All News

Hamilton College’s annual convocation will take place this year on Sunday, Aug. 27, at 4 p.m. in Wellin Hall, Schambach Center. The traditional ceremony will open the college’s 195th academic year, bringing together members of the administration, faculty and students.

Following a summer of construction and preparation, the home of the new Hamilton Outdoor Leadership Center was dedicated and celebrated on Wednesday, August 23. Following the dedication there was a reception, cookout and screening of adventure films on the lawn open to the entire Hamilton College community.

Katherine McElroy ’08 (Sudbury, Vt.) spent her summer as an intern at the Vermont grass-roots music group Big Heavy World. As a grant writer and the manager/administrator of an online store, McElroy learned about the administration of a non-profit organization.

Hamilton trustee John Rice '78 has been named president and ceo of General Electric Co. Infrastructure. The infrastructure unit, which makes products including jet engines and power-generating equipment, is GE's largest business, accounting for 28 percent of the company's $149.7 billion in revenues last year. Rice, who majored in economics at Hamilton, was appointed a vice chairman at GE in 2005. He began his General Electric career in 1978 as a member of the Financial Management Program.

In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marxist critics Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno claim that in capitalist societies, art loses its revolutionary potential and becomes part of a culture industry which propagates the exploitive system that produces it. This summer, Laura Oman ’07 (New Providence, N.J.) used her Emerson grant to investigate whether and how Japanese and Japanese-American women writers resist this drag toward the culture industry.

Anique-Marie Cabardos ’07 (Cobourg, Ontario) spent her summer in the lab of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones, studying the effects of sodium halides on structure II clathrate hydrates.

Barbara Tewksbury, the William R. Kenan Professor of Geosciences, and three colleagues have been awarded a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant is a collaborative grant from NSF's Division of Undergraduate Education and is for a $2 million project over three years. It will fund continuation of a national project, On the Cutting Edge, which developed a comprehensive program of workshops and related Web-based resources to support geosciences faculty professional development at all stages of their careers. The initial NSF grant for the project was awarded five years ago to Tewksbury and her co-principal investigators (Heather Macdonald, College of William and Mary; Cathryn Manduca, Carleton College; and David Mogk, Montana State University).

Paint what you know is the maxim and Katharine Steigerwald ’07 (Fayetteville, N.Y.) is taking that advice. An artist and dancer, her summer research focused on the ballerina as a figure. Her project, “Classical Ballet and the Figure, a Study in Painting,” will be expressed as four large paintings and a paper on the experience of creating the project. With this work, Steigerwald hopes to “render the figure of the classical ballet dancer in painting in a way that causes ordinary people to be able to relate to the experience of dance.”

Haley Reimbold '06, an AmeriCorp VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) Community Outreach Coordinator through Hamilton's Levitt Center, has been named to the 7th annual Mohawk Valley 40 Under 40. The awards honor those who have contributed to work and the community while under the age of 40. Reimbold was honored for her work in co-founding The Underground Cafe in Utica, a teen center in Utica, where she is also program facilitator. Earlier this year Reimbold was awarded the national Huntington Public Service Award. The Samuel Huntington Public Service Award provides a $10,000 stipend for a graduating college senior to pursue one year of public service anywhere in the world. Reimbold donated her stipend to The Underground Cafe.

Nicole Tetreault ’08 (Schenectady, N.Y.) and Amy Klockowski ’09 (Rome, N.Y.) spent their summer in the lab of Silas D. Childs Professor of Chemistry Robin Kinnel working on what is affectionately known as “the butterfly project.” They studied the Phyciodes tharos (pearl crescent) butterfly in conjunction with the chemical germacrene D, a natural chemical produced in plants.