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When you tell people you are spending the summer on an archaeological dig, those who have any experience with excavations begin to tell you how it will affect your daily life.

Pablo Picasso once said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” This summer, Eva Hunt ’11 is discovering how art is used cathartically, but for some heavier dust than Picasso’s; through internships with Project Create and The Smith Farm Center, Hunt is learning that art can be therapeutic for children and adults.

Professor of English and Creative Writing Doran Larson published an essay “Writing Behind the Wall” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (8/1/10). The piece details Larson’s experiences in teaching creative writing at a maximum security prison and the related class he teaches at Hamilton, “20th Century American Prison Writing.”

In researching and experimenting with magnetic properties, scientists use beams of neutrons with all the same spin. They ensure that the neutrons are all polarized the same way with the help of an apparatus called a helium-3 polarizer. Jake Zappala ’12 is engineering a helium-3 polarizer test system for researching the diagnostic tools used in the polarization process.

For Olivia Wolfgang-Smith ’11, the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts is only barely a metaphor. Working at the literary magazine The Missouri Review, Wolfgang-Smith pores over 30 manuscripts per week, evaluating their quality. With an Emerson grant and guidance from Associate Professor of English Tina Hall, Wolfgang-Smith is learning the production process of a highly-respected literary magazine.

WAMC in Albany will feature a reading by Maurice Isserman, James L. Ferguson Professor of History, on Thursday, Aug. 5, as part of the public radio station’s Academic Minute. The new program airs each weekday at 7:37 a.m. and 3:56 p.m at 90.3 FM in the Clinton area.

Assistant Professor of English Katherine Terrell presented a paper titled "The Trojan War in the British Isles: Anglo-Scottish Conflict and the Invention of Myth" at a conference on "Recycling Myths, Inventing Nations" at the University of Wales in July. The paper examined the evolution of competing English and Scottish origin legends in the late Middle Ages, and their contribution to the development of a nationalist discourse.

Despite the constant quest to live a happy life, people in today’s complicated world are finding happiness increasingly elusive. Past philosophers have proposed how to be happy, but each suggestion is radically different. Advised by John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy Richard Werner, Jesica Lindor ’12 is analyzing philosophies on happiness through modern psychology through an Emerson grant.

Professor of English and American Studies Catherine Gunther Kodat has published an essay, "Unhistoricizing Faulkner," in Faulkner's Sexualities (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

Armed with her pipette and sterile gloves, Danielle Lashley ’13 carefully transfers the solution from her test tube to the petri dishes in front of her. But the solution she so cautiously maneuvers is store-bought Juicy Juice, used to attract flies so she can work with their embryos. Lashley is attempting to clone and catalog the development of two gap genes of the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, in embryos.