Martha Umphrey, Bertrand H. Snell 1894 Professor in American Government in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought
Martha Umphrey became Amherst’s provost and dean of the faculty on July 1, 2024. An active law and humanities scholar, the provost has addressed the following in her teaching and research: the interaction of law and culture, historically and theoretically, with particular emphases on speech and the First Amendment, the cultural life of trials; cultural representations of law in film and literature; American constitutional and criminal law in historical context; law, visuality, and performance; and law, love, and mourning. Provost Umphrey was the founding director of Amherst’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Past president of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, she has edited or co-edited twenty-eight books, including: Trial Films on Trial (University of Alabama Press, 2018), To Kill a Mockingbird at 50: Race, Law, and Family in the American Imaginary (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); Subjects of Responsibility: Framing Personhood in Modern Bureaucracies (Fordham University Press, 2011), and Trials International Library of Essays in Law and Society (London: Dartmouth/Ashgate Publishing, 2008). She is also co-editor of the longstanding Amherst Series in Law and Jurisprudence, and has authored numerous journal articles. Learn more about her publications here. Provost Umphrey earned a B.A. in English, a Ph.D. in American culture, and a J.D. from the University of Michigan.