All News

The Bell Ringer Award is presented each year at Reunions to a member of the Hamilton family in recognition of contributions made to the College, its alumni and the community. This year Milton P. Kayle '43 and Donald O. Pollock '51 had the honor bestowed upon them at the annual meeting of the Alumni Council.

Abhishek Maity ’08 was a 2006 fellow of StartingBloc, a non-profit institute of social innovation for social entrepreneurs. Maity (Kolkata, India) was one of 200 students chosen from a pool of more than 3,000 applicants. He spent the year attending training and networking events at top business schools, including Wharton, Columbia and Yale.

About 70 Seneca Street Elementary School students (Oneida) in grades 3-6 visited Hamilton for a Science Day on June 5. The students completed a reading challenge and this field trip was their reward. The morning began with a presentation by Doug Weldon, the Stone Professor of Psychology. Weldon showed optical illusions and explained how vision is controlled by the brain and why we see images the way we do.

George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry, presented a lecture at the 38th Middle Atlantic Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society on June 5, in Hershey, PA.  His talk, "Computational Design of a Small Peptide that Inhibits Breast Cancer: An overview of computational chemistry research at Hamilton College," encompassed the work that he and Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner have completed with their students over the past few years.

Assistant Professor of English Gillian Gane attended the 32nd annual convention of the African Literature Association in Accra, Ghana, where on May 17 she presented a paper, "Rape, Race, and Incest in the New South Africa: Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit."

The Village Voice, after months of turmoil and layoffs, has named a new chief editor. He is Erik Wemple, editor of Washington City Paper. Wemple will be the legendary alt-weekly's fourth editor in the past year. It is now owned by New Times Media of Phoenix, which owns a chain of weeklies. Wemple has spent his entire journalistic career in Washington, so will be an outsider in New York City. He will start his new job in July. New Times has said it is trying to get more reporting and less opinion in the weekly. "Erik Wemple stood out in a process that went on for months as I reviewed applications and interviewed journalists from major American dailies, national magazines and alt-weeklies," said Michael Lacey, executive editor for Village Voice Media., in a Wednesday release. "Wemple's savvy and grit are reflected in the newspaper he edits. I'm looking forward to his leadership, as well as the speculation and second-guessing sure to commence with this announcement." http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002611350

Alison Fisher ’08 (Medina, Wash.) became aware of the depth of the problem of sex trafficking after a friend returned from a trip to Thailand and brought up the issues. Fisher became “blown away by the magnitude of this subject” and applied for and received an Emerson grant in collaboration with Associate Professor of Sociology Stephen Ellingson to pursue research on the topic this summer. Fisher’s project is titled “People for Sale: Modern Day Slavery in America.”

Hamilton College will welcome back more than 1,100 alumni and their guests when it hosts its annual Reunion Weekend, this year on Thursday-Sunday, June 1-4.  Highlights of this year’s reunion will include alumni colleges, a Choir Reunion to celebrate Professor of Music G. Roberts Kolb’s 25th anniversary as director of Hamilton’s choral programs, and a Track and Cross Country Reunion to honor longtime coach Gene Long.

currently doing research in East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo, on performances in the harvest festival Gawai.  He is researching the ways the harvest festival has been influenced and reinvented in response to local, national, and global forces including tourism and nationalism. His research is supported by the Mellon Faculty Development Program, and follows his first trip to the area last year at this time.

The Emerson Gallery will host two photography exhibits this summer. The exhibitions will run from June 1 through Sept. 10, 2006. The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poverty and the Promise of Higher Education, features 50 color photographs coupled with first-person narratives, providing accounts of the struggle, hard work and finally the celebration of growth and dignity experienced in the attainment of college degrees by low-income student parents across the nation. In addition to The Missing Story, the Emerson Gallery will present a special complimentary exhibition of ten photographs taken by Alexis Mann ’05, a recent Hamilton graduate and photography major.