All News

Danielle Roper, a candidate for May graduation from Hamilton, has been awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for 2006-2007. Roper’s project is titled “Humour as Protest: A Study of Stand-Up Comedy, Humour in Mass Media and Popular Theater in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Nicaragua.” Nearly 1,000 students from up to 50 selective private liberal arts colleges and universities apply for these awards annually. This year 176 students competed on the national level after their institutions nominated them in the autumn.

Hamilton senior physics major Greg Armstrong presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), held in Baltimore March 13-17. Armstrong’s paper was titled “Enhanced fluorescence in rare earth doped sol-gel glasses containing Al3+” Other authors were Hamilton Professor of Physics Ann Silversmth and Daniel Boye of Davidson College. More than 6,000 papers were presented at the conference. The American Physical Society was founded in 1899, when 36 physicists gathered at Columbia University for that purpose. They proclaimed the mission of the new Society to be "to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics," and the APS has been at that task ever since. The APS actively represents its more than 40,000 members in the arena of national, international and governmental affairs.

Renowned author of economics and finance Peter L. Bernstein will speak at Hamilton College on Wednesday, March 29, at 5:30 p.m. in the Chapel. The lecture is sponsored by the Office of the President and the History department and is free and open to the public.

Professor of English Vincent Odamtten participated in a roundtable discussion at the symposium “Insurgent Cross-Cultural Conversations in the Expressive Arts: Contesting Notions of Transnationalism and Citizenship” at Syracuse University in March. Odamtten was a member of the roundtable on Literature and Writing: Exploding Silences in Notions of Transnational Citizenship. The symposium brought together scholars, specialists, practitioners and activists in orature, rhetoric, literature, writing, music, theater, dance and film to discuss the meaning of transnational citizenship.

Assistant Professor of English Steven Yao organized a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, "The Human and its Others," held at Princeton University in March. Yao's panel was titled "Human Difference/ La Difference Humaine." He is the recipient of an American Council on Learned Societies fellowship and currently serving an external faculty fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center.

"Extremity of the Sky," a concerto for piano and orchestra by Melinda Wagner '79, received rave reviews for its debut by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. on March 23. In a review of the concert (3/24/06), Tim Page of The Washington Post wrote "Far and away the best music of the night came with Melinda Wagner's 'Extremity of Sky,' a concerto for piano and orchestra that melds high modernism with prismatic color and romantic fancy. It is in four movements, contains a whopper of a part for pianist (here the estimable Emanuel Ax) and combines assertive mantric chiming with soft, neoimpressionist chords. Imagine Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen teaming up to write a concerto, add a certain lithe sense of mystery that is Wagner's own and you'll have some idea of 'Extremity of Sky.'" Wagner won a Pulitzer Prize for music composition in 1999.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Government Peter Cannavo attended the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association on March 16-18 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He presented a paper on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans titled, “In the Wake of Poseidon: Katrina, Climate Change, and the Coming Crisis of Displacement.”

Philip Klinkner, the James S. Sherman Associate Professor of Government, was quoted in a Boston Globe article titled "Democrats See Northeast As Ripe For Picking" (March 23, 2006). He commented on how the strategy employed by the Republicans in the midterm elections of 1994 to defeat the Democrats could be used by the Democrats in this year's election. Klinkner was quoted in an earlier article in The New York Times, "For Democrats, Lots of Verses, But No Chorus," (March 5, 2006), that also addressed the possible outcomes of the midterm elections next fall and the role national issues might play. Klinkner is the editor of Midterm: Elections of 1994 in Context (Westview Press).

Hong Gang Jin, professor of Chinese and director of the Associated Colleges in China Program, lectured during March at the Baker Institute of Rice University on Chinese language education. Her lecture was titled "Opportunities and Challenges: Chinese Language Education in the Global Context." She also give a lecture and workshop at the Center of Language Studies at Rice University and the Houston area on "Form-focused Instruction and Second Language Acquisition."

Hamilton's America's Greatest Heart Run and Walk Team raised approximately $3,000 for the 2006 event, held March 4 in Utica. Team Hamilton had 60 participants, including students, employees and family members.