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Working in a field where she can use her major is a summer job dream-come-true for Rani Doyon '08 of South Falls, N.Y. This summer, Doyon is an intern in the finance department of the SYDA Foundation -- an experience she said was vastly superior to her work last year in a Utica insurance agency.

In an international society, we encounter works in translation but we seldom consider the effort the translator has made to create or re-create the text. Erica Fultz '08 (Carlisle, Pa.), however, has acquired first-hand experience of rendering a text. Working with Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures Kyoko Omori, Fultz has an Emerson grant to spend her summer translating a Japanese short story into English.

Abraham Lincoln is one of this country's most popular presidents, standing out in the middle of the nineteenth century -- not a good period for memorable presidents, said Jerome Noel '09 (Carmel, Ind.), who has a Levitt Fellowship this summer to research Lincoln's rhetoric. The history major hopes to prove that it was Lincoln's extraordinary gift with words which made our 16th president one of our most famous.

"I prefer to call them gender performers," said Jessica Goldberg '08 (Pittsburgh, Pa.) of the male and female artists who make masculinity or femininity part of their act. Sociology major Goldberg has an Emerson grant this summer in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Sociology Yvonne Zylan, to research female lesbian drag king culture from a sociological and feminist perspective.

David Hamilton ’09 (Middleton, Mass.) is working on a collaborative project with Ian Rosenstein, associate professor of chemistry, and Camille Jones, assistant professor of chemistry. Professor Jones had previously been studying propylene oxide, a molecule she uses as a guest in hydrate inclusion compounds, with quasi-elastic neutron scattering. Due to the presence of three different hydrogen atoms in propylene oxide, however, she obtained confusing results from this analysis. Hamilton is spending his summer synthesizing derivatives of the guest molecule.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Armando Bayolo conducted the Great Noise Ensemble in three performances during the second annual Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C. in July. The Great Noise Ensemble, founded by Bayolo in 2005, is a group of 18 musicians specializing in contemporary music. The performances included previews of Bayolo's Chamber Symphony, "Illusory Airs," a work which he wrote while in residence at Hamilton in the fall of 2006 and inspired, in part, by research conducted during his fall, 2006, class on the history of the symphony. The Chamber Symphony, which will also have preview performances this fall in Syracuse and Clinton by the Society for New Music, will have its official premiere in May, 2008, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Internships are taking Hamilton students far afield this year, from urban India to rural Hardwick, Vermont, where Emma Stewart '09 (Colchester, Vt.) works as an intern for Vermont Soy and Vermont Natural Coatings, two local ventures based in Hardwick.

John C. O'Neal, professor of French, presented a paper in French on the question of the soul in the writings of Rousseau and the philosophes at the biennial meeting of the Rousseau association in Lyon, France in June. This was the same colloquium O'Neal hosted at Hamilton in June of 2005. One of the highlights of the France meeting was an excursion to Chambery and the home of Mme de Warens, who had a tremendous influence on Rousseau's life. Rousseau spent some of his happiest moments at Les Charmettes in Chambéry with Mme de Warens, which he describes in detail in his Confessions.

The discoveries made during three Antarctic expeditions led by Eugene Domack, Joel W. Johnson Professor of Geosciences, in 2004, 2005 and 2006 were highlighted in the National Science Foundation’s online Discoveries publication in July. The Web site features major discoveries in NSF-funded research areas. The article on Domack’s findings was one of only two included in the Arctic and Antarctic research area on the site in 2007.

Those visiting the Science Center recently will have noticed the tables set out in the atrium and a number of students in dress clothes or the distinctive green “Shieldslab” shirts. On July 29-31 Hamilton hosted the sixth annual MERCURY (Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry) Computational Chemistry conference.