disadvantaged"—students who arrive from underprivileged backgrounds without prep or boarding school to soften their college transition. Although both groups come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the privileged poor have more cultural capital to navigate and succeed—in the college environment and beyond.
This event is funded by the Croxton Lecture Fund.
Fri, Feb 7, 2020
Life Stories Lunch with Carol Bailey, Visiting Associate Professor of English
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Keefe Campus Center, McCaffrey
The Life Stories series provides a forum for the Amherst community to get to know each other outside of our professional and academic roles. At each lunch, a student, faculty or staff member will share a story from their lives, followed by the opportunity for participants to engage in reflection and discussion. Lunch provided.
Marsh Coffee Haus VI: Haus of Love
8:00 pm - 9:30 pm Marsh House, Ballroom
St. Valentine's Day is right around the corner, so take your sweetie's hand and skip up the hill to Marsh Coffee Haus (what could be more romantic?)! Gaze into each other's eyes and snack on aphrodisiacs while listening to some gorgeous performances from student artists. Maybe Maria will dress up like Cupid?? It's unconfirmed!
Hey, why not serenade someone yourself? Coffee Haus is open to anyone and everyone who wants to share their talents, so reach out to marshcoffeehaus@gmail.com or message us (Lena Lamer, Tom Amsbry, & Maria Gramotina) if you have any questions or are interested in performing.
Cameron Chandler '20 and Shane Auguste '20 Senior Thesis Concert: "The Motley Crew" and "Outlets"
3:00 pm Buckley Recital Hall
The Amherst College Department of Music presents The Motley Crew and Outlets, original theses in composition by Cameron Chandler '20 and Yohan Auguste '20. The concert is free and open to the public; seating is by general admission.
The Motley Crew is a collection of six movements stylistically ranging from big band jazz, to tango, to Japanese pop music. Inspired by different styles of music, each "member" of the crew has a distinct, interesting and fun personality.
In student composer Shane Auguste's words: "Plug into Outlets, a string quartet cycle performed by the Wistaria Quartet. The piece rests upon musical concepts I have encountered at Amherst and explores my own interpretation and relationship to those concepts."
For a complete listing of upcoming Amherst College Department of Music events, visit us on the web: www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/music/events
Build Your Relationship Tabling
11:00 am - 2:00 pm Keefe Campus Center
Come stop by the PA and SHE table at Keefe (Feb. 11, 11 AM-2 PM, Feb. 13, 11 AM- 1PM) for some information on healthy relationships and chocolates!
Tue, Feb 11, 2020
David Hall '91, Amherst College: "Tying Knots in a Quantum Fluid"
Knots are familiar entities that appear at a captivating nexus of art, technology, mathematics and science. They have recently attracted significant experimental interest in contexts ranging from knotted DNA and nanostructures to nontrivial vortex knots in classical fluids. In this talk, I will discuss the first controlled
experimental creation and detection of knot solitons, which are particle-like topological excitations possessing a knotted field character. The superfluid medium within which they exist is a Bose-Einstein condensate with a temperature some tens of billionths of a degree above absolute zero. In addition to enabling future experimental studies of their properties and dynamics, these knot solitons provide a striking demonstration of the celebrated Hopf fibration, which mathematically tie together many seemingly unrelated physical phenomena.
Spring Opening Reception at the Mead
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm Mead Art Museum
Celebrate the opening of the Mead's spring exhibitions at this evening reception, featuring "The Best Impressions: Inside the Edward C. Crossett Collection of Prints," along with new rotations of works in "Starting Something New: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions and Gifts and Ten Years of Trinkett Clark Memorial Student Acquisitions." Join us for curatorial remarks, live music and refreshments in the galleries.
Free and open to all!
Wed, Feb 12, 2020
Dr. Theodore S. Gonzalves to Present "Smithsonian's Years of Music"
2:30 pm - 4:30 pm Fayerweather Hall, Pruyne Lecture Hall
Dr. Gonzalves will discuss the Smithsonian Institution's ambitious programming challenge—to present tie-based music-related events every day in 2019. It's also the planet's largest music museum. You will hear an insider's take on the state of research, collections and exhibition work at an institution tasked with the "increase and diffusion" of knowledge.
Fiction Reading: Steven Dunn
8:00 pm Amherst Books
Steven Dunn, aka Pothole (because he's deep in these streets), is the author of two novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press—Potted Meat (2016) and water & power (2018)—and a chapbook, Our Migrations (Business Bear Press, 2018). Potted Meat, which Laird Hunt described as "full of wonder and silence and beauty and strangeness and ugliness and sadness and truth and hope," has been adapted to film by Foothills Productions. Dunn was born and raised in West Virginia, and is currently an MFA student at Stetson University, and an MFA instructor at Regis University.
The reading will be followed by refreshments.
RLadies Amherst: A Conversation with Professor Amy Nussbaum
Come learn how to visualize data using maps taught by Professor Nussbaum, a lecturer at Mount Holyoke College. In addition to academia and research, she promotes the use of statistics in government and industry by advocating for evidence-based policymaking and the federal statistical agencies. Everyone is welcome! RLadies hopes to encourage, inspire and support women in the R community.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in SMUD 208.
