The Legacy of Jules Chametzky: “Honoring the Intellect, Fostering Justice and Equality” will be held Friday, Oct. 7, 2022 from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m in the Old Chapel on the UMass campus. Chametzky has some special connections to our department, as Barbara Partee notes:

Esther Terry, mother of our Mike Terry and the Head of the Afro-Am Studies Department at the time it got its PhD program approved, was Jules Chametzky’s PhD student in the English department. (Our Mike Terry is actually Jules Michael Terry, named after Jules Chametzky and Michael Thelwell (a prominent Afro-Am scholar here).

Mike Terry (PhD 2004, now at UNC Chapel Hill) will be amongst the presenters in the afternoon symposium. The full schedule is in the image beneath the following summary of the day from the above-linked announcement.

A day-long celebration of the life and work of Jules Chametzky, founding editor of the Massachusetts Review, early president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, first director of UMass’s Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, and co-signatory at the founding of the national Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. In the morning, friends and family will offer their memories; an afternoon symposium will include an assortment of well-known writers and scholars, among them poet Doug Anderson, writer, artist, and astrophysicist Nia Imara, poet Hilene Flanzbaum, translator and scholar Jacqueline Loss, novelist Robin McLean, and linguist J. Michael Terry. In the morning, a discussion of reparations will also be held, via Zoom, with Duke economist William A. Darity, Jr., and, in the afternoon, renowned American Studies scholar Werner Sollors will speak on “Chametzkyan Studies and Its Future.”