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The Inaugural Class: Five College 40th Anniversary Professors
The Five Colleges will be marking the 40th anniversary of the incorporation of their consortium this year. Established in July 1965, their consortium, Five Colleges, Incorporated, is widely regarded today as one of the oldest and most successful in higher education and has served as a model for others founded in more recent years. To celebrate the occasion, the Five College Board of Directors and Five College Deans have chosen to honor the faculty whose teaching and scholarship have remained central to cooperation among the institutions over four decades. In late spring, the Board established the Five College 40th Anniversary Professorships. The professorships single out for recognition faculty members at the five campuses who have earned distinction in both scholarship and teaching. Each of the members of the inaugural class of Five College 40th Anniversary Professors is widely published and distinguished in scholarship. As experienced teachers, their courses enrich the curriculum with their specialized focus. Taken together, their work represents a range of disciplines. All will serve for a three-year period in a special capacity as a Five College 40th Anniversary Professor. Reflecting on 40 years of cooperation, Lorna M. Peterson, executive director of Five Colleges, Incorporated, lauded the decision to celebrate the contributions of the faculties. "Faculty exchange and joint faculty appointments have for decades been a hallmark of Five College cooperation. We now add to those models with this new form of exchange, which similarly enables us to share the excellence of our scholarly communities with one another." The appointment brings with it a number of obligations as well as benefits. In return for an annual research allowance and release from one course at the home campus, these faculty members will in turn teach a course of their own choosing once a year at one of the other campuses. This year's honorees will all teach in the spring of 2006. During their three-year appointment, they will also offer a colloquium or public lecture on a topic related to their research. Nominations for the 40th Anniversary Professorships were made by the Deans of Faculty and Provosts and approved by the Board of Directors of Five Colleges, Incorporated, taking into account "the accomplishments of the faculty and their contributions to their institutions, to their disciplines, and to the education of their students." The Directors anticipate awarding 2-3 professorships per institution, and no more than 12 professorships in any three-year period. Biographical sketches of the Inaugural Class: Amherst College Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in the departments of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought and Political Science. Sarat holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin and a J.D. from the Yale Law School. A member of the faculty at Amherst since 1974, he has recently been a visiting professor of political science at M.I.T. and Harvard University. One of the courses he teaches at Amherst, called "Murder," has attracted hundreds of Five College students and received national coverage. His most recent publications include: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives, edited with Christian Boulanger (Stanford University Press); and Mercy on Trial: Clemency in the Killing State (Princeton University Press). Forthcoming are Race and the Death Penalty, edited with Charles Ogletree (Northeastern University Press); and Hollywood's Law: What Movies Do for Democracy (Oxford University Press). Sarat currently serves as editor for two publications: Law, Culture, and the Humanities LCH@Amherst.edu and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. He is president of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (www.culjp.org). Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latina American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Stavans earned his doctorate at Columbia University, where he is Visiting Professor of Poetry. His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Riddle of Cantinflas (1998), On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish (2003), and Dictionary Days (2005). He is the editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia Latina (Scholastic), the three-volume Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories (Library of America), and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His work has been translated into a dozen languages and he has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, an induction to the Latino Hall of Fame, and Chile's Presidential Medal. He is also the host of the syndicated PBS show La Plaza: Conversations with Ilan Stavans. Hampshire College Daniel Warner is a professor in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. As a composer and electronic artist, his recent installation and sound work has been presented in a wide range of venues including the Festival Synthèse in Bourges, France; the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival in Vancouver, Canada; the AV Festival in Newcastle, England; and the Kenyon College Art Gallery. Warner's book, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (co-edited with Christoph Cox), is published by Continuum Press. Mount Holyoke College Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Benfey, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, came to Mount Holyoke in 1988. A scholar of late-19th- and 20th-century literature, he has special research interest in the literature and culture of the American South, in connections between the United States and Asia, and in the poetry and life of Emily Dickinson. Author of two critically acclaimed books, Degas in New Orleans and The Great Wave, in 2001 he collaborated with the distinguished photographer Jerome Liebling and Dickinson scholars Polly Longsworth and Barton Levi St. Armand on a book titled The Dickinsons of Amherst. Benfey is also a prolific critic and essayist whose reviews appear frequently in the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Smith College David Newbury is the Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies at Smith College. The historical dynamics of Central and East Africa constitute the primary focus of three major projects with which Newbury's research has concerned itself. One of those projects studied the border area between Rwanda and Congo, analyzing the relationship of clan alterations to the emergence of kingship in a Congolese community. A second project studied the far-reaching and long-lived consequences of a devastating famine in eastern Rwanda during the 1920s. The third, focused on a forest community in eastern Congo, documented drastic social transformations resulting from what he characterizes as "draconian colonial agrarian policies of the 1930s." In the wake of the past 15 years of turmoil in Central Africa, Newbury's more recent research has examined the historical roots of political violence there. Newbury says he will use the appointment to develop his interest in environmental history. His publications include Kings and Clans: A Social History of the Lake Kivu Rift Valley; African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa? and Paths to the Past: Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina. UMass Amherst Barton Byg is Professor and Graduate Program Director in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A graduate of Drake University, Byg earned an M.A. in German and in Comparative Literature from Washington University, where he also received a Ph.D. A founding faculty member of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, his areas of specialization include 20th-century literature and film, in particular the cinema of the German Democratic Republic, and film theory. In the University's Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, he teaches "German Cinema: From Berlin to Hollywood"; "Fascism and Film: Propaganda, Resistance, Memory"; and "The East German Cinema." His book, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, has recently been published by the University of California Press. In January 1996 he taught a summer school course on German cinema and national identity at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and in 2005 he led a third NEH Summer Institute, an international faculty workshop entitled "Changing World, Shifting Narrratives: German and European Studies in the U.S." Byg directs the DEFA Film Library Project, the only collection of East German film in North America, based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Courses to be Taught All the courses to be taught by this year's named 40th Anniversary Professors will be given in the spring semester 2006: Christopher Benfey of Mount Holyoke will teach "Gilded Age New England: At Home and Abroad" in the Department of American Studies at Amherst College. Barton Byg will travel from UMass Amherst to teach "Brecht and World Cinema" in the School of Humanities & Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. David Newbury of Smith College will teach a course for the History Department at Amherst College entitled "Ecology and Imperialism in Africa." Austin Sarat of Amherst College will teach "Punishment, Politics, and Culture" in the University's Social Thought and Political Economy Program. Ilan Stavans of Amherst will offer a course entitled "The Sounds of Spanglish" for the Latin American Studies Program in the Department of Spanish and Italian at Mount Holyoke College. Daniel Warner of Hampshire College will teach, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a course entitled "SoundArt." Page created 10/28/05 Home
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