All News

Christine Rathbun, a playwright and performer, presented her one-woman play, "Reconstruction: Or How I Learned to Pay Attention" on Monday, Nov. 5. The performance was sponsored by the Diversity and Social Justice Project's "Health Matters" series.

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Comparative Literature, presented her paper, "Tragedy and Empire, American Style," at an international conference on the appropriation of ancient empires within modern imperial cultures. Her paper focused on the play The Darker Face of the Earth, by Rita Dove, African-American writer and poet laureate (1993-95).

William M. LeoGrande has written five books on politics in Cuba and Central America, published articles in media including The New York Times and The New Republic, and served on both the Democratic Policy Committee of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. On Monday, Nov. 5, he presented a lecture titled "Talking with Fidel: The Secret History of U.S.-Cuban Diplomacy" in the Chapel.

The week of Nov. 5 is National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Week and Hamilton is proud to recognize its 22 student volunteers. The current active members are Sujitha Amalanayagam, Nicholas Berry, Ashley Bourgeois, Megan Brousseau, Christina Clark, Ruth Duggan, Erin Evans, Max Falkoff, Michael Flanders, Ellen Griffin, Megan Herman, Shane Knapp, Jared Leslie, John Lofrese, Ryan Messier, Ben Saccomano, Amanda Schoen, Alexa Schwarzman, Ryan Seewald, Denroy Thomas, Emma Trucks and Kendra Wulczyn.

"The Flower in the Gun Barrel," an essay written by Professor of History Maurice Isserman was featured on PBS' BILL MOYERS JOURNAL (11/2/07). The piece was originally published last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review. Isserman's essay recounts his experience as a participant in the march and analyzes the event's importance in the evolution of the Vietnam anti-war movement. The program producers highlighted the essay along with photographs provided by Isserman.

Hamilton College's $700 million endowment and the alumni investment team that contributes to its success were featured in a New York Times article "How Smaller College Endowments Still Reap Big Returns" (11/04/07). The article noted that while it is sometimes difficult for smaller college endowments to match the returns of Ivies like Harvard and Yale, Hamilton with its $700 million endowment returned 21.1 percent last year. Henry Bedford '76, Richard Bernstein '80, David Solomon '84 and Robert Morris '76 were acknowledged in the article as providing "alumni expertise" to Hamilton's endowment. Bedford is portfolio manager at Moore Capital Management, Bernstein is chief investment strategist at Merrill Lynch, Solomon is co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Morris is founder of Olympus Partners, a private equity firm.

Philip Pearle, professor of physics emeritus, was interviewed for a New Scientist feature article "Taking the spookiness out of quantum theory" (11/3/07). In an article that questions whether quantum theory is "the final theory," Pearle comments on physicist Stephen Adler's "emergent quantum theory" – an idea that builds quantum physics from the bottom up, starting from a hypothetical lower level that obeys classical physics. "This work is truly ingenious," Pearle said in the article. "Is it the long-sought formulation that makes quantum, theory understandable? I'd say a definite maybe."

Martha Mockus, the Jane Watson Irwin Chair and visiting assistant professor of women's studies, published an article titled "MeShell Ndegéocello: Musical Articulations of Black Feminism" in the new interdisciplinary anthology Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, edited by Christa Acampora and Angela Cotten (SUNY Press, 2007).

Gillian Zucker '90 was featured in a Dallas Morning News article "The women of NASCAR: Females making inroads in sport dominated by men" (11/4/07). Zucker, president of California Speedway since 2005, said in the article that she decided she wanted to run a sports franchise while working as a non-paid intern for a minor league hockey team in Utica when she was a student at Hamilton.

Visiting Professor of English Scott MacDonald, currently on leave from Hamilton and teaching with the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard, presented two "Cinema 16" shows at the Harvard Film Archive in September.