Associate Professor of French Joseph Mwantuali gave an invited lecture at Mount Holyoke College on Feb. 18, titled “The Congo in the Colonial Imagination and the Response of the Congolese National Literature.” He discussed a range of topics including history and politics of colonization in the Congo and their relation to the present tragedy and the responses of the Congolese artists and writers. More ...

Andrew Dykstra, assistant professor of mathematics, spoke at Furman University on Feb. 18. His talk investigated examples of chaotic dynamical systems that arise in nature. In addition to finding mathematical models of these systems, the talk focused on using numerical analysis to describe long-term evolution. More ...

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe has published a paper titled “Role of Secondary Sialic Acid Binding Sites in Influenza N1 Neuraminidase” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The work was carried out in collaboration with Jeffrey Sung, an undergraduate at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), and collaborators from the University of California-Irvine and UCSD. More ...

Associate Professor of English Naomi Guttman will give a poetry reading on Wednesday, Feb. 17, at 12:30 p.m. at Utica College’s MacFarlane Auditorium, DePerno Hall, as part of the Professor Harry F. and Mary Ruth Jackson Lunch Hour Series. More ...

Professors of Archaeology Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones have a co-authored an article that appears in the latest issue of American Antiquity (vol 75, no. 1). Their article, "Clovis and Western Stemmed: Population Migration and the Meeting of Two Technologies in the Intermountain West," evaluates whether terminal Pleistocene cultural traditions of the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau were derived from an early colonizing population known as Clovis or represent independent cultural developments. More ...

Austin Briggs, the Hamilton B. Tompkins Professor of English Literature emeritus, delivered a lecture titled "The Joys of Dickens: Reading Great Expectations" on behalf of PEN at the Belles Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, on Feb. 2. The preceding week, at the San Miguel Biblioteca, Briggs introduced David Lean's adaptation of Dickens' novel, a film ranked number five in the British Film Institute's list of the 100 best British films of the 20th century. More ...

Associate Professor of Chemistry Myriam Cotten published an article in the “Membrane Protein Dynamics by NMR: Correlation of Structure and Function” special issue of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) – Biomembranes. The paper titled “Can antimicrobial peptides scavenge around a cell in less than a second?” is co-authored with a Pacific Lutheran undergraduate and Eduard Chekmenev of Vanderbilt University. More ...

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics James Wells will discuss “‘Are you the bee or just a stinging story?’: Maurice Manning’s Bucolics and Poetic Representations of God in a Secular Age,” on Thursday, Feb. 4, at 4:10 p.m. in the Science Center’s classroom 3024. The lecture, the fifth in the Hamilton College Humanities Forum, is free and open to the public. More ...

Dean of Faculty Joseph R. Urgo has co-authored a new book, Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! (University Press of Mississippi, March, 2010), with Noel Polk, professor emeritus of English at Mississippi State University. More ...

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas published a book review in the March 2009 issue of the Arts Journal (Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, History, Art and Culture of Guyana and the Caribbean). He reviewed the new book by Trinidadian academic Selwyn Cudjoe, Caribbean Visions: ARF Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation, (published by Mississippi Press, 2009). Webber, an early and prominent politician in British Guiana was instrumental in forming the Popular Party in 1926, the first organized political party in Guiana and the colonial British West Indies. More ...