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In honor of the 6th annual Jazz Appreciation month, a national event sponsored mainly by the Herb Alpert Foundation, Hamilton is hosting a series of jazz performances.

Arch-enemies Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson will battle for the right to be called “master debater,” thanks to a bold trio of students from Hamilton College who have successfully goaded debaters from the University of Virginia to face off in the Hamilton-Jefferson Public Speaking Competition. The debate, initiated by seniors Michael Blasie, Scott Iseman and Joshua Agins, will take place on Saturday, April 14, at the University of Virginia’s campus in Charlottesville.

The Hamilton College Department of Theatre presents "Stone Cold Dead Serious," a high-octane romp across the wastelands of American suburbia, opening on Thursday, April 12, at 8 p.m. in Minor Theatre.

Sean Zielenbach, senior consultant for the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute, will speak at Hamilton on “Evaluating Neighborhood Change” on Thursday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m. in the Science Center G041. This event is hosted by the Levitt Center and is free and open to the public. Zielenbach runs a Washington, DC-based private consulting firm specializing on issues related to community economic development. He has evaluated a number of public housing redevelopment endeavors, assessed neighborhood revitalization strategies in multiple cities, and was instrumental in the design of the federal New Markets Tax Credit program. Zielenbach publishes widely on topics related to affordable housing and community development.

According to the predictions of Benjamin Bowser, the African American middle class could completely disappear in as little as 20 years. Bowser, chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Services at California State University, East Bay, spoke on April 10 about his recent book “The Black Middle Class: Social Mobility – and Vulnerability,” in the Kirner-Johnson Red Pit at Hamilton. The former president of the Association of Black Sociologists has written extensively on race, ethnic relations and HIV/AIDS prevention.

The Classics Department at Hamilton College is hosting a conference, "Alexander Hamilton and the Classics," on Wednesday, April 11, from 2:30-5:30 p.m. in the Kennedy Auditorium of the Science Center (G027). The event is free and the public is welcome to attend.

On Wednesday, April 4, Visiting Professor of Film History Scott MacDonald lectured at Colgate University as part of Colgate's Art and Art History Lecture Series. In his talk, "Aspects of a Critical Cinema," MacDonald explored some of the ways in which the varied experiences provided by avant-garde films offer critiques of the conventions of mass culture as these conventions are embodied in commercial media; create revealing avenues into essential elements of the cinematic apparatus (the set of machines and practices that make motion-picture media possible); and retrain perception, instigating new forms of engagement with the spaces and times of everyday experience.

Economics lecturer Nesecan Balkan and Gwyn Kirk, a former Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women’s Studies (1999 – 2001), traveled in El Salvador during spring break to observe sustainability projects. They are researching sustainable development in Central America with a focus on El Salvador, a country characterized by great inequality, legacies of colonization, militarism and war; environmental devastation; and the privatization of resources, especially water.

Sylvia de Swaan presented a slide talk about her work at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, N.Y., on Wednesday April 4, as the community service component of her 2006 photography fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her presentation, which was free and open to the public, included selections from her work of the last 15 years. She placed special emphasis on her ongoing project "Sub-version," which on a range of contemporary issues - terror, surveillance, mass media, post millennial anxiety, dual realities, shadowy threats and ominous rumors.

Robin Wong, a candidate for May graduation from Hamilton College, has been awarded a Fulbright Grant to China. She plans to study attitudes toward aging in China to investigate the relationship between age identity, life satisfaction and positive mental health. In her proposal Wong says, "Maintenance of an identity younger than one's actual age has been correlated to positive well-being in the U.S. but may bit hold true for adults in a collectivist culture such as China. Both explicit and implicit measures are necessary for a more complete view of age identity."