Collections: Faculty

Gretchen Gerzina, Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography and Professor of English at UMass Amherst, served as dean of Commonwealth Honors College for five years before joining the English department full-time. A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., who grew up in Springfield, Mass., Gerzina is the child of a white mother and Black father who, in her research and writing, has often engaged with issues of race and the lives of those affected by racial and other boundaries. She is known for her biographies, including those of Dora Carrington and Frances Hodgson Burnett; her work on Black Britain including Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (a revised and reissued version of Black London: Life Before Emancipation); and the acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend. Gerzina hosted public radio’s nationally syndicated program “The Book Show,” interviewing many of contemporary literature’s notable figures, from 1997 to 2012, and a ten-part BBC radio series, “Britain’s Black Past,” which aired in 2016. She has also taught at Vassar, Barnard, and Dartmouth, where she was the first Black woman to chair an Ivy League English department.

The Gerzina Papers consist of materials relating to some of Gerzina’s research and published books and include notes, correspondence, draft manuscripts, and publication-related material, as well as approximately 400 recordings on CD of “The Book Show.” Additions to the collection are expected.

Walker Gibson, a professor of English at the University from 1967 to 1987, was a passionate teacher of writing and rhetoric and author of humorous verse. Gibson was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1919 but was raised in Albany, New York. He earned his B.A. from Yale in 1940 and began graduate work at Harvard, however, his studies were interrupted by World War II, where he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps. After the War, Gibson earned his M.A. from the University of Iowa, where he was a research assistant for the Iowa Writers Workshop. For the next twenty years, Gibson taught English and writing at Amherst College and published prose and his signature humorous verse in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harpers, and the New York Times Magazine among others. Gibson also published several books, including collections of verse, as well as prose works on writing, teaching composition, and literary criticism. Gibson died at the age of 90 in February, 2009.

The Walker Gibson Papers document the writer and teacher’s career through published and unpublished early writings during his years at Yale, binders including his published writings from the 1950s, correspondence with Theodore Baird, his supervisor at Amherst College, and lecture notes from his University writing and English classes. Completing the collection are three folders of miscellaneous correspondence and a folder of Gibson’s unpublished manuscripts from the late seventies and early eighties.

German-born agricultural chemist, professor of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when it was known as Massachusetts Agricultural College, and President of the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists and the American Chemical Society who made several important contributions in nineteenth century chemistry and held at least four patents.

The Goessman collection includes correspondence (mostly professional), some with presidents of Massachusetts Agricultural College, William Smith Clark (1826-1886) and Henry Hill Goodell (1839-1905). Also contains handwritten drafts of addresses and articles, his dissertation, printed versions of published writings, handwritten lecture notes, class records, proposed college curricula, notes taken by students, handwritten research notes, newsclippings and offprints utilized in research, and biographical materials.

Professor of English, adviser to student newspaper (The Collegian) and Jewish student organizations, University of Massachusetts, and founding member, College English Association.

The Goldberg Papers contain correspondence, speeches, published writings, papers written as a graduate student, biographical material, book reviews, subject files, newsclippings, and material from committees and projects with which he was involved, including the College English Association, College English Association Institute, Humanities Center for Liberal Education, and American Humanities Seminar.

Romanian-born Morris Golden earned his doctorate in English from New York University in 1953. Golden authored six books of literary criticism on 18th and 19th century writers, including Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Charles Dickens. Appointed Associate Professor of English at UMass Amherst in 1962 and promoted to full professor in 1965, Golden taught at UMass for 24 years. Golden retired from UMass in 1986, the year he was a Guggenheim Fellow, but he continued to teach literature at the Amherst Senior Center until his death in 1994.

The Golden Papers are a collection of Golden’s writings as a student at NYU, a draft of his dissertation and other manuscripts as well as many of his publications. Also included in the collection are grade books, professional correspondence, and extensive notes for research and teaching in the area of English and world literature.

An accomplished and distinguished scholar of politics and the federal judiciary, Sheldon Goldman is also one of the longest-serving faculty members at the University of Massachusetts, having taught in the department of political science (known as the department of government until the early 1970s) from 1965 until his retirement in 2020. He earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University and his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard. Goldman is known and lauded as much for his influential research and writings on federal courts, the politics of federal judicial selection, and constitutional politics, as for his teaching and mentorship of his students. Among his honors are several awards for outstanding teaching and the Chancellor’s Medal. He is the author of Picking Federal Judges: Lower Court Selection from Roosevelt Through Reagan and many other books and articles and has been interviewed on national news programs and in major publications.

