All News

Literary criticism is a deceptively simple field; it seems easy enough to separate written work into fiction and non-fiction. Rising senior Kathleen Naughton (Cromwell, Conn.), however, challenged this assumption with her research into the autobiography. Naughton, a creative writing and chemistry minor, has always been interested in the resonances of the writer upon his or her subject matter, which she researched this summer.

Today members of the class of 2011 gathered at the historic Kirkland Cottage to sign the College Register symbolizing their matriculation at Hamilton.  This tradition, established in 1975, represents not only the beginning of a college career, but also membership in the Hamilton community.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association held in New York City Aug. 11-14. Her paper was titled "Learning the Nexus: Networks, Neoinstitutionalism, and Diffusion as Explanation for Curricular Change." She is secretary-treasurer of the History of Sociology section of this organization.

Philip Klinkner, associate professor of government and associate dean of students, was quoted in a USA Today article on Wednesday, Aug. 23, titled "Few Dems show for 'Prez on the Rez.'" The article focused on the anticipated absence of top-tier candidates — U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois and former U.S. Senator John Edwards of North Carolina — from Thursday's "Prez on the Rez" debate at the Morongo Band of Mission Indians' reservation in Southern California.

Hamilton College was cited in a Time magazine article, “Can We Avoid Another Virginia Tech” (Aug. 7. 2007), which concerned campus mental health programs and early warning signs of a student's psychological distress. The article referred to Hamilton: “Campus administrators are restructuring RA training to focus less on mental health counseling; they say they are recognizing that these students are not professionals and can be overwhelmed by a crash course in how to be a shrink 101. Instead, RAs are being trained to refer students in potential danger to trained professionals who are best equipped to assist them."

The food isn't all that's environmentally friendly at The Green Café in Hamilton's McEwen Dining Hall. During the summer McEwen's furniture was replaced with new tables, chairs and carpet that are made from recyclable materials.

Steven Beale '09 (Durham, N.C.) is a world politics major with a long-standing interest in international security and the War on Terror. This summer, he combined these two fields with a newer interest in Russian policies to design research on the Russian reaction to the U.S.-led War on Terror, for which he has a Levitt Fellowship. Beale worked with Lecturer in Government David Rivera.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin presented her work "The Determining Number of a Cartesian Product" at a special session on Product Graphs at the 6th Slovenian International Conference on Graph Theory at Lake Bled, Slovenia. Boutin's recent work focuses on finding a smallest set of nodes that captures all the symmetries in a network. In this talk Boutin surveyed work in the area, gave her recent results, and suggested a new topic for research.

Mathematics professors Dick Bedient and Sally Cockburn presented a talk titled “The Hamilton College Senior Seminar” at the Summer Meetings of the Mathematical Association of America in San Jose, California. The talk was part of a session called “Getting Students to Discuss and to Write about Mathematics.”

Fenglin Zhao dreams of a career in finance. A rising sophomore, she decided she wanted to spend the summer working in New York City even if she couldn't land an internship in the financial sector. Fortunately for her, a former employer tipped her off to an internship with his company, International Enterprise Singapore, which Zhao secured for the summer.