All News

In response to the devastation suffered by the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Hamilton College is eager to assist its Central New York student neighbors. Those students who are within commuting distance of Clinton, N.Y., and who are enrolled in colleges and universities in the Gulf area that have been forced to suspend operation are welcome to take classes for credit at no cost at Hamilton this fall, depending on course availability. Local students who were enrolled or planned to enroll at colleges located in the disaster area are encouraged to contact Hamilton's Office of the Dean of Students immediately at 315-859-4020.

Cheng Li, the William R. Kenan Professor of Government, was interviewed and quoted in a Business Week article titled "Mr. Hu Comes to Washington" which appears in the magazine's  September 12 issue. The article discusses Chinese President Hu Jintao's upcoming visit to the United States and how his meetings with President Bush will shape future China-U.S. relations.

John Werner ’92 (Dorchester, Mass.) has been named executive director of Citizen Schools Boston. Citizen Schools is a national network of after-school “apprenticeship education” programs for students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Werner will lead nine Citizen Schools’ program sites, and his primary responsibilities will be to promote a culture of school achievement and to raise the visibility and impact of Citizen Schools’ hands-on learning classes. He will oversee 75 full- and part-time staff serving 800 youth in the city. “I want to make Boston the best city to grow up in,” said Werner, “I think Citizen Schools and our business and community partners can play a significant role in making that happen.”

Experience as a Green Party member in Washington State led Young Han '06 to apply for an Emerson grant to study electoral reform. An economics major, Han chose the project based on his personal interest, rather than academic goals. "I realized how skewed the system was against the third party," said Han. His project, titled "Single-transferable Vote in the Rhetoric of Electoral Reform," brought him to Vancouver, British Columbia, where electoral reform is at the forefront of public issues. Han's project was to "study how electoral reform advocates have framed the issue to make it accessible to the general public," he explained.

Fifty-six Hamilton students were awarded prizes and scholarships at the College's annual convocation, held this year on Sunday, Aug. 28. Convocation marked the ceremonial start to Hamilton's 194th year. Among prizes awarded were The Benjamin Walworth Arnold Prize Scholarships, given annually to the holder of a regular scholarship in each of the sophomore, junior and senior classes who has achieved the best record in college coursework in the preceding year. Winners were Matthew Danziger '06 (Ocean Beach, N.Y.) Heather Michael '07 (Red Hook, N.Y.) and Kristin Alongi '08 (Chittenango, N.Y.) Alongi also was awarded the Brockway Prize, given to the rising sophomore who has the best academic record.

Monk Rowe, the Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive, was a panelist at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting held in New Orleans in August. Rowe was a member of the panel "All That Jazz: The Role of Academic Repositories in Preserving American Jazz." He discussed how Hamilton's Jazz Archive transcribes video and audiotaped interviews of jazz artists.

Epidemiologist Dr. Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University will present a lecture, “100,000 Civilian Deaths in Iraq: A Story of Media Spin,” on Thursday, Sept. 1, at 7 p.m., in the Events Barn at Hamilton College. It is free and open to the public. Researchers from Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health visited 1,000 randomly selected households in September 2004, and published a report estimating that at least 100,000 civilians have died because of the May 2003 invasion of Iraq. The report received front page coverage across the globe but little coverage in the U.S. media.

Heather Schrum '05, a geosciences major, certainly used her time at Hamilton to get plenty of hands-on experience in her field. She participated in field work on two Antarctic cruises, in 2004 and 2005, and in the summer of 2004 spent two months doing geochemistry research on campus with Professor of Geosciences Eugene Domack.

Hamilton alumnus Jonathan Overpeck ’79, geosciences professor at the University of Arizona and chairman of the National Science Foundation’s Arctic System Science Committee, has published findings confirming that the rate of ice melting in the Arctic is increasing at an unprecedented rate due to the effects of global warming. The report was issued by the Arctic System Science Committee and published on August 23 in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union. Overpeck’s findings were released just a few weeks after the journal Nature released Hamilton geoscience professor Eugene Domack’s study conclusively confirming that the recent collapse of a major Antarctic ice shelf was due to the effects of global warming.

Noelle Short, a 2005 Hamilton graduate, joined with junior Grant Zubritsky and visiting government professor Nicholas Tampio to lead the Adirondack Adventure community service group this month. Not only did Short lead the group, but she wrote about the experience for her new employer, Saranac Lake’s Adirondack Daily Enterprise, in an article titled “Hitting the woods before hitting the books.