All News

As the holidays approach, organizations and departments all over campus are getting involved in projects that are focused on making this time of year happier for others. We know that we may have missed some good stories of selfless giving, but we hope you enjoy those that we have gathered.

Hamilton College men's soccer player Max Akuamoah-Boateng '09 (Winneba, Ghana/Nottingham HS) has been selected to the 2008 all-region team by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.

President-elect Barack Obama has tapped former Iowa governor and Hamilton alumnus Thomas J. Vilsack '72 to be his secretary of agriculture. He introduced Vilsack on Wednesday, Dec. 17, at a news conference in Chicago. According to The New York Times, "Mr. Obama particularly praised Mr. Vilsack's advocacy of biotech and his work to foster 'an agricultural economy of the future that not only grows the food we eat but the energy we use.'"

Over the past decade, Senior Fellow Kyla Gorman has closely followed the development of narrative structure within video games. As a computer science major and creative writing minor, her growing interest comes as no surprise. "I've played video games since I was little, but I also always wanted to be a novelist," she explains. "Slowly, I realized that the intersection was in video game story design."

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate, visiting associate professor of religious studies, recently published the book, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World, with the London-based film studies press, Wallflower (distributed in the U.S. via Columbia UP). The book is one of the first truly interdisciplinary works on the topic, investigating religions via film studies, and film via religious studies.

The Norwegian research group "A l'ombre des Lumières" invited Professor of French John C. O'Neal to speak at a colloquium in Norway, Dec. 4-5. Held at the University of Trondheim, 500 kilometers north of Oslo, the colloquium hosted a group of international scholars on 18th century literature, all of whom made separate presentations in a plenary format. O'Neal made his presentation on the pedagogical writings of Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his uses of the visual.

FibroGen, Inc. has named Hamilton graduate Frank Valone '70 as Chief Medical Officer. At Hamilton, Valone majored in Biology and Chemistry and was a member of the Men's Ice Hockey and Soccer teams.

In an attempt to find another way to communicate with Hamilton alumni, New York City GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade) Co-chair Zach Kubin '05 recently created a Young Alumni Blog. The blog, aimed to inform Hamilton College Alumni living in NYC of upcoming events, College updates or individual updates, was created so that the region, which has the largest young alumni population in the nation with nearly 900 constituents, has a home page that directly relates to young alumni's interests and needs. The blog will not replace the Hamilton website or HOLAC; rather, it will serve as another venue for GOLD alumni living in NYC to receive information, ask questions, provide feedback in various surveys or simply learn more about the GOLD network in NYC.

Earlier this year Castile Ventures expanded its investment staff by naming Skip Besthoff '92 as a General Partner. Besthoff graduated Hamilton with a BA in Economics and French and was a member of the Men's Rugby team.

Austin Briggs, the Hamilton B. Tompkins Professor of English emeritus, published a review of Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce, Christine O'Neill (ed.), (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2007) in the October, 2008, issue of James Joyce Broadsheet (University of Leeds, UK).