Privacy
Faculty Biographies
Dan Burnett '14 will graduate this spring from the department of law, jurisprudence, and social thought. He is currently working on an honors thesis on Privacy and Property in Social Media, having taken to the subject during a series of summer internships in start-ups around Silicon Valley. He is particularly interested in the way that technological innovation forces paradigmatic change in law and politics. Outside of the classroom, he is a member of the executive board of the Amherst College Entrepreneurial Society, where he leads a small team focused on alumni outreach. Daniel is a native of Lexington, Mass.and attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School prior to his enrollment at Amherst.
Laure Katsaros holds a doctorate in American literature from the Université Paris-7 in Paris and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She taught American literature at the Université Paris-13 and at the Université de Provence from 1996 to 2002. Since then, she has been teaching nineteenth-century French literature and culture at Amherst College, first as assistant professor (2002-2010) then as associate professor (2010-present). She is currently chair of the French Department. She is the author of two books.
Un Nouveau Monde Amoureux: Célibataires et prostituées au dix-neuvième siècle (
A New World of Love: Bachelors and Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century France) was published in Paris by Editions Galaade in 2010. Her second book,
New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012. She is currently at work on a book-length biography of Isabelle Rimbaud, the sister of the celebrated French poet Arthur Rimbaud, while also researching architectural utopias, surveillance, and privacy. This new project, provisionally entitled
Glass Architectures: Utopian Surveillance from Fourier to the Surrealists, will be supported by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, starting in the fall 2014.
Nicole Ozer '97 is the director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Project at the ACLU of Northern California and manages the organization's work on new technology, privacy, and free speech. Nicole is a nationally recognized expert on issues at the intersection of consumer privacy and government surveillance and free speech and the Internet, is regularly quoted in print, television, and radio outlets, and has written several influential publications including
Privacy & Free Speech: It's Good for Business, a primer of dozens of case studies and tips for baking safeguards into the business development process, and "Putting Online Privacy Above the Fold: Building a Social Movement and Creating Corporate Change" (
NYU Review of Law & Social Change- 2012). Nicole graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College, studied comparative civil rights history at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and earned her J.D. with a Certificate in Law and Technology from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California Berkeley.
Austin Sarat is associate dean of the faculty and the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Hugo L. Black Visiting Senior Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law
Professor Sarat is a pioneering figure in the development of legal study in the liberal arts, of the humanistic study of law, and of the cultural study of law. He is also an internationally renowned scholar of capital punishment, specializing in efforts to understand its social, political, and cultural significance in the United States.
Professor Sarat founded both Amherst College's Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought and the national scholarly association, The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. He is author or editor of more than 90 books including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty; The Road to Abolition; Something to Believe in: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyers (with Stuart Scheingold); and The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society. He is currently writing a book entitled Hollywood's Law: Film, Fatherhood, and the Legal Imagination. He is editor of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities and of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society.
Professor Sarat has received numerous prizes and awards including the Harry Kalven Award given by the Law Society Association for "distinguished research on law and society"; the Reginald Heber Smith Award given biennially to honor the best scholarship on "the subject of equal access to justice"; the James Boyd White Award, from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, given for distinguished scholarly achievement and "outstanding and innovative" contributions to the humanistic study of law; the Stan Wheeler Prize, awarded by the Law & Society Association, for distinguished teaching and mentoring of undergraduate, graduate, or professional students working on issues of law and society.
A profile of him in US News and World Report noted that he is "one of the best loved professors at Amherst College" and praised his teaching for combining "innovation and inspiration." His teaching also has been featured in The New York Times, on NPR's Fresh Air, and NBC's The Today Show.
Martha Merrill Umphrey, professor and chair of the department of law, jurisprudence and social thought, received her B.A., J.D. and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, and has been a member of the Amherst faculty since 1994. Her research and teaching address the interaction of law and culture, historically and theoretically, with particular emphases on the cultural life of trials; on the relations among law, culture, and social identity (particularly gender and sexuality); on cultural representations of law in film and literature; on American constitutional and criminal law in historical context; and on law and love.
Marcy Wheeler '90 is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, consults with First Look Media, publishes at outlets including the Guardian, Salon, and the Progressive, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of
Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and she live - blogged the Scooter Libby trial. She is best known for her analysis of legal documents on counterterrorism programs. In a September 2013 article,
Newsweek called her
The Woman Who Knows the NSA's Secrets. She won the 2009 Hillman Award for blog journalism.
