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Summer research students Sarah Bertino '09 (Natick, Mass.), William Caffry '09 (Lyme, N.H.), Max Falkoff '08 (Stamford, Conn.) and Jenney Stringer '08 (Manlius, N.Y.) are working on projects related to lupine and butterfly populations in the Rome Sand Plains. Advised by Ernest Williams, the Leonard C. Ferguson Professor of Biology, and Associate Professor of Biology William Pfitsch, the team travels to the Rome Sand Plains several times each week to conduct field research and bring samples back to the lab.  

Timothy Eddy ’07 (Pittsfield, Mass.) is on the Hill for summer research into a country far, far away. His Levitt research will focus on the increasingly complicated and contradictory nature of U.S.-Uzbek relations, as well as the implications of this relationship on U.S. foreign policy and security overseas. Advised by Sharon Rivera, assistant professor of government, Eddy is working on a project titled “The Andijon Massacre: A Major Setback in U.S.-Uzbek Relations?”

James McConnell ’07 (East Setauket, NY) is spending his summer in the lab of George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry, although he is also working on several projects with Associate Professor of Chemistry Timothy Elgren, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones respectively. Originally, McConnell had planned to work on heme-induced dehalogenation but has since branched out to other projects, all of which come under the umbrella headings of applied statistical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.

The Office of Alumni Relations has what we hope will be a compelling group of Alumni Travel programs planned for 2007. These exciting small group travel trips all contain a strong educational component and are open to members of the Hamilton family. Trips are organized in concert with Bates and Colby colleges. The Antartic and South African trips were very successful. Details on our remaining tours to India, the French Riviera, the Italian lakes district, Peru and the Turkish coastal area follow.

ACCESS Project students Nolita Clark (Hamilton '06) and Shannon Stanfield '07 wrote an article with Vivyan Adair, the Elihu Root Peace Fund Associate Professor of Women's Studies, that has been published in the edited collection, Women's Lives, Multicultural Perspectives. The book, by Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa Rey, is published by McGraw Hill Books. The ACCESS students' chapter is titled "Remarkable Journeys: Poor, Single Mothers Accessing Higher Education"(section 53). This is a major publication (essays are from some of the most important writers in the field) and an extraordinary achievement for any student, according to Adair.

Professor of French John O'Neal presented a paper in French at the 4th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at the University of Carthage in Tunis in July. O'Neal's paper was titled "La confusion de la societe dans la Lettre a d'Alembert sur les spectacles et la question de la modernite de Rousseau." While there O'Neal visited the ancient of Utica, for which the local city is named.

Photographs by Visiting Art Instructor Sylvia de Swaan are on display at the Utica Public Library through Aug. 29 as part of an exhibit titled “Work Zone.”  De Swaan will participate in a panel discussion on Monday, July 17, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the library’s gallery with two other photographers, Sarah Lathrop and Gina Murtaugh, whose works are also included in the show. The event is free and open to the public.

Chemistry major Marco Allodi ’08 (Oriskany, N.Y.) is busy this summer, multi-employed in the lab of George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry. Allodi is working on two very different projects. The first deals with atmospheric reaction kinetics and pre-reactive complexes while the other is an attempt to model ene-diyene anti-cancer drugs.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons published an article in the June 2006 issue of Mobilization: The International Quarterly Review of Research in Social Movements, Protest, and Contentious Politics. It is a special issue on repression and the social control of protest. Her article is titled "Who Rules the Social Control of Protest?: Variability in the State-Countermovement Relationship." It examines the variable relationship between a state organization that tried to maintain segregation during the Civil Rights Movement, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and a citizen-led countermovement that tried to do the same, the White Citizens' Councils.

Professor of History Maurice Isserman wrote a review of the new book, Timothy Leary: A Biography, by Robert Greenfield for the Chicago Tribune (July 2, 2006). Isserman wrote: "In 'Timothy Leary: A Biography,' Robert Greenfield (a former associate editor of Rolling Stone magazine and author of a well-received biography of Jerry Garcia) has written a book that combines the serious probing of cultural history with the compulsive readability of celebrity biography."  In the review Isserman says Leary  "became one of the most famous Americans of his generation as an exponent of personal liberation, spiritual discovery, the politics of ecstasy--and the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD." Isserman is an historian of 20th-century U.S., particularly the 1960s. An expert on reform and radical movements, he is widely acknowledged to be the preeminent historian of the American left. Isserman is co-author with Michael Kazin of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.