AMHERST — UMass Amherst chef de cuisine Robert Bankert captured first place and won the gold medal in the 2017 Culinary Challenge staged at the annual conference of the National Association of College and University Food Services, held last month in Nashville, Tennessee.
Representing the Northeast region, Bankert won the title with his dish of pork loin wrapped with porcini farce and confit fat cap, polenta, braised wild mushrooms and kale, skillet-roasted fennel and apricot glaze. His winning plate bested chefs from five other universities.
Bankert joins fellow UMass chefs Matthia Accurso and Anthony Jung, who previously won the national competition.
AMHERST — Amherst College recently announced that its Folger Shakespeare Library has been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a collaborative research project, “Before Farm to Table: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures.”
The interdisciplinary, multiyear project will examine underexplored collections at the Folger. The project will highlight new voices and genres from the past and contribute to social and cultural histories, as well as forging new grounds for meaningful conversations with experts from inside and outside the humanities.
In addition, the project will produce public events and exhibitions.
SOUTH HADLEY — The Odyssey Bookshop in the South Hadley Village Commons is now selling Mount Holyoke College clothing and other items under a new contract between the two entities.
The contract, which began in June, will feature a wide array of items from T-shirts and sweatshirts to coffee mugs and diploma frames. The transition to the Odyssey will end a long relationship between Mount Holyoke College and Follett campus stores, which has operated in the campus store for many years.
SOUTH HADLEY — Mount Holyoke College’s Veronika Kivenson, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to use the agency’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, known as the XSEDE, to examine the biodiversity in specific marine ecosystems.
Valued at more than $53,000, the grant gives Kivenson more than 265,000 hours of access to the XSEDE, which is a supercomputer system that allows scientists to analyze complex biological data, according to the college.
As co-principal investigator of the project, Kivenson is looking at microbial communities in the ocean. A graduate of Bunker Hill Community College, Kivenson came to Mount Holyoke as a Frances Perkins Scholar and one of the college’s first scholarships in STEM program scholars.
AMHERST — Amherst College this fall is offering a new major, Latinx and Latin American studies.
The college is also offering a new major in classical civilization. The new majors are the first for the college in five years.
Through an interdisciplinary course load, students who major in Latinx and Latin American studies will critically examine the diverse histories and cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. Latinos and Latinas.
Rick Lopez, associate professor of history, dean of new students and longtime chairman of the Five College Latin American Studies Committee, will chair the new Amherst program this fall.
This new major is distinct from the Five College Certificate in Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, offered since 1990. While that certificate remains an option for Amherst students, now that the College has its own major, interest in it will likely decline