The Amherst 250 Plan is rebuilding and rebalancing the faculty by investing in key programs to advance campus teaching and research. In each issue we’ll introduce you to some of the newest members of the UMass Amherst faculty community.
- Chris Bachelder, English.
Satire, Interrupted
He has proved himself adept at skewering the American scene. The problem, says Chris Bachelder, is that the subject matter (these United States) is careening off into flights of ridiculousness that make it hard (or maybe too easy) for the satirist to keep up. If the results weren’t so unfunny (all war all the time) he could be content to “sit, vulturelike, at the end of the cultural assembly line,” as he puts it, to combine acumen with amplification to “show the underlying lunacy, violence, inequality, or inhumanity” of where we are at. Things have gotten to the point, though, that if readers can’t see that without his help, they’re not paying attention.
What’s a satirist to do when “an absurd culture renders absurdists obsolete?” That’s a question nagging at Bachelder. “Many of us have gathered in the cul de sac of satire,” he recently wrote. “Unfortunately, satire seems less and less viable and powerful, and our decades-long immersion in irony has made conviction alien and meaning slippery.”
Bachelder’s next act plays itself out in Amherst, where he is now a professor in the MFA writing program. He left Colorado Springs, a city with a heavy military presence, to join the denizens of an almost prototypically liberal enclave. The move itself was almost a “punch line,” he says.
He won’t know what this chapter in his life as a writer will bring until he sits down at the empty page. He is unlikely to give up his comic style, he says. But he expects to struggle to artfully communicate his trepidations without succumbing to schoolmarmish admonitions of earlier social critics like Upton Sinclair (the main character in Bachelder’s most recent novel (U.S.!, Bloomsbury, 2006).
- Duncan Irschick, Biology.
Lizard Lessons
According to biologist Duncan Irschick, there is much humans can learn about and from small reptiles and the like. He studies what he jocularly refers to as “creepy, crawly things.” Lizards mainly, but frogs and spiders have also found themselves in his sights. “I’m interested in extreme performance and how animals do amazing things,” he said, pointing out that spiders “can jump really long distances” and some lizards run seven meters per second, even though they are only six centimeters long. A thread running through Irschick’s research is an interest in locomotion. He wants to know how animals run so fast, how they bite so hard, and generally, “what makes them so good at what they do.”
Irschick is moving to UMass Amherst this fall from Tulane University in New Orleans, where he has been for the last five years. It is a move he would have contemplated even before Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed. But the catastrophe added a level of uncertainty to what research priorities will be at Tulane, which is being forced into a severe retrenchment mode.
“There’s a big group of people down here who study global warming and wetlands ecology; many of them have stayed. I think Tulane is going to try to build in that area,” Irschick said in a telephone interview.
Most of Irschick’s graduate students dispersed around the county after the storm. Now the Berkeley, California, native will be bringing his talents for scientific inquiry to New England.
- Amy Schalet, Sociology.
Straight Talk About Teen Sex
When Amy Schalet transferred as an undergraduate to Harvard from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland, she was surprised by the amount of attention the American media paid to teen sexuality. And that most of the stories conveyed a sense of anguish and quandary.
“I was like, wow, this is weird,” Schalet said recently. Her curiosity about America’s obsession with teen sex grew when she learned that young people here are much more likely to experience public health problems such as pregnancy, disease, and emotional damage.
Schalet’s subsequent research involved conducting 130 detailed interviews on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the questions was whether it would be okay for a teen to bring a lover home for the night. She talked to 72 teenagers and 58 parents and found that sexual maturation is often a source of drama in American homes, whereas the Dutch tend to treat it as a normal part of development.
As a newly appointed professor to the UMass Amherst sociology department, Schalet hopes to broaden her research to look beyond the white middle-class families she questioned for her dissertation.
Her book, Raging Hormones, Regulated Love (University of Chicago Press), due out next year, has already led to speaking invitations. “Even though there’s a lot of hype about sex in the U.S., parents and kids can’t seem to talk about it,” she said, adding that many American teenagers don’t use contraceptives effectively and they seem to be less likely to form true romantic relationships than are Dutch teens.
As a sociologist who works with public-health practitioners Schalet hopes her contribution will be to stimulate conversation that leads to happier and healthier coming-of-age experiences.
- Mwangi wa Githinji, Economics, and his partner, Renae Brodie, a biology professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Economist for the Proletariat
Incoming economics professor Mwangi wa Githinji took for the name of his first book a phrase from a speech Kenyan freedom fighter turned parliamentarian J. M. Kariuki gave shortly before he was assassinated. He warned that his country was headed in the direction of having “10 millionaires and 10 million beggars.”
According to Mwangi, a Kenyan who describes himself as a Marxist with an interest in development and the environment, his country went that route and now suffers from some of the worst inequality on the globe.
Mwangi is currently working on several projects. One is in Kenya, looking at ways in which the benefits of economic growth can be distributed more equitably by making sure growth is accompanied by job creation.
He is also launching an endeavor in Jamaica, studying the interactions between humans and land crabs in the resort area of Negril. The issue there is that the crustaceans spend much of their lives out of the water but they need to return to the ocean to spawn. They also play an important role as food for other ocean species. As a Marxist, Mwangi is especially interested in examining how the class interests of the stakeholders (such as farmers, hotel owners, and people who fish) play into how this part of the wildlife is managed.
Mwangi notes that the kind of analysis he does challenges the orthodoxy of neoclassical economists who dominate the discipline, adding that mainstream economics doesn’t do a very good job of explaining the problems facing most of the people in the world.
