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Hamilton College will open its 201st year with the traditional Convocation ceremony on Wednesday, Aug. 29, at 4:30 p.m., in Wellin Hall. Members of the administration will welcome students and new faculty, and academic achievement prizes will be awarded to students. This year’s Convocation will feature guest speaker John Chandler, Hamilton’s 15th president and president emeritus at Williams College. His talk is titled “Hamilton: Two Centuries and Counting.” The ceremony will be webcast live.

While studying in Dublin, Ireland, Genevieve Nierman ’13 constantly came across references to early 20th century author James Joyce and his famed work Ulysses. She became intrigued by Dublin’s obsession with the novel and was awarded an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant to study the relationship between Ulysses and Dublin and to discern what attributes of the novel are responsible for its international success.

National Public Radio science reporter Richard Harris interviewed Eugene Domack, the Joel W. Johnson Family Professor of Geosciences, for a segment on All Things Considered on Aug. 22 titled “Humans’ Role In Antarctic Ice Melt Is Unclear.”  Domack’s research, published in the journal Nature in 2005, provided evidence that the break-up of Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf was caused by a combination of long-term thinning over thousands of years and short term cumulative increases in surface air temperature that have exceeded the natural variation of regional climate during the Holocene period.

Professor of Classics and Africana Studies Shelley Haley presented “Cleopatra: From African Queen to Shifting Icon” on Aug. 12 at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute (MWPAI) in Utica. The lecture was in connection with the Institute’s current exhibit, “Shadow of the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt and Its Influence.”

The Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H., is unique among so-called living history museums because it does not focus on a single era of history, but rather documents the transformation of the neighborhood from its original state in 1695 until the residents left in 1955. This unique approach to preserving the past inspired history major Eryn Boyce ’13 to apply for an internship at Strawbery Banke.

Professor of English Onno Oerlemans delivered a paper titled "The Inhuman Voice: Birdsong in the Romantic Lyric" at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Aug. 15-19. The conference, on "Romantic Prospects," was co-organized with the University of Zurich and the University of Neuchatel, and was held in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in part to celebrate the tercentenary of Jean-Jacque Rousseau's birth.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Chinthaka Kuruwita authored a paper published in the proceedings of the IEEE, 55th International Midwest Symposium on Circuits & Systems, Boise, August 2012.  He was among authors of a paper titled "Detection of Anomalies in Network Traffic Using L2E for Accurate Speaker Recognition."

Families of first-year students arriving on Aug. 25 should be aware that the Village of Clinton is hosting an Art & Music Festival on Saturday, Aug. 25, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Please be advised that there might be traffic congestion in town.  All roads will be open but traffic may get a little backed up, so a bit more time might be needed to drive through town.

With an interest in Russian that began in high school, Grace Lee ’13 spent the past year studying in St. Petersburg where she was surprised by the prevalence of Russian folklore symbols even in the busy city.  This summer she pursued a research project on the interplay between Russian folktales, culture and politics with the support of an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant.

S0me 280 members of the Class of '16 arrived on the Hill on Aug. 17 to prepare for pre-orientation. Adirondack Adventure (AA) and Outreach Adventure (OA) give incoming students the chance to spend a week getting to know their new classmates in an informal setting, interacting on an equal basis and learning something new. The rest of the Class of '16 will arrive on Aug. 25 when new student orientation begins.