Grit - Grace - & Glow: A Night with Nikki Giovanni
Join us as we welcome Nikki Giovanni, poet and University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Ms. Giovanni will be this year's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr./Black History Month Symposium keynote speaker.
A brief biography in Ms. Giovanni's own words:
"I was asked to do a biography, so this is it. I am 71 years old. I highly recommend old age; it's fun. I have been awarded an unprecedented seven NAACP Image Awards, which makes me very very proud. I have been nominated for a Grammy; been a finalist for the National Book Award. I am very proud to have authored three New York Times and Los Angeles Times best-sellers, highly unusual for a poet. I am a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. I don't have a lot of friends, but I have good ones. I have a son and a granddaughter. My father, mother, sister and middle aunt are all deceased literarily making me go from being the baby in the family to being an elder. I like to cook, travel and dream. I'm a writer. I'm happy."
Nikki Giovanni is one of America's most celebrated poets. Her work, which has both drawn from and influenced the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements, has been central to the cultural conversation since Giovanni first rose to prominence in the 1960s. Her literary contributions include books for children and adults, creative nonfiction and spoken-word albums. She has been awarded 25 honorary doctorates, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, numerous NAACP Image Awards, the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award, the Langston Hughes Award and the Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award. Since 1987 she has been a member of the faculty at Virginia Tech, where she is a University Distinguished Professor.
Hyper Education: When Good Grades, Good Schools and Good Behavior are Not Enough
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lewis-Sebring Commons, Valentine Hall, Mullins & Faerber Rooms
The Faculty Colloquium Series for 2019-20 presents a lecture titled "Hyper Education: When Good Grades, Good Schools, and Good Behavior are Not Enough" presented by Pawan Dhingra, professor of American studies.
"A recent truth in middle-class parenting is the over-scheduling of young children in extracurricular activities. Hyper-education refers to a growing trend of young children already performing well in school and yet participating in privatized, extracurricular education. After-school math learning centers and academic competitions (e.g. spelling bees) are two main types. This trend is normally associated with Asian Americans (e.g. "Tiger moms") but is growing among whites as well. Based on ethnographic research on Asian Americans and others, I explain the motivations of this seemingly foreign practice and demonstrate that it is in line with contemporary education reforms, and as such should be expected to grow. The rise of hyper education has implications for educational inequality."
Faculty Colloquium events are sponsored by a group of faculty colleagues who meet informally with the purpose of supporting and promoting the College's commitment to faculty research. Colleagues interested in joining this endeavor are welcome and should contact us by email: adsarat@amherst.edu or visit https://www.amherst.edu/mm/33214. Faculty, staff, and members of the administration are cordially invited to attend these presentations.
Canine Valentine's Day
12:00 pm - 2:00 pm Science Center, Living Room
Come and get some puppy love on Valentine's Day! Dog treats and human treats will be provided. There will also be a craft station to make your own Valentine. Sponsored by the Counseling Center, the Science Center, and Alumni and Parent Programs.
M@A Chamber Series Presents Dover Quartet with Davóne Tines, baritone
Named the Cleveland Quartet Award-winner and honored with the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Dover has become one of the most in-demand ensembles in the world. The quartet's rise from up-and-coming young ensemble to occupying a spot at the top of their field has been "practically meteoric" (Strings).
Performing works by Mozart, Barber, Shaw, and Shostakovich
"Charismatic, full-voiced" (The New York Times) bass-baritone Davóne Tines joins the Quartet for
Barber's "Dover Beach" and Caroline Shaw's "By and By."
Mozart: Quartet in C Major, K. 465, "Dissonance"
Barber: Dover Beach, Op. 3
Caroline Shaw: "By and By"
Shostakovich: Quartet No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 117
Single ticket prices:
General public: $28
Senior citizens (65+) and Amherst College employees: $22
Students with valid ID: $12
FREE student rush available at the box office beginning one hour before the concert.
Single tickets on sale at:
https://amherst.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1310&r=a160827c183...
WAMH 89.3 PRESENTS! A VERY PUNK VALENTINE'S
8:30 pm - 11:00 pm Marsh House
Boston-based punk band SNOOZER and local punk band LANDOWNER come to Amherst for a show that is FREE and open to all Five College students! Presented by WAMH 89.3, Amherst College Radio and AAS. Come wearing your best anti-Valentine's day garb. Eyeliner and black boots encouraged.
McBride Commission Concert: Jihye Lee and the Amherst College Jazz Ensemble
The Amherst College Jazz Ensemble and the Jihye Jazz Orchestra perform Lee's new work, "Try Out," for the McBride Jazz Commission Series on Feb. 15 at 8 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Center, on the Amherst College campus.
Admission is free; no tickets are required. Donations to benefit the Amherst Survival Center will be gratefully accepted.
This year's composer of the 16th composition in the Jazz Commission Series is New York City-based Jihye Lee. Her 13-piece Jazz Orchestra performs her new work "Try Out," and the ACJE performs music from Les Hooper, Gil Evans and Peter Pan.
