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A $370,000 gift from charter trustee David Solomon ’84 and his wife Mary will enable Hamilton College to make its campus completely wireless by the time classes begin again this fall.

A group of Hamilton students traveled to New Orleans for 10 days to contribute to post-Hurricane Katrina cleaning and rebuilding efforts. This was Hamilton's first summer service trip, and it was funded by both ASB and HAVOC. Participants were: Tamim Akiki '08, Mike Flanders '09, Sarah Gulack '09, Shane Knapp '09, Ashley Langer '09, Stacey Ng '10, Doug Paetzell '09, Emily Pallin '08, David Schlifka '09 and Stephanie Tafur '10.

Kyoko Omori, assistant professor of Japanese, has been awarded an SSRC/JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct year-long research at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. She will be working on her book project titled “Detecting Modanizumu: New Youth Magazine, Tantei Shôsetsu [Mystery Fiction], and The Culture of Japanese Vernacular Modernism, 1920-1950.” Omori was also awarded a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship for next year.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark Bailey is managing a program for faculty from colleges with high minority enrollments. The program supports travel for faculty to attend one of 17 research conferences being held in San Diego in June as part of the Association for Computing Machinery's Federated Computing Research Conference (see http://www.acm.org/fcrc). Bailey secured funding for the program from a grant from the National Science Foundation with matching money from various special interest groups with the Association for Computing Machinery.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Ian Rosenstein and three students participated in the 40th National Organic Symposium, sponsored by the Division of Organic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society at Duke University, June 3-7. The students, Daniel Griffith, Silas McKee and Rebecca Parkhurst, all graduated from Hamilton in May. The three students made four poster presentations. Griffith was a co-author on two posters, one with Rosenstein and the other co-authored with Associate Professor of Biology Herm Lehman. McKee's poster was co-authored by Greg Nizialek '08 and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones and Rosenstein. Parkhurst and Rosenstein were the authors on her poster.

Thirteen students from Geosciences 295: The Geology of Tasmania, along with the Joel W. Johnson Family Professor of Geosciences Gene Domack and Associate Professor of Philosophy Katheryn Doran, are traveling through the country to study the geology of Tasmania and wilderness ethics. The students participating are: Andrew D'Amico '08, Samuel Bromley '08, Taylor Burt '08, Abigail Carpen '09, Katherine Goodwin '08, Alyssa Kanagaki '10, Julia MacDougall '09, Michael Millar '09, Richard Munschauer '09, Ryan Murphy '08, Sarah Powell '09, Kimberly Roe '08 and Cody Westphal '08. The group is filing reports from their trip.

With a record 1,617 alumni and guests on hand, Reunion Weekend 2007 represented a historic moment of transformation for the Hamilton campus, with three events that both change the face of the College and help mark its historic legacy.

The weather might have been unpredictable for Reunions '07, but one thing attendees could count on was an abundance of things to do during the weekend of May 31-June 3. From history classes to art exhibits, musical performances to sports discussions, building tours to a golf tournament, the weekend was packed with 86 activities, from the sedate to the stimulating.

The first edition of Stone Canoe: A Journal of Arts and Ideas from Upstate New York won a bronze medal in the anthology division of the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Stone Canoe is edited by Robert Colley '66, and contributors to the award-winning issue include sculptor John von Bergen '63 and Monk Rowe, the Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive at Hamilton.

Associate Professor of History Lisa Trivedi is the author of a new book, Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Indiana University Press).  The book explores the making of one of modern India's most enduring political symbols, khadi: a homespun, home-woven cloth. According to the publisher's Web site, "The image of Mohandas K. Gandhi clothed simply in a loincloth and plying a spinning wheel is familiar around the world, as is the sight of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other political leaders dressed in 'Gandhi caps' and khadi shirts. Less widely understood is how these images associate the wearers with the swadeshi movement—which advocated the exclusive consumption of indigenous goods to establish India's autonomy from Great Britain—or how khadi was used to create a visual expression of national identity after Independence. Trivedi brings together social history and the study of visual culture to account for khadi as both symbol and commodity. Written in a clear narrative style, the book provides a cultural history of important and distinctive aspects of modern Indian history."