Mead Art Museum Amherst College Collection Guide

Elizabeth E. Barker

Amherst College Press

Written between 1858 and 1861, these three letters were addressed by Emily Dickinson to a man she called "Master". Although there is no evidence that they were ever mailed, the letters suggest an extended relationship, separated by geography, and the possibility of a much larger correspondence, as yet undiscovered. According to R. W. Franklin, the three letters stand near the heart of Dickinson's mystery. This volume presents them in chronological order, based upon new dating of the manuscripts, and provides transcriptions that show stages in the composition of each letter. Franklin's introduction places the letters in historical perspective and closely analyzes relevant aspects of the poet's handwriting. Included with the volume are full-sized facsimiles of the letters, which allow the reader to hold them individually in hand and read them apart from the scholarly apparatus -- the closest possible approach imaginable short of examining the originals in the Amherst College Library.

The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson

Emily, Dickinson

Teaching What We Do: Essays

Education & Teaching

Amherst College Faculty

Schools & Teaching

337 page paper back book on Emily Dickinson.

This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson

George Frisbie Whicher

In fourteen years as a college president-first at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then for nine years at Amherst-Tom Gerety taught and worked with some of the nation's finest under-graduate students. During this time he also had an opportunity to regularly address these students, and thousands of others, through public speeches on topics of national, institutional and personal interest. This book collects nearly three dozen of these speeches-on topics ranging from teaching to residential life, from Shakespeare to the liberal arts, from war to love, and loss. Together, these essays offer insight into one of our nation's leading college presidents, and into the lives of American college students.

The Freshman Who Hated Socrates, A College President Reflects on Life in the Liberal Arts

Tom Gerety

Most of the selections in this anthology are narrative chapters of Amherst College history from the earliest days to recent time. They describe the unsightly college of the first decades and-more than a century later-the tree-shaded campus known as The Fairest College. Writings by 21 authors take the reader chronologically from the 1820s, when students learned the rudiments of Vulgar Arithmetic, up to a 1990 colloquium on quantum mechanics. Essay titles include The Coeducation Debate of 1871, The Mischief of Robert Frost, The Civil Disobedience of John Ward.
Here one can also read about student anti-slavery efforts, Civil War casualties, college dealings with the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, baseball glories, faculty deliberations, and a black student's sensitive view of his undergraduate experience in the 1970s. The editor opens each selection with a short introduction to give it further context. There are accounts of memorable teaching, and portraits of prominent educators and alumni-among them Robert Frost, Alexander Meiklejohn, Calvin Coolidge (1895), Joseph Hardy Neesima (1870), and Charles Hamilton Houston (1915).
Such a volume is long overdue. Together these articles form the first wide-ranging book about Amherst history to be published in more than 50 years.

Passages of Time, Narratives in the History of Amherst College

History

Editor)

Americas

Wendy Ewald has collaborated with children and adults around the world for forty years, encouraging them to use cameras to create self-portraits and articulate their fantasies and dreams. In this new public art project Ewald partners with painter Brett Cook to lead the Amherst College campus in exploring the meaning of community and learning. Cook engages in public art projects which often involve teaching workshops along with making music and food. In this project Ewald and Cook work with eighteen Amherst students, faculty, and staff to probe perceptions (and misperceptions) that hold different campus constituencies apart -- and to discover the experiences, beliefs and human qualities that connect them. The result, Who Am I in This Picture? comprises six 12 x 30 portrait-triptychs installed around campus. Nine of the portraits were collaboratively created paintings, and nine were photographs; each includes quotes from interviews Ewald and Cook conducted with the sitters. The collaborative process is documented with photographs, interviews with the participants, and illustrations of the completed works. Richard Powell s essay discusses the artists work in the framework of portraiture; Declan McGonagle situates the project in the context of collaborative art; and Rhonda Cobham-Sander writes about education at the beginning of the 21st century. Why this project is special, unique: The catalog reveals how an American institution, in particular an academic institution, functions at the beginning of the 21st century and examines how an artistic/community collaboration can work.

Who Am I in This Picture?: Amherst College Portraits With Brett Cook and Wendy Ewald

Arts & Photography

Wendy Ewald

Betsy Siersma

Brett Cook

Photography & Video

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. 
Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, town and gown relations, governance, and funding during its two centuries of existence. Through Amherst’s engagement with educational improvement in light of these historical undulations, it continually affirms both the vitality and the utility of a liberal arts education.

Amherst in the World

SAXTON, Martha

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was an artist, teacher, and seminal thinker on the perception of color. A member of the Bauhaus who fled to the U.S. in 1933, his ideas about how the mind understands color influenced generations of students, inspired countless artists, and anticipated the findings of neuroscience in the latter half of the twentieth century. With contributions from the disciplines of art history, the intellectual and cultural significance of Gestalt psychology, and neuroscience, Intersecting Colors offers a timely reappraisal of the immense impact of Albers’s thinking, writing, teaching, and art on generations of students. It shows the formative influence on his work of non-scientific approaches to color (notably the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and the emergence of Gestalt psychology in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work also shows how much of Albers’s approach to color—dismissed in its day by a scientific approach to the study and taxonomy of color driven chiefly by industrial and commercial interests—ultimately anticipated what neuroscience now reveals about how we perceive this most fundamental element of our visual experience. Edited by Vanja Malloy, with contributions from Brenda Danilowitz, Sarah Lowengard, Karen Koehler, Jeffrey Saletnik, and Susan R. Barry.

Intersecting Colors: Josef Albers and His Contemporaries

Individual Artists

The ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidential candidacy of the Republican Party has been both remarkable and, to most commentators, unlikely. In The Rise of Trump: America’s Authoritarian Spring, Matthew MacWilliams argues that Trump’s rapid rise through a bewildered Republican Party hierarchy is no anomaly; rather, MacWilliams argues, it is the most recent expression of a long-standing theme in American political life, the tendency and temptation to an ascriptive politics—a political view that builds its basic case on ascribing to any relatively disempowered group (whether defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, or other identifying category) a certain set of qualities that justify discriminatory treatment. The ascriptive tradition in American politics, though longstanding, has generally been kept to a relatively small minority—a minority whose rights, perhaps paradoxically, have been protected by the principles of Madisonian democracy, even though central to its worldview is the need and urgency of limiting the rights of some. It has found champions in years past in such figures as Andrew Jackson, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and Pat Buchanan. But in Donald Trump this tradition has found a significant new voice, one emboldened by deeper shifts in the American political landscape. Trump’s swift and unsettling rise to the pinnacle of presidential politics may point toward the emergence of more significant and substantial questions about the future course of a democratic government committed to principles of equality and the freedom of expression, association, and conscience.

The Rise of Trump: America's Authoritarian Spring (Public Works)

MacWilliams, Matthew C.

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