For a complete listing of upcoming Amherst College Department of Music events, please visit us on the web: www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/music/events
Biology Monday Seminar
4:00 pm Science Center, Kirkpatrick Lecture Hall A011
Seminar with Javier Apfeld, Ph.D., assistant professor in the biology department at Northeastern University
C. elegans processes sensory information to choose between freeloading and self-defense strategies
My lab's goal is to elucidate how the brain regulates aging and resilience to oxidants, using the nematode C. elegans as a tractable model organism. Our work combines molecular genetics, quantitative microscopy, mathematical modeling and engineering. During my Ph.D., I pioneered using genetics to study aging in Professor Cynthia Kenyon's lab, and discovered that intercellular communication regulates lifespan in the nematode C. elegans. I then translated this new science of aging in biotech. Returning to academia, I help develop enabling technologies for studying C. elegans aging in collaboration with Professor Walter Fontana, a theorist and computational scientist.
"Ghosts from Fukushima"
4:30 pm Fayerweather Hall, 113
Professor Isomae Jun'ichi from the International Research Center for Japanese Studies will address the experience of prayer and despair in Japan following the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. A prominent scholar of religion, Professor Isomae explores the challenges of capturing the unseen world of hope and despair in contemporary Japan. There will be a response by Professor Marion Eggert of the Ruhr-University Bochum.
"Of Monsters and Women: Collecting Japanese Art in 19th-Century Paris": A Talk by Professor Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State University)
The Paris Musée d'Ennery owes its existence to a young woman who, in the 1840s, had an interest in acquiring the Chinese and Japanese "monsters" hidden in antique shops. Fifty years later, Clémence Lecarpentier d'Ennery bequeathed her collection of nearly 7,000 objects to the French state. Although she assembled these pieces and built a house and galleries to curate and display them, museum conservators posthumously erased her life's work, presenting it instead as her husband's achievement.
This lavishly illustrated talk will present the museum, its collections and its history before teasing out some of the complicated social factors—among them class, gender, religion and nationalism—that led to the museum's marginalization as a cultural institution.
Sanam Nader-Esfahani, Amherst College: "Literature and the Eye in the Age of Kepler"
"I shall describe the means of vision, which no one at all to my knowledge has yet examined and understood in such detail. I therefore beg the mathematicians to consider these carefully, so that thereby at last there might exist in philosophy something certain concerning this most noble function." It is with these words in his Optical Part of Astronomy (1604) that the German mathematician Johannes Kepler credits himself with inaugurating a new chapter in the history of vision. Kepler does indeed fulfill his promise by advancing knowledge about the eye, vision and the use of lenses in the correction of vision. His conclusions, however, bring anything but certainty on a philosophical level, especially with regard to the relationship between an object and its image. Reading Kepler in dialogue with a selection of nonscientific texts, this presentation experiments with the affinities between Kepler's scientific findings and literature as a form of knowledge and representation in the 17th century.
JUSTICE! Amherst College's Speaking Competition
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm Johnson Chapel
Students compete with five- to seven-minute speeches using this year's theme: Justice.
Winners receive cash prizes and recognition in the College award ceremonies.
"Recognition of American Judgment in Japan"
Each country's judgment is valid only in that country, as making a judgment is a sovereign act of the country. However, if a judgment ordered in a foreign country can be given the same effect as a judgment in one's own country, the burden on one's country will be reduced. For that reason, modern nations are actively adopting a system to recognize foreign judgments. But unconditional recognition can put your country's judicial system at risk. Therefore, when certain conditions are met, a system is adopted to recognize the effect of the judgment of a foreign court.
The most remarkable of these conditions is "do not violate public order and morals." If the contents ordered by a foreign court do not conform to the legal consciousness and legal system of one's own country, it cannot be recognized. In fact, there are cases in which the judgment of the United States has been denied recognition in Japan. One is a judgment ordering punitive damages, and the other is a judgment that allows a child born by a surrogate mother to have a parental relationship with her genetic mother. Neither of these was recognized, because each violated Japanese public order and morals.
In this lecture, apart from the legal system of each country, I would like to consider why these conclusions are different between Japan and the United States.
—Yukihiro Okada, Professor of Law at Doshisha University
Presented by the Doshisha University and Amherst College Faculty Exchange Program. Please note that this lecture will be in Japanese.
"Vaping Debunked: Schooling the JUUL & Beyond"
Want to learn more about vaping? Curious about recent studies and the various health effects? Christine Johnston, M.P.H., assistant director of alcohol and other drug education and health promotion at Springfield College, is a prominent lecturer on the social and health impacts of vaping. Join us and demystify vaping for yourself!
Keynote: Professor Dick Goldsby: "The Nature and Biology of Race"
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm Science Center, Lipton Lecture Hall, E110
Join us for a keynote lecture from Dick Goldsby, Amherst's Thomas B. Walton Jr. Memorial Professor of Biology, Emeritus, on "The Nature and Biology of Race." The talk will be followed by a moderated question-and-answer session.
Professor Goldsby is the author of the 2019 book Thinking Race: Social Myths and Biological Realities.
Co-sponsors for this lecture are:
Being Human in STEM
Departments of Biology, Sociology, Anthropology and Black Studies
Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Film Screening of "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am"
7:30 pm Stirn Auditorium, Mead Art Museum
Come celebrate Toni Morrison's birthday with a film screening of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Drinks and desserts will be available.
This artful and intimate meditation on the legendary storyteller examines her life, her works and the powerful themes she has confronted throughout her literary career (imdb.com).
