“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” Emily Dickinson, poet. As part of the Amherst Poetry Festival Sept. 15-17, fans will read all 1,789 of Emily Dickinson’s poems in the home and landscape where she wrote them. Dickinson’s home, now the Emily Dickinson Museum, was built in 1813 by her grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson, a founder of Amherst College.
“I'm so amazed at the degree to which people can suffer, but at the same time, people's capacity to heal.” Tara Neelakantappa Safronoff ’97, , widow of 9/11 victim Brock Safronoff ’97. She spoke to Amherst magazine 10 years after the World Trade Center attacks. FOOTNOTE: Amherst remembers the four alumni lost on 9/11: Frederick C. Rimmele III ’90, Brock Safronoff ’97 and Maurita Tam ’01.
“You are now part of a conversation that would be lacking without your voice.” Brittanie Lewis '17 in The New York Times, offering her advice to new college students.
Frost Library, named after poet Robert Frost, who taught at Amherst for many years, holds more than 1.5 million volumes and nearly 600,000 other media materials, including 330,400 e-books.
FOOTNOTE: On Oct. 26, 1963, in one of his last public appearances before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy visited campus to receive an honorary degree and to speak at the groundbreaking of the library.
“My process was to work backward from that thousand-word fever-dream ending.” Dan Cluchey ’08. In this interview, a former Obama administration speechwriter discusses the inspiration and creative process that went into writing a novel.
“When Bob told me about the day he was injured, he called it his second birthday.” Mark R. Rigg ’89. In the new Amherst magazine, Rigg shares his point of view about how a Amherst experience forged an unusual friendship in “A College in Common."
The Amherst College Wildlife Sanctuary includes approximately 500 acres in a diverse collection of open fields (both actively maintained and unmanaged), wetlands, flood plain woods, river, upland woods, plantation pines, and ponds—and is an important place for both recreation and research.
“I wonder what could be more practical than doing something that makes you happy and fulfilled.” Helen Wan ’95, lawyer-turned-novelist writes about “Letting in Uncertainty” in Amherst magazine.
“Turn out all your lights, go out on your porch and watch. ” Firefly researcher Sarah Sander ’06 in the new Amherst magazine.
“HIV tricks our cells into being little virus factories.” Christopher ’12. Ph.D. candidate in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale; majored in biochemistry at Amherst. In the lab, Lim studies how HIV evades the defenses of the human body. Outside, he's making STEM a bigger tent.
“Its past is still alive and shifting in relation to the new.” Eleanor Ray ’09. Ray’s tiny paintings “suggest a reverse hubris, a pride in how much she can do with so little,” wrote one critic.
“I kept asking that why question. I've always thought that the center of the liberal arts is that three-letter word.” Andrew Hacker ’51, professor emeritus in the department of political science at Queens College in New York. Hacker—whose political science research relies heavily on the use of numbers—went to the math department at Queens College a few years ago and asked if he could teach, experimentally, one of the introductory courses. He went on to write a book about math education.
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” David Foster Wallace ’85, from his novel Infinite Jest. Novelist, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a professor of English and creative writing, Wallace majored in English and Philosophy at Amherst. Wallace was a towering figure in modern literature. In 1999, three years after Infinite Jest was published, he did an interview-by-mail with Amherst magazine.
“A people without a thorough knowledge of roots and history cannot move into the future, cannot rest in the proper chair of life.” Sonia Sanchez, Poet, activist and scholar who taught at Amherst from 1972 to 1975 and was the first chair of the Black Studies department.
“My favorite place on campus was Charles Drew Memorial African American Theme House. While we lived there, we were family.” Lynettra Artis ’05. #AlwaysAmherst. The Annual Fund closes at 11:59 p.m. PDT on Thursday, June 30th. Help us hit our goal.
“The addition of gender opened up practically every known psychological principle to question.” Professor Rose Olver was the L. Stanton Williams ‘41 Professor of Psychology and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, Emerita. The late Professor Olver was the first woman hired into a tenure-track position at Amherst.
“Real learning and a real preparation for citizenship demand the intersection of different life stories and different sensibilities.” Frank Bruni, New York Times columnist, writing about Amherst receiving the $1 million Cooke Prize for Equity in Educational Excellence. Read the news story: Amherst College Awarded $1 Million Cooke Prize to Continue Work with Outstanding Low-Income Students.
