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On September 15, David Smallen became the Vice President for Libraries and Information Technology, a position that allows him to create new pathways of collaboration between the traditional functions of both the Burke Library and Information Technology (IT). Smallen has been at Hamilton since 1972 — “I sometimes joke that I handed out the pistols at Hamilton’s duel,” he said — and has been involved with the Information Technology department since 1974.

Distinguished author and Professor James Oakes of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York was the featured speaker of a lecture sponsored jointly by the Hamilton College Dean of the Faculty and History Department on Oct. 3. Oakes gave attendees a sneak preview of his most recent book, The Scorpion’s Sting: Anti-Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War, which will be published in May of next year.

Composer and pianist Jon Jang will present a series of lectures and a performance during an academic and artistic residency from Monday, Oct. 7, through Friday, Oct. 11. All events are free and open to the public.

Four faculty members of the Hamilton College English department delivered papers at the Return of the Text conference organized by the LeMoyne College Religion and Literature Forum on Sept. 28-29. This conference was co-sponsored by Hamilton's English Department.

Hamilton College Performing Arts continues 25th anniversary season of the Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts with the Brentano String Quartet on Saturday, Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m., in Wellin Hall, Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts.

Sidney Wertimer Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz and James Phelan, of Ohio State University, have contributed “Twain, Huck, Jim, and Us: Or, the Ethics of Progression in Huckleberry Finn” to a new book titled Narrative Ethics (edited by Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn and published by Rodopi). Rabinowitz and Phelan, described in the editors’ introduction as “undoubtedly the best-known practitioners” of rhetorical narrative theory, use the concept of progression to cast new light on the ethical questions that have long plagued readers of Huckleberry Finn.

An article by Associate Professor of Mathematics Sally Cockburn appears in the October 2013 issue of the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics. The paper, "The Homomorphism Poset of K_{2,n}" was co-authored by Yonghyun Song '13.

Hamilton’s Class of 2014 has voted for its Senior Gift to be funding toward a planned terrace at the Siuda House Admission Office that commemorates the Class of 2014 as the first need-blind class. The Senior Gift was announced at the Kickoff reception on Sept. 26 in the Wellin Atrium of the Taylor Science Center.

Jim Helmer, Oral Communication Center director, recently spent a week in Boston working with a nine-member management team from Keolis Commuter Services in preparation for a major oral presentation to the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA).

For the 30th consecutive year the ecology class Biology 237 traveled to Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondack high peaks to examine the response of trees to elevational and climatic gradients. The day was a spectacularly clear and beautiful, with intense fall colors in the foliage.