Co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty and the Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies Department
RLadies Amherst: A Conversation with Professors Brittney Bailey and Katharine Correia
4:00 pm Science Center, E108
Learn how two Amherst College statistics professors got to where they are now in their careers in data science. Everyone is welcome! RLadies hopes to encourage, inspire and support women in the R community.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Refreshments will be served.
Poetry and Performance: Dao Strom
An evening of poetry and performance from Dao Strom, whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate "voices"—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. The New Yorker has called her work "Quietly beautiful … hip without being ironic." She makes music as The Sea & The Mother and is the author of five books, including a bilingual poetry/art book, a hybrid-form memoir with a song-cycle, a collection of novellas and a novel. She is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists of the Vietnamese diaspora, as well as the editor of diaCRITICS. Refreshments will follow.
Grab and Don't Go with Christopher Myers
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Multicultural Resource Center, Keefe Campus Center
Christopher Myers is an artist and writer based in New York City. A widely acclaimed author of literature for young people, he is also an accomplished fine artist who has lectured and exhibited internationally. His work questions what it means to be an artist and to create art that is rooted in the experience of global cultural exchange.
Meet Myers for lunch in the Amherst College Multicultural Resource Center. Learn more about his artistic practice, his work in publishing, how his work centers historically marginalized perspectives in art and literature, and how he collaborates with artists and craftspeople across cultures and around the world.
Reflections on Teaching with Rhonda Cobham-Sander
4:30 pm Frost Library, CHI Think Tank
Rhonda Cobham-Sander, the Emily C. Jordan Folger Professor of Black Studies and English, will reflect with us about her teaching now and how her teaching has evolved throughout her career at Amherst College.
RSVP through the Center for Teaching and Learning website.
Law's Infamy: Ashker v. Brown and the Failures of Solitary Confinement Reform
4:30 pm - 6:05 pm Clark House, 100
Keramet Reiter, Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, will present a paper entitled "Law's Infamy: Ashker v. Brown and the Failures of Solitary Confinement Reform." This is the fifth presentation in a series of seminars that will take place this year on the theme "Law's Infamy."
Keramet Reiter studies prisons, prisoners' rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems.
"The Court System of Japan"
"After giving an overview of the Japanese court system, I would like to talk about the mediation system, which has been evaluated as characteristic in the Japanese court system. Of course, there is a mediation system in the United States, but mediation in Japan is performed in a court building and involves nonlegal professionals as mediators, which is completely different from mediation in the United States. I would like to think about how disputes are resolved in Japanese court through this characteristic system and what kind of image the Japanese have of the court."
Presented by the Doshisha University and Amherst College Faculty Exchange Program
Please note that this lecture will be in Japanese.
Math Colloquium: Amanda Folsom, "Symmetry, Almost"
Some definitions of the word symmetry include "correct or pleasing proportion of the parts of a thing," "balanced proportions" and "the property of remaining invariant under certain changes, as of orientation in space." One might think of snowflakes, butterflies and our own faces as naturally symmetric objects—or at least close to it. Mathematically, one can also conjure up many symmetric objects: even and odd functions, fractals, certain matrices and modular forms, a type of symmetric complex function. All of these things exhibit a kind of beauty in their symmetries, so would they lose some of their innate beauty if their symmetries were altered? Alternatively, could some measure of beauty be gained with slight symmetric imperfections? We will explore these questions, guided by the topic of modular forms and their variants. What can be gained by perturbing modular symmetries in particular? We will discuss this theme from past to present: the origins of these questions have their roots in the first half of the 20th century, dating back to Ramanujan and Gauss, while some fascinating and surprising answers come from just the last 15 years.
"The Red Plague Rid You for Learning Me Your Language": Artist Talk with Christopher Myers
Join us for an artist talk with Christopher Myers to learn more about his artistic practice and the thinking behind this year's Rotherwas Project.
This program is supported by the Arts at Amherst Initiative and is free and open to all.
"Feminist Theory? Queer Studies? Memoir? How to Write the History of Pregnancy and Birth in Changing Times"
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm Chapin Hall, 101
Sarah Knott is a writer, feminist and professor of history. She is the author, most recently, of Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History, which The New York Times described as "a joy to read." She is currently an associate professor of history at Indiana University and a research fellow of the Kinsey Institute.
Sponsored by the Department of History, the Lamont Lecture Fund, and the Eastman Lecture Fund
"Intimate Distance": Five College Dance Faculty Concert
This year's Five College Dance Faculty Concert features five faculty and guest artist works (one from each campus) that investigate human distance and intimacy. Set against the backdrop of global social and environmental crises, these performances provide ways to contemplate how we connect—or not—with our own internal landscapes, with other individuals and with our physical surroundings. The concert invites performers and audiences to consider how embodiment, movement collaboration and the community inherent to performance can provide not solutions to the difficulties we face, but rather new avenues by which to broach them.
All five pieces are premieres that either continue or initiate the artists' choreographic investigations with Five College Dance students. Featuring new work by newer members of the Five College Dance community, this concert can be seen as a look into the future of Five College Dance.
