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“Benshi” Sakamoto Raiko, a performance artist who provides live narrations for silent films, will perform on Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 6 p.m. in the KJ Auditorium. The two films to be shown will be Jirokichi the Rat (1931) and Kid Commotion (1935). A panel discussion with Visiting Professor of Film Studies Scott MacDonald and Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Kyoko Omori will follow the film. The event is free and open to the public.

“In the early ‘70s, we had a deal where you could leave for January, as long as you convinced Dean Winton Tolles that it had some academic value,” explained Josh Simpson, a 1972 Hamilton graduate, to the audience at the Science Center Kennedy Auditorium. And so Simpson managed to do just that – and Tolles allowed him, as Simpson had requested, to practice glass blowing in Vermont for the duration of that month. Simpson, who is now a professional glass blower, remarked “It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.”

Monk Rowe, the Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive and lecturer in music performance, was a guest lecturer on Jan. 28, on the SUNY Oneonta campus. Also that day, Rowe spoke informally about jazz and the photography of JoAnn Krivin at the Project Space Gallery. Rowe wrote the introduction to Krivin’s book Jazz Studies, a collection of photographs of jazz performers taken during the late 1970s through the 1990s.

Some Hamilton students got a real taste of the Adirondacks on Feb. 7, as 20 members of Professor Ernest Williams’ Cultural and Natural Histories of the Adirondack Park went on a snowshoe trek to Grass Pond in Old Forge, N.Y.

Shelley P. Haley, professor of classics and Africana studies, will present a talk titled “Cleopatra: From African Queen to Liz Taylor,” on Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 7:30 p.m., at the Other Side in Utica. This is the sixth event in the Imagining America collaboration between Hamilton College and The Other Side.

The Hamilton College Choir’s presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel delighted Wellin Hall audiences on Feb. 5 through Feb 7.

Associate Professor of Theatre Mark Cryer performed his one-man show, 99 Questions You've Always Wanted to Ask an African American But Were Too Afraid to Ask, at the University of Akron on Feb. 4. While there he also taught a master class. Cryer created the play with a student, Jared Johnson '02, who conducted interviews of people in New York City to arrive at the questions.

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.

Described by a New York Times reviewer as “the book of a lifetime... an awe-inspiring work of history and storytelling,” Fallen Giants - A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes has been released in paperback by Yale University Press. Co-authored by James L. Ferguson Professor of History Maurice Isserman and University of Rochester professor Stewart Weaver, the book was originally published in 2008 in hardback.

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.