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Associate Professor of Sociology Yvonne Zylan presented a paper at this year’s Law and Society Association’s annual meetings held in Honolulu, Hawai’i, June 5-8.  The theme of the conference was “Sociolegal Conversations across a Sea of Islands.”

Mathew Ha’s ’14 grasp of the North Korean political structure is impressive, especially considering the reclusive nature of the 65-year-old single party state. Ha took inspiration in designing his Emerson Grant summer research project on the 2012 North Korean leadership transition from Hamilton alumnus Jae Yong Kim ’10, whose 2009 Emerson research project studied the role of NGOs in North Korea.

Professor of History Shoshana Keller was invited to conduct a Junior Scholar Training Workshop for the University of Illinois Russian, East European and Eurasian Center June 18-20. The workshop for graduate students focused on methods of researching Soviet Central Asian history. Keller also conducted research on childhood and child labor in Soviet Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

As a physics and philosophy dual concentrator, Emi Birch ’14 has taken an interdisciplinary approach to her education, an approach that is also reflected by her summer research project. Birch is attempting to replicate an experiment conducted by French physicist Jean Foucault in 1851. Foucault hung a 67 meter (about 220 ft.) pendulum from the roof of the Pantheon, in Paris, in order to demonstrate the rotation of the earth.

Professor of Biology Ernest Williams participated in the international conference on Monarch Biology and Conservation June 21-23 in Minneapolis,where he gave a talk on “Microclimatic benefits of the high elevation oyamel fir forest.”

Eugene Domack, the Joel W. Johnson Family Professor of Geosciences, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant of $182,453 for the project “Continuation of the LARISSA Continuous GPS Network in View of Observed Dynamic Response to Antarctic Peninsula Ice Mass Balance and Required Geologic Constraints.”  The award is effective July 1, 2012 and expires June 30, 2017.

Members of the Hamilton College Community Farm have had a busy spring, maintaining the Hamilton farm while also lending a hand at a vegetable garden in Utica.

George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel 1984 famously featured cameras capable of discerning a person’s state of mind – their contentedness, truthfulness or trustfulness – simply by looking at their face. The year 1984 came and went without such a technology emerging, but as demonstrated by Diane Paverman ’13 and Eric Murray’s ’13 summer research on the functional near-infrared spectrometer (fNIRS), scientists are getting closer to achieving Orwellian-like surveillance capabilities.

Professor of English and Creative Writing Doran Larson delivered a paper titled Ethnic American Civil Death: Constructing the Alien in Asian & Pacific Islander Prison Writing at the International Law & Society Association Conference in Honolulu in June.

Professor of English Vincent Odamtten recently participated in two conferences. In May he presented “Story-Telling as Performance: From No Sweetness Here to Diplomatic Pounds” at the “Gender, Creative Dissidence and Discourses of African Diaspora Colloquium in Honor of Ama Ata Aidoo” at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California at Santa Barbara.