On December 16, 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $32.8 million in grants to support 213 humanities projects in 44 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Two UMass Amherst faculty members, Melissa Mueller and Traci Parker, are among the new cohort of NEH fellowship recipients. They each received $60,000 to work on projects in their fields.

Plans were recently announced for a film adaptation of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the best-selling debut novel by Ocean Vuong, associate professor in the Department of English. The novel will be adapted by A24, the company behind films like Uncut Gems, Midsommar, Lady Bird and Moonlight­.

MSR Classics has released a CD, Quicksilver, by the UMass Wind Ensemble, led by Director of Wind Studies Matthew Westgate, featuring world premiere recordings of three works, with soloists Jonathan Hulting-Cohen, saxophone and the late Nadine Shank, piano.

UMass jazz faculty Thomas Giampietro has released a CD, A Thru-Composed Life, with Giampietro on drums, Jonathan Kreisberg, guitar; Gary Versace, organ and guest trumpeter Ingrid Jensen.

Peter Gizzi, poet and professor in the English department's MFA for poets and writers, has published a follow-up to his National Book Award finalist Archeophonics. His new collection, Now It's Dark (Wesleyan), is filled with poems that probe loss, death, beauty, sadness, poetry itself, and light.

Coming across a full-size, antique carousel in a nearly vacant academic building will stop you in your tracks. But it’s the sound that gets you. Vimoksha by Kathryn Fanelli ‘20MFA­—part of her thesis exhibition entitled The Passing Show—is a site-specific installation of a century-old merry-go-round, which has been stripped of paint and gilding to reveal a bare, wooden platform and stark, metallic horses. It was originally intended to be interactive, experienced by students and others as they moved through the Studio Arts Building on the UMass Amherst campus during their daily routines, and powered by electric motor. Due to the building’s limited use resulting from restrictions put in place in response to COVID-19, Vimoksha can be experienced in small groups by appointment only. And it's powered manually.