The choreographers are:
Deborah Goffe, assistant professor of dance, Hampshire College
Barbie Diewald, assistant professor of dance, Mount Holyoke College
Sarah Lass, Smith MFA '18, Smith College guest artist
Jenna Riegel, assistant professor of dance, Amherst College
Aston K. McCullough, assistant professor of dance science, UMass Amherst
Main Studio Theater, Hampshire College
Tickets are $5 for students/seniors and $10 for general admission, and are available online: www.fivecolleges.edu/dance
See the poster for more information.
Art and Reading with Christopher Myers
10:00 am - 1:00 pm Mead Art Museum
Enjoy a children's storybook reading and signing with author and artist Christopher Myers. Books will be available for purchase. After story time, stay for free activities inspired by Myers's latest exhibition, Rotherwas Project 5: The Red Plague Rid You for Learning Me Your Language. Choose from sonnet writing, quilting, mapping and more!
Refreshments will be served.
Activities are designed for children ages 6–11, but all are welcome to attend. This program is presented in partnership with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, The Common and the Amherst College Women's and Gender Center.
If you have accessibility concerns, please contact Danielle Amodeo at (413) 542-5651.
Life Stories Lunch with Sheila Jaswal, Associate Professor of Chemistry
"Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive-Use Musical Instrument": A Talk by Professor Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas)
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm Arms Music Center, 3
The music department presents a special talk by jazz historian and professor of American studies Sherrie Tucker. All are invited.
Professor Tucker's talk focuses on the work of composer, musician and humanitarian Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), who is renowned for her innovations in composition, sound technology, research, philosophy and practices of listening, as well as feminist and environmental humanitarian projects. Less known is her work on all-ability improvisation through the Adaptive-Use Musical Instrument (AUMI), a free download/app that transforms any laptop, desktop, iPad or iPhone into a musical instrument that uses motion tracking to adapt to every body. Oliveros considered the AUMI a continuation of, not a departure from, her life's work, listing it as her major research project with her department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in her final years. From 2007 until her passing, she spoke of the AUMI as interconnected with her other projects and collaborations intended to expand our abilities to listen, and thus to expand consciousness—such as the Sonic Meditations, Expanded Instrument System and Deep Listening® practice.
In this lecture/demonstration, jazz studies scholar Sherrie Tucker shares what she has learned as a member of the ongoing collaborative AUMI Research Project, including how it challenged her exclusive relationship with jazz as an object of study, and pivoted her jazz studies questions and methods toward explorations of inclusive mixed-ability listening, sounding and sociality. Participants are invited to bring laptops, iPads or iPhones (sorry, Android users), if they wish. Those who want to try the AUMI in advance may download it free of charge at http://aumiapp.com/download.php.
Sherrie Tucker (professor, American studies, University of Kansas) is the author of Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke, 2014) and Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s (Duke, 2000) and co-editor, with Nichole T. Rustin, of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke, 2008). She is a member of the AUMI Editorial Collective, whose collaborative volume, Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) is currently under review at University of Michigan Press. She is a member of two major collaborative research initiatives: the International Institute of Critical Improvisation Studies and Improvisation, Community and Social Practice (for which she served as facilitator for the Improvisation, Gender and the Body research area), both funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a founding member of the Melba Liston Research Collective, a member of the AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument) Project and founding member of AUMI-KU InterArts, one of six member institutions of the AUMI Research Consortium. She was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University in 2004-2005, where she was a member of the Columbia Jazz Study Group. With Randal M. Jelks, she co-edits the journal American Studies. She serves with Deborah Wong and Jeremy Wallach as series editors for the Music/Culture Series at Wesleyan University Press. She is the proud holder of a Deep Listening® Ear-tificate.
For more information, contact Professor Jason Robinson (jrobinson@amherst.edu).
"Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today"—A Talk by Denise Murrell
4:00 pm Fayerweather Hall, 115 - Pruyne Lecture Hall
Denise Murrell is the curator behind the highly praised exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today that opened last year at the Museé d'Orsay in Paris. Murrell's new analyses and rigorous research into social and art histories resulted in the writing of significant biographies for previously unknown Black models and muses, and the suggestion of new titles for paintings by Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso and others where those depicted had previously been reduced to words like "negro" or "mulatto." Beyond the focus on 19th- and 20th-century art, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue have created entirely new paradigms for research and teaching, and have transformed perspectives in the history of art.
Murrell was recently appointed to the post of associate curator of 19th- and 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a newly created position that will involve her working closely with both the museum's modern and contemporary department and its European painting department. The first new appointment by the Met director Max Hollein signals that new perspectives are being pursued at the museum, moving beyond the Western lens. "Max and his team want to proactively move toward a more inclusive presentation of art history across all periods," Murrell told The New York Times (November 20, 2019).
Murrell's lecture is sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series and the Department of Art and the History of Art at Amherst College. Following her Friday lecture, Murrell will be leading a faculty seminar and a workshop with students at the Smith College Museum of Art. Murrell's visit is being organized by Karen Koehler, visiting faculty in art and the history of art at Amherst and professor in architectural and art history at Hampshire College, and Darcy Buerkle, associate professor of history and affiliate in the study of women and gender at Smith College.
Image: Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eileen Travell
2020 Five College Film & Video Festival
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm Stirn Auditorium, Mead Art Museum
Join us to watch 26 short films from Five College students. Celebrate diverse works of animation, documentaries, experimentals and narratives. A small award ceremony will be held at the end, with a special audience award.
