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Two students in Hamilton's program in Washington D.C. met U.S. Senator Barack Obama (Illinois). Lynn Wetzel is interning with Rep. Gregory Meeks (6th District, N.Y) and Natasha Jenkins is working in the office of Rep. Bobby Rush (1st District, Ill.) Sixteen Hamilton students are spending the semester in Washington with Professor of Government Ted Eismeier, who is director of the Fall 2006 program.

Author and internationally recognized human rights attorney Geoffrey Robertson spoke at Hamilton on September 19. Robertson’s most recent book, The Tyrannicide Brief, recounts the story of John Cooke, the man who prosecuted Charles I for treason. In his lecture, Robertson recounted some of the story of Cooke and discussed the necessity and difficulty of bringing tyrants before the bar.

Ernest Williams, the Leonard C. Ferguson Professor of Biology, was the first speaker of the year in the Asa Gray Seminar Series at Utica College. His lecture was titled "Population structure and conservation of three rare butterflies."

Theobald Gakwaya, a Rwandan genocide survivor, lectured with the aid of a translator at Hamilton College’s Science Center Auditorium to a large group of students and faculty on the issue of Rwandan genocide on September 18. Gakwaya was a minister to the Rwandan government for one year and has since dedicated his efforts to human rights issues. Calling the genocide in Rwanda the “great humanitarian disaster of the contemporary world,” Gakwaya spoke about the social, political and economic history and problems surrounding the political and ethnic upheaval between the Hutus and the Tutsis. He told the audience that the Rwandan conflict has brought the whole area of the great African lakes onto the brink of war with an estimated five million people dead: two million Rwandan and three million Congolese.

Winslow Professor of Chemistry George Shields presented a seminar at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York City, on September 12. His talk, "Computational Design of a Small Peptide that Inhibits Breast Cancer" highlighted the work that his students have completed while working with Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner and himself.

Ray English, the Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, presented the second annual Couper Phi Beta Kappa Library Lecture.  English spoke about the need for fundamental reform in the system of scholarly communication, and advocated a move toward open access publishing. The Couper Phi Beta Kappa Library Lecture, established last year in honor of Richard “Dick” Couper ’44, brings a distinguished lecturer to campus each fall to speak on issues related to the College’s library or libraries in general.

Summer didn’t turn out quite as expected for Tamim Akiki ’08. The native of Lebanon had planned to go home for the summer and evaluate the objectives of the central bank as part of his Levitt research on the role of a central bank in a small open economy. Then came mid-July and Akiki found himself in a war zone between Israel and Hezbollah.

Cheng Li, William R. Kenan Professor of Government, was quoted in the cover article of the September issue of the National Geographic Magazine. In “The Manchurian Mandate,” Li commented on how the Chinese government could not afford to allow the frustrations of the residents of northeast China to erupt. Social unrest in that area of the country has been high due to lay-offs, rampant corruption, human and environmental disasters and a growing income gap between the highest and lowest groups. Li is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.

Vivyan Adair, the Elihu Root Peace Fund Associate Professor of Women's Studies, gave a lecture at Williams College on Sept. 15 in conjunction with the ACCESS Project exhibit, The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poverty and the Promise of Higher Education. The exhibit was the first of a series under The Canvas Project, a series of exhibits sponsored by the Williams College Multicultural Center.

Hamilton’s newly-established Diversity and Social Justice Project awarded grants to three students to pursue “unpaid socially useful work” over the summer. The grants had matching funds from the Kirkland Endowment. The recipients were Pat Hodgens ’09, Jessica Yau ’08 and Joshua Cheung ’09.