The 12th Annual Five College PoetryFest will be held at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, in Pruyne Lecture Hall in Fayerweather Hall at Amherst College. The event is free and open to the public.
Brazilian dancer and scholar Amélia Conrado will discuss “Afro-Bahian Dances: Values and Contradictions at the Borders of Globalization.” The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be March 3, at 4 p.m. in room 2601 of the W.E.B. DuBois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The event will be followed by a reception at 6 p.m. in the same location.
An interdisciplinary group will gather to discuss “The State of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at the Five Colleges” all day Saturday, March 8, at the Gamble Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College. The symposium will feature roundtable discussions and a keynote on “Why Asian American Studies Matters Now” by George Lipsitz, professor of Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The event is free and open to the public.
Students from Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges will present their research at the second annual Five College Film Studies Undergraduate Conference Sunday, March 2, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at 101 Dwight Hall at Mount Holyoke.
Lunch will be served at noon in the Cassani Room at Shattuck Hall, and a reception will follow the afternoon sessions at 2:30 p.m. in Dwight Hall. The event, which is free and open to the public, is hosted by the Five College Film Council, which coordinates the study of film and video at all five campuses.
Langston Hughes, Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice—the creative team that collaborated on the Tony-award-winning opera Street Scene—enjoyed wide and varied careers in their respective fields. Three performances, each highlighting the work of one of these artists, will lead up to the Five College Opera/UMass Department of Theater production of Street Scene.
Cabaret! Songs of Kurt Weill
Sunday, February 2, 4 p.m.
Sweeney Concert Hall, Smith College
Five Colleges has established a fund to honor Jackie Pritzen, one of the consortium’s early leaders, who died in August at the age of 83.
Pritzen was hired in 1969, four years after Five Colleges was incorporated, as assistant coordinator of academic programs. A Fulbright fellow who studied at Cambridge and Yale, Pritzen was already a veteran of consortium campuses, having taught at Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges.
Jackie Pritzen, associate coordinator for academic programs at Five Colleges from 1969 until her retirement in 1995, passed away in August. Earlier this summer, E. Jefferson “Pat” Murphy, coordinator and chief executive of the consortium from 1975 to 1987, died. Jackie and Pat both played critical roles in the development and expansion of a wide variety of consortium projects, such as Five College certificate programs, creation of the Dance Department and the internationalization of Five College programs.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright will participate via live webcast with local scholars in a national day of programming on China on October 28th at Amherst College’s Fayerweather Hall.
China Town Hall: Local Connections, National Reflections will be presented locally by the Five College Center for East Asian Studies and the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations as part of a national program involving more than 60 cities throughout the United States.
Even in a time when 80 percent of college and university library acquisitions are electronic, new books and other print materials still take up an increasing amount of space in campus collections, pushing libraries to explore new ways to maintain access to their print collections while repurposing space for new collections, media centers and even cafes. That is the issue driving the 90 colleges and universities participating in the Northeast Regional Library Print Management Project, an 18-month planning effort funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.