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Eleven students were inducted into the Hamilton chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, the National Classics Honor Society, on April 30. The Hamilton chapter was established this year. The charter members of the Hamilton chapter of Eta Sigma Phi are Kevin Coppola ’07, Adam Weisz ’07, Rob Dunn ’07, Chrissy Rubino ’08 (president), Nate Miller ’08, Matt Mesi ’08 (secretary), Cassie Sullivan ’09 (vice president), Casey Green ’09 (treasurer), Ashley Langer ’09, Maddie Ware ’09, and Larry Allen ’09 (sergeant-at-arms). The new Hamilton chapter was established by Hamilton Classics Department faculty.

Leanne Pasquini '07 has received the 2007 Undergraduate Student Award from the New York Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. She will be honored at the NYSAS celebration meeting to be held at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on June 17. A Phi Beta Kappa chemistry major, she was nominated by Professor of Chemistry Tim Elgren. He nominated Pasquini for her self-directed project that looked at the Raman spectral features associated with various gemstones. The work was done in collaboration with Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones, Professor of  Geosciences Dave Bailey and Professor Elgren. Pasquini presented a poster on the project titled “Raman Spectroscopic Characterization of Gem Stones” at the Chicago American Chemical Society meeting in April.

Winslow Professor of Chemistry George Shields presented a seminar at Vassar College on April 25, titled "Research on accurate pKa calculations, the role of water clusters in Atmospheric Chemistry, and the use of computational chemistry in Cancer Drug Design." He discussed the work that Hamilton students have done over the past few years, working with him and Karl Kirschner, co-Director of the Center for Molecular Design.

Janis Stout, author of Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times (1995), Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000), the forthcoming Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin, and others, will reflect on the perils of scholarly work at the intersection of biography and close reading of text in a lecture titled, “Biographical Criticism: Neither Fish Nor Fowl but Pretty Good Red Herring,” on Thursday, May 3, at 4:10 p.m. in the Red Pit. This lecture is hosted by the Dean of Faculty office and is presented in conjunction with English 462, Seminar on Willa Cather. This event is free and open to the public.

Associate Professor of English and American Studies Catherine Gunther Kodat contributed a chapter on the work of William Faulkner to the just-released Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel.  Edited by Morag Shiach, professor of cultural history in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel features essays on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Djuna Barnes, and Samuel Beckett, in addition to Kodat's chapter on Faulkner. Published by the U.K.'s Cambridge University Press, the Cambridge Companions are among the world's most highly-regarded guides to literature, featuring erudite yet accessible essays written by experts in the field.

Eight Hamilton students and three faculty participated with about 50 other people in the annual Utica Marsh clean-up, sponsored by the Utica Marsh Council, on April 28. Students who helepd with the clean-up were David Schlifka '09, Louise Roy '10, Diana Di Leonardo '10, Ashley Langer '09, Matt Crowson '09, Michael Zesk '08, Bobby Wysocki '07, and Emma Stewart '09. Hamilton faculty volunteers were Professor of Biology Ernest Williams, Professor of Biology Dave Gapp and Associate Professor of English Onno Oerlemans.

Molly Kane '09 is a member of the Sophomore Seminar class "Global Warming: Is the Day After Tomorrow Sooner Than We Think?" with Professor of Geosciences Gene Domack and Associate Professor of Chemistry Ian Rosenstein. That class, as well as Domack's Antarctica and Global Change class, had the opportunity to participate in a question and answer session with former Vice President Al Gore, who came to Hamilton on April 26 to present his multimedia "An Inconvenient Truth" lecture. Kane here offers her impressions of the classroom session with Mr. Gore.

Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin participated in the annual conference of National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) in Madison, Wisc., in April. Currently the vice president of the council, Jin attended the executive board meeting and the assembly meeting with 14 member organizations representing more than 20 world languages. During the conference, she also chaired a workshop conducted by national experts on "National Foreign Language Standards and Performance Guidelines" and presented a research paper titled "Design curricular objectives for less commonly taught languages: a model based on learning outcomes."

D.C. Hamiltonians were out and about this past Saturday, April 28, lending a hand to help the local community. Hamilton fielded a team as part of the “Hands on D.C. 2007” volunteer project, which sends groups of volunteers to various public schools in the District of Columbia.  According to Washington D.C. Alumni Association President Paul Reichert ’90 “The eight of us on the Hamilton team spent the day painting a classroom, turning it from a dirty and peeling yellow classroom into a bright and fresh blue (an appropriate shade for the Hamilton team). Everyone had a great time and we're eager to do a similar volunteer event next year.”

Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, was the 15th lecturer in the Sacerdote Great Names Series at Hamilton College on Thursday, April 26, in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House. Mr. Gore's lecture on the threat of global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," was accompanied by the multi-media presentation on which his best-selling book and Academy Award-winning film of the same name are based. Gore asked those in attendance to take on global warming, calling it "the most dangerous crisis we have ever faced in our civilization."