Free snack is included!
Founded in 1994, the Five College Student Film & Video Festival is an annual event featuring original films and videos by Five College students. The festival has become an important venue for film students to meet, collaborate and share their productions with their peers and with the Five College film community.
Students from each of the Five Colleges organize the festival with the assistance of a student director from the host college and a faculty advisor. The festival, which is sponsored by the Five College Film Council, is held each year during the spring semester. Submissions are evaluated by a jury of students and faculty members from each campus. Selected works are shown at the festival, and awards are given.
Film Showing: "Queen & Slim"
8:00 pm - 11:00 pm Keefe Campus Center, Keefe Theater
There will be a discussion following Friday's showing.
There will be food!
Synopsis: A young couple's first date hits a snag when they inadvertently kill a police officer who pulled them over for a traffic infraction. However, as the truth of their story comes out, the country finds itself divided on the matter of the couple's fate.
Amherst Dance Auditions
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm Webster Hall, Studio 1
Are you interested in being a part of Amherst Dance this semester? An all-inclusive, low pressure, and low time commitment dance group on campus, we are looking for people who want to be a part of our spring show in early May. All levels of experience (beginner to advanced) and all styles of dance are welcome. In the past we've had larger beginner pieces—tap, flamenco, contemporary, vogue, hip hop—really anything goes! If you are interested in choreographing please contact either mcooper22@amherst.edu or nkiley21@amherst.edu. See you there!
Film Showing: Queen & Slim
A young couple's first date hits a snag when they inadvertently kill a police officer who pulled them over for a traffic infraction. However, as the truth of their story comes out, the country finds itself divided on the matter of the couple's fate.
Biology Monday Seminar: "Carbohydrates at the Host–Microbe Interface"
Laura L. Kiessling, Ph.D., the Novartis Professor of Chemistry in Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give a talk titled "Carbohydrates at the Host–Microbe Interface."
Our health depends on maintaining a functional microbiome and avoiding the propagation of pathogenic microbes. Our group seeks to understand the mechanisms of microbial control by focusing on a prominent feature of the cell's exterior—the carbohydrate coat. From humans to fungi to bacteria, all cells on Earth possess a carbohydrate coat. A critical role of this coat is to serve as an identification card. Our group has been examining the role of carbohydrate-binding proteins, called lectins, in influencing our microbiota and in immune defense. This seminar will focus on understanding the basis of carbohydrate-protein interactions and how they are used to control microbes. We envision that our findings can lead to alternative means to combat pathogens, methods for rapid approaches to ID microbiota, and the development of new strategies to regulate microbiome composition to promote human health.
Ivy Watts: Mental Health Empowerment Speaker
8:00 pm - 9:30 pm Science Center, Lipton Lecture Hall
Join us as a former standout student-athlete shares her story, promoting self-worth and mental health practices based on her experience at the University of New Haven and beyond. This presentation is open to all students and members of the community and is co-sponsored by the Department of Athletics and the Community Mental Health Fund.
Chris Faesi, UMass: "The Forest AND the Trees: Bridging the Multi-Scale Physics of Star Formation"
The conversion of interstellar gas into stars provides the energy, momentum and chemical enrichment that help drive the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time. Observational limitations have previously made it difficult to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the star formation process (and its role on environment) due to the large dynamic range in scales over which it is relevant. However, pioneering new observational facilities are now moving the field from case studies to big data, enabling measurements across statistically significant samples of galaxies at very high resolution. This allows us for the first time to directly investigate how the small-scale (< 100 pc) physics of star formation couples to large-scale (1-10 kpc) galactic dynamics and environment.
In this presentation, I will highlight recent and current progress toward a more complete picture of star formation in the local Universe. I will show how new population synthesis models for young stellar populations can bridge the gap from Milky Way to extragalactic star formation studies. I will also present the results of the first molecular cloud-scale study of molecular clouds beyond the Local Group of galaxies. Finally, I will review some first results from two large observational campaigns through which we are tracking molecular gas and young stars at the cloud scale across dozens of nearby galaxies. This includes the systematic investigation of important physical quantities including gas conversion efficiency, molecular cloud densities and dynamics, and star formation timescales across multiple galactic environments.
Statistics Colloquium: "Are We Not Doing Phrasing Anymore?": Mining Narrative Texts for Meaning with John Laudun
The rise of algorithmic analysis has been met by a rise in the interest in storytelling, suggesting that we are most human in the stories we tell, and that the stories we tell cannot be readily rendered into numbers. And so data scientists and digital humanities scholars have turned their attention to narrative forms in hopes of at least sketching out a computational model of narrative which might reveal how narratives work, at least as texts, if not also as vehicles for the delivery of meaning. Much of this work has, however, focused on texts like novels, skipping over the kinds of texts that most of us produce each and every day, both online and off.
This presentation surveys recent work in corpus stylistics, digital humanities, and information and data sciences, and then sketches out what might be a way to discern the shape of small stories. Examples are drawn from local legends about treasure, the clown legend cascade of 2016 and select literary works, among other things.
