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Karl Kirschner, visiting professor of chemistry and co-director of the Center for Molecular Design, spent the past month visiting the Universität Dortmund in the Ruhrgebiet region of northwest Germany. The partnership between Hamilton and the Universität was formed though the efforts of Hamilton's German program and Dr. Walter Grünzweig, chair of the American Studies Program at Dortmund. The relationship has two components: an undergraduate exchange program and a teaching fellow program. Kirschner was there in order to generate interest in a chemistry student exchange. He met with Grünzweig as well as Dr. Christof Niemeyer, Dr. Roland Winter, Dr. Klaus Jurkschat, and Dr. Hans-Dieter Arndt of Dortmund’s Chemistry Department. In addition, Kirschner and Jurkschat created a new scientific collaboration to investigate the conformations and energetics of a silicon-phosphorus compound.

Filmmaker Su Friedrich presented a program of recent films and videos, including Rules of the Road (1993) and Seeing Red (2004) on Nov. 28 as part of the F.I.L.M. (Forum for Images and Languages in Motion) series organized by Scott MacDonald, visiting professor in art history.

Joseph Berger, New York Times columnist and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust, will speak at Hamilton College on Thursday, Nov. 30, at 7:30 p.m., in the Kennedy Auditorium of the Science Center. It is free and open to the public.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Emily Rohrbach contributed a book review of Peter Fritzsche’s Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Harvard UP, 2004) to the journal, Studies in Romanticism 45:3 (Fall 2006). A cultural history of perceptions of lost time in post-Revolutionary Europe, Fritzsche’s book presents archival research on wandering princes, cathedrals in ruins, and parents figured as cultural anachronisms, and it does so in a style accessible to an undergraduate readership. She plans to make the chapter on “Ruins” part of her spring 2007 senior seminar on “Architecture and Memory in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel.”

Associate Professor of History Shoshana Keller published an article in Volume IV of the Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures (Leiden: Brill). The article is an overview of women's education in modern (post-1800) Central Asia.

Carl Rubino, the Edward North Professor of Classics, gave two invited lectures in November at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. The first talk, "It Was Their Destiny: Roman Power and Imperial Self-Esteem" was to a group of classics students. It began with a reference to Star Wars, moved on to Rome (Vergil, Horace, and Tacitus), and ended with a discussion of Thomas Jefferson. In the evening Rubino gave a public lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities Professorship titled "Human Choices in an Uncertain Universe: Reflections on Science, Ethics, and the Humanities." The lecture focused on passages from Plato, Isaiah Berlin, Laplace, C. S. Peirce, Aristotle, Stephen Jay Gould and Ilya Prigogine.

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas was interviewed on Atlanta Radio WRFG 89.3 (Radio Free Georgia) on November 25 about the British Guiana "riots" of 1905. He discussed the causes, course and implications of this early 20th century rebellion for the future of the former British colony, now Guyana, after gaining its independence in 1966. The interview was conducted on the Atlanta radio station's regular Saturday afternoon program “Radio Diaspora” in the 5-7 p.m. time slot.

Award-winning African director Mweze Ngangura will show his latest film, an African version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” this evening (Nov. 27) at 6:30 in the Science Center room 3024. Two other films by Ngangura, “Life is Rosy” and “Identity Card,” will be shown from 3-6 p.m. followed by a discussion.

Twenty-four students from Women's Studies Professor Vivyan Adair's Globalization Sophomore seminar (New York: The Global City as Text) and her Women's Studies: Feminist Theories of Class travelled to New York City in November. They visited the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side and then the Frick Museum on the Upper East Side, toured and then had lunch and dinner in different ethnic neighborhoods.

Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin participated in several activities at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in November. She conducted a pre-conference workshop whose purpose was to help foreign language teachers apply recent theories of second language acquisition into teaching practice, specifically, on how to integrate the cognitive factors of "noticing effect" and "restructure process" into a form-focused curricular design.