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It’s rare that an Emerson recipient will confess that their proposal was inspired by a pulpy movie with pretty actors, but Rebecca Wagner ’07 (Lyman, ME) gamely admits to just that. The rising senior English major first encountered the story of Tristan and Isolde in her medieval literature class because it was the only part of Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur that they did not cover. Later, Wagner saw a recent film adaptation of the legend and became curious about the story. Still curious, she applied for and received an Emerson grant to study the evolution of the Tristan and Isolde story through a historo-feminist lens.

While some people joke that they will save the world or find the cure for cancer over summer vacation, Kathleen Naughton ’08 (Cromwell, Conn.) comes closer to the truth of that joke than many. This summer she has an Emerson grant to do research on a project titled, “Experimental Investigation of the Solution Structures for Bioactive Peptides Derived from Alpha-Fetoprotein.” Previous research suggests that these protein peptides have potential to inhibit and even treat cancers linked to estrogen. She will be advised by Robin Kinnel, the Silas D. Childs Professor of Chemistry.

Hamilton College will host the fifth MERCURY (Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry) Computational Chemistry conference July 26-28. This national conference is devoted solely to undergraduates who are working on research projects in computational chemistry.

Hamilton College welcomed members of the Blood family at a dedication ceremony for its new fitness and dance center in July. The Charlean and Wayland Blood Fitness and Dance Center is scheduled to open officially on August 25, and will be dedicated formally during the college’s Fallcoming Weekend in October. It is being named for the parents of David Blood, a member of the Class of 1981 and the third generation of the Blood family to attend Hamilton.

Joshua Agins ’07 (Rochester, N.Y.) is working for the environment this summer, though not in the way you might expect. Agins is a Levitt Fellow and with Peter Cannavo, visiting assistant professor of government, is researching how the Supreme Court has applied individual standing to sue in environmental citizen suits. 

Physics students Michael Gregg ’08 (Albany, N.Y.), Yubo Lu ’07 (Shanghai, China) and Julia MacDougall ’09 (Wilmington, Mass.) are working on summer research projects involving the theory of Quantum Gravity with Associate Professor of Physics Seth Major. The theory of quantum gravity is the “missing link” in a unifying theory between quantum mechanics, which deals with a small scale, and the theory of general relativity, which looks at the larger scale.

Associate Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu was keynote speaker of the 5th International Conference on New Technologies in Teaching and Learning Chinese (ICNTTLC5), held at City University of Hong Kong, China, on July 19-22.  His speech was titled "Multimedia Instruction-Reasons, History, Current Situation, and Future." ICNTTLC5 is the largest biennial conference on technology and Chinese language teaching, which is organized by the Association of Modernization of Chinese Language Education (AMCLE). 

Professor of Art History Rand Carter presented a paper titled "Schinkels Sammlung architektonischer Entwuerfe: Dokument oder Romantische Träumerei" at the Karl Friedrich Schinkel: ein Sohn der Aufklaerung International Conference sponsored by Berlin’s Humboldt University.

Assistant Professor of Japanese Kyoko Omori gave a presentation titled "Frantically Walking About the Modern Space With(in) a Magazine: Youth Migrancy and Travel in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Popular Fiction" at the Association of Japanese Literary Studies Conference at Josai International University in Tokyo, Japan (July 1-2). This year's conference theme was "Travel in Japanese Representation Culture: Its Past, Present and Future."

Dan Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology, recently published the second edition of a research methods textbook, Making Sense of the Social World: Methods of Investigation, with Russell K. Schutt. The book is a comprehensive introduction to social science methods, including surveys, interviews, experiments, elementary causal and data analysis, and issues of data synthesis and conceptualization, and occasionally includes examples from Hamilton's Mellon Foundation Assessment Project, a longitudinal study of student educational experiences at Hamilton.