Dr. John Laudun, professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is "fascinated by how humans create their world with relatively simple resources." His current work in culture analytics has brought collaborations with physicists and other scientists seeking to understand how texts can be modeled computationally in order to better describe their functions and features.
Spring Semester Kickoff: Arts at Amherst Initiative Open Meeting
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm Bailey Brown House
Join the Arts at Amherst Initiative for our first event of the semester, featuring a panel of members from the Amherst arts community. The panel will explore how creative practice and scholarly practice coexist in each of our liberal arts environment and their specific departments. Panelists include David Gloman (ARHA), Amelie Hastie (FAMS) and Ana Candida Carneiro (THDA), and will be moderated by Dwight Carey (ARHA). Food and drinks will be provided!
Please RSVP to Ellen Mutter, arts coordinator, at arts@amherst.edu.
This meeting is open to all faculty and staff!
Turkey, Syria and the Future of Kurdish Movements
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm Frost Library, CHI
Russian Film Screening: "Legend №17" • Легенда №17
This film is based on real life events and tells a story of Soviet hockey player Valeri Kharlamov's career and the first match of the Summit Series between the USSR and Canada in 1972. Directed by Nikolai Lebedev and completed in 2013, the film's runtime is 134 minutes.
The film is in Russian with English subtitles. The film will be screened at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m.
Peer Advocates for Sexual Respect 3rd Annual Community Promise
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm Keefe Campus Center, Friedmann Room
Join the Peer Advocates as we celebrate our community values through the lens of Healthy Relationships! This year, we posed the questions of "What Does a Healthy Relationship Look Like?" and "Why Do You Deserve to Have One?" Come hear the responses of your peers and members from the broader Amherst community!
"Gossamer"
8:00 pm Holden Experimental Theater, Webster Hall
The Department of Theater and Dance presents Gossamer, written and directed by Sophina Flores '20. Gossamer follows three children and their mother through a dissociative fantasy world they have created as a response to trauma, trapped in the liminal space between death and life. Through surrealist movement, Gossamer carries us through a distorted narrative of a broken home—a family grappling with forgiveness, acceptance and hope for recovery, while facing the truth that no one is innocent within the cycle of abuse.
Set design by Laura Carty '20, costume design by Lorelei Dietz '20, lighting design by Lauren Thompson, projection design by Brenna Kaplan '22, and sound design by Christianna Mariano '21 and Alistair Edwards '22
Starring Sam Beach, Emily Fedor, Leah Folpe, Nick Govus, Eli Quastler, Andrew Rosevear, Caroline Seitz and Renz Toledo
Tickets are free; reservations are recommended: call (413) 542-2277 or email theater@amherst.edu.
Wellness Party
Join us for lunch, raffle prizes, coloring and DIY self-care kits. We will be celebrating the end of the Wellness Challenge, but the event is open to anyone who would like to hear a little bit more about the Challenge or just enjoy a fun break.
Cheminar: "Ghost Proteins"
3:15 pm - 4:30 pm Science Center, Kirkpatrick Lecture Hall - #A011
Professor Ronald T. Raines, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Chemistry
ABSTRACT: The lipid bilayer that encases human cells has evolved to keep the outside out, and the inside in. This barrier is not, however, impenetrable. Some small molecules, including many drugs, can burrow through and manifest therapeutic activities. Others can be "cloaked" to endow membrane permeability, and then uncloaked inside cells. We have learned how to beneficially cloak proteins, which are typically 100-fold larger than small-molecule drugs. Specifically, the conversion of protein carboxyl groups into esters enables a protein to traverse the lipid bilayer. The nascent esters are substrates for endogenous esterases that regenerate native proteins within cells. The ability to deliver native proteins directly into cells opens a new frontier for molecular medicine.
M@A Masterclass: Parker Quartet Feb. 28
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm Buckley Recital Hall
Please join us for a public masterclass as M@A Chamber artists the Parker Quartet work with students on their craft.
Crafting a Career in Food Writing
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Frost Library, CHI Seminar room
The foodie media universe offers storytellers with a passion for the culinary the opportunity to share in and define new culinary traditions. Explore the possibilities for your own work—across print, digital, and television—with this behind the scenes look at Crafting a Career in Food Writing. This in-depth discussion will feature three distinguished Amherst community members who will share the details of their trajectories into careers as food writer, cookbook authors, recipe developers and personal chefs.
Lizzy Briskin '15 is a personal chef, cooking instructor, food writer and recipe developer specializing in healthy, vegetable-forward food.
Dana Cowin P '22, best known for her two decades as the Editor-in-Chief of Food & Wine, is a tastemaker, talent scout, consultant, author, lecturer and radio show host.
Ted Lee '93 is co-founder of The Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalogue, an award winning cookbook author, and host/executive producer of Southern Uncovered with The Lee Bros. on Ovation.
"Shusenjo—The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue"
4:30 pm Keefe Campus Center, Keefe Theater Auditorium
Miki Dezaki, a YouTuber who was threatened and harassed by Japan's notorious netouyo (cyber neo-nationalists) for his video on racism in Japan, is not shying away from controversial topics with his debut feature-length documentary on the comfort women issue. The film dives deep into the most contentious dispute between Japan and Korea and finds answers to hotly debated questions, such as: Were the comfort women "sexual slaves" or prostitutes? Were they coercively recruited? Were there really 200,000 comfort women? And does Japan have a legal responsibility to apologize?
