91B0FBB4-04A9-D5D7-16F0F3976AA697ED
C9A22247-E776-B892-2D807E7555171534
John O'Neal, Rob Kantrowitz '82 and Ann Owen.

Four members of the Hamilton faculty were recognized for their research and creative successes through the Dean’s Scholarly Achievement Awards at Class & Charter Day on Friday, May 8. The Awards were instituted in three categories by Dean of Faculty Joe Urgo in 2008.

Professor of French John O’Neal received the Career Achievement Award, which marks significant achievement over the course of a career. Associate Professor of Economics Ann Owen was awarded the Early Career Achievement Award, which recognizes significant achievement at the advanced assistant or associate level. Maurice Isserman, the James L. Ferguson Professor of History, and Professor of Mathematics Rob Kantrowitz ’82 received the Notable Year Achievement awards, which honor up to three faculty members for particular accomplishments in the past year.

John O’Neal, a member of the faculty since 1984, earned a master’s in French from Middlebury College, and a Ph.D. from U.C.L.A. He was named a Knight in the Order of the Palmes Academiques by the French Ministry of Education in 1998 and promoted to officer in 2008. O’Neal directed the Hamilton College Junior Year in France program six times between 1986 and 2004 and has lectured at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He has written extensively in both French and English about 18th-century French literature and thought. 

His latest authored book, Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France, was published in 2002 by the University of Delaware Press. O’Neal’s most recent edited books are Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries (Modern Language Association, 2003 with Ourida Mostefai) and The Nature of Rousseau’s Rêveries:  Physical, Human, Aesthetic (from the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford in 2008).

In December, O'Neal was elected to the board of directors of the American Society for French Academic Palms, a group of scholars who have received recognition from the French government for their teaching and research.

Ann Owen, formerly a Federal Reserve economist, earned a Ph.D. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from Babson College. She has diverse research interests and has published papers on long-run growth and income distribution as well as teaching economics to undergraduates. Examples of her current research projects include an examination of how the process of economic growth varies across countries, a study of the effect of individuals' knowledge about the environment on their pro-environment behaviors and an investigation into the differential impact of course grades on male and female students' propensity to study economics.
 
She teaches courses in economic growth, monetary policy, macroeconomic theory and statistics. Owen also serves as director of the Sustainability Program at the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center. She is interviewed frequently about the U.S. economy and interest rates by national media.

Maurice Isserman is an expert on 20th-century U.S. history, particularly the 1960s. He is the author of many well-received books on the history of American radical movements, the 1960s, and most recently the history of exploration and mountaineering. 

His biography of Michael Harrington, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000. Isserman’s history of the 1960s, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, co-authored with Michael Kazin and originally published in 2000, was published in its third revised edition in 2007. Isserman’s most recent book, Fallen Giants: The History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes, co-authored with Stewart Weaver, was published in 2008. The book has received numerous accolades and was called “an awe-inspiring work of history and storytelling” by The New York Times Book Review. It received the 2008 Best Book - Mountaineering History award from The Banff Mountain Book Festival, and Atlantic Monthly called it “an enormously engaging addition to the climbing-lit canon.”

Rob Kantrowitz, a 1982 graduate of Hamilton College, earned a master’s and doctorate from Syracuse University. He returned to join the Hamilton faculty in 1990. His research is in analysis, with particular focus on Banach algebras, automatic continuity, and operator theory, and his teaching interests include analysis, linear algebra, and calculus. 

In 2008 Kantrowitz published an article in the Mathematical Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Volume 108, Issue 2, 2008). In the paper “Approximation by Weighted Composition Operators on C(X)” Kantrowitz and co-author Michael M. Neumann of Mississippi State University investigate bounded linear operators between Banach algebras of continuous functions. 

His paper “Yet Another Proof of Minkowski’s Inequality,” also co-authored with Michael M. Neumann, appeared in The American Mathematical Monthly in May 2008, and provides a new proof of a celebrated, century-old inequality attributable to the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909). The article “Optimal angles for launching projectiles: Lagrange vs. CAS,” is accepted for publication and will appear in the Canadian Applied Mathematics Quarterly.

In January Kantrowitz spoke at a session on Mathematics and Sports at the annual Joint Meetings of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America held in Washington, D.C.

Help us provide an accessible education, offer innovative resources and programs, and foster intellectual exploration.

Site Search