She was recently named president of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. The group convenes an annual conference in March and publishes the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities.
As she starts a three-year-term heading the ASLCH, Umphrey also heads into her fourth and final year as director of Amherst’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry.
We recently spoke with her, looking back and looking ahead.
Q: What is the mission of the ASLCH?
A: It began as a group of people committed to interdisciplinary legal scholarship that was more humanities in orientation, which has been a persistent conversation in my scholarly life. We find a broader and somewhat more theoretical approach to legal scholarship than we tend to see in this country.
The association offers a platform for young scholars who are trying to work in an interdisciplinary way, not about making policy prescriptions, but rather bringing the insight to the humanities to bear in a number of different ways in legal scholarship.
It’s an organization that’s very dear to my heart and has a vision of legal scholarship that I really care about. Some of what I’m excited about has to do with the work that I’ve been able to do at the CHI, which is to get a really broad bird’s-eye view of new trends in the humanities in particular.
Q: What does the view back at the CHI look like?
A: When we started three-plus years ago, there was no furniture, there was no real infrastructure here. We had done a quick search for some postdocs, but really the place was empty. It’s been an amazing and wonderful experience to build a center like this up from the bottom.
I think that we are so lucky to be situated in the library. It’s really made this place a successful place. It’s in the heart of campus, in a very lively space with lots of interesting, engaged people all around us.
Q: What does the CHI do these days?
The center’s mission has been to try to foster an environment of ideas for faculty and staff at the College, with some programming for students.
We operate in three different registers of activity. One of them is bringing to Amherst, and sustaining, postdoctoral fellows. They’re fresh out of graduate school, they’re doing really remarkable work, and so having them as a presence on campus has been really wonderful, really galvanizing in many ways.
The second register of activity here is more broadly about bringing faculty and staff together to create a culture of ideas. One [facet] is the weekly salon series, which is a low-stakes, warm, inviting way to have people present or perform their work. I think over time we have moved from a model of “let’s create a social space for faculty and staff” to “let’s create a kind of continual flow of ideas and practices” every week. We’ve seen our numbers grow and lots of different amazing things going on every Wednesday here.
The third register of activity is working with some of the amazing cultural institutions that Amherst is affiliated with, the [Emily] Dickinson Museum being one.
Q: How do you decide, what with resources and time being finite, what programs to go with?
A: [We decided] to say yes to everything that sounded promising, and see what worked. There have been some ideas floated along the way that I would love to be able to do but didn't have the administrative infrastructure to do.
There’s so much exciting programming here, so many talks, so many amazing performances, so many wonderful people to work with. I’m in the very happy position of keeping my eyes open and my ears open and saying, “We would love to help you with this—how can we do that?” And nine and a half times out of 10, it works wonderfully well.
Q: What would you like to see happen for your final year at the CHI?
A: We just had a lunch around the table with humanities department chairs, trying to talk in an intentional way about what’s going on in the humanities at Amherst, which has been a very supportive environment for the humanities in a small college. One of the things that we talked about was support for a summer language study.
We are also in a cycle where we’ll decide on the next two-year theme, and we’ll be hiring five new postdocs. That’s a pretty big project for us. We tend to get over 400 applications every search round.