“The poet is one of our best sources, one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith and our hope.” Emily Jordan Folger, ’32 Honorary doctorate; Co-founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger made this comment in a speech about her late husband, Henry Clay Folger, Class of 1879. The couple founded Amherst’s Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.. This month the Folger brings Shakespeare’s First Folio to Amherst as part of a national touring exhibition celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare.
“If music be the food of love, play on.” William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. Amherst is the host site for the state of Massachusetts for a national traveling exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio, one of the world’s most treasured books.
“It was the culmination of all my childhood dreams to lead a shovel army into the mountains and extract literally thousands of gigantic bones.” Kirk Johnson ’82, Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and honorary degree recipient. Read “Out of the Shadow” from Amherst Magazine, which traces Johnson's path from Amherst College's geology department, to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Photo credit: @Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
“It is important for me to tell the story that my mother cannot tell for herself.” Tracey Jarrett ’11, of NBC news, on her reporting on HIV and AIDS. Julie Keith Jarrett ’81 died from AIDS in 1994. To imagine the person her mother might have become, Tracy Jarrett ’11 traveled from East Harlem to Cape Town to Chicago.
“If you want to fight terrorism, educate girls.” Amherst College welcomed Stavros Lambrinidi ’84, the European Union (EU) Special Representative for Human Rights on April 19, 2016 where he presented a keynote address titled: “Rights without Borders? Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Today’s European Union.”
“We’re not in a history-less vacuum but instead are rooted in a tradition of discussion.”
Michal Harmon ’16. Harmon spearheaded a faculty lecture series on Amherst’s history and defining characteristics inquiry, and progress.
“Environmental protection doesn’t always turn out to be incompatible with development goals...” Katharine Sims, assistant professor of economics. Sims, and colleague Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, were recently awarded esteemed Carnegie Fellowships to further their research.
“Witnessing a musical, having that experience, is in some ways like being in a liberal arts classroom at its best.” Sam Rosenblum, '16, political science, Jayson Paul ’16, physics and philosophy, and visiting director A. Scott Parry, sat down with President Biddy Martin to discuss the upcoming musical “Into the Woods.”
“We are hungry for novels that tell our story, that tell the world what our ancestors endured a century ago.” Chris Bohjalian ’82, author of such books as The Sandcastle Girls, an award-winning novel about the Armenian Genocide. He is one of six who will receive honorary degrees at Amherst’s Commencement on May 22.
“To me, the starting place is the sense of wonder. And that can take you into science. It can take you into art. Other human beings are amazing and beautiful.” Mary Catherine Bateson: Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Anthropology, 1980-1987. On the Oct. 1, 2015 episode of “On Being,” Krista Tippett interviewed Mary Catherine Bateson (daughter of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson).
“Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.” Anna Deavere Smith: playwright and actor; campus speaker: April 13. Amherst will welcome Smith to campus on April 13 for a program titled “Snapshots: Portraits of a World in Transition.” The event is free and open to the public.
“How do people grapple with memories and experiences of a world, of institutions and cultural values that suddenly no longer exist?” Aleksandra Burshteyn ’16: excerpt from Burshteyn's 2016 Thomas J. Watson Fellows application. Burshteyn is one of two Amherst College seniors who will embark on a global journey to learn their stories, as the College’s 2016 Thomas J. Watson Fellows.
“Difficulty need not foreshadow despair or defeat.” William Hastie ’25: lawyer, judge, educator, public official and advocate for the civil rights of African Americans. Hastie was the first African-American to serve as Govenor of the United States Virgin Islands, as a Federal judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, and as a Federal appellate judge.
Students have access to 850+ courses offered on the Amherst College campus as well as 6,000 more via the Five College Consortium. Learn more about the Five College Consortium. All of the Five College campuses are connected via a free bus service, so students are never more than a half hour from arriving at another campus to take a class, join an intramural club or socialize.
“From the first minute, it was clear that survival was in finding a creative way through it.”
Singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke ’85 referring to her mother’s dementia. Brooke put her career on hold to care for her mother, who had dementia. Then she wrote a musical about it, My Mother Has Four Noses. It ran off-Broadway to critical acclaim.
“Students need arguments that they can then amplify or argue against.” Catherine Epstein, Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty on her textbook about Nazi Germany. Epstein structured her 2014 textbook, Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths, by setting up and then debunking various myths.
Diverse. Visionary. Thought-provoking. Curious. Entertaining. Inspirational. The voices of Amherst come from the past and the present. Read, enjoy and continue the conversation by sharing these quotes by email, Facebook or Twitter.