Dezaki masterfully interweaves footage from demonstrations, man-on-the-street interviews, news and archival clips with in-depth interviews with the most prominent scholars and influencers from both sides of the debate, including Yoshiko Sakurai (journalist), Kent Gilbert (lawyer/celebrity), Mina Watanabe (secretary-general of the Women's Active Museum), Koichi Nakano (political science professor) and Yoshiaki Yoshimi (historian).
Shusenjo includes surprising confessions and revelations that uncover the hidden intentions of both supporters and detractors while deconstructing the dominant narratives. That Dezaki has managed to bring nuance to a sensationalized and often oversimplified issue is just one of the many reasons that Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue is a must-see work.
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Languages & Civilizations; History; Sexuality, Women's & Gender Studies; and Film & Media Studies
A Conversation with 2019 National Book Award Winner Susan Choi and Finalist Laila Lalami
Join Professor Judith Frank, in conversation with National Book Award recipient Susan Choi and finalist Laila Lalami. This event free an open to the public, to be followed by audience Q&A and book signing. Hosted in partnership with the National Book Foundation.
Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out in 2019. Trust Exercise won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Choi teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.
Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain and the United States. She is author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist; and The Moor's Account, which won the American Book Award, Arab American Book Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was on the Man Booker Prize longlist and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Harper's, The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere. A recipient of British Council, Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, she teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a Los Angeles Times best-seller, a best-of-2019 selection from NPR and Time and a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.
Judith Frank is author of a book of criticism, Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor, and two novels, Crybaby Butch, which won a 2004 Lambda Literary Award, and All I Love and Know. In 2008, Frank received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. They have been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and have published short fiction in The Massachusetts Review, Other Voices and Best Lesbian Love Stories 2005. They teach English and creative writing at Amherst College and are currently working on a novel about race, reproduction and queerness.
Poets of Amherst: A Conversation with Karen Skolfield
11:00 am - 12:30 pm Frost Library, Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2nd floor
Join host J. Riley Caldwell-O'Keefe, director of Amherst College's Center for Teaching and Learning, in conversation with Northampton's own poet laureate, Karen Skolfield.
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Karen Skolfield's book Battle Dress won the 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Frost in the Low Areas won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry and the First Book Award from Zone 3 Press. The poet laureate for Northampton, Mass., for 2019–2021, Skolfield has won the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review, 2015 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and 2015 Arts & Humanities Award from New England Public Radio, among other awards and fellowships. Her poems can be found in dozens of journals and magazines. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her M.F.A.
J. Riley Caldwell-O'Keefe directs Amherst College's Center for Teaching and Learning. She was recently elected to the Core Committee of the Professional and Organizational Development Network. Previously, Caldwell-O'Keefe was a faculty member in the Boise State University theater department and associate director of the general education program. She served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force and traveled the world as stage manager for Air Force Entertainment's Tops in Blue, then drew on this experience for her master's and doctoral work, which she completed at UC Santa Barbara with a feminist studies emphasis. Her current research focuses on implicit bias in course evaluations, students as pedagogical partners, and teaching and learning at small liberal arts colleges.
An Afternoon with Jesmyn Ward
Join host Jennifer Acker '00, founder and editor-in-chief of The Common literary magazine, with special guest Jesmyn Ward, the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice, for the novels Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).
This event is free and open to the public, to be followed by audience Q&A and book signing.
Ward's memoir, Men We Reaped, deals with the loss of five young men in her life. Ward edited the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, a New York Times best-seller. In 2020, she will release Navigate Your Stars, an adaptation of her 2018 Tulane University commencement speech. A professor of creative writing at Tulane, Ward received the 2016 Strauss Living award and a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and was named one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2018.
Jennifer Acker '00 is founder and editor-in-chief of The Common and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World. Her short stories, essays, translations and reviews have appeared in Amazon Original Stories, The Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, Guernica, The Yale Review and Ploughshares, among other places. Acker has an M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest.
M@A CHAMBER Series Presents: The Parker Quartet
Inspiring performances, luminous sound and exceptional musicianship are the hallmarks of the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. Renowned for its dynamic interpretations and polished, expansive colors, the group has rapidly distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation. Performing works by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Szymanowski and Beethoven.
"pinpoint precision and spectacular sense of urgency" —The Boston Globe
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus Szymanowski: Quartet No.2
Beethoven: Op.132
Tickets are available in the 14 days ahead of each performance at amherst.universitytickets.com.
Craft Night: Mug and Coaster Decorating
8:00 pm - 11:00 pm Keefe Campus Center, Friedmann Room
Come decorate mugs and coasters this Saturday at 8pm in the Friedmann Room! Presented by AC After Dark. There will be food! Supplies are limited.
Student-Written 10 Minute Play Festival
until Feb 1, 2020
Interested in writing a 10-minute play? Interested in having your 10-minute play performed in an hour-long student-written play festival? Submit your 10-minute plays (approximately 10 pages) to acgreenroom@gmail.com by Saturday, Feb. 1, to be considered. Plays will be provided one set: a dining room table and chairs. Do with that what you will. Any questions, submissions or interest in design to be e-mailed to acgreenroom@gmail.com.