October 15, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-The inauguration of Anthony W. Marx as the 18th president of Amherst College will take place on the steps of the Robert Frost Library at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 26. In case of rain, the ceremony will be held in Johnson Chapel, with a live simulcast to Stirn Auditorium, Merrill 2, 3 and 131. Marx will deliver his inaugural address, after a reading by poet Richard Wilbur '42 and remarks by Amos B. Hostetter, Jr. '58, the chair of the board of trustees of Amherst College. The Amherst College Inaugural Band and the Amherst College Choral Society will offer music.

At 3 p.m. the same day, in Johnson Chapel, Marx will moderate a discussion on "The Liberal Arts: Privilege and Responsibility" with Sheldon Hackney, Catharine Stimpson, Sen. Harris Wofford, Diana Chapman Walsh and William Julius Wilson.

Anthony W. Marx began his tenure as Amherst's president on July 1, 2003, after serving for 13 years on the faculty at Columbia University, where he was professor and director of undergraduate studies of political science.

Marx is a respected teacher and an internationally recognized scholar who has written three books on nation building, particularly in South Africa, but also in the U.S., Brazil and Europe. He also has established and managed programs designed to strengthen secondary school education in the U.S. and abroad. During his last year at Columbia, he served as director of the Gates Foundation-funded Early College/High School Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which establishes model public high schools as partnerships between school systems and universities. He founded the Columbia Urban Educators Program, a public school teacher recruitment and training partnership. In the 1980s, he helped found Khanya College, a South African secondary school that helped prepare more than 1,000 black students for university.

Marx is the author of a dozen substantive articles and three books, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (Oxford University Press, 1992), Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2003). Making Race and Nation received the American Political Science Association's 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award (co-winner for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism) and the American Sociological Association's 2000 Barrington Moore Prize (for the best book of the preceding three years in comparative-historical sociology.

Marx received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 (the youngest member of the Columbia political science faculty to be so honored). He also has received fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Humanities Center, the Howard Foundation and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Marx attended Wesleyan and Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. degree in 1981. He received his M.P.A. degree from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1986, then earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton in 1987 and 1990.

Marx is married to Karen Barkey, professor of history and sociology and director of undergraduate studies in sociology and historical sociology at Columbia. A popular teacher and prominent scholar, she is the author of Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization and co-editor (with Mark von Hagen) of After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building, the Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires. Marx and Barkey have two children, Joshua and Anna-Claire.

The inauguration events, open to the public as space permits, will be broadcast live on the Web at the Amherst College site, www.amherst.edu/inauguration. Between the morning and afternoon events, brunch will be served by the college Dining Service at Valentine Dining Hall.

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