The Goldman Papers document Goldman’s intellectual and pedagogical life and contributions as well as the evolution of UMass Amherst’s political science department. The collection includes correspondence, research notes, and administrative materials, along with copies of Goldman’s own publications and publications in which he is interviewed or quoted.

Barrie Barstow Greenbie was a key member of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at UMass Amherst from 1970-1989. In a long and remarkably diverse career, Greenbie worked as an artist with the Works Progress Administration, as a soldier and journalist, as a professor of theater, an architect, inventor, author, and landscape planner. After earning a BA in drama from the University of Miami (1953), he worked for several years in the theatre program at Skidmore College. While there, he added architecture to his array of talents, designing the East 74th Street Theater in New York in 1959, and founded a company to produce a “self-erecting” building designed to substitute for summer tent theaters. Two years after joining the faculty at UMass in 1970, he completed a doctorate in urban affairs and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin and continued with a characteristically broad array of creative pursuits, designing the William Smith Clark Memorial, among other things, and conducting an extensive aerial survey of the landscapes of the Connecticut River Valley. In monographs such as Design for Diversity and Spaces: Dimensions of the Human Landscape, Greenbie examined the interactions between humans and nature. He died at his home on South Amherst in 1998.

The Greenbie Papers document a long career as academic, writer, artist, architect, and theatrical designer. Of particular note is the extensive and engrossing correspondence, which extends from Greenbie’s years as a student at the Taft School in the late 1930s through his World War II service with the Sixth Army in the South Pacific and Japan, to his tenure at UMass Amherst (1970-1989). The collection also includes a small but interesting batch of correspondence between Greenbie’s parents (1918-1919).

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

The anthropologist Joel Martin Halpern (1929- ) has worked in regions from the Alaskan arctic to Laos and Lapland, but he is best known for his studies of modernization in the Balkans. Following undergraduate study in history at the University of Michigan (BA, 1950), Halpern entered the renowned anthropology program at Columbia, receiving his doctorate in 1956 for a study of the village of Orašac in the former Yugoslavia, which in turn became the basis of his first book, A Serbian Village (N.Y., 1958). After two years working in Laos as a Field Service Officer with the Community Development Division of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration, Halpern was a member of the faculty at UCLA, Brandeis, and the Russian Research Center at Harvard (1965-1967) before coming to UMass Amherst in 1967. A prolific author, Halpern has written or edited dozens of books on the Balkans and Southeast Asia, including A Serbian Village in Historical Context (1972), The Changing Village Community (1967), The Changing Peasantry of Eastern Europe (1976), and The Far East Comes Near (1989). Since retiring from the university in 1992, Halpern has remained in Amherst.

A massive collection documenting the long and varied career of a prolific ethnographer, the Halpern Papers include a wide range of textual and visual materials documenting the anthropological study of modernization, ethnicity, rural life and urbanization, the economy, and cultural change. Much of Halpern’s research centered on the Balkans (Macedonia and Serbia), Laos, and arctic Alaska and Canada, however he has worked on Asian immigrant communities in the United States and many other topics.

The horticulturist Tom S. Hamilton was a member of the faculty at UMass Amherst in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. A specialist in ornamental plants, Hamilton worked at UMass from prior to 1950 until his retirement in 1986.

The Hamilton Papers contain three works on ornamental plants published by the Dept. of Landscape Architecture, along with a mimeographed laboratory manual that Hamilton used in his courses on landscape operations in 1979.

Lewis Hanke, the Clarence and Helen Haring Professor of History from 1969 to 1975, was a scholar of Latin American history, served as the president of the American Historical Association, worked extensively as an editor, and was best known for his research on Bartolome de Las Casas. Hanke was born in 1905 in Oregon City, Oregon, and received his B.S. and M.A. in history from Northwestern University. After earning his Ph.D from Harvard in 1936, the great depression barred his way to professorial appointment, allowing Hanke to work outside of academia as the director of the Hispanic Foundation until 1951. After teaching at the University of Texas and Columbia University, Hanke eventually became a professor at the University of Massachusetts in 1969 until his retirement in 1975. During his tenure at the University, Hanke edited the Guide to the Study of US History Outside the US, 1945-1980, and the year before his retirement, he served as the president of the American Historical Association, where he oversaw the re-writing of the AHA’s charter. Hanke died in March, 1993.

Lewis Hanke’s papers document his historical research and his prolific scholarly output. The largest portion of the collection are notes, correspondence and administrative records relating to his editorship of the Guide to the Study of US History Outside the US, 1945-1980, as well as a collection of his published and unpublished papers from 1939. The collection also includes notes, correspondence, and image reproductions for Hanke’s book Spanish Viceroys. The remainder of the collection is professional correspondence, documents from Hanke’s tenure as AHA president, and materials from his many research projects.