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Professors of Archaeology Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones have a co-authored an article that appears in the latest issue of American Antiquity (vol 75, no. 1). Their article, "Clovis and Western Stemmed: Population Migration and the Meeting of Two Technologies in the Intermountain West," evaluates whether terminal Pleistocene cultural traditions of the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau were derived from an early colonizing population known as Clovis or represent independent cultural developments.

Described by a New York Times reviewer as “the book of a lifetime... an awe-inspiring work of history and storytelling,” Fallen Giants - A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes has been released in paperback by Yale University Press. Co-authored by James L. Ferguson Professor of History Maurice Isserman and University of Rochester professor Stewart Weaver, the book was originally published in 2008 in hardback.

Austin Briggs, the Hamilton B. Tompkins Professor of English Literature emeritus, delivered a lecture titled "The Joys of Dickens: Reading Great Expectations" on behalf of PEN at the Belles Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, on Feb. 2. The preceding week, at the San Miguel Biblioteca, Briggs introduced David Lean's adaptation of Dickens' novel, a film ranked number five in the British Film Institute's list of the 100 best British films of the 20th century.

The Emerson Gallery is lending a painting by Percy Wyndham Lewis from its collection to Fundación Juan March, an art museum in Madrid, Spain, for Wyndham Lewis, 1882-1957. This exhibition, which opens on Feb. 5, brings together drawings and paintings by the British artist from across Europe and the United States. The loaned work was a gift to the gallery from Omar S. ’51 and Elizabeth Pound.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Myriam Cotten published an article in the “Membrane Protein Dynamics by NMR: Correlation of Structure and Function” special issue of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) – Biomembranes. The paper titled “Can antimicrobial peptides scavenge around a cell in less than a second?” is co-authored with a Pacific Lutheran undergraduate and Eduard Chekmenev of Vanderbilt University.

Shannon Fitzsimons ‘05 returned to Hamilton this week as guest dramaturg for the Theatre Department's production of A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, written in 1879. The production will be staged April 15-17 and 21-24. Fitzsimons, currently a student in the Ph.D. program in theatre and drama at Northwestern University, majored in theatre and creative writing at Hamilton.

Does America have an unhealthy obsession with beauty? Darryl Roberts thinks so. Roberts’ documentary, America the Beautiful, imagines the causes and social implications of the unrealistic physical ideals presented for women in the American media. On Feb. 3, Hamilton students had the privilege of attending a screening of America the Beautiful, which was followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker himself.

Despite the pressure of continued economic turmoil, Moody’s Investors Service has assigned Hamilton College an Aa2 rating and said the college’s financial outlook is stable.

In an introduction to the Feb. 3 lecture on Tim Davis’ photography, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Kathryn Parker Almanas skipped nearly all customary information in favor of presenting the audience with eight simple facts about the artist. These included his talent for skipping faster than he can run and playing ukulele. Though such random pieces of trivia may seem irrelevant to a professional discussion about photographs, they could not have served as a better preface to Davis’ character.

Anne E. Lacsamana, assistant professor of women’s studies, was invited to Rollins College as a Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar in January to deliver a public lecture on her current research on the Philippine women’s movement.