Profiles

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
Professor of English, former dean of the Commonwealth Honors College, and Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography at UMass Amherst, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is a prolific author and media host. She has written or edited nine books. From 1997 to 2012 she hosted the nationally-syndicated public radio program "The Book Show," and interviewed guests like Toni Morrison, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, A.S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Tracy Chevalier, Maya Angelou, and Philip Roth. In 2020, she has experienced heightened interest in her work as writer specializing in Black British Studies.

Karen Kurczynski
Karen Kurczynski, assistant professor of modern and contemporary art in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture, discusses "Human Animals: the Art of CoBrA," the exhibition she curated for the University Museum of Contemporary Art (September 15 – November 20, 2016), and the appeal of the CoBrA movement to students and scholars of all disciplines.
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Nicholas Bromell
Nick Bromell received a B.A. in Classics and Philosophy from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University. He was the founding editor of The Boston Review, where he continues to be a contributing editor; he also serves on the editorial board of The Sixties and as an advisory editor to the Class: Culture series published by the University of Michigan Press.
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Barbara Zecchi
Barbara Zecchi, director of the Spanish and Portuguese program in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, discusses her latest projects, why teaching is so important to her and why every student should learn another language.
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