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At the National Conference of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) held in June 2008 at the College of St. Benedict's in Minnesota, Professor of Chemistry Tim Elgren presented a lecture with Silvia Ronco, program officer at Research Corporation, titled "Success at the Department Level: Cultivating a Shared Vision." This talk highlighted the successful process undertaken by the Hamilton chemistry and physics departments to develop departmental plans that led to a $500,000 departmental development award from Research Corporation. Elgren is the past president of CUR and serves as the project director for the departmental development award.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Selcuk Eren presented a paper titled "How Well Do Individuals Predict the Selling Prices of their Homes?" in June at the 2008 North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society hosted by the David A. Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pa.

For Casey Green '09, the path to her summer research project began with two Hamilton courses. As a double major in classical languages and history, Green was taking a class on the American founding era and another on Virgil's Aeneid. Both courses discussed the ideal of a republican mother, and Green was interested by how close those ideals were. "I instantly saw a connection," she says.

Bill Purcell '76 has been appointed director of Harvard's Institute of Politics (IOP) at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, starting September 1. The former mayor of Nashville, Tenn., Purcell has worked in public service, law and higher education for more than 30 years. He will succeed former U.S. Congressman James A. Leach (R-IA), who served as IOP director for the 2007-08 academic year.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Alan Kim presented a paper titled "Function and Symbol in Marburg Philosophy of Science," in June at the International Society for the History of Philosophy Science (HOPOS) seventh international congress in Vancouver, Canada. Kim's paper examined the various senses of the technical term, "function-concept," in Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer's analysis of the presuppositions of the exact sciences, especially mathematical physics. Details may be found at: http://sts.arts.ubc.ca/program.html

Sharon Werning Rivera was quoted in an April article in Russian Profile on the future of U.S.-Russian relations under Russia's newly elected president Dmitry Medvedev. Titled "Fighting for Equality," the article surveyed the views of numerous American specialists on Russian politics.

Emily Chamberlain '10 feels she's been thrown into the real world with a vengeance. The rising junior is interning for the Honorable William K. Sessions III, a U.S. district judge for the District of Vermont and vice-chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Assistant Professor of Art Rebecca Murtaugh is currently showing her work titled "To Mark a Significant Space in the Living Room" in the exhibition "Made in New York 2008" at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, N.Y. The show opened on June 21 and runs until August 23. Murtaugh will give a public talk on August 3 at 2 p.m. in the gallery. For more information please visit www.schweinfurthartcenter.org.

Visiting Instructor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale is directing Hamilton's involvement in The Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC), an interdisciplinary collaborative research and teaching project on the island of InisAirc in County Galway, Ireland. Collaborators on the project include students and faculty from Hamilton, the University of Notre Dame, Trinity College and University College Dublin. Broadly defined, the purpose of the project is to understand rural life-ways during prehistoric and historic times in west-central Ireland's County Galway. 

Richard Werner,  the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy, presented "Hope and the Ethics of Belief" at the Third International Conference on Philosophy, June 2-5, in Athens, Greece. The paper argues that when the stakes are high it is rational to hope for and consequently believe in the best outcome as long as that outcome has a nonzero probability of success and even if it is not the most likely or best-supported outcome by the evidence. The argument continues that present world problems present us with high stakes where the likelihood of success is less than optimal but where hope for success is nevertheless rational.