Amherst College Event Calendar   Academic Year at a Glance

Faultlines: Mapping Jazz in the 21st Century, the yearlong Amherst College music festival, continues with a concert by bassist, computer musician and visual artist Lisle Ellis along with percussionist Bob Weiner and electro-acoustic saxophonist and Amherst music professor Jason Robinson.

Johannes Hahn, professor of ancient history at Münster University in Germany, will speak on “The Christianization of the Late Roman City: Parameters and Problems,” on Monday afternoon, Nov. 9, at 4:30 p.m. in Pruyne Lecture Hall in Fayerweather. Professor Hahn’s research focuses on the social, cultural and religious history of Greece and Rome and on the ancient sciences and philosophy. His current research is concentrated on Late Antiquity (3rd to 6th century A.D.). The lecture is sponsored by the Religion Department and the Willis D. Wood Fund and is free and open to the public.

Faculty will have an opportunity to meet the third candidate in the Dean of Students search at an open lunch meeting. The meeting will last from noon to 1:30 p.m., so that you can attend for however much time your teaching schedule permits. Your participation is critical to evaluating our candidates and to familiarizing the candidates with our community and culture.

This workshop and writing instruction program is designed to help you to find a less painful and more productive writing process, as well as to produce papers that reflect the complexity and brilliance of your thought, which may not be showing up on the page. In addition to discussing the distinctions between the roles of creator and critic, we will rethink the idea of a draft—both the purpose of a draft and what a draft might look like. You will be introduced to and experiment with a model for drafting that makes writing easier, yet ultimately leads to essays that demonstrate greater depth of thought, stronger development and synthesis of ideas, and more in-depth engagement with specifics. You will be encouraged to follow the workshop with a series of individual sessions, designed to analyze and address your specific writing goals and challenges, as well as to guide you in completing a particular assignment. Preregistration on the Writing Center Web site is required and is limited to 12 students.

Interested in making the world a more peaceful place? The “100 Projects for Peace” program, an initiative of the Davis UWC Foundation, provides funding for undergraduates to create and implement their own grassroots projects for building peace in the 21st-century world. Amherst College is among a selected group of U.S. colleges and universities invited to nominate one or two student project proposals for consideration. Through a competitive process, the Davis Foundation will then select 100 projects for funding of $10,000 each during the Summer of 2010. Overall, the 100 projects will be worldwide in scope and impact; individual projects may be undertaken anywhere, including the U.S. A proposal may be submitted by an individual student or by a group of Amherst students. Students from all class years (including graduating seniors) are eligible. Preliminary information, including questions and answers and last year’s selected projects, is available at www.davisprojectsforpeace.org. Interested students should not contact the Davis UWC Foundation directly. Instead, questions should be directed to Dean Frances Tuleja, the Amherst College program liaison, in the Dean of Students' Office, at 413-542-2529 or fetuleja@amherst.edu. An information session for interested students will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m. in the Career Center.